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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#941

Post by laurent92 »

BossingAround wrote: post #631
laurent92 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my startup I interviewed a 48 years old senior Java programmer with excellent resume, who took 1hr to write a String.contains(), it only worked for the requested 4 letters, didn’t work if a letter was repeated twice, and didn’t work with Chinese characters. At least it had the JUnit. I asked an employee to do it too and he made his code pass the JUnit in 6 minutes. The candidate hated the interview, claiming it wa…

What was the goal of the question? Why did you want the person to implement a contains method? Did you really want to verify they understood String implementation in Java? And if the candidate was able to do this in 6 minutes, what would you have thought? "Great, let's hire"? In my humble opinion, the question is a waste of time either way. You'll get much further trying to probe what the candidate does know rather t…

Parent here.

> What was the goal of the question?

This is the introductory question before solving concurrency problems, because it’s much easier to understand what a thread does when you’ve coded the body yourself.

> Why did you want the person to implement a contains method?

The job is CRUD + integrating with Confluence + parsing search queries from the user, so finding “I have the feeling that you think this question is entirely abstract, but I both tailored the exercise because he touted being good at improving app performance on his resume (including using JProfiler) and I took care of using a realistic on-the-job example.

> Did you really want to verify they understood String implementation in Java?

Well, what consumer product can you work on if you trip into all UTF-8 traps? Telling customers “Just write English because we can’t be bothered to learn the easy thing in Java that handles UTF-8 properly” is… is acceptable unless he also fails the fuzzbizz test. And once UTF8 is mastered, it’s good for life! I wouldn’t mind teaching him if he didn’t fail the rest, but as a senior you should really know the difference between .getBytes() and .codePointAt(i).

> If the candidate was able to do it in 6 minutes, what would you have thought? “Great, let’s hire”?

The 4 other questions were classic gross concurrency errors, tailored because he touted it in his resume and I wanted him to shine. A senior should be able to guess them blindfolded as soon as I tell them “There are concurrency problems”, without even looking at the code ;) Volatile, atomic, ArrayList non-synchronized, 200 threads for a connection pool of 10, a DB accepting 7 cnx (note the prime numbers make it easy to spot which multiple is causing the issue), and strings of 10MB each with Xmx=100m, if he finds any 3 of the 12 problems, and 2 more with help, I’d hire him. If he ditched the code and postes tasks into an ExecutorService (as they teach in the Java certification level 1), I’d hire immediately.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#942

Post by danielmarkbruce »

mLuby wrote: post #787
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might well be a good idea. I can imagine downsides to it, but it might work. The long and short of it is though - one has to face the reality of the situation they are in. If you go interview at Google (or any FAANG I would guess), you have to understand what you are in for and do your best to get through. Or, just don't interview there.

One company I interviewed at in late 2019 referred me to an interviewing-as-a-service. I forget the name, but the gist was that this service hired and interview-trained software engineers (at least part-time, maybe full-time) who then conducted interviews and provided feedback to the companies purchasing the interview-as-a-service. From my perspective as a candidate, it was fine (the interviewer was friendly and aske…

Yup, totally. It seems unsolvable.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#943

Post by bb88 »

vidarh wrote: post #477
bb88 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I wanted to interview at google, I sensed some frustration between HR and the engineering. Some engineers just didn't make good interviewers. HR wished I had gotten a different interviewer.

I had a recruiter obtain approval to have my technical review ignored because I pointed out so many flaws in it. At that point I had too much of a distaste for the process to continue. But I kept being approached by Google recruiters, kept recounting what had happened last time and asked if I could expect better this time. None could promise things had improved, and a few did express that kind of frustration. This wa…

I was getting HR hits like every six months and eventually I told them I would get back in touch when I was ready.

Now I'm getting an email every month from FB, and about ready to do the same with them.

The last time I passed the first and second rounds and Google let me languish on the third round for a month. I still probably would not have made it through, but it was surprising that my candidacy was dropped like that.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#944

Post by heavyset_go »

Lio wrote: post #716
cainxinth wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re forgetting that it’s easier to get a FAANG job once you’ve already had one. They love to poach each other’s people.

If that's true it's at least is a change from the "no poaching" agreements that used to exist.

It's because the DoJ Antitrust Division came down on them hard in 2010[1], and part of the settlement forbade the companies from engaging in that behavior again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#945

Post by dang »

billytetrud wrote: post #212
bfung wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being on the hiring end, it’s less out of incompetence and more of not enough time, and open source code is low signal that the candidate can actually solve problems. If I submit some “open source” code as some proof that I can code, how do you know I didn’t copy the code from somewhere? Also, writing code for the sake of writing code doesn’t tell a hiring manager if the person can take requirements and translate tha…

> how do you know I didn’t copy the code from somewhere? You can ask your candidate to explain the code... Is that not obvious? > writing code for the sake of writing code doesn’t tell a hiring manager if the person can take requirements and translate that to an automated process Kind of sounds like you don't know what open source software is. > excuse my language, shit out code for the sake of appearing productive I…

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#946

Post by ulber »

sdevonoes wrote: post #568
AJRF wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geohotz had a good rant about this once - the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process. Obviously it doesn't always work like that.

> the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. I thought it was exactly those who Google wants to pass. Anecdote: ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. His knowledge about algorithms and data structures was like mine: I know what a tre…

The "reverse a binary tree" problem gets often brought up as one of these tricky algorithm problems that you just have to know. However, the "algorithm" is to just swap all of the left pointers with the right pointers in each node.

The biggest difficulty for most seems to be that they don't know what "reverse a binary tree" actually means. It sounds kind of mathy and opaque, so I get it, but candidates should be able to have a dialog to figure out what the requirements mean. And on the flipside interviewers should be ready to have that dialog and not count not knowing the term by heart against the candidate.

This problem to me feels qualitatively different than the "rabbit and hare" algorithm for finding a loop in a linked list mentioned by another poster. That one needs a non-trivial algorithmic insight that just might not come to you during an interview. The solution to "reverse a binary tree" flows out of the structure of the problem statement as long as you have the fundamental skills for walking and manipulating data structures and the conversational skills to understand the problem, both of which seem fair to test for.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#947

Post by axaxs »

aix1 wrote: post #234
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

I'm curious, how long ago was this? And, if you don't mind, which job ladder were you interviewing for?

2014, SRE. I don't have any clue the level.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#948

Post by worker767424 »

sokoloff wrote: post #356
hiyer wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)

To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)

And this is why the distinction is important. You could have an offer by Wednesday. That's a 10-day turnaround, and no one was stringing the other party along. When you consider scheduling, unless both parties are desperate, the process couldn't reasonably go much faster.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#949

Post by danielmarkbruce »

resonious wrote: post #801
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably an opener for discussion. Assume the best about the interviewer for a minute. What is the best possible interpretation of where they wanted to go with the question?

The fact that the interviewer didn't get the joke and immediately divulged "the answer" makes it hard to assume the best here. If they were really trying to open a dialogue, I'd expect a chuckle and maybe some clarification (like, what _is_ in an inode?)

You may well be right. I'm reading between the lines and could be wrong - but I'd guess the interviewee gave those answers in a frustrated tone. This specific interviewer could have just been a jerk.

There does however seem to be a lot of criticism of FAANG interviews which seems immature.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#950

Post by rhizome »

XorNot wrote: post #264
ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

The only people who get tortured this way are people who are getting interviewed outside of the networking pipeline, where the cool people are.
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