[HN Gopher] It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out ...
___________________________________________________________________
It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job
candidate
Author : simonw
Score : 345 points
Date : 2021-07-21 14:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
| barbarbar wrote:
| Is a doctor also going to publish achievements? A construction
| engineer should he/she publish calc of beam dimensions? A
| carpenter how should he/her show creations. If it was doors or
| windows installed in people's houses. Something is wrong here in
| this industry.
| simonw wrote:
| I would hope that carpenters would include photographs of their
| work as part of an interview process.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Depends. If you're a framer they just want to know if you
| have tools and when you can start. If you're a lead it's
| important to know stuff like how to square a foundation and
| calculate stair risers and hips/valleys, and you should be
| familiar with different hardware and where it goes. But
| nobody is going to ask you about which cracker-jack spec
| houses you built at your last job.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I guess I'd also point out that some doctors might be
| expected to give talks and publish findings etc.
| codingdave wrote:
| Every contractor I've ever hired to work on my home has a
| portfolio of projects they can show. Modernized folks have them
| online, old-school folks have binders they'll bring in to show
| you, but they have them, and will also provide references. As
| will doctors, BTW, especially surgeons. Asking to see examples
| of prior work is in no way unique to technology.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I think the crux of the matter is that for almost all other
| such professions (MD, Engineers, Lawyers, etc.), there is a
| more formal type of gatekeeping when it comes to recruiting.
|
| Education, licenses, and similar - often in combination.
|
| The world of software development is MUCH more open to people
| that necessarily don't have the correct formalities, because
| there's a common knowledge that there are tons of talented
| people that never studied CS / Software Engineering / etc.
|
| That, combined with high pay, of course attracts a lot of
| incompetent people.
|
| So what would the solution be, to require all "professional"
| developers to have a degree and/or some professional license? I
| mean, yes, it could work - just look at the Cisco certification
| system. Some of those are quite rigorous, so the networking
| industry knows that if you hire someone that hold certain
| certs, they're probably competent.
|
| But, then again, most the certifications boom of the 90s kinda
| died out.
|
| That's why we're stuck with the grinding leetcode + technical
| interviews + side projects situation today.
| wreath wrote:
| Id rather grind leetcode and system design problems and get
| credentials for it and dont have to again. Wait.. thats what
| my university degree was for..
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Yes - but for some reason, there's this extreme
| (irrational?) fear that imposers might have coasted through
| Uni., and you get these infamous blogs and articles stating
| that _" comp. sci graduates can't code anymore! candidate
| failed fizzbuzz!"_, and everyone seems to have their own
| anecdote about that one co-worker that couldn't code
| themselves out of a wet paper bag.
|
| It seems like we're in a situation where companies would
| rather pass on 10 competent devs, rather than hire 1
| incompetent dev.
|
| Personally, I think most of the above boils down to bias.
| You only remember the best and the worst coders you meet in
| your life, as far as work quality goes. And those are
| outliers. Coding interviews are stressing, so you can end
| up with competent candidates completely blocking due to the
| stress, and thus failing trivial problems.
|
| Anecdotes seem to be the gold standard, as far as evidence
| goes.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Some Doctors publish research, and put that on their resumes.
| benrbray wrote:
| Doctors are also licensed for their specialty by a medical
| board.
| alibarber wrote:
| Yes but at some point there will be a position such as
| 'senior doctor of whatever' and having a medical licence
| would be taken as a given, and yet there will be some
| competition for that place.
|
| I don't know really if these discussions are around hiring
| for your average SE role or something more specific though.
| cpiemontese wrote:
| How fun, a life spent trying to stand out to other people in the
| hopes of getting hired for the prized job.
| BlissWaves wrote:
| Yup, very inorganic way of life. There's no happiness in this
| line of work.
| no_time wrote:
| I always wanted to have a public gh and website that has my name
| on it... My only problem is that most of my non work related
| projects are either
|
| a). Reverese engineering projects that may or may not be legal. I
| don't care at all but I wouldn't put it next to my name. Most of
| my projects fall under this category
|
| b). So personal that it's very unlikely that anyone would find it
| useful.
|
| c). Can only be used or even demonstrated with data that falls
| under strict NDA.
| baliex wrote:
| Do it. Even if you can only publish parts of them...
|
| a) you could write-up just the parts that aren't (borderline)
| illegal b) I think you'd be surprised at what people find
| useful and interesting c) maybe you could apply a little bit of
| (a) to this one but even if you have to not publish about this,
| you'll still have something from (a) and (b)
| t3ssel wrote:
| Same advice: do it anyway.
|
| My write-up are focused on the technical sides. I avoid making
| references or giving clues to what the target is.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is an interesting post - though it saddens me. It seems
| modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it leads to an
| interesting quandary - is it possible to have an online presence
| and still honestly call yourself a modest person?
|
| To elaborate - my issue with this post is that it promotes the
| further commercialization of activity. If you're doing it because
| you want to, then you would've done it already.
|
| This post basically says, "hey, you - person who probably doesn't
| do it, do it and you'll have an advantage!" IMO it promotes
| further insincerity, not to imply that those who do have a
| presence are insincere.
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think modesty is incompatible with writing about things
| online, or sharing projects that you've built.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > It seems modesty is going the way of the dodo. Though it
| leads to an interesting quandary - is it possible to have an
| online presence and still honestly call yourself a modest
| person?
|
| If by "modesty" you mean not bragging and not presenting
| yourself as _better_ than you are, that 's absolutely a
| desirable quality. And that's perfectly compatible with
| publishing your work.
|
| If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or
| presenting yourself as _worse_ than you are, that 's neither a
| useful nor a desirable quality.
|
| The article here talks about posting a project to GitHub with a
| README and screenshots, or having a technical blog with some
| articles about things you've learned or worked on. That seems
| perfectly reasonable.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > If by "modesty" you mean keeping your work unpublished, or
| presenting yourself as worse than you are, that's neither a
| useful nor a desirable quality.
|
| To be fair, historically the entire point of modesty was to
| present yourself as worse than you are (historically this was
| done with attractiveness specifically).
|
| Has modesty taken on a new definition where it means simply
| not bragging? I honestly wasn't aware.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I don't see much value in arguing over the definition or
| intepretation of the word "modesty", beyond the degree to
| which that started this subthread in the first place.
|
| I'm suggesting that _either_ you can interpret modesty as a
| positive trait (moderation, unpretentiousness) that is
| perfectly compatible with what this article suggests, or
| you can interpret it as a negative trait, or you can
| interpret it as an entirely unrelated trait. But anything
| that suggests you _shouldn 't_ publish your work is
| unhelpful and not something to admire or aspire to.
| tolbish wrote:
| In reality, modesty is not used in the way you say it is.
| You call someone modest when it is a slightly negative
| trait. You would otherwise call them unpretentious or
| humble.
|
| Posting on GitHub and having a decent internet presence
| seems like something a humble person may do, not
| something a modest person may do. A modest person would
| have all of their code on private servers, or would have
| nothing impressive associated with their public/resume
| persona.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's exactly the point I'm getting at: to the extent
| modesty is _incompatible_ with publishing your work, it
| 's not a positive trait, and nobody should lament it
| "going the way of the dodo".
|
| (I was, earlier in the thread, attempting to find a
| charitable interpretation of modesty that was
| compatible.)
| aethertron wrote:
| >historically this was done with attractiveness
| specifically
|
| And money. Mostly money, at some times and places. Many
| examples of ostentatious displays of wealth being
| discouraged or forbidden. Lots of good reasons for that,
| social and individual.
|
| e.g. 1 Timothy 2:9.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Everyone's best work and well-considered thoughts are worth
| sharing.
| jameshush wrote:
| Of course. Even modest people text their friends and colleagues
| and say "You gotta see this, look at this testing library I
| just found!"
|
| Just copy that text and paste it in LinkedIn or Twitter too.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| We're actively encouraging peacocking. It's no surprise since
| it's the current pattern in social media, and obviously it was
| bound to seep into tech.
|
| 'Keeping up with the Johnsons' scaled like hell in the digital
| world. We all know it's bad, but here we are. If you can't beat
| them, join them, and let's just keep making the world shittier.
|
| The main reason why this line of advice (original tweet) is bad
| is because it is self promotion for the sake of self promotion.
|
| Here's a quiet solution: Have a small website and a projects
| page. Describe a few of the projects and what's interesting about
| them. Then send it to the company. It's no one else's business.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| I need to add "peacocking" to my HN bingo board asap.
| simonw wrote:
| My point here was meant to be that you DON'T need to invest a
| huge amount of effort in peacocking. Just a small amount of
| effort in ensuring there are public examples of your work out
| there is all it takes to get a boost against other candidates
| who haven't done that.
|
| A small website and a projects page is exactly the knid of
| thing I'm suggesting here.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| But the active promotion via the social channels is what sets
| off the 'keeping up with the Johnsons' effect. Some people
| are so shy that they would never consider advertising like
| that. The peer pressure builds, and suddenly you have a
| generation of self conscious people maintaining appearances.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Michael H. Goldhaber foresaw this in 1997, in his
| presentation, _The attention economy and the Net_ [1], see
| the section "Further Expectations"
|
| 1 https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440
| akhilpotla wrote:
| It makes the job of the person referring you so much easier. If
| we agree that getting a referral is the easiest way to get a job,
| which I think it is, then making the job of the person referring
| you is the most important thing.
|
| If they can talk about you for a couple of minutes and then email
| their boss a link to a well written blog post, you derisk the act
| of referring you. You allow the boss to sell himself by providing
| the material, so your friend isn't on the hook as badly.
| peteretep wrote:
| As someone who reads a lot of CVs: if you're applying for a
| front-end role and your CV looks like ass, maybe fix that?
| komali2 wrote:
| Depends a lot on what you have to stand on. Got FANG on your
| resume? or NASA or something? Coast through your career if you
| want. Fresh out of a bootcamp or a college that isn't One Of
| Those Big Ones? Yea, a project is a great way to prove you know
| your stuff.
|
| Having a project I was actively working during my job search was
| great for a lot of other reasons, too. A lot of interviewers
| don't really know what to talk about, hadn't looked at my resume,
| etc. I could quickly take control of these interviews by bringing
| up my project, and many interviewers would seem almost relieved
| to have the pressure taken off of them. This had relatively
| obvious advantages for me insomuch as I controlled the narrative
| of the interview, came off as very competent (despite having
| literally no working experience), and left interviewers with a
| good impression. All in all I consider this, along with my volume
| of applications, to be the most important aspect of my job
| search.
| trhoad wrote:
| You'll miss out on a whole range of engineers that have a life
| outside of work (which also brings some balance and maturity to
| the job), and therefore have no time (or inclination) to groom a
| public presence on the internet. Raising a family, going cycling,
| volunteering, reading books - these are all more valuable
| insights into a candidate for me, more so than your retweets.
| puppet-master wrote:
| Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow
| makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the
| effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it. As a
| candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career almost
| exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech blog
| attracting the attention of a recruiter. As a hiring manager,
| I've dumped all resumes for a position and practically begged
| an extremely young (barely legal) candidate to interview and
| work for me on any terms just based on the strength of the
| passion found in their resume and web site.
|
| Simon's article is expressly about how little work is required
| to exploit this effect. You can still have a life outside of
| work while presenting the appearance of being passionate about
| what you do during work, it's really not hard.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > As a candidate, I landed a FANG job early in my career
| almost exclusively on the basis of my (poor quality) tech
| blog attracting the attention of a recruiter.
|
| I would be careful attributing this to your blog or thinking
| that wouldn't have contacted you if you hadn't had a blog.
| I've never had a blog, live in the midwest, haven't
| contributed to my Github repos in years, and I don't even
| work as an engineer anymore (I've switched into product
| management), and yet I still get the occasional recruiter
| email from Amazon, Facebook, and even Google. Recruiters cast
| a VERY wide net because most people don't respond to their
| emails. I'm not saying I would necessary be qualified for any
| of these jobs, but merely haven't a recruiter reach out to
| you doesn't mean much.
| watwut wrote:
| > Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect
| somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring
| manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore
| it.
|
| Overwhelming majority of employed developers has literally no
| public presence.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Then you'll have a leg up on the overwhelming majority of
| employed developers. Just because lots of people don't have
| public presence, doesn't mean that you _having_ public
| presence doesn 't make you stand out. Quite literally the
| opposite: it _will_ make you stand out.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks - that's exactly the point I was trying to make in
| the article.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > while presenting the appearance of being passionate about
| what you do during work
|
| Why would anyone want this? It's fake. Let's try to keep the
| IT world free of as much BS as we can please. Don't follow
| this nonsense trends.
| obedm wrote:
| Why? You don't need to be passionate about your work to be
| a great employee.
|
| Many days I don't feel like working and I'm not motivated.
| But I still do (I think) a great job and try my best.
|
| Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases, but
| it's not requirement to do a great job.
| xenocratus wrote:
| I think the parent comment was more about the "fake" than
| about the "passion" - as in, don't fake something for the
| sake of getting a job, whatever that something is.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases,
| but it's not requirement to do a great job.
|
| I strongly disagree. Maybe for other professions, sure.
| But to write great software _requires_ passion. Showing
| up and doing the bare minimum leads to the garbage
| software that proliferates the world today. Not that that
| really matters to the individual; if you 're doing what's
| asked of you and nothing more, then more power to you for
| finding a good work life balance. But you simply cannot
| produce top quality software without being passionate
| about it.
| puppet-master wrote:
| What's fake about showing initiative? I was under no
| illusion the young lad would be an ideal hire, but I'd have
| been even more impressed to discover post-hire that he'd
| hoodwinked me. You can't advertise for or buy that kind of
| intelligence
| simonw wrote:
| From my article:
|
| > The vast majority of candidates have little to no evidence of
| creativity in public at all. The same is true for many of the
| best engineers I have worked with.
|
| > As a hiring manager, this means you have to learn how to
| source candidates and interview effectively: you don't want to
| miss out on a great engineer just because they spent all of
| their energy making great products for prior employers rather
| than blogging, speaking and coding in public.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| People on Reddit were making the same complaints, even when I
| expressly wrote "It's not a must have, but if you do have it,
| it's a leg up." I think people are just rationalizing why
| they don't need to do anything, so they don't actually read
| the text of the articles/comments and just project what they
| want it to mean.
| sevagh wrote:
| "Why would you make a good candidate for this position?" "I
| actually wrote a popular open-source app that-" "Shh... do you
| ride a bicycle? And do you raise children?"
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I think this is a bit of an obtuse take. Doing non-coding
| things can give one skills that are useful in a software
| engineering role. Soft-skills like writing or public
| speaking, organisational skills, etc.
|
| Having an outlet that's not related to your job helps keep
| your mind sharp and fresh when it comes to work, too. Less
| chance of burnout if programming isn't 100% of what you do
| within and outwith work.
|
| If you deal with end-users, having a social life that
| involves non-technical people is a bonus too. Helps one to
| maintain an open-mind.
| ganafagol wrote:
| > Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.
|
| This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In
| school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal
| project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their
| mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects
| that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost
| interview chances.
|
| Don't. Whenever I screen a job candidate and go to their github,
| if I find that this is just there so you can tick off "projects
| on github" from your employability checklist, you get huge minus
| points from me. Then better not have it at all.
| Jach wrote:
| How do you distinguish between "made a crappy chat app with
| Python+Flask because I wanted to play with Flask [and perhaps
| by making it public my hiring prospects will improve as a
| bonus, or not, but I don't have a strong reason to just keep it
| private on my machine]" and "made a crappy chat app with
| Python+Flask because I want to put Flask on my resume and
| hopefully my hiring prospects will improve"?
|
| Or is it just that it's crappy enough to turn you off? If
| that's the case I'm kind of in agreement with the sibling that
| it seems overly harsh. Github-as-code-archive is a fine use
| case, I've never expected that someone linking their account
| should also be actively contributing to some projects used by
| other people. I'm happy just to see code of any sort, I don't
| care if the project is dumb or half-completed or finished or
| abandoned or still being worked on with a bunch of other
| people.
|
| The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I
| interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing but
| a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in them. It's
| like they were trying to pull a fast one on me, hoping I'd only
| look at it for a few seconds and think "oh lots of repos, good
| coder!" I'd have preferred an account be literally empty,
| because then at least I can believe they only linked to it out
| of some imagined (I hope) dumb HR filter as shallow as "has
| github acccount? check!"
| serial_dev wrote:
| > The only account that rubbed me the wrong way when I
| interviewed FTEs and interns was the kind that had nothing
| but a bunch of forks of other repos on it, no commits in
| them.
|
| Maybe they didn't understand how GitHub works exactly? In the
| first weeks of me using github, I didn't notice the star
| feature, so I just forked a project, so I have it on my list.
| Even today, if I see an important repository, I just fork the
| repo if I'm afraid the original author will delete the repo.
| [deleted]
| Jach wrote:
| That's a possible charitable interpretation, sure. Still,
| it's weird, the only reason you should want to link your
| github account is to showcase some of your work. If there's
| nothing of your work there, not even any gists, what's
| going on? I don't care if you have a ton of forks so long
| as there's also something of your own I can look at.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Why would you give people negative points for trying anything
| they can do to compete in a fucking ridiculous job market? I
| mean, suggest alternatives if your genuine intention is to help
| people find work, rather than just saying that you actively
| look down on people for trying something.
|
| You get negative points for being a dick. Of course, I'm making
| assumptions, which you should never do.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If what you do comes across as manipulative, and specifically
| trying to manipulate me into believing you are more
| qualified, then it's entirely rational for me to compensate
| for that by assigning negative points.
|
| The job market is indeed ridiculous right now. Companies need
| more qualified SWEs than they can find. That causes wages to
| rise. Rising wages, buzz, and large numbers of openings
| attract more people to the field to compete for these jobs.
| Unfortunately, a lot of the people newly attracted aren't
| fully qualified SWEs. People not qualified are rarely
| selected and so keep applying and interviewing. To inject
| some sanity, companies look for more ways to filter the
| incoming stream to find the signal in the noise. Applicants
| look for ways to make their application look more like
| signal. And the wheel in the sky keeps turning...
| brailsafe wrote:
| And you default to assuming that someone who wrote code in
| order to have something to show a prospective employer is
| attempting usurp the integrity of your hiring funnel. Wtf
| is a fully qualified SWE anyway, and how is someone
| supposed to get there if not by getting in the door?
|
| Lastly, it's absolutely not rational to follow that line of
| reasoning. If you find yourself out of work, and discover
| that the interview process has changed so dramatically that
| your resume basically accounts for fuck all, then you need
| to stand out somehow. If you assume someone is
| automatically unqualified, you might just not be very
| qualified to make these determinations. Ya filter however
| you're going to filter, but this is just prejudice.
| ganafagol wrote:
| If somebody is trying to stand out by having a github
| with two projects, one is a merge sort implenentation
| they typed essentially 1:1 from a book during an
| algorithms 101 class and the other is an almost-trivial
| shopping list app that neither compiles nor they can
| explain anything about it, and then put a link to this
| github at the top of their resume, then they'd have been
| better off not having created that github account at all.
| It's easy to see through this nonsense and the filter of
| evalutating this helps avoiding wasted time of a few
| interview hours.
|
| And yes, I'm totally preducied agains people with those
| kinds of github contents. That's my whole point.
| ganafagol wrote:
| "Ridiculous job market"? The job prospects for devs in todays
| market is an essentially 100% guarantee that you get a job.
| The demand is huge and there are more jobs to fill than
| candidates available. You may not get into the company of
| your dreams, but overall, what's ridiculous is not how _low_
| the job chances are, but how _high_ the demand is. If you do
| 100 interviews and 0 offers then you have an issue. It may
| not be your fault. Maybe it 's a visa problem or some
| medical/psychological condition that makes it hard for people
| to see a good future colleague in you. But in the general
| case, there should be no problem getting a job if you're not
| too picky. Compare that to many other industries where it
| _actually_ is ridiculously hard to even interview.
|
| My suggestion is to go for quality. Only put up on you github
| stuff you are genuinely interested in or proud of or do. Not
| some mandatory exercise which is obviously only there to
| check a box.
|
| > You get negative points for being a dick.
|
| Giving you the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming this was a
| "generic you".
| throwaway2727 wrote:
| I agree with this - if you're a student or just starting in the
| workforce. However, a lot of companies in the industry have IP
| agreements that prevent you from sharing code in public - and
| there have been cases where companies have told employees to stop
| work on their personal projects/stop contributing to open source
| because of this. Some even restrict public comments to social
| media or participation in online discussions.
|
| Now a lot of people, including me, have a Github and contribute
| to open-source using a anonymous screen name. However that also
| means that prospective employers can't use this to find me, and
| that I can't really mention these projects in a job interview.
|
| I'm just surprised that no one has mentioned this here, as I've
| seen quite fruitful discussion on HN before on such agreements
| and am surprised this hasn't came up. I know some employers that
| would definitely tell you to cease work on your (publicly
| visible) Github projects once you are hired if you mentioned them
| in your interview.
| benhoyt wrote:
| My own experience backs this up: on the hiring side, I always use
| someone's personal projects as a fun discussion point in
| interviews (if they don't have any it doesn't count against them
| ... but like simonw says, it may help get an interview). On the
| being-hired side, I have a fair bit of tech writing and a few
| personal projects on my own website. I do these because I enjoy
| coding and learning, not because I want to get hired, but one of
| them (GoAWK) piqued the interest of Canonical's CTO and got me an
| interview and then a job.
| wreath wrote:
| Side projects show only one attribute that is a reason why id
| hire someone, which is their technical ability. Delivering on
| time with reasonable quality, working within given constraints,
| with people from other disciplines are other aspects that are as
| important as technical capabilities but blogging and side
| projects cannot convey, therefore side projects wont make you
| standout imo unless you built a business around it. Id much
| rather work with people who have another life outside tech than
| not.
| maxk42 wrote:
| I don't understand why "public creativity" would be something
| you'd screen for in an engineering role.
| [deleted]
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I'm not sure. There does seem to be a pretty significant
| increase in selection criteria for a lot of things, from hiring
| to investing, that biases heavily toward rewarding "influencer"
| and/or "celebrity" traits.
| tibbetts wrote:
| The amount of information available on candidates to hiring
| managers is extremely limited. Evidence of outside creativity
| is a pretty good sign that someone is not a bozo.
| dheera wrote:
| Why is this such a hard problem to solve?
|
| When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people
| who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing
| themselves as available on LinkedIn.
|
| When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to
| get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people
| within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and
| usually often results in jumping straight to the on-site
| interview step.
|
| Why isn't there a central website where you can just post
| your name-redacted-resume, accomplishments, and (optionally)
| target location and salary range anonymously, and if someone
| wants to reach out, then you can reveal your real name and
| e-mail?
|
| Or better yet a Tinder-like interface where companies swipe
| candidates and candidates swipe companies, albeit with no
| photos, just a name-redacted resume?
| [deleted]
| a_t48 wrote:
| You just know someone would ruin it by finding a way to
| cross reference it with LinkedIn data.
| lodovic wrote:
| This may not provide you with the desired results - you
| usually want to hire people for their technical skills, not
| how good they are building an online presence and marketing
| themselves.
| dheera wrote:
| They don't need to build an online presence, they just
| need to join the app and upload a resume.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Again - I fail to see how the second part is derived from the
| first. If I'm already engaging in a screening process,
| wouldn't it be better to ask the candidate to solve a problem
| that relates to their role than to ask them if they've done
| any blogging on the topic of tech?
| simonw wrote:
| Being able to write and communicate clearly is an important
| skill for software engineers, especially in senior roles -
| and it's something that's difficult to evaluate in an
| interview setting.
|
| Interviews don't tend to include writing - and strong
| communicators who get nervous during interviewers may end
| up at a disadvantage.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this.
|
| I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I
| get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is
| trying to pick among the people who do approximately as
| well on that, then other factors can help.
|
| At that stage, I definitely like to see things that
| indicate people are excited about something enough to just
| make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If
| that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better.
| But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can
| just give them a user problem or a technical issue and
| trust they'll go off and do something good with it.
| wyager wrote:
| By the time you've gotten someone in an interview you've
| already committed a huge amount of effort towards them.
| Seeing a cool project someone made is a very strong signal
| that interviewing them won't be a waste of time.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Because it gives you a more rounded sense of the
| individual. Other passions. Other ideas. Areas they've
| worked in unrelated to your problem.
|
| Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and
| many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to
| the stress of the interview (so much that I'd rather stay
| in a mediocre position than go through the agony of
| interviewing -- I hate it with every fiber of by being, and
| it correlates 0% to my in-job performance).
|
| It's just more data, which is especially useful if you're
| on the fence with someone. You can also see creativity
| which isn't something you can test well for in an interview
| -- especially technical interviews.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > it correlates 0% to my in-job performance
|
| False. It correlates directly to your job performance,
| unless you're YAML developer.
| azinman2 wrote:
| My ability to solve an artificial problem on a whiteboard
| time limited with a gun to my head correlates directly to
| my job performance?
|
| Not only does it not in my case, I don't know how you
| could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work,
| and how I perform in such interviews... and that's just
| me. Much has been written on this subject with similar
| anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by
| Google's HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at
| large, but it's well documented to be a poor correlate.
| simonw wrote:
| It's not something you screen for - as I said in the article,
| "you don't want to miss out on a great engineer just because
| they spent all of their energy making great products for prior
| employers rather than blogging, speaking and coding in public"
|
| But if someone has it, you're likely to take it into account.
| So as a candidate it's useful.
| maxk42 wrote:
| In the article you state "you don't have to put very much
| work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a
| job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a
| hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity."
| I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've
| been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never
| been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my
| career the majority of the best coworkers I've had have had
| little to no public presence online and I can think of at
| least one counterexample of a person who was extremely
| prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who
| happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. There is
| some underlying assumption in this article that I'm not
| grokking.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > I can think of at least one counterexample of a person
| who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks
| at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at
| their role.
|
| My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who
| we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were
| pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy.
|
| Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to
| conferences, and working on his press coverage. Very little
| actual work got done, and we quietly parted ways with him
| in less than a year.
|
| In retrospect, it's a bit of a "well duh" moment,
| connecting the dots. But at the time, we all just assumed
| that there must be incredible substance for him to have
| such a high profile.
|
| I took a big lesson from that: people who are good at
| building an audience would be a great hire if you need to
| build an audience. If you need something else, don't assume
| the audience (or conference organizers, or reporters) have
| actually vetted that person for the skills you need. They
| probably didn't.
|
| Ultimately, he ended up as an executive at another company,
| with responsibility for raising their profile and finding
| new clients. His skills and inclinations are perfect for
| that.
| yurishimo wrote:
| I can picture someone who fits this profile to a T. I'm
| sure it's not the same person but now I'm thinking about
| how many people could fit this description.
|
| Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and
| for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience.
|
| I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our
| industry and worldwide...
| jldugger wrote:
| Yea, it took me a while to realize that the people with
| amazing stage demos multiple times a year have optimized
| their career for amazing stage demos; they effectively
| have a different career than practitioners. Presenting at
| conferences is not a 10 percent time project you do while
| supporting the company as an SRE the other 90 percent of
| the time. You have to spend time developing talks,
| pitching them at open RFPs, and rehearsing them that a
| pager somewhat precludes.
| simonw wrote:
| I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a
| hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who
| don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms
| of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have
| evidence of public creativity.
|
| But... of course I look beyond the resume that the
| candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a
| relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount
| of public creativity on display for hiring managers to
| spot.
|
| Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they
| get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of
| their skills and experience which can help guide a second
| round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great
| talent.
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what
| should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage
| because you are stating you are not screening for it for
| FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I
| doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.
| simonw wrote:
| For me, they will be. If I have ten candidates and only
| one of them has 1-2 blog posts about a technology I am
| using, that candidate is going to be one of the subset
| that gets an interview.
| maxk42 wrote:
| So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that
| don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the
| statement in the article that "you can give yourself a
| big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd
| with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to
| imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with
| blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes
| and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their
| resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have
| concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to
| rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being
| passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a
| candidate who made it to the technical interview but then
| couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see
| when someone posts a really great piece of code in their
| github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were
| even the person who wrote the code or not, so the
| technical interview is their chance to show me they have
| at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that,
| there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in
| github that might make me reconsider a poor performance
| in the interview and that's never happened to me before.
| So I still don't understand the premise that candidates
| with a public presence should stand out more nor the
| premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence
| would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most
| managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never
| been something I've screened for and I've yet to be
| convinced I should start.
| simonw wrote:
| The advice I gave in this article will work if I am your
| hiring manager.
|
| Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate
| phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2
| or 3 (because my time is finite).
|
| If you have some public writing or public code, you are
| much likely to make it to the phone screen stage.
|
| If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself
| already, you are free to ignore my advice.
|
| I had assumed that most other hiring managers are
| affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe
| I'm wrong about that.
| gwerbret wrote:
| I'll rephrase the GP's question because I'm also curious,
| and I don't feel your response answered the question.
|
| Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity"
| equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume
| already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate,
| as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview
| performance?
|
| I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can
| be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may
| be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated
| strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet
| again, their resume should speak for itself.
| [deleted]
| simonw wrote:
| I don't believe that public creativity is required for a
| good engineer.
|
| I do believe that candidates with public creativity are
| more likely to make for a promising interview. Thinking
| back, I can't remember many cases where a candidate with
| some evidence of public creativity bombed the interview
| completely.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| I think in most companies my comment from the other week
| holds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776
|
| IE, unless the role is explicitly "go be the face of the
| company and smile on youtube and praise our products and
| their awesomeness", no one cares about your github resume
| since they've barely looked at your resume before the
| interview. Just try and demonstrate you know what you're
| talking about during the interview and can relate some
| real world experiences in a sane manner, and you're
| halfway there.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Really? I have a blog (not very active) and two android apps (not
| popular). I do think the apps help, but I don't think that really
| makes me stand out. Most places value creativity second to
| output.
| simonw wrote:
| Any time I've been screening candidates I have taken this kind
| of thing into account.
|
| If I was hiring an Android developer the fact that you have two
| Android apps would absolutely play into my decision process -
| it would increase the chance that you'd get to an interview,
| and I'd very likely ask about them during that interview.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mean, it could be helpful, but my guess is that you would
| go with someone who has worked on it professionally. Plus you
| would probably want someone with more recent Kotlin
| experience.
| wpietri wrote:
| It depends a lot on the place and the role.
|
| I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team
| that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the
| characteristics we need is people who are willing to step
| outside their technological comfort zone and just make
| something work. We have no mobile code and probably won't,
| but I was still happy to talk with somebody who'd built a
| couple of iOS apps for fun. It was a sign they were enough
| of a self-starter that I could trust them to learn on the
| job when that was necessary, and also that they could think
| about user needs and how to solve them.
|
| It's true that some places basically take the resume of a
| current engineer and try to clone them by hiring an exact
| technology match. I'm not sure if that gets them better
| results or it's just something that's easier for a
| cumbersome recruiting process. But consider that maybe
| those are places you wouldn't be very happy anyhow.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "One of the characteristics we need is people who are
| willing to step outside their technological comfort zone
| and just make something work."
|
| Honestly (and no offense), this sounds just like every
| place. My current job expects me to be full stack on
| multiple stacks, be the application security champion,
| and provide rotating (1 week every 3 weeks) prod support
| for about 10 apps that we own. And it's a mix of legacy
| and somewhat newer stuff, so DB2 to Dynamo, JSF to
| Angular, plus all the no-code stuff like Tableau. I feel
| like this is a huge efficiency drain. Did ECON 101 stop
| staching about specialization of labor? I'll never be an
| expert when split across 10 different technologies. I
| have a bad mid year rating because I'm "slow", but it
| shouldn't really be surprising when I'm context switching
| all over the place.
|
| I would love a place that says "you will do this one
| [tech/language/stack] 90% of the time". As soon as a
| posting or manager starts talking about a plethora of
| tech that I will have the "opportunity" to work with, I
| mark that as a potential red flag, it's really just a
| matter of magnitude since they all do it.
| wpietri wrote:
| It definitely depends on the place.
|
| The last large company I worked at had specialized per-
| technology teams. The IOS devs would be on a team with
| other IOS devs. Android with Android, web with web, back
| end with back end. My boss was seen as unusual for just
| trying to get different kinds of engineer on one team,
| even though they'd still specialize.
|
| I do think there's a difference between "this is a small
| team, so we all need to cross-train enough so that we
| don't have silos" and "we're a large company that never
| cleans up a mess, so you'll have to be able to work with
| the code from 7 different half-assed projects going each
| going back 1d20 years". There's no excuse for the latter,
| and I'm sorry you're in it.
| austincheney wrote:
| I used to think this but now I don't. It's what lead to this
| comment that received many upvotes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27906769
| simonw wrote:
| That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about
| this.
|
| The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you
| need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in
| order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading.
|
| But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a
| couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN
| give you most of that value.
|
| Hiring managers faced with five candidates, one of whom has a
| blog post about the technology they are hiring for, are more
| likely to bump that candidate through to a phone screen or
| interview round.
| yesenadam wrote:
| But if that candidate only made the blog posts and put stuff
| on github to help them get work, and not, say, because they
| were interested in the subject?... Then that becomes a reason
| to ignore their blog and github.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > But if that candidate only made the blog posts and put
| stuff on github to help them get work, and not, say,
| because they were interested in the subject?... Then that
| becomes a reason to ignore their blog and github.
|
| they only wrote their resume to help get work, not because
| they're... i dunno, interested in resume writing. should i
| ignore their resume?
|
| it's all just a source of stuff to talk to them about.
| yesenadam wrote:
| It's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith. The
| only reason for writing a resume is to help get work, as
| I'm sure you understand.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| It's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith - you
| allow that a resume is written only to get work and so
| consider it, but if they write a blog only to help them
| get work you dismiss it with the reason "they only did it
| to help them get work"? How is that consistent?
| cxr wrote:
| Job-seeking is anti-inductive. From
| <https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-
| ant...>:
|
| > _"Oh God," they answered. "No, anything but that. Nothing
| says 'person exactly like every other bright-eyed naive new
| doctor' than wanting to help people. You're trying to
| distinguish yourself from the pack! [...] Okay, tell you
| what. You have any experience treating people in disaster-
| prone Third World countries? [...] Talk about how you want
| to become a doctor because the people of Haiti taught you
| so much."_
|
| > _During my interviews, I talked about my time working in
| Haiti. I got to talk to some of the other applicants, and
| they talked about their time working in Ethiopia, or
| Bangladesh, or Nicaragua, or wherever. Apparently the
| "stand out by working in a disaster-prone Third World
| country" plan was sufficiently successful that everyone
| started using, and now the people who do it don't stand out
| at all. My interviewer was probably thinking "Oh God, what
| Third World country is this guy going to start blabbering
| about how much he learned from?" and moving my application
| to the REJECT pile as soon as I opened my mouth._
| simonw wrote:
| Honestly that wouldn't make a difference for me. If it was
| obvious that they had only put up blog posts to help them
| get work, but the content of those blog posts was good,
| they'd still bump themselves up my list of candidates
| compared to candidates that hadn't done that.
|
| The signal I'm looking for here is proof that the candidate
| can write, can think and can do some aspect of the work. A
| resume usually won't prove that to me on its own.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Sure, ok, fair enough. p.s. I did enjoy the article,
| thanks for that. :-) It's encouraging to be told you
| don't need to feel like you need a gapless decade on
| github and/or blogging, that anything is still something.
| [deleted]
| jameshush wrote:
| In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to
| care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online
| (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to
| write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn't
| matter.
|
| This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn't actually my
| goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and
| sales, all of those things _really_ mattered. Now that I'm
| running workshops and talks professionally, posting publicly is
| _critical_.
|
| Moral of the story: if you enjoy posting in public and teaching
| in public, but you feel like its getting you nowhere career wise,
| maybe you are in the wrong career like I was. Once I decided to
| double down on my strengths and spent nights and weekends at
| public speaking training instead of grinding leetcode things
| started to click.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and
| released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be
| played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen,
| and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly
| included the link on my resume.
|
| Never brought up during the interview process, I was still
| expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly
| on one question I almost always got passed, even though the
| games I made had plenty of things going on, and some were even
| finalists in game contests (one hosted by Microsoft, even).
|
| I don't bother keeping up a portfolio anymore (I am working on
| a new personal site again, but not to put on my resume).
| golergka wrote:
| I've worked in gamedeve since 2007 and interviewed a lot of
| people. Small games portfolio doesn't matter, because small
| games, just like beginner tutorials from Unity, don't teach
| you skills necessary to work on a large-scale project with
| multiple developers. When you're working on small-scale
| projects, you can follow bad practices and don't hit their
| limitations.
|
| However, if I would be interviewing a game designer and not
| an engineer, this portfolio would have been incredibly
| relevant.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Does this also apply to junior roles? I would expect a
| portfolio of small games or some tech demos is the best you
| could expect there.
| aloner wrote:
| No, small side projects will definitely help you stand
| out when you're applying for a junior position since you
| don't have a lot of experience yet.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Sure, but neither do binary searches and balancing trees.
| If writing a 10000 line game is not like working on a
| million line project, writing a 100 line algorithm is even
| less so. And yet, some recruiters value coding tests more.
|
| In fact, practices in competitive coding are almost the
| opposite of what you need in large projects. You need to
| get a result as fast as possible, and the code is thrown
| away in the end. Readability, robustness, reusability, none
| of these matter, descriptive names are a waste of time, so
| is freeing up resources. Competitive coders are usually
| good coders in general, simply because they care, but so
| are people with side projects.
| Hermel wrote:
| Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that
| don't have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?
| cableshaft wrote:
| Happens at smaller companies too. I just finished a round
| of job interviews, and interviewed at several smaller
| companies that didn't give a shit, they had their own pet
| processes for hiring and didn't care about anything I did
| beyond the most recent two jobs.
|
| At one of them the guy was the epitome of what I would call
| "friendly condescending", spending half the interview
| pontificating on why the vast majority of developers don't
| understand what they're doing and should spend all their
| free time having a deep philosophical understanding of
| their work and suggesting I might be amongst those idiots
| (I'm really not doing a great job of selling it, he went on
| and on elaborating all the ways in which all developers but
| him were lacking and how he couldn't find anyone worthy of
| working at the company), but with a smile on his face the
| entire time. To be fair he did call himself "the asshole at
| the company" during the interview, though.
|
| The two job offers I got were from larger companies, but I
| talked to some younger guys working there that liked video
| games and sci-fi novels and going to a summer camp hosted
| by a popular 80s/90s band and DSLR photography, etc. and
| being able to talk about those things even a little bit may
| have helped them get excited about me, actually :) Also
| helped I did well on their coding tests, though.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Most small companies copy the bureaucratic hiring processes
| of the larger ones at this point.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Usually they copy them wrong and dont know why its not
| working
| bob1029 wrote:
| I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so
| badly. The principal advantage of small business is that
| you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense
| to.
|
| Some of our best employees are the ones who came in with
| the fewest credentials and the most to prove. There is no
| candidate I would refuse purely on the grounds of
| credentials.
|
| We are much more interested in side projects and work
| ethic than formal certifications or other pieces of
| expensive paper.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| >I'll never understand why business owners want to fail
| so badly. The principal advantage of small business is
| that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes
| sense to.
|
| But how are you meant to know "when it makes sense to"? I
| imagine that lots of small businesses are run by owners
| who don't necessarily have the confidence to strike a new
| path in every facet of the business. If you're investing
| a lot of time and effort innovating on your
| product/service, it can also make sense to import a
| tried-and-tested hiring model wholesale from somewhere
| else.
|
| Of course, in a less generous sense that could be
| maligned as "cargo-culting", but if at the end of the day
| the planes show up (you make good-enough hires), you're
| not going waste time introspecting on the process.
| ithkuil wrote:
| One of the most common modern hiring "bureaucracy" I saw
| being applied in small companies/startup is the rule that
| candidates must be selected by their peers. There are
| many reasons this policy is appealing. One is that there
| is a growing recognition that managers aren't meant the
| be too technical and gauging the technical skills is thus
| delegated to those people who actually know the tech
| (namely the devs). The other reason is that it's assumed
| that in order for a team to work well together you need
| people who like and respect each other, and this often
| means answering the question "would you like to work with
| this person?".
|
| This policy backfires in many ways. It entrenches the
| existing culture and often doesn't easily allow to raise
| the seniority level of an existing company. I've been in
| many interview where only junior members where perplexed
| about some minor shortcomings about the candidate but
| they were the majority and the general sentiment was that
| if the devs noticed a red flag, it must be because
| manager and senior staff focused too much on high level
| stuff that was easy to fake, but luckily the juniors
| caught the impostor!...
|
| I was looking in dismay how one good candidate after
| another got rejected. Fixing this kind of problem took a
| tremendous amount of effort.
| SlowAndCalm wrote:
| I am similar (putting my WebGL games on my portfolio) and
| I've found it's actually a pretty good filter of employers
| for me. If they bring it up and are willing to have a
| discussion about it, it's always a good sign. There's a wide
| range of topics to talk about that can relate to the possibly
| more boring requirements of the job.
|
| If they are dismissive of them, it tends to be an early sign
| that they are unable to think of things in a broader or
| alternate context. These are also the interviews that tend to
| have questions with right or wrong answers, even if the
| questions have multiple solutions and warrant discussion.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > it's actually a pretty good filter of employers for me
|
| Reminds me of the story of the movie Good Will Hunting -
| Ben Affleck and Matt Damon added a completely out of place
| scene (a gay sex scene) in the middle of the screenplay
| just to see who would call it out, as a way of checking to
| see who had actually read the entire script.
| z3t4 wrote:
| If you are over qualified, like having published several
| games on your own, it's not like they don't think you can
| do they job, they might think you will get bored and
| miserable.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Maybe the candidate just wants a nice quiet easy job so
| they can reduce their stress and put their focus on other
| parts of their life?
| satyrnein wrote:
| That would be a perfectly fine reason! Ideally this comes
| out in the interview process, for example if the
| candidate is asked why they're leaving their previous
| role and says that work/life balance was an issue. As
| long as their needs match what you're offering, great.
|
| The thorniest situation is the overqualified, currently
| unemployed candidate. That person is often not trying to
| make a lifestyle change, but instead looking to pick up a
| paycheck for a few months until something better comes
| along (for good reason!).
| cableshaft wrote:
| Making games doesn't mean they're financially successful
| or making bank. Several of those I made were released as
| free Flash games back in the day, for example. And yet
| even those were more popular than some games I worked on
| professionally for companies while in the industry.
|
| So now I do enterprise development for my day job and
| work on games on nights and weekends. And enterprise
| development isn't inherently boring either.
|
| Programming is still programming, in both games and
| enterprise software there are times where you just need
| to power through easy boilerplate with some music or a
| podcast on, and other times where it's an intricate
| puzzle you have to mull over in silence, do some research
| or experimenting on, ask your colleagues for their
| opinions or insight, etc.
| obedm wrote:
| Being a good engineer goes beyond being good at coding.
|
| Many great coders suck at communication or are just not
| nice to be around.
|
| I've seen amazing "coders" not being hired because they
| can't have a good conversation during the interview. I'm
| sure they're the same ones that complain about interviews
| being too hard.
| MillenialMan wrote:
| Do people really pass on candidates that often because
| they're too impressive? Overqualification in general
| seems like the kind of spectre that I just can't see
| translating to the real world.
| starkd wrote:
| Are people really passed on for being over-qualified? Or
| is it a polite way of declining some applications? Or
| maybe even a little of both?
| MaKey wrote:
| I was passed on because I was overqualified for a
| position. I'm thankful for that because I found a much
| better fitting position a few months later.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Not an automatic rejection, but it certainly requires a
| conversation. I recently had to go back to a candidate to
| triple check that she really, really was fine not leading
| a team anymore, with no timetable on when that might
| happen again. After a few days, she withdrew. We were
| bummed, because she was great, but we had suspected it
| wasn't really what she was looking for.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Sometimes that's the case, though. I've led teams before,
| and I don't mind going back to just head down focused on
| code again. Leading people tends to be more lucrative but
| also dulls the coding blade.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Certainly, people's preferences change, their lives
| change, etc. Nothing wrong with that, just have to make
| sure all parties are aligned.
|
| And yes, my blade is quite dull at this point!
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I've personally come across this dilemma when hiring
| people. My own take is that's none of my goddamn business
| and if the person is the most qualified for the job then
| it's theirs for the taking.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Or you could perhaps discuss your concerns with the
| candidate... They may have a good reason for applying to
| this specific job.
| krageon wrote:
| "I want to work here because I need money to eat and you
| seemed like a safe choice"
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Some day I'm actually going to try this in an interview.
|
| Interviewer: "Why do you want to work for us?"
|
| Me: "Honestly, I don't want to work for anybody because I
| have too much other stuff I'd much rather be doing with
| my time. But I need an income to sustain myself so, if
| I'm going to work, I want to work here because I think
| it'll be easy, provide decent benefits, and it's a 20
| minute bike ride from my house."
| cableshaft wrote:
| If I were in charge of hiring (I'm not), I very well
| might hire you for that :)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That might very well be why you aren't in charge of
| hiring.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Valid enough reason if you ask me.
| satyrnein wrote:
| I don't think is optimal, either. It's not worth
| investing in onboarding someone, getting them situated in
| a team, then having to tell everyone a few months in that
| the person quit. If that seems like a very likely
| outcome, it makes sense to avoid it.
| Retric wrote:
| My experience is the most impressive people are
| significantly less likely to quit early. If they where
| doing a lot of interesting things in their free time they
| either become engaged with interesting projects at work
| or put in a solid work week and then go home to have fun
| with their own projects.
|
| Albert Einstein for example worked for several years as a
| patent examiner while developing special relativity. Sure
| his contemporary physicists mostly worked in academia,
| but teaching is as unrelated to research as everything
| else yet they still did it.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Sometimes having a light day job gives you more energy
| for your personal projects you care a lot more about at
| night :)
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I've made lots (thousands? hundreds at least) of commits to
| the Linux kernel and have been working on it since pre (git)
| history, have developed a number of novel concurrent data
| structures / algorithms for it.
|
| I decided to talk with a FANG recruiter a couple of years ago
| who must have scraped my name from mailing list or commit
| histories. Despite first making it clear by email I wasn't
| interested in a job interview at the moment but was just
| curious about some things, on the call they pretty soon
| demanded to know what I thought the best Big O notation was
| for a sort algorithm. They were rather insistent that I
| answer them this before they would move on and spend much
| more of their time explaining why they contacted me or
| answering my questions. Fortunately I hadn't wasted a lot of
| my time at that point either.
|
| Strange, rude, entitled behavior. Sadly, they probably do
| hold real power over graduates and new developers, and those
| without jobs or much experience, or just those who dearly
| want to work for these companies. So they can get away with
| treating people like this, putting out these drag nets,
| paying no real interest or respect to any individual (at
| least not until they think their canned questions have
| filtered out most of the useless scum).
| lobocinza wrote:
| Getting frustrated by that after graduation I decided to
| work as contractor instead of "getting a job".
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| To play devil's advocate, having a standardized process for
| all candidates has some benefits. I've witnessed otherwise
| stellar candidates with amazing open source contributions
| absolutely bomb coding interviews. Real "write a function
| that does X" in whatever language you're comfortable with
| and whatever tools or resources you want. Simple stuff.
|
| So yeah maybe the Big O stuff is lame, but sometimes it's
| also a filter for entitlement on the behalf of the
| candidate. Hiring isn't hard, but it's not easy.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > To play devil's advocate, having a standardized process
| for all candidates has some benefits. I've witnessed
| otherwise stellar candidates with amazing open source
| contributions absolutely bomb coding interviews. Real
| "write a function that does X" in whatever language
| you're comfortable with and whatever tools or resources
| you want. Simple stuff.
|
| I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate very well
| here, because this suggests to me that the interview
| process did _not_ work well. Do you want to hire someone
| who can write a binary tree insertion in 30 minutes, or
| someone who can make amazing contributions to real
| software projects?
|
| > So yeah maybe the Big O stuff is lame, but sometimes
| it's also a filter for entitlement on the behalf of the
| candidate. Hiring isn't hard, but it's not easy.
|
| My point wasn't that hiring is easy or even that
| programming quizzes do not have a part in interviews. It
| is the level of contempt that some of these companies and
| their recruiters and hiring processes show to people.
|
| To be fair I did open myself up to it having responded to
| an unsolicited message, but I always try to politely
| decline if I get a message from a real person. They
| responded with something interesting and hooked me to
| agree to a call. I made it clear I was not interviewing
| for any position, and again while on the actual call I
| declined the Big O question. It just shows they were
| perfectly happy to send out probably mass spams and waste
| people's time, but were not willing to even read what I
| wrote or listen to me, or worse they did and decided
| they'd just ignore what I said anyway.
|
| My point is treating people like people, not like bycatch
| in your drag net. Simple stuff.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate very
| well here, because this suggests to me that the interview
| process did not work well. Do you want to hire someone
| who can write a binary tree insertion in 30 minutes, or
| someone who can make amazing contributions to real
| software projects?
|
| Most companies want malleable, fungible engineers. Most
| companies are not stable, something is usually in flux --
| projects, teams, organizations, business models. Most
| managers would rather have someone who can write a binary
| tree insertion in 30 minutes.
|
| But that is not how I personally hire, it's just reality.
| I'd rather have someone I can work with. In my
| experience, a lot of big open source contributors are not
| good colleagues. Are they going to focus on their job or
| spend their hours in the office working on their passion?
| Are they going to put their head down and get the work
| done or write essays debating in a mailing list? If we
| can't even have a conversation about algorithm complexity
| then there are better ways I can spend my time.
|
| > It is the level of contempt that some of these
| companies and their recruiters and hiring processes show
| to people.
|
| I really don't think this is true contempt, at least not
| usually. Recruiters, for better or for worse, vary
| widely. They are rarely good representations of the rest
| of the business. They're usually just sharks. A good
| recruiter is worth their weight in gold. But mostly
| they're ignorant, greedy, and have no care for you or the
| company you're interviewing for.
|
| > It just shows they were perfectly happy to send out
| probably mass spams and waste people's time, but were not
| willing to even read what I wrote or listen to me, or
| worse they did and decided they'd just ignore what I said
| anyway.
|
| Look, I'll be honest. I've conducted nearly a thousand
| interviews. I've hired at FAANGs, unicorns, YC companies.
| I almost _never_ look at a candidate 's resume/CV. If I'm
| not doing a coding interview and I want you to go into
| detail about something you worked on, I might take a
| glance. But otherwise, I actually do not care. I don't
| have time to peruse your GitHub profile or past projects.
| I don't even have time. One in a hundred applicants even
| get interviews, and I'm often interviewing 2-3 times a
| week. If it's important to you, tell me about it! I'd
| rather talk to you than read about you! In my experience,
| the resume/CV/published work is not a strong signal for
| making a good hire. It sounds like it's already helped
| you get your foot in the door, I wouldn't recommend
| expecting it to do anything more.
|
| I'm sorry you had a shitty experience with this company,
| but I encourage you to be humble and give them the
| benefit of the doubt. Unless they're a tiny, boutique
| company with a lifestyle or OSS-focused culture, they are
| busy people. If they don't ask these questions, then more
| often than not, by the time we're in a room or on a call
| together it's a waste of both our time.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I'd say I'm in a qualitatively similar position as you.
| If I'm going to interact with a candidate in any
| capacity, I always spend at least 30 seconds to skim
| their resume if I have the means to.
|
| When I'm acting as a hiring manager for a role, I read
| through applicant's materials in detail before deciding
| whether to advance them in the process. It's at least 50%
| of my work time, and my technical work suffers. I
| communicate that to the relevant managers and stake
| holders, and they can help decide whether it's the best
| use of my time.
|
| I also regularly receive followup emails from rejected
| candidates saying that they thought the interview was the
| most fair and thorough of anywhere they applied, they
| understood why they didn't get the job, and in the
| process they learned where they need to focus on to be a
| better fit for the same type of role in the future.
| borroka wrote:
| I apologize for the "one-liner". I am busy, I interview
| and hire many people, and I read resumes. You can do it
| too, it is one page and it is often interesting,
| including the lies here and there that disqualify
| candidates.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| > One in a hundred applicants even get interviews
|
| If you don't bother to read the CV, who do you even pick
| to interview? Randomly?
| refactor_master wrote:
| Of course. You wouldn't want an unlucky candidate.
| DJHenk wrote:
| > I'd rather have someone I can work with.
|
| > I almost never look at a candidate's resume/CV. > I
| don't have time to peruse your GitHub profile or past
| projects. I don't even have time.
|
| So you want someone you can work with, but you don't want
| to spend a couple of seconds to look at who you're
| talking to. Which is, you know, sort of the most basic of
| things necessary to get an actual relationship started.
|
| This goes both ways. If you don't even want to spend a
| few minutes to assess whether the resume or the projects
| are interesting to you, then why on earth would the
| candidate spare you any time or energy?
| jjeaff wrote:
| So they are stellar candidates with amazing
| contributions. Yet they can't do your whiteboard
| questions.
|
| So, are you trying to hire someone who will make stellar
| contributions to your codebase or are you looking for
| candidates who are good at answering dumb questions?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| umm... because manholes are round, and about 500,000 golf
| balls.
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| It filters out those who know how to structure code, but
| don't know how to write it. Stack overflow copy and paste
| can still create public projects.
| ericd wrote:
| It also filters out people who get anxious in interview
| situations, since anxiety tends to put people in fight or
| flight mode and shut down the critical thinking parts of
| the brain.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Sound like it filters out all types of weaknesses, which
| makes it a good thing when you have a large pool of
| candidates to filter through.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| I don't typically whiteboard. I'll write the prompt on
| the whiteboard, but otherwise it's a tool. The candidate
| has a computer, either their own or we provide one, with
| whatever tools they requested or want to use.
|
| Yes, plenty of candidates with otherwise amazing track
| records can't code comically simple functions (not dumb
| questions) together, with tons of help and hints and
| direction provided. They can't articulate their thought
| process, can't describe what they're doing, can't ask for
| help or get combative or aggressive or entitled.
|
| The question is entirely _not_ the point. It 's
| everything else that is signal. Could I work with this
| person? Could I give them a task and have confidence?
| gopher_space wrote:
| Think about what your interview process would look like
| if it was a normal day at work.
|
| You show up out of the blue with a task that isn't
| connected to anything the org does and with all the
| decisions made already. I cannot search the internet, but
| you do not explain why. You sit down across from me and
| stare.
| neilv wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily blame the _recruiter_ for that
| particular one, since I 'd guess the question was on a form
| that the org or manager required them to fill out.
|
| The recruiter might've been especially metrics-driven,
| though. And maybe they were playing to metrics in a way
| that the org/manager didn't intend.
|
| Or maybe the org/manager did intend your experience, and it
| was behavioral screen, for candidates who'll submit to
| whatever the emergent behavior of a corporate behemoth ends
| up doing to them. :)
| arethuza wrote:
| A couple of years back I managed to have three job offers
| at the same time - all of which I turned down. One
| recruiter got really angry with me, one basically
| disappeared the moment they heard I wasn't immediately
| accepting their offer and the third had a sensible and
| mature conversation about it.
|
| Guess which one gave me a good impression of their company
| and who I might work with again?
| codeOnMaster wrote:
| I'm curious why you put in the effort to apply to several
| places and passed up on all the offers.
| arethuza wrote:
| They approached me, I had interviews with each one
| thought about it and and on reflection once I found out
| more about each company and the roles decided I was
| better off staying where I was at the time. At the time
| the company I was working for had some commercial trouble
| (not related to me) so I thought it was wise to be
| informed about what opportunities were available but I
| wasn't desperate.
|
| Since moved somewhere else and am very happy with my new
| role.
| paganel wrote:
| For what it's worth I spent the last few days wfh-ing with
| a close family friend who happens to be a manager at a FANG
| company. Those few days convinced me to not wanting to work
| at a FANG company (or at any big company, for that matter)
| unless there's no other way to pay the bills and buy food
| for out two pets, it seemed like almost everything at that
| company was based on politics and how to sell yourself as a
| programmer (or IC-er, or whatever the correct term is) or
| as a manager, almost no talk about the product itself.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned
| out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode,
| there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or
| sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who
| studied programming as their major in college, the best
| predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.
| BlissWaves wrote:
| I like leetcode as a hiring metric and I think it's the best
| measure to test out an engineer. Unless a company uses it
| basically to find people that implement the fastest
| algorithm(read: have memorized it already) in 30 minutes it
| can be a very very effective way of screening.
| mattmanser wrote:
| If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad,
| it just sounds like there's something wrong with your
| process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices,
| which isn't what's being discussed really.
|
| The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for
| every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker.
|
| All you're actually saying is that novice programmers
| straight from uni mildly correlate in ability with SAT
| scores.
|
| Nothing surprising in that.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Yes, the thing that is wrong with the process is that they
| didn't check to see if the person was able to write code.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been
| bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your
| process.
|
| I think this is part of the reason for the widespread usage
| of take home / coding assignments etc.
|
| If you have a bad process making people do some work
| improves your result.
|
| I remember the first company I had with a friend in the
| late 90s and our process sucked. It was embarrassing,
| although thinking about it we still had a 50% success rate
| in technical quality of people we hired. If we had given
| tests to the people we didn't have someone to vouch for it
| would have meant we did not make the mistakes we did. And
| by saying we had a bad process we had a bad firing process
| as well. The bad hires we made really were catastrophic
| because we couldn't handle any part of the process.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Where are you finding public speaking training? I'm asking
| because that's a skill I would myself like to develop.
| wpietri wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on the place. I'm hiring now and we
| actively appreciate things like mentoring and doing public
| work.
|
| I agree that people not feeling appreciated should try other
| things, but I think that includes different kinds of employers
| as well as different kinds of job.
| jameshush wrote:
| I agree, I was in the California market for 7ish years so my
| experience is heavily skewed for that culture.
|
| That being said, I'm NOT bashing those interviews. I've been
| a hiring manager too, if I was able to offer double money and
| high prestige like a FAANG company I would have had a high
| filter too. I focused more on sourcing people through friends
| of friends so the interviews were more of a soft sale on my
| end than a leetcode grind.
| jdenning wrote:
| Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my
| portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.
| driverdan wrote:
| When possible I bypass shorteners so candidates won't know
| when I've looked, eg add + to the end of bit.ly links.
| thefr0g wrote:
| I mean why would someone want to visit your online portfolio
| if it looks like you didn't even put in enough effort to get
| a proper domain?
| ornornor wrote:
| Same experience here. Everyone says you should spend your
| nights and weekends building a portfolio on top of your day
| job, but no one looks at it when you apply. And then you get
| put aside because you didn't know for sure in an instant what
| is the result of `'1' + 1` in JavaScript.
| sheikheddy wrote:
| What does 'credits' mean in this context?
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah I need to leave the industry.
|
| Problem is, not much else looks appealing. Most realistic
| pivots look more miserable and end up just being adjacent roles
| that remove all the parts of what I like about software
| development while becoming mostly what I don't, likely with a
| much lower salary cap. I thought about doing something radical
| and going back to school, but I don't have the time or money.
| Though this thread makes me want to look again.
| whataremyvalues wrote:
| I've found careerexplorer.com to be a helpful tool for career
| planning and exploration.
|
| Knowing where I stand and what my values are also helps when it
| comes to navigating the professional environment.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions
| they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to
| fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| I don't see how having high enough standard means that they
| want "good enough".Do you want their hiring level to be even
| higher or what?
| N00bN00b wrote:
| >Do you want their hiring level to be even higher or what?
|
| I just described what I see. It's not about what I want or
| don't want. Personally I'm mostly indifferent, I'd say.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| For a pure engineering role things like credits at large
| companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really
| great ways to get an interview.
|
| I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an
| interview.
|
| You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a
| lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm
| really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.
| kebman wrote:
| Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are
| flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or
| less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather
| have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than
| one that has showed continuous progress with several finished
| projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys
| somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank
| sheet imp that they can mould wholly in their own image? Is
| real creativity and output really of no value to these guys?
| everdrive wrote:
| The reality is that companies just don't know. They have a
| few interviews to vet a candidate, and can't possibly make
| a truly informed decision. They move from different vetting
| tactics and follow trends because they can't really measure
| the outcome of their vetting strategies directly.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I am an individual contributor and technical leader with
| multiple degrees in computer science engineering, and about
| 15 years of experience working on safety critical real-time
| embedded systems. I've interviewed many hundreds of people
| for software engineering roles over the years. The majority
| of people that apply for software engineering roles are
| simply not a great fit. Onsite interviews are very
| expensive in terms of engineering time, so as a company we
| try to vet coding ability via phone interviews and no-time-
| limit coding challenges. If we do ask a whiteboard coding
| question, it's because there were potential red flags
| earlier on in the process. When someone gets rejected after
| an on-site interview panel, it's either because they
| flopped multiple interviews, or were mediocre across all
| interviews. There's detailed notes individually typed up by
| each interviewer, and you can typically see common themes
| emerge across the various sessions.
|
| "This person seems really sharp, and their questions were
| very insightful!"
|
| "They really focused on testing more than the typical
| applicant."
|
| "I tried giving them a hint four different ways, but they
| just wouldn't take it. When I explicitly explained what I
| was looking for, they agreed with me, but I couldn't tell
| if they actually understood."
|
| "Their solution seemed a lot more complicated than
| necessary, and had a bunch of unhandled edge cases as a
| result. Every time I pointed out an edge case, they added
| another branch rather than fixing the underlying structural
| problems."
|
| "Several times when I asked a question, they deflected or
| answered something else, or assumed I was implying
| something and continued writing more nonsensical code."
|
| Also, many people people tend to attribute a lot of value
| to their personal/hobby projects. They're certainly very
| cool and fun to chat about, but it's very rare for projects
| to be novel in a way that sets you apart when being
| considered for serious engineering projects. At work we
| develop UAVs. Your hobby grade FPV quadcopter is totally
| sweet, but it isn't going to get you an interview. If you
| built a hardware-in-the-loop testbed for your quadcopter,
| then let's talk!
|
| "Output" in particular is a funny thing to gauge in
| software engineering. I'll sometimes go a month without
| writing a single line of production code. My favorite PRs
| delete more lines of code than they add. A more junior
| coworker will have bloody fingertips from coding around a
| problem for days, and then I'll ask a relatively dumb
| question about what they're trying to do, they'll think for
| a minute, and then delete 1000 lines of code and replace it
| with 50 because they were making incorrect assumptions.
| It's not just individual productivity that matters, but
| also team productivity.
|
| "Creativity" is also a funny thing. Within embedded
| software, the most elegant solution is the most boring one.
| Any time someone does something creative, there better be
| an extensive unit test for it, because otherwise it's
| definitely going to be buggy. With wisdom, discipline and
| creativity all together one can build more sophisticated
| and complex systems than otherwise, and that's highly
| valuable. Lacking wisdom or discipline, though, creativity
| does indeed become a liability.
| kebman wrote:
| Thank you for taking your time to give this answer! I
| think it gives great insight into how you work and what
| you're looking for!
| carnitine wrote:
| Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn't
| implement it from scratch. There's no complex idea or trick
| to remember, it's the most basic algorithmic around.
| driverdan wrote:
| Has anyone who's worked for you had to write binary
| search from scratch on the job? It's pointless to ask
| candidates to write code that they'd never have to do in
| the real world.
|
| I've been writing code for 25+ years, 15 years
| professionally, and the only time I had to write any
| search algos from scratch was in school. I'm sure I could
| do a binary search given enough time but I'd probably
| just refuse and end the interview.
| trhway wrote:
| a guess - you're young and have short industry
| experience, just enough to make very sure of yourself, so
| probably the age is between 25-30 with the experience
| between 5-10 years?
| watwut wrote:
| I am older then that and still don't fond that question
| extraordinary hard?
| trhway wrote:
| the point isn't about whether the question is hard. It is
| about understanding that other people are different and
| especially when the people stumble for whatever reason.
| The manifested "holier than thou" and lack of humility
| probabilistically suggest relative youth and
| inexperience.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes other people are different, but I have yet to meet
| good developer who struggle to understand binary search.
|
| Yes, people can randomly fail in interview due to stress
| or whatever. But that can happen on any question. This
| particular question really should weed out all that many
| otherwise good people.
| Jochim wrote:
| I learned the common search algorithms in school. I
| haven't had to touch them since, if you asked me to write
| psuedo-code for them on the spot I'd almost definitely
| fail to implement them properly. There's a huge
| difference between struggling to understand something and
| not being able to do it from memory on a whiteboard.
|
| Imo conversational questions are much better indicators
| in an interview of whether someone will be a good hire,
| the candidate knowing why you would use a binary tree
| over another data structure offers much more insight than
| asking them to write one. The more conversational
| approach also allows the interviewee to demonstrate their
| knowledge and gives you a better idea of how they
| approach a problem or whether they'd be a good fit on
| your team.
| kebman wrote:
| As a teacher I'd say that depends. If it's relevant to
| the job, then you should obviously know it, and perhaps
| even be able to expand upon it. Though after reading the
| posts here I have a sneaking feeling that things like
| that usually aren't relevant.
|
| With that said, having a conversation with someone
| solving a problem right in front of you, gives you a very
| good insight into how the person thinks. To that end I've
| censored a lot of pupils where they have to "defend"
| (i.e. talk about or explain) a piece of code that they
| made, sometimes beforehand as a bigger project, or
| sometimes on the fly.
|
| I'd often give them extra problems and talk with them
| about it as they solved it if I was unsure about the
| grade. I find that this gives me far more insight in
| where the pupil is coming from, and hence his level of
| competence, rather than seeing the code on its own, or
| having him answer a multiple choice or SAT type test. I
| can see how an interviewer might make use of a similar
| technique if he's unsure about the candidate.
| kebman wrote:
| Relax. It was just an example of the often menial 1-2-3
| things that often aren't really relevant for the job in
| question, but are still used to fail even accomplished
| coders in interviews.
| vaylian wrote:
| StackOverflow disagrees:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/504335/what-are-the-
| pitf...
|
| I quote from the thread: "binary search was first
| published in 1946 but the first published binary search
| without bugs was in 1962"
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I wonder what the expectation of the interviewer is on
| this. Virtually every single piece of code I'll ever
| write is going to have a a few off-by-one errors and
| probably other common bugs. That's why you do some basic
| validation and QA to find those bugs and fix them. The
| first pass isn't likely to even compile, but who cares?
| The compiler will tell you exactly why and you can fix
| that, too. Perfect code on a first try is a useless
| skill.
|
| On the other hand, just understanding how the algorithm
| works is what matters. And binary search may have been
| "published" as an implementation on programmable
| electronic computers in the recent past, but it's a
| timeless and intuitive algorithm that I understood
| perfectly well when I was 4 years old and first learned
| to read and started looking up entries in the dictionary,
| encyclopedia, and phone book.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I agree that it's not particularly challenging. As a
| counterpoint though, a linear search is more basic. It's
| also often faster than a binary search for small
| datasets, and it's easier to prove correct purely by
| inspection.
|
| Anecdotally, a coworker we hired a couple years ago (and
| has been doing an awesome job) dusted off her old coding
| challenge from when she applied, and ran it through a new
| test suite we've been working on. The suite failed, and
| it turns out her binary search was buggy...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > As a counterpoint though, a linear search is more
| basic. It's also often faster than a binary search for
| small datasets, and it's easier to prove correct purely
| by inspection.
|
| Also for sorted datasets where the most frequently
| referenced data is at the top.
| dmurray wrote:
| I feel like I'm pretty good at these things, but I'd 100%
| have an off-by-one error in my first attempt at binary
| search. I can get it right quickly if I'm able to test
| the code, or very slowly if I have to work through
| several test cases by hand on the whiteboard.
|
| There's a lot of room in between "couldn't implement it"
| and "can do it in 5 seconds" and "wrote a buggy version
| of it".
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I agree it's very easy to make an off-by-one mistake in
| binary search. (Related article: [1]) But an interview
| candidate showing something that is _almost_ right and
| then has enough self-awareness to say "but I'm sure
| there's an off by one error in there somewhere" has given
| a really good overall answer in my books. I think there's
| still value in asking the question because that sort of
| answer constrasts against candidates who flounder
| completely (which is more common than you'd imagine).
|
| A common counter argument is that a bad interviewer
| wouldn't accept an answer that has minor bugs in it like
| that. But I don't buy that counter argument, because a
| bad interviewer could misjudge candidates regardless of
| the interview format.
|
| [1] https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/are-you-one-
| of-the-1...
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| One of the things these discussions rarely bring up is that
| companies want to have a similar process for evaluating
| _everyone_. This is especially important if a rejected
| candidate accuses the company of illegal discrimination. If
| you can show that you applied the same criteria to
| everyone, then you have a better defense. I think side
| projects are great, and can be useful in evaluating how
| well a candidate will "fit" a job or work environment, but
| there's no denying that it's a deviation from a standard
| evaluation process.
|
| At one place I worked, one of the exercises we used
| simulated working in a team environment. HR was really
| worried that we were giving a "test" (this really sets of
| their alarm bells if they haven't vetted it!) and we had to
| prove up and down that it was an exercise to see how they
| performed in a group setting, and the actual code wasn't
| very important.
|
| The whiteboard coding interviews are beyond stupid IMO, but
| at least they can prove that they're consistently applied.
| simonw wrote:
| I interviewed for a job at the BBC many years ago and
| there was an HR person in the room with the interviewer
| making sure that they stuck exactly to the script.
|
| As someone who thrives on talking about side-projects, I
| did not do well in that interview.
| eschneider wrote:
| Ok, I interview and hire folks where I work. (Mostly
| looking for C/C++ folks.) If you list projects or GitHub
| links, I'll DEFINITELY go through them and probably spend a
| lot of time asking questions about your design and
| implementation because it's great seeing what folks can
| tell you about things they wrote.
|
| In the absence of that, why might I ask you to implement a
| binary search or maybe a linked list: I want to give you a
| problem that you (should, for senior folks) understand and
| will show me that you understand pointers and dealing with
| memory with something basic. I don't expect perfect on a
| whiteboard interview, I'm just looking for red flags.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I had a co-worker about ten years ago. His coding
| question was always: Please implement a linked list for
| me in any language. He said more than 80% of candidates
| failed. Incredible. LinkedList! I can understand that
| people will struggle to write a HashMap, BinaryTree, or
| BinarySearch (always full of bugs), but LinkedList is
| just crazy.
|
| To be fair, I always get tripped up by the classic
| interview question of reverse-a-single-linked-list. It's
| not something I ever do outside an interview!
| kebman wrote:
| I had a good laugh from this one xD Thanks for sharing!
| Almost makes me wonder what's the most "creative" and
| convoluted way of solving a linked list. "Any language?
| Well, how do you like this implementation in Whitespace?"
| yobbo wrote:
| > Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are
| flawed
|
| They are optimizing for something. It's just not what you
| think it is.
|
| A lot of it seems to be about the identities of the
| employees and the hazing ritual that initiates new members
| into the group.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> hazing ritual_
|
| Got it in one.
|
| Whenever I ask people about these tests, we have some
| back-and-forth, and it inevitably ends with them
| declaring (in so many words): "Well, I got hazed, so you
| will, too."
|
| I don't suck at the tests, but I'm not particularly good
| at them. I never practice them, and didn't come up
| through the traditional CS curriculum (I started as an
| EE), so I'm often seeing the problems for the first time,
| when I look at them.
|
| They just don't have any relevance to the type of work I
| have experience doing, or the value I could bring to a
| team. Since it seems that most interviewers are looking
| for particularly formulaic responses, they are a pretty
| good way of filtering out people like me.
|
| I'm always puzzled as to why interviewers waste valuable
| time on these seemingly pointless exams. If they don't
| want me to work for them, there's much easier ways to
| discourage me.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| > Or is it that they want a blank sheet imp that they can
| mould wholly in their own image? Is real creativity and
| output really of no value to these guys?
|
| That's what I'm starting to suspect, and that suspicion is
| shared by several of my friends in the industry.
| ithinkso wrote:
| > Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve
| binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed
| continuous progress with several finished projects over the
| years?
|
| They probably only interview people that have showed
| continuous progress with several finished projects over the
| years and hire only those that are good and can code
| instead of pulling leftpad from npm (a snarky response but
| so is yours, as if it's either good at whiteboard
| interviews but uncreative imp or bad at interviews but
| great and accomplished)
| thewarrior wrote:
| The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps
| one understand the answers to questions like why companies
| prize things like performance on coding tests that don't
| correlate very well to the job. Even FANGs are not looking
| for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation
| comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry
| luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to
| fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines
| that will learn the "syllabus" just like they learn to leet
| code.
|
| These deep technical skills don't matter as much because a
| lot these highly paying companies don't have work that is
| deeply technical. Their challenges are primarily around
| management and scaling the number of engineers.
|
| This requires reducing people down to something very simple
| and being able to treat engineers as fungible resources.
| Hiring and evaluating each person as a special snow flake
| is not the most profitable thing to do at large scales.
|
| This is exactly the thesis behind Paul Graham's ideas on
| startups and innovation. The scaling of a large corporation
| inevitably jams up the gears of the system and a small team
| can completely outflank a large company with employees
| keeping more of the returns and the work being more
| fulfilling.
|
| Unfortunately the incumbents have sucked in most of the
| revenue so even though you regularly have small teams of
| people knocking out work that puts the biggies to shame
| making money is hard to impossible. So everyone on "Hacker
| news" is now left reverse engineering every detail of how
| big co works to get ahead .
| kebman wrote:
| Thank you for your insight! Hm so perhaps statistics and
| probability are actually more valuable for companies like
| that?
| thewarrior wrote:
| Do not think only in terms of technical skills. Large
| companies operate via easily scaled algorithms for
| everything including promotions and hiring. The
| simplicity of these algorithms often means that they can
| be circumvented. You want to get hired at Google. What do
| you do ? Spend 3 years doing side projects or spend 3
| months befriending and impressing some engineers so you
| get a referral.
|
| There maybe god level engineers who are stuck at junior
| levels because they simply don't know how to fit into the
| gears of the hierarchy. If you want to get promoted your
| relationships and trust with the management chain is as
| important as the quality of your work.
|
| Don't buy into the official stories about systems and
| processes work. Learn how they actually do.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I have to do my 6-monthly plug of The Inner Ring [0] by
| CS Lewis here. Dives into some of this, drawn from War
| and Peace.
|
| [0] https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative
| engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions
| or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead
| projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines
| and be highly productive coding machines that will learn
| the "syllabus" just like they learn to leet code.
|
| FAANMG also has a deluge of resume thrown at it every
| semester. Ever since mainstream media filmed at the
| Google Campus/Facebook HQ, every parent wants their kid
| to work there since "he's really good at this computer
| stuff" and "he's gaming all the time, he might as well
| make money at the computer!".
|
| And then you get to interviewing and realize this
| candidate cannot write 2 lines of code...
| closeparen wrote:
| There's a big world between "cannot write 2 lines of
| code" and "studied Leetcode full-time for only two months
| instead of three." I give a lot of interviews, the
| majority of candidates who fail are in the latter
| category.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems
| to care.
|
| I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at
| these kinds of moves to try to impress me.
|
| I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is
| some kind of shallow engagement.
|
| It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do
| it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your
| chances if you propose 5 simple commits to random projects on
| Github to be your greatest accomplishment.
|
| A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you are
| still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I always remind
| people to learn something first before you try to teach other
| people.
|
| I will still want to see you code yourself out of a paper bag.
| maxFlow wrote:
| I don't keep a blog to impress you. Nor to "try to teach
| other people"; if anything I use it to teach myself (ie to
| organize my own thoughts and to document my learning).
|
| Blogs are simple media to share one's thoughts, because one
| likes to write and... to share---that is it. If you don't
| care for my writing and my sharing then you're free to move
| on.
|
| The beautiful thing about knowledge is that it's free and
| open to anyone, implying that junior engineers shouldn't have
| blogs is next level elitism and conceit. That is what I find
| worrying.
|
| I feel sorry for the people having to interview with you or
| working under you, that need to code themselves "out of a
| paper bag" to impress you.
| lmilcin wrote:
| And that is perfectly fine.
|
| You know what is not fine? Telling people they need blogs
| or open source projects to get better chance at getting
| work.
|
| Because then I get candidates that spent a lot of their
| time and effort doing something they did not really want to
| do rather than getting better at what they want to.
|
| > I feel sorry for the people having to interview with you
| or working under you, that need to code themselves "out of
| a paper bag" to impress you.
|
| I feel sorry for the people that have to work with you if
| you feel ability to demonstrate you can program is not a
| prerequisite for working in a development team.
| teknofobi wrote:
| > I always remind people to learn something first before you
| try to teach other people.
|
| Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your
| relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning.
| It's one of the greatest tricks a good college class will
| pull, having students continually drag each other a step
| further as they learn something new and then have to explain
| it to their peers. Most blogging is this kind of "I'm not
| writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to
| remember it now.", so it's seems to me you might be
| dismissing some eager learners if you think the act of
| blogging is self-important.
| lmilcin wrote:
| > Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop
| your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently
| learning
|
| Oh sure it is.
|
| I studied theoretical math and I found teaching other
| students math was great way to get it organized in my head.
| But we also had professor and I wasn't teaching anybody
| _original_ ideas, just the material that was already
| written and defined.
|
| Now I have decades of development experience I still find
| explaining things to other people a very useful and
| efficient way to get my thoughts organized.
|
| I kinda exclude blogs with posts of the form "see, I have
| found something interesting today!" or "I just spent 5
| hours solving this problem, writing down solution here so
| you don't have to waste time". This is fine.
|
| But if you have 3 years of experience in development and
| start writing blog posts criticizing OOP, that is
| definitely not going to help your case.
|
| I mean, it is highly unlikely you got enough experience and
| thinking done to even understand OOP, let alone start
| criticizing it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Rather than making conclusions based on their level, see
| the arguments they have in their article and if it's
| doubtful they didn't come up with those thoughts on their
| own, but simply copy pasted, then ask them to elaborate
| on some things and it will be clear.
| pmichaud wrote:
| I find this attitude a bit sad :( I think there's at
| least one place we agree which is that it's annoying when
| people do shiny yet perfunctory things as basically a
| gimmick or trick to convey the impression of depth that
| just isn't there.
|
| But... I think someone with 3 years of experience deeply
| engaging with the question of OOP is a great thing to do.
| You're not wrong that they can't possibly know, but
| that's not relevant I think. Trying to own the domain and
| think critically about the sacred cows and reinvent the
| useful parts is exactly what a good autodidact has to do.
| And doing it in public view, available for critique and
| ridicule, I think puts skin in the game and shows
| character.
|
| There's something to be said for certainty and epistemic
| humility, but also I think basically everyone who ever
| invented a truly new thing or learned something
| nontrivial on their own had to bring enough audacity to
| the table to get over the line.
|
| Maybe it's a personality difference and you're making the
| right choice for the type of personality you want your
| org to have.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| >A blog about programming is not going to impress me if you
| are still junior engineer.
|
| I don't quite agree here. Junior engineer doesn't always say
| much about skill. People can have deep knowledge in a field
| like reverse engineering but still work as a junior because
| they got out of college 1-2 years ago.
|
| When it comes to junior/senior titles I get the feeling age
| is more important than "skill".
|
| I get what you're saying though, you should never act like
| you're a god amongst men, but blogposts that show deep
| knowledge aren't something I would dismiss.
| vaylian wrote:
| > if you are still junior engineer. Rather, it is worrying. I
| always remind people to learn something first before you try
| to teach other people.
|
| The curse of knowledge is also a thing: An expert might have
| a harder time explaining things to a novice. A novice can
| more easily explains things to a fellow novice.
|
| And if someone gets something wrong on the internet, sooner
| or later someone else will point it out. #XKCD386
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| It helped me to get offers from companies, so I didn't have to
| apply for anything anymore.
|
| Sure, when I applied, I had to do dumb tests. But when a C or
| VP level asked me it was usually not an issue to get a job.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| This really depends. Are you talking about FANG+ type
| companies? Doesnt matter who you are you will probably have
| to whiteboard.
|
| Outside of FANG? I'm sure you can bypass many technicals with
| credentials.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm not talking about big companies. I'm not that famous.
|
| But I think, if a person above VP level wants you at
| Facebook, an assesment center isn't an issue.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| That's actually not really true. You still have to
| interview. A referral or being recruited directly isnt a
| free pass. You'll probably get some additional prep but
| the person recruiting you cant just say let's make this
| person an offer.
| k__ wrote:
| Really?
|
| I had a professor who got people jobs at big corps and he
| said, many of them failed the assesment, so he had to
| talk to higher ups.
| booi wrote:
| Most FAANG companies do actual coding now instead of
| whiteboarding :(
| raverbashing wrote:
| Great to know, an editor is much easier than a whiteboard
|
| I'd much prefer it rather than scribbling in a whiteboard
| with an eraser that doesn't work and trying to put
| together the solution
|
| Whiteboard does work for higher level discussions, not
| for anything resembling code
|
| Lest they ask you to whiteboard FizzBuzz, that makes me
| want to leave the interview immediately.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I've had a couple of interviews where I was asked to
| either whiteboard FizzBuzz, or answer 00s era Google
| brain teasers. From a big company that would be a swift
| exit from the interview process for me, but in both cases
| it happened to me I was interviewing as the first
| engineer at startups - I did the tasks, and then had a
| conversation about how if I were hired I'd remove them
| from the interview process.
|
| In both cases I got the job, then stuck around for 5+
| years, so I'm going to say it worked out ;)
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Because their interview questions were silly?
| colordrops wrote:
| Why the unhappy face? Is this considered a bad trend? I'm
| personally way better at online coding sessions than
| whiteboarding.
| ant6n wrote:
| Jotting down an algorithm and talking about complexity is
| probably easier than implementing it?
| maxioatic wrote:
| A coding session usually implies something unrelated to
| algorithms. Whiteboarding is usually much more than
| "jotting down an algorithm".
| [deleted]
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > if I forgot how to write binary search
|
| The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget".
| For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the
| letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is
| the brakes.
| sedeki wrote:
| I think the overall point is the risk of forgetting something
| judged as "fundamental."
| Vvector wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean here? I would argue that any
| decent programmer could hack out a sorting routine, without
| having the code memorized.
|
| If you cannot write a binary search routine from scratch,
| how can you be expected to solve much bigger problems?
| kragen wrote:
| Sure, but there are a lot of subtle issues in both
| sorting and binary search. The simplest sorting routine
| is probably dumbsort: void
| dumbsort(int *p, int n) { for (int tmp,
| i = 1; i < n; i++) { if (p[i] < p[i-1]) tmp =
| p[i], p[i] = p[i-1], p[i-1] = tmp, i = 0; }
| }
|
| But it lives up to its name; I can't imagine any reason
| you should ever _use_ this algorithm. It compiles to 16
| instructions but it 's O(N3). Insertion sort is more
| complicated--it compiles to _17_ instructions--and is
| actually a reasonable thing to use in some circumstances:
| void isort(int *a, size_t n) {
| for (size_t i = 1; i < n; i++) { for (size_t
| j = i; j > 0; j--) { if (a[j-1] <= a[j])
| break; int tmp = a[j]; a[j] =
| a[j-1]; a[j-1] = tmp; }
| } }
|
| That's because it has the lowest constant factor of all
| the O(N2) comparison sorts on common machines, so it's
| the absolute fastest way to sort small arrays. (On my
| laptop it sorts N items in 0.34 ns x N2 +- 2%.) And it's
| also very fast for large arrays of nearly-sorted data, so
| it's a reasonable way to finish up after a rough
| quicksort.
|
| It took me about five minutes to write that, and it
| worked the first time I tested it. But that's in part
| because I find sort routines fascinating and I've been
| studying them, and programming in C, for almost 30 years.
| Even if it took you an hour or four hours and required a
| lot of debugging, you still might be a decent programmer.
| Especially for jobs where things are less well defined
| and you have to do a lot of debugging anyway!
|
| (By contrast, I've actually spent most of the last hour
| trying to write a properly working quicksort, the variant
| that finishes up with a single call to insertion sort,
| using both notes _and_ a compiler. Of course it produces
| correct results because of the final insertion sort but
| it 's not as efficient as it should be and I can't figure
| out why. Apparently I can't brain today... good thing I'm
| not in a job interview!)
| cassonmars wrote:
| I think you're overestimating most people's ability to
| withstand the stress that quiz show style Leetcode interviews
| can put on people. I've literally blanked on an interview
| before when I was tasked with writing a simple parser and
| I've written entire compilers. The interview processes are
| broken in most companies. Pair programming sessions with
| debugging and incremental graduation of the problem scope are
| way better at assessing programming competency, because you
| also get a sense for how well the candidate can collaborate
| and communicate.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Stressful situations happen at work. If you're not able to
| handle it in the interview you might not be able to during
| crunch time.
| eschneider wrote:
| Yeah, folks can definitely freeze up and I'm pretty
| sympathetic to that in interviews. I'll often spot folks
| most or all of the algorithm if it looks like they locked
| up. "Hey, you could dry implementing it like this..." and
| see where they go from there. I mean, we really want to see
| people succeed with these things.
| jerrre wrote:
| Your analogies are things that you use a large % of the time,
| almost any second. Whereas I've been programming for years,
| and never wrote a binary search (I think?), but perhaps I
| don't qualify as literate?
|
| I think writing an if-statement would be closer to your
| analogies.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > ...but perhaps I don't qualify as literate?
|
| Probably.
|
| Point is, you don't really need to know how to program to
| ship software.
| Ueland wrote:
| Yeah, the parent commment is what I consider a reason for
| why many fear the imposter syndrome. They read about other
| developers saying "If you dont know how to do X, you suck
| and cant get a job".
| adamors wrote:
| This comment is nonsense. Nobody is writing binary searches
| in their day-to-day jobs, and if they do it's once in a blue
| moon, not every day. You're using pedals every time you
| drive.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Binary searches should be internalized as part of your
| life's vocabulary if you're a programmer.
|
| You don't use all 10000 words of your native language every
| day. You don't ride a bike every day. Nevertheless, that's
| part of you and you don't need to make a conscious effort
| to remember which way the pedals spin when you ride a bike
| after a long hiatus.
| swanndev wrote:
| I don't think those examples are really applicable here.
| You don't use all 10000 words, but our brains are evolved
| to process language and you interact with language
| everyday. Riding a bike has you engaging in a physical
| activity which is also something that we're geared to
| remember.
|
| Programming is already pretty unnatural and implementing
| binary searches and other basic algorithms is really only
| something you do constantly in the beginning. Over time
| that "muscle memory" will fade. It's also something
| that's easy enough to look up and understand in a couple
| minutes.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Yeah, I need to implement a binary search maybe once a
| year. I had a legit use of a priority queue a couple years
| ago and I'm still excited about it!
|
| I've still never had a professional use for a Trei
| structure. I tried really hard to make a case for it on a
| project at Google, but it just didn't make sense vs.
| slapping down std::map and then drinking a beer.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| In which case would you actually implement a binary
| search instead of using an existing library method for
| that?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Code running on a microcontroller with very limited RAM,
| operating on data structures that don't naturally plug
| into generic algorithm implementations. For example,
| finding the end of a several GB long append-only log file
| stored on the raw blocks of an SD card.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| In these cases did you write it from scratch or were you
| able to copy paste a working solution?
|
| Because most pragmatic to me would be to google for a
| solution on Stack overflow, see what is upvoted and seems
| reasonably vetted, then potentially go over the code
| yourself to see if there's any issues and maybe write few
| tests to be extra sure.
|
| Maybe your use case is too niche though to be able to
| copy paste though, I'm not sure.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Sure, I'll find some example code on Wikipedia or
| whatever as a reference. It's faster than deriving it all
| again from scratch. I don't really copy paste algorithms
| like that, though. Instead, I review the reference
| material until I understand the algorithm and any
| potential edge cases and optimizations that may apply,
| and then code it up and unit test it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| The last time I actually wrote a binary search was in
| college in 1992. I still remember exactly how to do it...
| because it's really basic.
| Vvector wrote:
| > Nobody is writing binary searches in their day-to-day
| jobs
|
| But in an interview situation, they cannot give you a three
| week task. Like FizzBuzz, a binary search is a simple task
| that can be done during an interview. They are not testing
| your ability to write a binary search. They are testing you
| on your ability to implement a function, given specific
| requirements.
| midasz wrote:
| How often are you writing binary search algorithms hahah, is
| it like your variant of a doodle?
| kragen wrote:
| For me it is! It's one of my standard exercises when I'm
| sketching out a new programming language: what does binary
| search look like in this language? How general is it?
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/paperalgo#addtoc_23
| kragen wrote:
| Well, but he said "forgot how to write binary search in 10
| minutes". This came up here three months ago: "school was
| years ago...I've forgotten how to implement a hash table in C
| within 30 minutes. Is that really the gatekeeper we want?"
|
| Well, I thought, yes, I think it is, actually? So I tried
| implementing a hash table in C--without testing it, as if I
| were writing it in an interview without programming tools. It
| took me 15 minutes and had a significant bug:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593250
|
| I concluded that implementing a hash table in C in 30 minutes
| is a reasonable thing to ask someone to try during an
| interview, and how people work on it will probably tell you a
| lot about their programming abilities. I wouldn't hire them
| for a C programming job if they said "school was years ago,
| I've forgotten", but you shouldn't necessarily expect them to
| succeed flawlessly.
|
| Binary search in particular is notoriously tricky. It's easy
| to explain the idea in a lot less than 10 minutes, and it's
| easy to write a version of the code that sometimes works in
| less than 10 minutes, something like bs(k,
| a, i, j) { int m = (i+j)/2; return
| a[m] == k ? m : a[m] < k ? bs(k, a, m, j) :
| bs(k, a, i, m); }
|
| But it's easy for the algorithm to hide subtle bugs. That
| version has at least one type error (in modern C, anyway),
| one obvious correctness bug, at least one obvious performance
| bug, and probably some subtle correctness bugs as well. Many
| years passed between the first publication of a binary search
| algorithm and the first publication of a correct one.
|
| Also, though, there are lots of kinds of programmers. You can
| spend a lot of time writing screen-scrapers or CRUD or
| machine learning models in Python without ever needing to
| implement binary search. In Python you should probably just
| use the bisect module in practice, most of the time, rather
| than reimplementing it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > But it's easy for the algorithm to hide subtle bugs.
|
| For sure, but I _guarantee_ you the interviewer from the
| grandparent comment wasn 't looking for correctness and
| safety when they asked to implement a binary search.
|
| They ask the binary search question to check if the
| applicant knows what an algorithm is and if they ever had
| to implement one. ( _Any_ algorithm.)
|
| Sadly, 90% of programmers these days don't and haven't.
|
| > In Python you should probably just use the bisect module
| in practice, most of the time, rather than reimplementing
| it.
|
| Well, yes, most developers ship software without ever
| having to actually program.
| kragen wrote:
| > _I_ guarantee _you the interviewer from the grandparent
| comment wasn 't looking for_
|
| What, the company that interviewed James Hush about
| binary search was your company? Have you thought about
| the possibility that maybe he also interviewed at at
| least one other company which used different evaluation
| criteria? Maybe you should put a little bit more effort
| into correctness yourself!
|
| > _They ask the binary search question to check if the
| applicant knows what an algorithm is and if they ever had
| to implement one. (Any algorithm.)_
|
| > _Sadly, 90% of programmers these days don 't and
| haven't._
|
| That makes no sense. Every program or subroutine
| implements an algorithm. If you haven't written any
| programs or subroutines you aren't a programmer.
|
| > _Well, yes, most developers ship software without ever
| having to actually program._
|
| This reminds me of when I was a kid and we thought it
| wasn't "actually programming" when we programmed in BASIC
| or Pascal because actual programs were written in
| assembly. We were wrong about that.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| The opposite is also true. I work in system engineering
| (sometimes it's called sysops. Hybrid programming/administration,
| often production stuff) and I've learned to I hide my creativity.
|
| A lot of employers want people they can understand and they can
| trust.
|
| The companies I work for generally don't want someone that's
| creative. They want someone that's dull and reliable. Show your
| creative side and they'll look for someone else, even if you've
| got 10x more skills than someone else.
|
| Given that creativity doesn't pay anyway (there's a cap on pay
| and I've already reached that cap), there's no point to show it.
| I can get hired based on what's on my resume alone and by
| answering the same set of questions they always ask.
|
| Then I get hired, I automate everything in under 6 months and I
| go sit on my ass or do something else. Flaw in the capitalistic
| system. I know what I'm worth, I can bring across what I'm worth,
| but it's simply outside the bounds of what's expected or needed.
|
| And I know that sounds weird, but think of it like this:
|
| No one is going to pay the fastest cashier in the world 3x
| minimum wage. Not even if they check out customers 6x faster than
| the next person. And claiming you're the fastest cashier in the
| world during the hiring process just gets you thrown on the
| discard pile.
|
| The same goes for a lot of other professions, including mine.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > Flaw in the capitalistic system.
|
| ???
| N00bN00b wrote:
| What is it called.. Market failure? It's got a name, I don't
| remember it.
|
| The job market doesn't support certain overqualified people.
| I gave you an example.
|
| Rationally, you'd think that a cashier that works 3x faster
| than other cashiers can make 3x the income. Or even 2x.
|
| A plumber could do that, or a woodworker (they might have to
| start their own company, but they can do it). But a cashier
| relies on employers and they're just not going to pay a
| cashier that much. Cashier being an example. There are many
| support jobs were it just doesn't pay to be good at your job.
|
| These people are technically incentivized to be mediocre. And
| they often are. Some of these positions allow growth paths,
| but not all. And just because I'm the world's best cashier,
| doesn't mean I'm a good store manager.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| > Rationally, you'd think that a cashier that works 3x
| faster than other cashiers can make 3x the income. Or even
| 2x.
|
| I don't think so, because a cashier's main job is just to
| wait for customers to show up. They are faster at clearing
| bottlenecks when a lot of customers show up at once, but
| they don't handle anywhere close to 3x as many customers
| over the course of their entire shift.
| simonw wrote:
| That's a really interesting perspective.
|
| I've been in interview debriefs where the fact that the
| candidate speaks at dozens of conferences a year has been
| raised as a potential problem, since it suggests they may not
| be as dedicated to the work that needs to be done.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| >I've been in interview debriefs where the fact that the
| candidate speaks at dozens of conferences a year has been
| raised as a potential problem, since it suggests they may not
| be as dedicated to the work that needs to be done.
|
| You are right, that's another good example. Hiring someone
| that's very passionate might just not be in the best interest
| of the employer.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear it, but it's definitely true for certain
| kinds of employer. I once met somebody doing similar work to
| yours. Like you, he would bust his ass early on to automate
| everything and then be kind of bored. At one point he had two
| full-time jobs where he had done that and he still had time to
| play a lot of video games.
|
| I hope he found an employer who could really challenge him, as
| he was happier during the initial phase of hard work. But I
| wouldn't be surprised if he never did.
| sudeepj wrote:
| There are two modes of hiring:
|
| 1. General purpose: Typical FANG like where hire first and then
| do team matching later
|
| 2. Targeted hiring: Companies want specific people and they try
| to recruit them
|
| A sizable number of top open-source contributors get recruited
| are in #2. Eg. 1) Top contributors in Rust lang hired by AWS. 2)
| FANG companies targeting top AI researchers from academia.
|
| One's open-source presence needs to be really prolific and the
| project has to make an large impact to be in #2 category.
|
| For #1 category folks, your public profile does not matter that
| much (atleast for FANG companies)
|
| Other way to think is #1 are treated as cattle, #2 are treated as
| pets.
|
| The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by a
| top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in the
| wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a
| cattle.
|
| Note: Recruiter from FANG calling you still goes in #1 category
| for most people
| tdeck wrote:
| I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might
| think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-
| source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going
| into detail, this person built projects used by many people
| reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or
| interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary
| senior engineer level at Google.
| vmception wrote:
| You shouldn't be shocked by that, there are similar stories
| where the maintainer of a project, used by most engineers at
| Google, couldnt get hired due to the lesser relevant leet
| code / design / behavioral interviews
| sudeepj wrote:
| The key question imo is:
|
| Was he still subjected to same interview process where he has
| to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent open-
| source contributor?
|
| As for L5 level based on anecdotal stories anything beyond L6
| is hard in Google.
|
| Search for "Crossing that barrier to L6 is getting more and
| more difficult with time" in [1]
|
| [1] https://debarghyadas.com/writes/why-i-left-google/
|
| The article is from 2019 and its not that old.
| tdeck wrote:
| Yes, but my point is plenty of fairly ordinary engineers
| make it to L5 - it's nothing special. I feel uncomfortable
| going into this person's accomplishments, but other
| engineers I know were similarly shocked. If that and
| skipping some interviews is all being a leader in open
| source buys you, it isn't worth the extra effort from a
| bigCo career perspective.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Was he still subjected to same interview process where he
| has to prove his coding skills inspite of being prominent
| open-source contributor_
|
| Google don't want people who are generally great developers
| though. They want people with specific skills who can solve
| the complex compsci problems they think they have.
| Consequently they hire people who can invert binary trees
| rather than people who can just write good or popular open
| source code.
|
| Google's failure to capture the public imagination is why
| so many Google products get killed off, so _I reckon_ they
| 're solving the wrong problems. If Google engineers were
| less inclined to think 'this is a hard problem that only
| very clever people can solve' and more 'this is a simple
| problem that needs a better solution' they'd launch more
| things people actually want to use.
|
| This actually means Google would be _far_ better off hiring
| the popular open source dev instead of (or as well as) the
| PhD in Binary Tree Gravity dev.
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| Google hired me in 2006 (then 11 years of experience) as a 3.
| I didn't know any better at the time, partly because I was
| coming into the valley from the rest of the world.
|
| I didn't find out just how screwed up this was until becoming
| part of the hiring process at Facebook... some seven or eight
| years later.
|
| So... yeah. What you said is totally a thing.
| fsociety wrote:
| Wow Google tried a lot of mental gymnastics to down level
| me. Trying to convince me that higher levels at FB or other
| companies is equivalent.
|
| That's a whole other level though. Not surprising and it is
| hard when it's a coveted company. I would've taken the down
| level if I didn't have a better offer at another company.
| eru wrote:
| > The famous incident where author of homebrew was rejected by
| a top company because he could not invert a binary tree got in
| the wrong channel (#1) to begin with where he was treated as a
| cattle.
|
| It's apocryphal at best. The guy was rejected by Google, but
| was never asked about inverting binary trees, like he claimed.
|
| (I can believe that he was rejected on some other technical
| trivia, no clue. But the 'invert a binary tree' thing never
| happened.)
| cableshaft wrote:
| Okay, so you admit he claims it did happen, but you say it
| didn't without supporting that claim at all. Do you have a
| source we can verify?
| eru wrote:
| I was working for Google at the time, and saw an internal
| post by the guy who interviewed the candidate.
|
| I'm not sure if there's anything public (and what I am even
| allowed to say.)
|
| See https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-
| rejectin... where he (at least partially) admits that he
| was bullshitting:
|
| > I want to defend Google, for one I wasn't even inverting
| a binary tree, I wasn't very clear what a binary tree was.
|
| See also https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/7l5ibp/ma
| x_howell_h... for a discussion.
| nanidin wrote:
| I highly recommend interested readers to follow through
| to the Quora page. It's more or less a public apology,
| and helped break me out of the echo chamber that occurs
| here and on Reddit related to interviewing at Google.
| ant6n wrote:
| It looks like there are a bunch of programmers who think
| that having taken the first year uni course on data
| structures is more important than having experience
| actually building product and having it used by millions.
|
| It's kind of silly. Most programmers out of school have a
| lot to learn about building product and actually getting
| a big project done - which they are supposed to learn on
| the job. At a place like Google. Somebody who knows this
| part already could probably spend some time on the job
| learning about data structures.
|
| It's like these conventionally-taught programmers think
| they get to look down on somebody who actually built
| something cuz he's self-taught. (As a conventionally-
| taught programmer who is very comfortable with data
| structures I find that attitude aloof at best)
| nanidin wrote:
| I have a traditional Computer Science background and I'm
| still intimidated to even apply to Google. I got out of
| bigCo Software Engineering in part because I wasn't
| interested in putting myself through the wringer of
| whiteboarding memorized solutions.
|
| I'm also the guy that found low hanging fruit in a huge
| codebase to replace things like frequent linear array
| lookups with hash table lookups for 10x+ speed
| improvements in the build process. This is IMO precisely
| the type of capability that "Oh, that's O(n^2), surely we
| can do better. Is there any way to do this in O(1)?" is
| designed to tease out in the interview process. I did it!
| In a build process effecting 1000+ engineers, used to
| build for millions of shipped units! But talking about
| this in an interview makes eyes gloss over as we prepare
| to move on to sort algorithm trivia, how would I design
| search, or doubly linked list implementations.
| bawolff wrote:
| That was interesting.
|
| > But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes,
| absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult,
| I often don't know computer science, but. BUT. I make
| really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people
| really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used
| that.
|
| To me at least, being a dick is a negative that outweighs
| making good things, especially for a large organization.
| Maybe google made the right call.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| Right, Google actually has a 'no jerks' policy and values
| being a good team player more than pure technical
| brilliance. Being a good engineer gets you L4 (mid) or
| low L5 level at Google. Growing beyond that is mostly
| about soft skills and influencing other people - that's
| not compatible with being a dick. It probably wasn't the
| case for him in 2015 yet, but these days google has a
| mandatory 'googleyness' behavioral round that the guy
| would fail hard with that attitude even if he could
| invert the proverbial binary tree.
| andyxor wrote:
| he wasn't "bullshitting", you didn't get the point of his
| tweet and quora post and I think you're kinda proving his
| point.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| He wasn't "bullshitting" indeed. He was straight up
| lying. And his lie poisoned the thinking of millions
| (myself included) wrt. tech interviews.
|
| My opinion of the guy just dropped hard.
| sudeepj wrote:
| My bad. I based on the tweet from the author himself [1]
|
| May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a
| representative example of questions that typically asked.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
| eru wrote:
| No worries.
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159 for some
| more.
|
| > May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a
| representative example of questions that typically asked.
|
| Yes, that's a charitable and believable interpretation of
| his tweet.
|
| (Though I don't know where he got that 90% figure from.
| Probably made up, like 85.12% of statistics.)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It's a charitable interpretation, but seems super
| reasonable. Around that time, I think "inverting a binary
| tree" was a bit of a meme/shorthand about software
| interviewing.
| [deleted]
| carnitine wrote:
| Was it? I thought that meme began from his post. To be
| totally blunt if you get asked to invert a binary tree in
| a FAANG interview, that's very easy compared to most
| questions.
| catillac wrote:
| Interesting anecdote, where did you hear that? I remember the
| original source tweet that was something like, "invented
| homebrew but couldn't invert binary tree so they rejected
| me."
| eru wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159
| fibonachos wrote:
| After interviewing with multiple FAANGs and receiving no
| offers, my current employer recruited me based on my LinkedIn
| profile for a role on new team. I have since started telling
| the FAANG recruiters "thanks for reaching out, but no thanks".
| I guess that puts me in group number 2?
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| No, you're still a cattle. Until you receive an actual offer,
| you're always a cattle.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'm not sure I fully agree.
|
| There are plenty of good positions (at least in Europe) where
| they ask for an engineer who can work with tool/Lang x, and
| won't ask you to invert a binary tree, but will ask you about
| what kind of projects you've worked on.
|
| I thought that was what you meant by #2, until you mentioned
| that it required "really prolific" engagement with open source.
| kylec wrote:
| I don't know if hire first, team match later is a FAANG thing,
| I've worked for two of FAANG and neither did that, I was
| interviewed by and hired onto the team I ended up working on.
| [deleted]
| sudeepj wrote:
| Actually there both cases happen:
|
| 1. Team matching before hiring commitee [1]
|
| 2. Hiring committee approved but rejected because no team
| matched [2]
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/o6gs9
| m/g...
|
| [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-failed-at-the-team-
| mat...
| Nition wrote:
| > Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.
| Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the
| project and screenshots of it in action--almost no-one does this,
| it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the
| impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking
| you out.
|
| Not to mention the impact your project will have on potential
| users. Please include a screenshot and a decent description of
| your project if you want people to use it.
|
| GitHub projects I can forgive though, because you aren't usually
| trying to sell a project, and you don't owe anyone there
| anything. But even websites selling software occasionally don't
| have a single screenshot of it. In those cases I sometimes learn
| more from a Google image search than from the product website.
| wingworks wrote:
| ^ this, so much this. Please, if your project has a UI, please
| include a screenshot or two. I can't believe in this day and
| age, I still come across way to many repos (or software
| companies) with 0 screenshots.
| newfie_bullet wrote:
| > Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.
| Accompany it with a README with a detailed description of the
| project and screenshots of it in action--almost no-one does this,
| it only takes a few hours extra and it massively increases the
| impact your project will have on hiring managers who are checking
| you out.
|
| This is one of the key things I pointed out in a post I made
| after going through a lot of co-op resumes and interviews[1]. A
| little documentation and attention to detail goes a long way! If
| someone looks promising I DO look at their
| LinkedIn/GitHub/Website because it gives me some indication into
| their capabilities and whether they're willing to go a little
| above and beyond (to learn or present themselves more
| professionally online). I know not everyone has the time to do
| this (I have a 7 year old and don't have a great online presence)
| but if you're trying to start out in this industry it should be
| the minimum you're willing to do.
|
| 1 https://www.samuelrussell.net/posts/developer-hiring-dos-and...
| wyager wrote:
| I've interviewed probably >100 people and maybe 7 or 8 had
| anything interesting that I could look at publicly on their
| resume. It doesn't even have to be job-related. It's cool to see
| a website that's just photography or motorcycle customization or
| whatever. It helps me get a handle on the person I'm interviewing
| as an individual, maybe gives us something to talk about.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| My experience has been that if you're interviewing for a younger,
| or more modernized company, then side-projects and such can be a
| cool thing to talk about.
|
| But if you're interviewing for some F500 dinosaur, your CV is all
| that maters.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I don't even think it needs to be technical. A friend posted a
| jokey video he made in college introducing himself on his
| website, beside his resume, and he says recruiters often say they
| contacted him because the video was funny. He's obviously
| qualified too, but it just helps him stand out.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Interviewee: Check me out! I have 239 twitter followers!
|
| Interviewer: Cool. Can you setup mysql replication? What does a
| read replica mean?
|
| Interviewee: Neat! Check out my github on a emoji generator!
|
| Interviewer: ....
|
| Interviewer: [proceeds to slack least favorite teammate to follow
| up interview]
| azinman2 wrote:
| Or..
|
| Interviewee: Check me out! I wrote a NES emulator that is cycle
| accurate and supports a game with a specialized chip that I
| reverse engineered that no other emulator supported.
|
| There's a large spectrum of quality of public content out
| there. You could say the same thing about any resume.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| To be fair, the OP started with "I have 239 twitter
| followers!", not "I wrote a NES emulator"
|
| I think the point was clear and you missed it.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I think you're taking the post's 'it doesn't take much' too
| literally, and the 'I have 239 twitter followers / wrote an
| emoji generator' reads like a straw man argument. Of course
| that wouldn't be impressive. The article mentions putting
| screenshots into a README on a project, but doesn't mention
| what the project would be... clearly if you're being judged
| from public information, the less impressive it is the less
| impressive you'll sound.
| maxk42 wrote:
| But that's a counterexample to the OP's thesis that "it
| doesn't take much". An "NES emulator that is cycle accurate
| and supports a game with a specialized chip that I reverse
| engineered that no other emulator supported" is a MASSIVE
| undertaking that would take a huge amount of time and effort.
| I would certainly give a candidate like that a second look -
| if NES emulators were remotely related to the kind of skills
| I was looking for.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| Exactly.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You're presupposing that the hiring manager would be able
| to tell what skills are involved in making an NES emulator,
| or even what skills they are looking for.
| maxk42 wrote:
| I'm presupposing that I'm the hiring manager. That's why
| I said "I would certainly give a candidate like that a
| second look."
| ipnon wrote:
| And still a mere semester at Stanford or year at Facebook still
| seems to stand out over all. The elite Silicon Valley
| institutions are extremely efficient at attracting, filtering and
| acquiring the best of the best. Their simple mention on a resume
| signals strongly to middle managers the world over that "the
| right stuff" has fallen into their lap, to the detriment of the
| rest of us.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| If I see a FAANG company on a candidates profile I don't even
| bother technical interviews. I just try to see if they are
| someone I can work with easily.
| eru wrote:
| > The elite Silicon Valley institutions are extremely efficient
| at attracting, filtering and acquiring the best of the best.
|
| Not sure. Google and Facebook have gotten so large, that they
| had to drop their bars quite a bit.
|
| I do agree that they are still seen as good signals on your CV.
| But the attraction to hiring managers might be in the same vein
| as the venerable 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Having FAANG, well the A selling stuff over the internet, on
| your CV was a stronger thing a couple of years ago than it is
| now. At least my experience, but than it could be industry
| specific.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I have a Wikipedia blog. Been doing it for over a decade. I post
| articles I find interesting, categorize and tag them, do some
| light copyediting, find/create a 300x300 pixel image to
| illustrate each, format them in a digestible feed, and added a
| random button.
|
| For years people asked me why I bothered. I did it because I love
| Wikipedia and wanted a record of my wikiwalks, but it has also
| become a fun example of my style and interests to show
| prospective clients.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I have a feel having a nice to read and simple layout (one that
| when recruiters copy and paste into their template without your
| contact details) might matter just as much!
| Zababa wrote:
| I had a few jobs interview recently. Here's what I got out of it:
|
| If you have something you want to promote (or is on your CV in
| general), be ready to talk about it. I'm very lucky because I can
| talk about things on the spot very easily. If that's not you,
| make a list of the few main points that you want to talk about
| and try to memorize it. If you always get the same questions, it
| may be a good idea to address them before people even ask them,
| or to memorize an answer to them too.
|
| I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt when
| you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want. I don't
| have a good answer on how to handle it, although I think having
| my canned answer ready helped. It got better once this started to
| be a conversation. The good part is that I developed a lot of
| empathy for people that talk about interview stress.
|
| It's going to be my first "real" job so these are probably
| obvious, but it might help someone so I'd rather share.
| maxk42 wrote:
| > I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt
| when you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want.
|
| Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job. Get
| that practice in and get comfortable with it. I went on 18 - 30
| interviews a year for many years when I was a contractor and
| got very good at interviewing over time. I still get a bit
| tense when the job is particularly appealing, but with practice
| it gets to the point where they'll rarely throw a question at
| you that you don't know how to handle.
| the_af wrote:
| > _" Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a
| job."_
|
| I'm ambivalent about this kind of advice. On the surface it
| seems right, and I've never been more comfortable in
| interviews than when I was thinking "I don't need this job",
| at the same time interviews are incredibly stressful time
| wasters. For a lot of people, interviewing is one of the most
| stressful situations they are going to be in, barring life or
| death situations.
|
| Just the thought of 18 to 30 interviews a year makes me
| anxious and I don't even need to interview now.
|
| I'm not a young person anymore, and interviewing more is not
| going to help me either. It's like pulling my teeth: not
| something I want to practice.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| I think it can be good to see what's out there, and
| interviews allow you to ask questions to the employer too.
| I've found it can be a good temperature check of how much I
| like my current job and organization, are my skills
| competitive, what's my monetary worth, etc.
|
| I love the feeling of "I don't need this job" during
| interviews but I feel a lot of stress when I want the
| job/need it for some reason. I feel for people who NEED to
| interview often.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Isn't that the point? Stressful experiences become less
| stressful as you practice and get used to them.
|
| I used to be stressed out speaking in front of 20
| colleagues or landing a small plane. Not anymore.
| unishark wrote:
| > Just the thought of 18 to 30 interviews a year makes me
| anxious and I don't even need to interview now.
|
| That was their life as a contractor. I think the advice was
| just to do more than zero, not necessarily go to such an
| extreme. You can't really hold a full-time job and do that
| much interviewing unless it's just tiny screening
| interviews.
| solipsism wrote:
| Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?
|
| I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually
| justified with something about how the companies don't
| respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing
| is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care
| about your time are the kind of people who would do something
| like this.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Whiteboarding will continue until morale improves.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them,
| right?
|
| as an interviewer, i'm far more concerned about the time
| spent sorting through piles of resumes from people who are
| just rolling the dice, and didn't read the job posting /
| aren't qualified.
|
| maybe upper management cares about the time spent, but i'd
| be happy to talk for 45-60 minutes to somebody who was an
| even remotely passable candidate who didn't actually want a
| job.
| Kalium wrote:
| > maybe upper management cares about the time spent, but
| i'd be happy to talk for 45-60 minutes to somebody who
| was an even remotely passable candidate who didn't
| actually want a job.
|
| Yup. If the job I've got for them is any good, if the
| company is good, and if _I_ am good, they might turn into
| a hire anyway. That a qualified person doesn 't need the
| job does not rule them out. It raises the bar and reminds
| us that interviewing goes both ways.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Yeah, getting a company to schedule a full onsite
| interview panel is a big time investment, and lame if
| there's zero chance of it going anywhere. If some random
| person emails me asking for advice on how to practice
| relevant skills or prepare for an interview, though, I'll
| schedule a video chat right away and talk for hours if
| they want. I'll also hop on a call a few days after
| rejecting someone and give them detailed feedback if they
| want.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| Sorry if I misunderstand you, but are you saying that it's
| wrong to interview for practice because it's wasting the
| company's time?
|
| Interesting, never thought about this. I think I disagree
| though; these are the people who (usually) play games with
| you and put you through some very stressful situation
| during the interview. I think candidates should be able to
| practice in a low stakes environment, i.e. one where they
| can't lose because they didn't really want the job. It's
| only fair.
|
| I'm not a great interviewer, but I always ask why the
| candidate is looking for a job, and more than once they've
| admitted they weren't actively looking but just testing the
| waters, and I didn't hold it against them...
| nitrogen wrote:
| Even if you are just practicing, it's still an
| opportunity for the company to convince you to change
| your mind.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > ...these are the people who (usually) play games with
| you...
|
| I don't think this even matters, to be honest. Not only
| is interviewing good for you personally (as you said),
| but also lets the company gauge the talent pool in the
| job market a bit better.
|
| Furthermore, if you have a positive experience with the
| company, there is precisely nothing stopping you from
| recommending it to your friends, should they be looking
| for work.
|
| However, for the most part i agree with you in response
| to the previous commenter's post - interviewing is good
| in general, even when you don't need a job at that exact
| time. There's also the possibility of just reaching out
| afterwards, if the situation changes.
| maxk42 wrote:
| I fail to understand how you equate "Go on interviews even
| when you don't need a job." with "waste people's time." The
| idea is to interview when you _don 't_ need a job so that
| you can easily negotiate for the best possible offer. If
| they won't beat your current compensation or benefits you
| can say "thanks but no thanks" and if they can you can say
| "I'd be delighted!" Nobody's time is wasted - the hiring
| company just has a higher bar to meet to entice you to join
| their team. If anyone's time is wasted it's yours when they
| can neither make a competitive offer nor help you to
| improve your skills in the interview.
|
| If you've only ever interviewed when you were desperate to
| take the first job that comes along then you're almost
| certainly under-compensated. Anyone who's not taking a
| better job when they get the chance is leaving money on the
| table.
| Jach wrote:
| Yup, I've always believed anything on my resume is fair game
| for someone to ask about, so I should be able to talk about
| each thing to some extent. As you accumulate more things it can
| be a useful filtering tool too as you just leave stuff off you
| don't want to talk about or where your recollection is too
| hazy.
|
| Getting into a conversation can be stress reducing for both
| parties (interviewers can get stressed too) though if the
| interviewee comes off as trying to control the discussion,
| interviewers pick up on that (even if they're new and bad at
| driving things themselves like they're supposed to) and will
| consider it a red flag...
|
| I hope after a while you get to experience the other side being
| one of the ~6 people interviewing someone for joining your
| team/the company, it's pretty eye opening too. Judging someone
| in such a short time period given at these bigger companies is
| tough, and when you actually want the candidate to join you
| don't want them to turn down an offer because of a bad
| interview experience with you. If you ever get involved I'd
| only encourage you try to improve things -- some ideas include
| trying to lower stress levels of candidates, or having more
| reasonable/useful and typing-instead-of-whiteboarding tests of
| "can you even program?", but there's many possible
| improvements, the goal of improving on what you have is what's
| important. (And there _does_ sadly need to be some sort of
| "can you even program?" test in the pipeline, at least at the
| sort of companies that do the multiple-people-all-day
| interviews, because the input stages are even more broken than
| the interviews.) Even if there are many corporate constraints
| on what you can do, and even if you can't get management or
| other interviewers on board with your proposals, you can at
| least make your section the best it can be.
| kirykl wrote:
| I've been told in the past by hiring managers my resume (at the
| time) was too creative. And later by hiring gurus that you need a
| creative resume to be noticed. Noticed doesn't necessarily get
| you the job
| vermarish wrote:
| Are you talking about having a creatively formatted resume, or
| about exclusively focusing on projects which demonstrate
| creativity in your resume?
| dasil003 wrote:
| The more experienced you get, the harder it is for any one
| interviewer to really grok your breadth and depth. This is
| doubly true in youth-biased tech cultures like Silicon Valley,
| and quadruply true 12 years into a bull market for tech.
|
| At some point the game becomes: read your interviewer and tell
| them what they want to hear.
| ipnon wrote:
| There's a different interview strategy for every middle manager
| under the sun. Engineers want a single algorithm to land them a
| job. Middle managers want someone they get along with to
| maximize productivity and minimize trouble, and that's a target
| that moves with every interview.
| Lapsa wrote:
| bullshit
| angarg12 wrote:
| > You will jump straight to the top of the hiring manager's
| mental list, maybe without them even noticing.
|
| That sounds like an unconscious bias that you should fight rather
| than indulge.
|
| I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for FAANG and I
| intentionally don't look at their CV to avoid biases. Personal
| projects can help with the interview if they are relevant, but
| I'm conscious about not "punishing" candidates who don't have any
| of those.
| machinehermiter wrote:
| My job opportunities are limited to what my real connections and
| friends can help me get.
|
| If I want to expand my opportunities I have to add nodes and
| strong ties in my network.
|
| Not gimmicks for the interview lottery and pray the hiring
| manager doesn't have a friend going for the job.
|
| From my past positions I suspect people highly underestimate how
| many times they go on an interview with no real chance for the
| position because the hiring manager already has someone in their
| real network in mind. I mean a real friend or friend of a friend,
| not someone they just added on social media but don't really
| know.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| This is wholly irrelevant at any tech company that uses leetcode
| style interviews, which is most companies in the bay area.
| vasilakisfil wrote:
| In my experience none really cares about your side projects
| during interviews. I have plenty of side projects, given plenty
| of talks, I list some of those in my resume along with my github
| link, yet from 40 interviews I had in the past 5 years I think ~3
| mentioned something about my talks and side projects. And
| definitely didn't give me any advantage over the other
| interviewers.
|
| But I am fine with that, I do my side projects & talks because I
| enjoy it and not to increase my chances when applying to a new
| job. Although there is nothing wrong to do a side project to
| increase your chances to get a better job.
| glangdale wrote:
| One unintended consequence of this advice being widely followed
| will be a lot of (or, frankly, "even more") write-only projects
| appearing on Github. As an interviewer I wouldn't be _against_
| this metric, but I would prefer to see that it wasn 't too
| obviously gamed. You'd hope that the public creativity was
| pursued for intrinsic reasons (interest in the topic) rather than
| extrinsic.
|
| I'm _not_ saying that people shouldn 't get hired if they don't
| have some huge repo that everyone loves, just that this shouldn't
| turn into some new thing for people to desperately grind.
|
| At the very lowest level, I'd expect to see a lot of plagiarism
| and projects that are barely competent rewrites of someone else's
| work. I often go searching for various exotic keywords and often
| see fragments of things that I've worked on "written up" in
| almost entirely content-free blog posts; more likely to attract
| clicks rather than interviewer attention, but still.
| adspedia wrote:
| Recruiters read so many CVs in a day that at some point they all
| become irrelevant. Has anyone here tried TikTok's new resume
| feature where people apply to jobs recording a video of
| themselves on TikTok?
| gambler wrote:
| Just because you stand out doesn't mean you stand out in a
| positive way.
|
| The idea that every piece of writing or open-source code you
| produce in public will be seen as _a positive_ by everyone out
| there is patently absurd. Yes, you can put "creative" stuff on
| your resume. Some companies might appreciate it, many will ignore
| it, and most will judge you for it.
|
| One obvious outcome of putting your blog on your resume in
| today's environment is that you will have to scrub it of anything
| anything even remotely controversial or unusual. You will have to
| constantly self-censor from that point on.
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