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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#91

Post by illumin8 »

eterm wrote: post #29
taneq wrote: post #6

The examples that always come up of "stupid interview questions" in this kind of rant: Implement a breadth first search, or reverse a binary tree, or write FizzBuzz. Are these really such difficult things to whip up, off the top of your head? Is it really that unreasonable to want to hire someone who can do so? Yes, if you need such a thing and it's not immediately obvious how to do it, off to StackOverflow you go to…

I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter to say I wasn't interested. The "Technical" part was just trivia. Never-mind that I was sat in front of a computer and could have googled everything asked, I chose not to do that. So yes, I stumbled when asked "what does the using keyword do". I explained how i…

The first Google phone screen for SRE candidates is so scripted that you can probably Google the questions and get exact answers. It's been years since I've had it, but I remember it being the exact same questions, about UNIX internals and TCP/IP.

This type of recruiting seriously turns me off because you can tell they're hiring minimum wage call center workers to read a script and filter out the 9/10 candidates that can't answer a few administrivia questions. It makes me think of them more as an industrialized recruiting center than a company that actually cares about their workers, which is probably the wrong message to send to potential employees.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#92

Post by cmdkeen »

stegosaurus wrote: post #4

Is it even just hiring? Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else. A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to…

I'd say a majority of those who graduated my CS class 6.5 years ago now own their own home, and that's in the UK where devs aren't as relatively well paid and house prices are high. There are plenty of good employers out there, though they don't spend all their time hiring because they have low turnover.

As for "eventually end up doing something else" isn't that career development? We can't bemoan having non-technical senior managers if some developers don't go on to do that.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#93

Post by unoti »

Google and similar companies aren't for everyone. They're looking for people on top of their game and willing to go the extra mile.

> To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold, so my expectations were rather low to begin with. I also did not get much sleep that day, so my problem solving skills weren’t at its peak.

The author is already annoyed, antagonistic, and planning for failure. He knew what he was up against, but didn't adequately prepare to succeed by studying. And didn't sleep the night before.

And none of the reasons for not succeeding are the author's fault, in his mind.

You can claim that the screening process is dumb, and in some ways you're right. But at the same time, this process does select to some extent at least against the people who make excuses instead of bringing their A-game when it counts.

If you want a job at a place like this, you can do it: commit yourself to a plan of action for success that involves real work and preparation. Wanting to change the industry practice of the top tier firms is interesting and all. But if you want to get in, work and preparation will reap more rewards than complaining.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#94

Post by unoti »

Google and similar companies aren't for everyone. They're looking for people on top of their game and willing to go the extra mile.

> To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold, so my expectations were rather low to begin with. I also did not get much sleep that day, so my problem solving skills weren’t at its peak.

the author is already annoyed and antagonistic. Knew what he was up against, but didn't adequately prepare to succeed by studying. And didn't sleep the night before.

And none of the reasons for not succeeding are the author's fault, in his mind.

You can claim that the screening process is dumb, and in some ways you're right. But at the same time, this process does select to some extent at least against the people who make excuses instead of bringing their A-game when it counts.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#95

Post by clueless123 »

What kills me is when you go to the trouble of interviewing , do ok, don't get the job and then... get called to interview for the exact same job 1 year later! I mean.. something must be wrong on a (recognizable name) company that does not fill a position for 1+ year..

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#96

Post by Scea91 »

unprepare wrote: post #90
Scea91 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had…

None of the employees I would consider working for gives fk about certifications.

I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#97

Post by odonnellryan »

truetuna wrote: post #82

I've had my fair share of bad interviews too. Just recently I was interviewing for a full stack position with a company that tried to get me to recite "what happens when I type google.com into my browser". I asked them where they had gotten idea from and showed them this: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when . They decided ask me another question soon after. Sometimes the questions aren't even related to data st…

> I got a call back from them a few days later for a follow up interview and they flat out didn't even bother to ask about the project I had completed for them. What was the point?

It's worse when they give you an easy project that takes you ~30 hrs to complete, they state it "doesn't have to be finished," then disqualify you because "why didn't you use a graph database for this problem?"

Oh well. Same company was using Mongo+Node on a new startup from when they were still in year one. Wish them the best..

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#98

Post by tobz »

bcook wrote: post #54
tobz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity: how many bad interviews, or interviews with a rejection at the end, have you had in a row? Or total?

Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.

Sure, but what I was trying to get at is: if you had a string of interviews that felt "bad", and/or rejections, that you would probably be a little sour, and that's what I get from the article. It doesn't strike me that the author is particularly socially inept.

As someone who watched previous coworkers, who are older, go through the interview ringer, I can sympathize with the author on the pigeonhole one can get stuck in due to seemingly trivial reasons: I don't have a classic CS background, people think I'm past my prime, etc.

These aren't imaginary problems, and I struggle to believe that I would be all "go-getter" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" after continually being rejected, too.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#99

Post by jmaley »

kkapelon wrote: post #76
jmaley wrote: post #21

TLDR: Doesn't know computer science fundamentals, doesn't get hired in a role that requires computer science fundamentals. Is this Hacker News or Script-Kiddie News?

Can you explain why a front-end position requires computer science fundamentals? If you are a company and have to select between two front-end developers where one has a vast portfolio of production apps that you find impressive and the other knows BFS by heart (but has never shipped something to production), who would you choose?

Consider a scenario where the developer is required to write a custom directory tree. Each row contains a caret and a checkbox. When either of these are clicked, you'll need to perform some sort of tree traversal to ensure integrity of the view -- for example, checking the checkbox on a row may require that all children as selected too. Additionally, you may need an upward traversal to the root to ensure the parents are either in a mixed or unchecked state.

If the developer doesn't understand performance (or at the very least, basic tree operations like searching/sorting/traversing), they're going to write some horrible code. Google and Bloomberg have their pick, they don't want a shitty developer.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#100

Post by bad_user »

ts330 wrote: post #67
bad_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees and graphs are fundamental to computer science and there are only two ways to traverse them. I don't know what kids are doing these days, but I learned this because of my high-school curricula. In other words, it's OK if you don't have a formal education in computer science, but when you don't have it, you need to make up for it by learning on your own, because this is basic stuff that high-school kids are lear…

You're right about learning. Everyone should be doing this ALL THE TIME. Problem solving and learning ability are what you should be measuring and then deciding if their past experience justifies the position/starting rate. This is far more likely to serve you well than testing the finer points of some algo/tech that is simply a building block of a solution to a far bigger set of business/technical challenges.

But you cannot measure problem solving and learning ability without relying on a set of common knowledge to use in your tests.

Again, are we speaking of giving out straight IQ tests? I think there's plenty of people that would be against that, plenty of people that consider IQ tests to be fundamentally flawed. And if not IQ tests, how do you measure problem solving and learning ability?

Maybe you give the interviewee something to do, like an algorithm or a piece of code to develop on the spot, right? But maybe your personal expertise doesn't match with what the interviewer wants or needs. And the interviewer has to give you some problem to solve in some way.

I remember that at a coding interview I was given the problem of programming a Lego Mindstorms device to detect obstacles and do stuff. But then the problem was really about reading a document on the C subset used to program the device, along with the several couple of functions needed to control the motion and read the sensors. Was that measuring learning ability in any way? Of course, if you think that the skill of reading a technical document with precise instructions is so rare. But that wasn't real world problem solving.

So how can you test real world problem solving? Do you give candidates a homework? Ah, but then you run into another problem: the good candidates, the ones that might actually solve your homework, are rarely interested in spending their time on such things, because most good people already have jobs and a life and things to do and you can consider yourself lucky if you get their attention for a couple of hours.

In that light, I don't think it's that unfair to give problems to solve that rely on basic algorithms and data structures, especially for companies where the problems solved are much harder than that.

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