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
#2>>"The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously?...I am not a recent college graduate anymore"
I wonder if just writing a brute-force maze solver, and then explaining that you are aware better solutions exist...but that you didn't have any memorized, would have sufficed.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#3WOW. I thought I was in a weak spot by being self-taught and scattered.
So just who the hell is passing these inquisitions? What's really necessary?
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#4Is 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 meet this 'market demand' which provides people with studio apartments, temporarily, in exchange for ~all of their productive hours.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#5Tech hiring sucks, and the people who continue to do such a bad job at it seem to wear their behavior and tactics as a mark of pride.
There are a few companies that make it a point to mention they avoid the kind of interviews you've been getting. Perhaps try to seek them out rather than rely on recruiters
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#6The 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 find some example code, but these are basic "do you understand fundamental data structure / control flow" type questions. It's not like they're asking you to implement a theorem prover or something.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#7The 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 don't know what BFS is.
I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now.
If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability.
It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate's first encounter with your terminology.
Steelmanning as applied to interviews, basically.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#8The 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…
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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#9I'm currently considering jobs directions too and finally have a name for what I'm experiencing. "career interview fatigue", it's probably similar to whatever performing elephants in circuses experience right before they snap.
I think it comes from a decade of experience of being asked to jump through increasingly ridiculous hoop sizes over time, and complicity cooperating with this nonsense system in an otherwise analytical logical calling.
Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry
#10"...almost as if they were looking for a reason not to hire me"
Essentially that's what is going on. Easier to exercise your biases when the default is "don't hire."