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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#91

Post by andreskytt »

friedman23 wrote: post #22

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if pr…

In my experience, a broken HR indicates a broken organization. Yes, you can hunker down and focus on your field and move on in a while but I can’t, usually.

As to shitty interviews. I was approached by Google for a non-programmer role a few years back. Failed the coding part as I’ve not been a professional programmer for a 20 years, despite being able to write all the code that I need for my research. Was told they’d be in touch for a development program as I’d apparently aced the rest of the interview. Never heard anything. Was approached again after a while and I agreed under the condition that there was no coding interview - I knew I had failed that and was going to fail again. Was assured there’d be no coding interview. Only to have one scheduled immediately.

So an organization that manages what’s probably the largest information system on the planet cannot for the love of their life implement a simple sales lead process? Why? Because they fundamentally do not care about you.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#92

Post by Der_Einzige »

anonygler wrote: post #48

Better advice: Leetcode is easy as shit. Suck up your pride and be good at it. You’ll rake in money getting companies to fight over you. I had a $670k offer that’s appreciated to $1m/yr. The company I joined didn’t ask LC, but it still mentally prepared me for the questions I got.

This comment must be satire, or peek hubris. Please tell me you are joking. I hope N-gate writes a bit about this comment, or about me for not clearly knowing if this is a joke or if it's real.

If you're not kidding, you are so delusional that I don't even know where to start.

If you are kidding than to did a damn good job!

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#93

Post by friedman23 »

selcuka wrote: post #40
friedman23 wrote: post #22

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if pr…

I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.

You venn diagram of engineering talent has good engineers in the side that don't understand the value proposition I posted above? It feels silly saying this but the idea that people working at these tech companies are shitty programmers that only know competitive programming is wrong.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#94

Post by friedman23 »

raverbashing wrote: post #38
friedman23 wrote: post #22

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if pr…

Yes, if you know the job is good go for it, it's a minor hurdle Otherwise you might not just bother, because it's usually a reflection of what the company values and how it thinks

Funny enough, I was looking for jobs relatively recently and decided to apply to cruise but didn't bother because they wanted a cover letter.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#95

Post by friedman23 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #87
barry-cotter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who studied a bit Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems if they were given two months full time one on one tuition and told they'd get $100,000 in cash at the end. That would probably hold true even if you restricted it to college graduates and definitely would for high school graduates. Most people are really, really bad at mathematical thinking. It's more than just a bit of study.

>Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems Most of the population are not programmers. For someone who already knows a PL or 2, the picture is very different: There are maybe 32-50 questions that get repeated in almost every "code puzzle"-style interview. Which ones these are is actively monitored and curated in several communities. A person intelligent enough to know a PL, can simply memorize these qu…

I was asked the stupid implement a calculator question at least five times.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#96

Post by usrbinbash »

quanto wrote: post #66

On HN and elsewhere, there are so much deeply personalized emotions regarding LeetCode-style interviews. Instead of focusing on personal specifics, I am more curious about it from a social and systemic perspective. 1. If LeetCode problems are not only irrelevant, but actually turning away good employees, why aren't more companies shunning LeetCode problems? Tech is a very competitive field, and in the current climate…

> why aren't more companies shunning LeetCode problems

Because its easier than talking to candidates and because many companies emulate FAANG, regardless of wheter that makes sense or not. If I am that big a deal, I NEED a system to filter, because I will always have a surplus of applicants, no matter what the market looks like. If I am a small company, or even a medium sized shop that has difficulty filling positions anyway, then doing the same doesn't make sense.

Not because my standards are lower, but the amount of applications I get are. Same as I don't build a webservices architecture to handle 10E6 req./h when it will serve less than a 1000, it doesn't make sense to apply methods designed for "hiring at scale" if I am not operating at that scale.

> What is a better solution?

Checking credentials, talking to people, about their past work, about how they would tackle example problems in the real world, their view on solutions.

aka. doing actual interviews instead of taking the easy route and just reading a puzzle question from a sheet of paper and waiting behind them with a stopwatch.

If I want competent people, I need to do competent hiring.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#97

Post by usrbinbash »

Barrin92 wrote: post #39

I personally like these questions a lot and I've used them in the past when I was tasked with hiring people because it basically boils down to a few things. One is that people who have a good grasp on algorithms, math or academic problems generally are pretty smart, and you can teach them practical coding skills very quickly while the reverse isn't true. so it's sort of like a IQ test. Secondly it rewards people who…

> One is that people who have a good grasp on algorithms, math or academic problems

And can you guarantee that this is what LC questions test for?

We are talking about questions here were the answers are known, their usage for interviews is known, and curated lists of questions commonly used for interviews exist .

So yeah, they may test for a good grasp of algorithms, data structures and math.

But they can also just be memorized and replayed at will given enough time.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#98

Post by AstralStorm »

johnwheeler wrote: post #52
selcuka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.

Exactly. Nothing is more valuable than a coworker who can implement a half-ass hashtable with a linked list even though there are state-of-the-art implementations available in nearly every programming language. I’ve got a sickness, and the only prescription is more bloom filters, baby

Depends on where you sit, I'd take a half assed hash table if it consumes 1/10th of memory and code space of a reference library implementation.

Embedded space sadly suffers from a dearth of good implementations for different parameters than CPU cycles.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#99

Post by jhatemyjob »

I used to believe in this dogma, I thought I was "too good" to practice brain teasers. It set my career back by years. We don't live in a utopia. Tech jobs aren't a meritocracy. If you want to work on cool stuff and get paid proportionally then start your own company. Otherwise it's best if you accept that tech recruiting is really fucked up, and just play this shitty game.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#100

Post by erik_seaberg »

speedgoose wrote: post #18
ngc248 wrote: post #5

I myself am not pro-leetcode, but I see the advantages of leetcode from both the interviewer and the interviewee side. From the interviewee side: It gives you a known set of material to prepare for (ofc there may be newer questions). But this alone helps a lot. With the explosion of frameworks, libraries, languages it is very hard to prepare for everything. From the interviewer side: Again it will give you a standard…

> I work for a company where I have to get permissions if i am gonna start a open source project, even though it may not be related at all to my current work. Is this common ? Or legal ?

“You agree that everything you write is work for hire owned by us, in return for your salary” is pretty common in full-time employment contracts. Certain jurisdictions have chosen to pass laws limiting it, so I suppose it would be legal otherwise.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140

For morale and tech brand reasons, some companies have a process to officially bless releases of work they might have had a good case for owning.

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