[HN Gopher] Don't do interviews, do discussions
___________________________________________________________________
Don't do interviews, do discussions
Author : maddynator
Score : 513 points
Date : 2021-11-07 18:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkingthrough.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkingthrough.substack.com)
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I think this is pretty much the opposite of what the evidence
| suggests: that unstructured interviews are pretty much worthless.
|
| Conversations gives both parties more fuzzy feelings, but are
| they actually better or just easier and less awkward?
| benatkin wrote:
| Both interviews and discussions are conversations. I know lots
| of interviews are too formal in some ways. I think it might be
| useful to start formal, get informal but still stick to rules
| like not asking discriminatory questions, and then get formal
| again for the end of the interview. Sort of like a feedback
| sandwich.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I know lots of interviews are too formal in some ways
|
| How do you know that? Maybe those interviews are the right
| amount of formal. Do you have evidence that they are too
| formal?
| benatkin wrote:
| Because I've been on both ends of the interviews and I've
| seen places where a handful of unplanned questions and
| comments have gotten useful information and other
| interviews where no on-the-fly questions were asked and I
| think it was a missed opportunity. If you were to apply _no
| true Scotsman_ to what is considered informal you might not
| include this because it was useful but I 'd rather not do
| that.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It matters where you are in your career in terms of the power
| dynamic of interviews. Early on while unproven your answers
| matter and how you answer matters while having good questions is
| super important.
|
| As you establish yourself the power dynamic changes considerably
| as companies are really trying to convince you to come over. At
| this point it really should be a conversation to understand if
| you're a fit and it's worth your time. Do the people you're
| speaking with impress you?
| margofx wrote:
| This is a way to go for me. It would be great to brainstorm and
| discuss things relevant to the industry or in the real world.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Slightly OT - on hiring, not interviewing - I recently realized
| what could improve hiring, and it's simultaneously a great and
| terrible idea.
|
| How does hiring work today? First, the employer sets out a
| "careers" page (which varies quite a bit, even within the same
| company, even for the same job title!) which includes the
| following banal information: A job title, part-time/full-
| time/remote/location-based, a company values blurb, a paragraph
| about the general responsibilities of anyone with this job title,
| a tech stack, a list of prerequisites that nobody will ever meet
| "or relevant experience", and maybe the benefits and perks.
|
| Nowhere does it describe the actual project they're working on,
| their timelines, what kind of situation you're walking into, what
| the specific team's culture is like, whether there's a strong
| team lead or everyone is just a genius, if they're culturally
| diverse, what their daily workflow is, whether their OKRs have
| sustainability or social responsibility goals, or feedback from
| team members. Is the project they're working on greenfield or
| brownfield? What's the architecture? Will you be on-call? Will
| you be supporting customers or working in a silo? What is the
| reporting structure like? Career advancement / lateral movement?
| Training? Do they go to happy hour on Fridays? Is there an LGBTQ
| ERG?
|
| And from the other side, the company knows next to nothing about
| who's applying. After all the candidates have played tech
| buzzword bingo in their resumes, the company (or worse,
| recruiter) pulls out a divining rod and tries to pick up the one
| or two candidates who they _imagine_ are a match culturally,
| technically, and professionally. If you don 't know somebody
| inside the company, or a recruiter doesn't push you as one of the
| two candidates they've found locally, you might as well be a
| translucent blob of Arial 12-point font.
|
| How can we connect employees and employers in a meaningful way
| that isn't an arbitrary screening process? Well it seems to me
| that somebody has already come up with an answer: dating sites.
|
| Please, stop throwing things at me and hear me out! What are
| jobs? Relationships between an employee and an employer. Well,
| dating sites are masters at finding the intersections where
| people match, in order to find good relationship matches. You can
| create a curated list of multiple-choice weighted questions, and
| ask the other person to fill them out, with a small text blurb to
| elaborate on your answer. The most common/popular ones
| automatically bubble up for everybody as default questions.
|
| This combination of quantitative and qualitative matching would
| allow people to quickly see which employees/employers are the
| best match. We may still need a way to ascertain technical skill
| or professional experience, but at least the people who come in
| the door would appear to be the closest matches to what we want.
| Will there be some catfishing? Sure, but there already is with
| today's hiring mess! Can somebody please make the OkCupid of
| hiring? I'm waiting to open my account.
| mark-r wrote:
| It's a great insight, but anecdotally dating sites aren't a
| great way to find a mate.
|
| I know two people who found their spouse through a dating site.
| The first was forced to get a divorce after his wife tried to
| kill him and nearly succeeded - she had some mental health
| issues that weren't captured by the dating site. The second
| found his 4th wife that way, and as far as I know they're still
| good but I haven't quizzed him on his personal life in a while.
| vbg wrote:
| I can interview any developer and by asking the right questions
| prove they are an incompetent fraud.
|
| It's a simple matter of asking the right questions.
|
| Who's wrong and who's right?
|
| The interviewer is always right.
|
| If you don't know what I think you should know then you're
| incompetent.
| charles_f wrote:
| Every few weeks someone comes back with the one true way of
| interviewing, or the X things wrong with how interviews are led.
| I have conducted a few hundred of these by now, and the most I
| know about it is that there's no good way, because you try to
| figure someone out in just a few hours based on stuff _they_ tell
| you. The format that seems to work the least worse for me is when
| you get them to tell you about actual stuff from their
| experience, which tends to prevent getting completely pointless
| people. I have been forced to do coding exercises for a while but
| I replaced by a general discussion on some tech they have been
| using recently, just to get a feeling of whether they understand
| what they 're doing.
|
| Recently I have been looking for another team internally to my
| company. An interesting fit is that I went through 3 interviews.
| I'm an engineering manager. Two interviews were focused on system
| design, one was coding. The only non coding question I received
| was around how I coach people. The three persons who interviewed
| me I asked: "what does the team need to do better", and they all
| answered a variation of "it takes a while to get stuff to prod
| once it's built. We need someone who can help get better at
| that". Yet not a single question for that. I guess the lesson
| learnt is that if you are looking for a particular skilk, maybe
| focus on that as well.
| RNCTX wrote:
| > they all answered a variation of "it takes a while to get
| stuff to prod once it's built. We need someone who can help get
| better at that". Yet not a single question for that. I guess
| the lesson learnt is that if you are looking for a particular
| skilk, maybe focus on that as well.
|
| If they knew enough about the problem and its solutions for it
| to filter down to people doing interviews, they wouldn't need
| to hire someone to teach them how to do it, right?
| charles_f wrote:
| You don't have to be an expert to get an idea of whether the
| person in front of you is experienced on a topic ; as long as
| you remain in the realm of their experience rather than going
| philosophic/theoritical
|
| - Can you tell me about a time when you had an issue
| delivering things to production quickly? What did you do to
| optimize? How did you know there was an issue? What
| alternatives did you consider? - Can you tell me about what
| you have done in the past to optimize they lead time to
| production? What strategies did you employ? How did you
|
| While you won't be able to tell if what they did was optimal,
| that can at least tell you if the person in front of you has
| some concrete experience in the topic, and some depth in
| their understanding. While that's not perfect, it's certainly
| better than flying blind
| wiseowise wrote:
| The is heavily biased to people who did X.
| charles_f wrote:
| How so?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I do the discussion approach, but my goal is to make sure I 'give
| candidates enough rope to hang themselves'. I also make extremely
| clear that it's ok to tell me that they don't know or aren't
| sure. A lot of times, I never ask the question that makes someone
| look bad, I just let them talk. No interview system is good, but
| after cycling through many interview styles, this is the one I
| have found to be the least bad. On a side note, I also can't
| believe tools like hackerrank report if a candidate has alt-
| tabbed out of the browser. I'm nearly 20 years in and I still
| have to look up basic syntax.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| In my company we use hackerrank for the coding interviews, but
| more as a whiteboard, since we are not doing in-person
| interviews anymore. We say that syntax is not the most
| important thing, we are not going to run the code, and that
| anything they would usually check on google/SO, they can just
| ask us.
| quercusa wrote:
| I usually pick some topic to do a deep dive on; I want to hear
| someone say "I don't know." If they can't or won't do that and
| just try to fill in with BS - that's a really bad sign.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I tried the discussion approach instinctively in most of the
| interviews I performed. I tried to look at it as if both the
| interviewee and I are evaluating each other to see if we're a
| match. Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on
| general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you
| were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new.
|
| The only difference is that I would drill into specifics in
| certain areas, but keeping it conversation-style so that it
| doesn't feel like a pointed question. Usually I found it to be
| pretty easy to see a persons level of knowledge because they tend
| to hit a certain depth where they aren't able to keep the
| conversation flowing, so you have to pull back up into their more
| familiar territory.
|
| The only drawback with this approach is that I have to be really
| mindful about potentially being biased. Pointed questions aren't
| as much fun but they're easier to approach from an objective
| viewpoint.
| nickjj wrote:
| This is exactly how I would approach interviews too. I say
| "would" because I mostly do contract work and sometimes sit in
| on interviews when other companies are trying to hire someone.
| I've always thought to myself almost exactly what you wrote. I
| think having a low pressure conversation with someone can get
| you almost everything you need to be comfortable hiring someone
| or at least trialing them out with contract work to begin with.
|
| You can absolutely get a good sense of their tech skills from
| just chatting and you can also get a decent feel for how they
| communicate in general which IMO is more important than tech
| skills once you reach a certain point.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I've lately been trying to get people to teach me something as an
| interview.
|
| Interviewed a guy with a PhD in organic electronics and asked him
| how to make an organic transistor at home. It was a great
| conversation, not sure yet if it was a great interview.
| mark-r wrote:
| I once had an interviewer ask me an obscure C++ question. I
| didn't know the answer, so I reversed it and asked if he knew.
| He did, and it taught me something I didn't know before. No, I
| didn't get the job. I no longer even remember the interviewer's
| name, but I remember well the question and answer.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| When I started doing interviews I also had some C++ questions
| (like what is the difference between const and define and
| some random stuff like that), that I was always unsure about:
| are these things actually telling me that the person is a
| good C++ programmer, or am I just asking some random stuff
| that I happen to know?
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| Best interview questions are open ended general questions. What
| is your opinion on software security? How would you improve your
| efficiency?
|
| This usually is a great discussion where everyone feels good at
| the end, but tell a lot about the sophistication of the person
| being interviewed.
|
| After this, pass a small test to make sure the person can do some
| real work.
| thadk wrote:
| Some of these comments, like attending to relative position in
| space, remind me of Phil Agre's fantastic "How to Help Someone
| Use a Computer" (1996) -
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html
|
| Phil's instructions mix some good influences and can be used when
| working with people in other mediated spot environments like
| interviews/discussions too.
| totorovirus wrote:
| It is really hard to filter those "discussers" in this way. They
| often know tons of possibilities and not the practical solution
| or skills to carry out their proposed solution
| airpoint wrote:
| > Use "We" instead of "you" because it feels more inclusive and
| it is. For example, ask a question as "Suppose we have this
| problem to solve. How would we go about doing that?"
|
| Oh god how much I hate this! It's misused by (some) managers so
| much these days, it's infuriating. For me it has the very
| opposite effect than the intended inclusivity.
| baal80spam wrote:
| On a tangent - to this day I can't stomach when Windows talks
| about itself in plural ("We are setting things up"). It started
| around Windows 10 and I hate it.
|
| Ugh...
| midasuni wrote:
| Well windows is plural...
| iamsb wrote:
| Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be
| swayed by unconscious bias in interviews.
|
| Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of
| putting it into practice without thinking through the bias
| problem.
|
| I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but
| unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last
| company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow
| scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in
| terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought.
| Most of it was comprised of "tech-bros".
|
| Scripted interviews do not mean you ask through a basket of
| questions. It just means that you stay within the guardrails of a
| set of topics and you go through _all_ the topics. With in a
| topic, you have fair amount of flexibility. For example if you
| are hiring for a mid level Java programmer your topics may
| include - Java 8, Testing pyramid, Functional programming, type
| safety, developer safety(CI /CD/Rollbacks/Code reviews/Pair
| programming etc), some domain specific knowledge and so on.
| philwelch wrote:
| > I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but
| unable to find them at the moment.
|
| That's too bad, because the obvious followup question is
| whether those papers survived the replication crisis.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I think most
| candidates don't hate scripter interviews, they hate robotic
| interviewers that go mindlessly through a checklist.
|
| When I train interviewers my advice is: have a script, but be
| happy to go off it. If interviewers keep an authentically
| engaged conversation, the questions will blend into the
| background.
|
| Scripts helps in several fronts. They help to reduce bias,
| standardise calibration and practices between teams, and
| provide a fallback to get the interview on track. However good
| interviewers should keep a living conversation with candidates,
| and take interesting cues off script.
| gamzer wrote:
| How is diversity of thought measured?
| iamsb wrote:
| Lack of diversity of thought is easy to spot IMO. Bigger
| point is - you should ensure your processes are setup to at
| least try to achieve the kind of diversity you would like to
| achieve. Those processes may still fail, just like anything
| else.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| If someone answered every question the way the interviewer
| thought it should be answered that is probably an indicator
| of lack of diversity of thought, but I think it would
| actually be hard to spot because they would really look
| like the perfect candidate - unless the interviewer thought
| of themselves as a bad candidate / unoriginal thinker -
| which is unlikely.
|
| On the other hand someone answers in a way that you have
| decided before hand is just the misguided answers of a
| particular tribe can be lack of diversity of thought,
| because you happen to be right about the preconceived ideas
| of said tribe, but pretty hard not to see that as the
| result of bias.
|
| If on the other hand someone says some things you don't
| understand, espouses ideas completely alien - insane!
|
| on edit: clarification
| gamzer wrote:
| I honestly don't comprehend this answer. You mentioned
| unconscious bias in interviews:
|
| > Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to
| be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews.
|
| Yet, lack of diversity of thought is "easy to spot".
| Without being swayed by unconscious biases?
| iamsb wrote:
| You are taking diversity of thought comment, which I
| mentioned as an attribute of a team and trying to apply
| to an interview, which is not what I intended. Your
| interview processes need to ensure that you do not hire
| based on biases, so that you will have a diverse team.
|
| Also interview processes are not just interviewer
| protecting against his/her bias, but also against bias of
| interviewee which seems to be somehow lost in these
| discussions.
| oblio wrote:
| Standard precog manual, page 46.
| dgb23 wrote:
| By asking questions and comparing the answers.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > In the last company I worked in London, only one team
| (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least
| diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms
| of diversity of thought.
|
| Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team,
| or any other negative business results that were specific to
| that team? If not, who's to say which interviewing method was
| better or worse?
|
| As an interviewer I've always felt very constrained by scripted
| interviews and "approved question lists". I always struggle to
| really evaluate a candidate when I'm asking pre-selected
| questions without knowing why I'm asking those questions.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Odd comment. We hate the tech interview because it doesn't
| fairly evaluate on the job performance of candidates, but
| apparently it's ok to reject them because they don't fit the
| interviewer's tribe.
| iamsb wrote:
| > Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps
| team, or any other negative business results that were
| specific to that team? If not, who's to say which
| interviewing method was better or worse?
|
| It did. And even if it had not in this particular case, it
| will hurt the company in the long run. There is not even a
| shred of doubt in my mind that diversity (of thought) is the
| best investment that leads to success.
|
| I have been using scripted interviews, the same method I
| mentioned in original comment, for more than 5 years now,
| hiring more than 200 engineers in three continent and I am
| super happy with my results.
| pallavkaushish wrote:
| I have seen the same thing happening in recruitment for
| marketing roles. Totally unscripted interviews often leads
| to suboptimal results in terms of the quality of the
| candidate and their fit for the role. Made this mistake
| firsthand before devising my own process of hiring.
|
| And the process I follow is based on having an exhaustive
| list of questions covering all areas of the role but during
| the interview if something else comes up, I don't mind
| pursuing that and going unscripted. It often helps me add
| more questions to my list so my list of questions keeps
| improving.
|
| I've been following this process for last couple of years
| and the structured process has helped me hire some of the
| best people I had the privilege of working with. Also, I
| feel more confident that I'm hiring the right candidate.
| But of course, there could be an element of bias in there.
|
| Side point - I've just finished a SEO hiring guide that
| covers my whole process of hiring an SEO person (both
| junior and senior roles). Will be publishing that in the
| next 4-5 days. If anyone is interested in purchasing a
| copy, my email is in the bio.
| jldugger wrote:
| > It did. And even if it had not in this particular case,
| it will hurt the company in the long run.
|
| Honestly, having been on plenty of interview panels for a
| decade now for DevOps and SRE roles, I'm not sure
| structured interviews, no matter how awesome they are, can
| solve the recruitment diversity problem. The war was
| already lost the moment the job description was published,
| IMO.
| ButtSpark69 wrote:
| I think it's also important to keep in mind that at
| minimum it would take a generation to truly solve in a
| root-cause way (one that won't just come back the minute
| you focus on something else). Many of these biases get
| built during childhood when your brain is so so much more
| plastic.
| jldugger wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone in Kindergarten knows anything about
| having a job, let alone DevOps. =)
| rimliu wrote:
| I wonder when will diversity require to also be skill-wise:
| like it is required to have someone on your team who cannot
| code at all, just for the sake of bringing "different
| perspective".
| iamsb wrote:
| Aren't most teams already fairly multi-disciplinary
| comprised of product managers, UI/UX, and other skill sets?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Research shows more diverse teams deliver better results.
| You're asking something that can't be proven though: is this
| thing that is occurring better than the thing that didn't
| occur. We can't know the answer to that.
| josephg wrote:
| > Research shows more diverse teams deliver better results.
|
| FYI, there's plenty of nuance in the research that people
| like to gloss over. My understanding is that diversity of
| background / experience improves team performance. But
| having a diversity of _values_ amongst your team decreases
| performance.
|
| For example, if you form a diverse team where some people
| care about profits above all else, and other people care
| more about doing good in the world, the team will become
| less effective. Its really hard to use this research when
| hiring because a lot of values questions (like "who did you
| vote for?") are somewhere between creepy and illegal to
| ask.
|
| Source: I used to work with someone who had a PhD in
| psychometric assessment. People saying "diversity=good" was
| one of her bug bears. I haven't read the research myself.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Would it be illegal/creepy to ask then to sort a list of
| propositions or something like that?
| serial_dev wrote:
| So which one is it? Is it"already shown by research" or
| "something that cannot be proven". You can't have it both
| ways.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Research shows more diverse teams deliver better results
|
| Seems like a bit of a sacred cow - how much better? Better
| enough to sacrifice, say, experience, contacts, or unique
| business knowledge for? How much, exactly?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| It also means you have definitive qualifications for
| correctness. It's harder to say "I'm not sure about this
| person," when they quantitatively answered every question
| correctly. If you "have a conversation," it's a lot easier to
| have those itches, which might be primarily driven by bias,
| make your hiring immediately become problematic.
| madmax108 wrote:
| Some of these are great tips and I agree wholeheartedly.
|
| However, in personal experience, I've found that this works much
| better with more experienced developers rather than with junior
| engineers. Why? Because for some reason, a lot of junior
| engineers have been pavlov-ed into thinking every interview is
| for something at Google/Facebook scale (no matter where they are
| interviewing) and they start describing extremely convoluted
| designs using tech that they are also not completely familiar
| with just because they want to come across as knowledgeable.
|
| Something that I struggle with in these cases is reining in the
| dev back to the "what" rather than the "how", because I've seen
| even good engineers go into this "let's add a system-bus for
| everything" way of thinking. Constraining problems explicitly
| tends to devolve into the "Interviewer-Interviewee information
| asymmetry" which is the same with most DSA problems (At least
| with DSA, most constraints are known by both parties).
|
| On the other hand, almost every time I've picked an actual
| problem we have with a system, be it a bug or a new product or
| something else, as an interview question with an experienced
| interviewee, I feel like I've come out understanding the problem
| space AND solution space better just through the process of
| discussion and in multiple cases, actually ended up using a lot
| of ideas from these discussions, so interviewing feels much more
| "natural" and a "dominant strategy" in game theoretic sense.
| akudha wrote:
| Interviews can be made much more useful and pleasant simply by
| making a subtle change - instead of finding out/exposing what the
| interviewee _does not_ know, find out what they _do know_.
| posharma wrote:
| Sorry. Countless articles have been written about how interviews
| should be conducted. But nothing changes. There are thousands of
| engineers vying for FAANG/MAMAA and they'll do backflips to get a
| job there; leetcode is nothing for them. Some do it to get better
| salaries as your compensation drops after the 4 yr cliff, some
| for prestige. So unless you can influence these companies to
| change nothing will change.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great
| paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit
| what interviewers think.
|
| Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer
| conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on
| being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though
| this might just be a result of being pickier about who I
| interview with.
|
| If nothing else, it's _amazing_ for negotiating. "honestly I'm
| really happy where I am, but every man has his price, what can
| you offer?" does wonders.
| osrec wrote:
| > I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if
| they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time
| and leave.
|
| I like this approach. Stops you from being painted into a
| corner, and if you are, you can still leave with your dignity.
| Some interviewers can be on such a power trip, which can make
| things feel pretty horrible for the interviewee.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > Stops you from being painted into a corner, and if you are,
| you can still leave with your dignity.
|
| Talk about wasting time. You are bothering to do the
| interview because for one reason or another you're interested
| in the job.
|
| It's weird to feel good leaving the interview where you
| somehow saved face for yourself by not answering any of the
| questions. You just guaranteed that you neither get the job
| nor learn anything useful for your next set of interviews.
| osrec wrote:
| Not quite. Confidence is a big part of interviewing, and
| having someone turn the screw on you on some esoteric topic
| doesn't really help build your knowledge or your
| confidence.
| xyzelement wrote:
| That's totally subjective. What someone may perceive as
| "turning the screw" could simply mean "probing deeper" or
| "seeing how you handle tough questions". One can get self
| righteous about that but it may be costing you
| tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings.
| osrec wrote:
| I understand your point of view, but I'm the sort of
| person that responds poorly to someone asserting too much
| authority. I've had issues with bad interviews before,
| where I've been rejected by someone, but then got the
| same job at the same firm, when interviewed by a
| different person.
|
| Also, the lost earnings argument doesn't matter much if
| it comes at the cost of your mental health.
|
| A bit unrelated, but there's an old joke my boss once
| told me, highlighting how poor interview
| questions/criteria can be at assessing one's ability for
| a particular job:
|
| A guy goes for an interview. The interviewer tells him
| "forget everything you learned in your degree, it won't
| be useful here". The guy says: "actually, I don't have a
| degree". The interviewer responds: "in that case, you're
| not qualified enough for this job"!
| xyzelement wrote:
| I hear your example and I have the counter :) I had an
| interviewer push deep on a failure. The entire interview,
| maybe 45 minutes, focused on something I failed to pull
| off at my old job. He kept pressing me for "what else I
| could have done" and I kept coming up dry for most of the
| interview.
|
| Two magical things happened - during this interview, I
| realized that I missed a huge opportunity at my previous
| job (in that case, the step I fell short of was
| escalating to the CEO) but more importantly, I got the
| job.
|
| I learned later that the company put a huge emphasis on
| their employees, especially managers, to be self
| reflective and not shy away from self examination or
| probing by others. The point of this interview wasn't
| whether I could come up with an answers but whether I had
| the stomach for looking critically at my own failure.
|
| So, I got the job. It paid a lot because the company had
| to pay for people who could pass these kinds of tests.
| And it was great to work with people who knew that "their
| shit stinks too" because they had all passed this kind of
| self reflection bar.
|
| If I walked out of the interview because the questions
| felt uncomfortable, I would have missed out on all that.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Huh, that's a really interesting story.
|
| I can only imagine how difficult that company finds it to
| hire though, as a _lot_ of people I encounter in
| professional settings don 't seem to have this ability
| when applied to ther own actions.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Interviews can be a valuable information-gathering exercise
| even if you don't want the job.
| CalRobert wrote:
| "You are bothering to do the interview because for one
| reason or another you're interested in the job."
|
| I'm interested in learning how other companies do things,
| what technologies people are looking for in the industry,
| what sorts of questions are being asked in interviews, and
| what kind of problems people feel are in the domain of a
| particular job title. I'm also interested in compensation
| trends in the industry.
|
| I can get all that information from a decent interview even
| if I walk away. Politely, of course! It's a matter of
| respect for each others' time.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I don't really agree with your point. In the example, the
| candidate did the interview for as long as he/she thought
| it could turn into something. As soon as he/she realized
| that they ask questions that are completely irrelevant to
| the job (in his/her eyes, at least), the candidate let the
| interviewers know that it's not the kind of job, team,
| priorities the candidate wanted. Nothing wrong with that.
|
| Wasting their time would be to continue the interview
| process and answer questions you think are pointless for
| the position at hand. It's something you can do when you
| already have other offers or your current position is good
| enough (meaning it is better than what the interviewers can
| offer).
|
| When you know you won't take the job, it's okay to cut the
| interview short.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Yeah it's a much better mindset to be in to interview when you
| aren't desperate to leave. At my last job which I was decently
| happy and comfortable I still interviewed once a year just to
| see what was out there.
|
| Though I was often asked "So why are you leaving?". Who said I
| was leaving?
|
| But interviewing every now and then has other benefits:
|
| - it has actually helped me become better at interviewing
| candidates
|
| - a competing offer helped me get a better salary at a job I
| liked, so I didn't have to leave
|
| - it kept my interview skills sharp for the next time I decided
| to interview
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| The best experience I've had while interviewing is when I did
| not care at all about getting the job. It allows you to be
| genuine. Not playing the game of trying to show what they want
| to see but just truly being yourself.
|
| It didn't have anything to do with my career though. It was
| early, I had an okay position and just encountered something
| really interesting and exciting.
|
| So perhaps the learning is more about how and when you choose
| to go explore something that excited you rather than other
| reasons to find a new job.
| marcodave wrote:
| > If nothing else, it's _amazing_ for negotiating. "honestly
| I'm really happy where I am, but every man has his price, what
| can you offer?" does wonders
|
| My cynical self is thinking whether this is (one of) the reason
| why young people are preferred in our industry.
|
| Young = Less experience in negotiating = lower wage
| xyzelement wrote:
| >> My cynical self is thinking ... >> Young = Less experience
| in negotiating = lower wage
|
| Your compensation formula is completely void of the value
| someone can bring to the table. Young = less experienced,
| period. In negotiation, sure, but also in the on-the-job
| skills/experience/maturity. So of course they make less.
|
| If you're a kid out of college competing with thousands of
| equally green kids, what would be your negotiating leverage?
| If you are someone 20 years in the industry with unique and
| proven experience, you can negotiate _because you have
| something to negotiate with - there isn 't another you._
| wpietri wrote:
| I think you're right, but I think it's also true that
| plenty of companies either can't spot value or don't really
| care.
|
| It's important to remember that a lot of execs get measured
| not by results, but by the resources they control. I've
| done contract work on projects that I could have built for
| 10% of the total budget. But nobody cared, because actual
| results were like the 4th priority, with the top three
| being 1) make the blowhard in charge look good, 2) make the
| project look big and important, and 3) provide a dramatic
| finish with 80-hour-weeks so said blowhard could look like
| he was managing very hard.
|
| So it's no surprise that plenty of companies want cheap
| bodies more than they want the value of experience. And
| that's before we even get to the companies whose whole
| business model is based on hiring a lot of newbs and
| renting them out as highly competent bright sparks
| (coughaccenturecough).
| gpderetta wrote:
| I had similar experiences as well. When there are no stakes you
| can be very relaxed during the interview and have all the cards
| during negotiations.
| b20000 wrote:
| this is the way.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| This is the proper way to negotiate. Most people don't do it
| while they have a job, only when they want one, and it puts
| them at a serious disadvantage.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| The flip side is it will often get you dropped out of most
| interview funnels since you're likely to be a waste of time.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Quite the opposite. Companies fight that much harder to get
| a candidate they know is valuable.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| That's true, if you have something to show for your
| value. You do sometimes get candidates who are very full
| of themselves but whose record track is not impressive,
| trying to use their confidence to skip past the
| interviews.
| ghaff wrote:
| And that may be fine. If I (rarely) respond that I'm pretty
| happy where I am but happy to have a chat and you vanish,
| shows you're not terribly interested either.
| vmception wrote:
| Which is fine because you arent desparate
| karmakaze wrote:
| And knowing this, if you can internalize it can maintain the
| advantage. I once took an extended time off working. When I
| realized that my personal 'runway' was running out, I didn't
| really have too many weeks to go through interview cycles
| with lots of companies. I didn't change how I interviewed and
| it payed off.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of
| performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet
| have.
|
| I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my
| career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always
| tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third
| interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much
| better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing them to the wall
| - performance seems to be inversely proportional to how much I
| am worried about doing well in this particular interview.
| sky_rw wrote:
| I had a strategy for this that I frequently recommend to
| people. Back when I was "in the game" and living in NYC, I
| used to take 1-2 interviews per month despite being happy in
| my then current role. I was up front with current and
| prospective employers about this.
|
| This strategy served me well on many fronts: confidence in my
| skills and my options, familiarity with evolving interview
| trends, and networking opportunities with team leaders in a
| tight knit industry. It also allowed me to chase
| roles/positions which I wasn't immediately qualified for
| without feeling stress and anxiety, and was immensely helpful
| later on as an engineer turned startup CEO to know what
| product/project management interviews should feel like.
| eropple wrote:
| I did the same thing for a couple of years here in Boston.
| (I stopped when I found a job I really liked and developed
| deeper extracurricular hobbies.) Interviewing can be _fun_
| if you have the right kind of mindset for it and you meet
| all sorts of people. Multiple people I interviewed with, I
| 've run into down the road.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Fascinating; how did your "open with current employer"
| conversations go? How did you present it? How did they
| react?
| sky_rw wrote:
| YMMV, software engineers can usually get away with
| murder.
|
| It really all depends on how you frame it. I probably
| used terminology like "taking meetings with" instead of
| "interviewing at". Just make sure it's not with
| competitive companies and maybe more importantly not with
| sister companies under shared VC funds.
|
| Honesty goes a long way, and if your employer is going to
| fire you because you are keeping tabs on your market
| value then you need a new employer anyway.
| kube-system wrote:
| I interview and I explicitly adjust for this in my
| interviews. Anxiety is not too hard to pick up on, especially
| if you know family and friends who have it, and I'll give
| people the benefit of the doubt in the case that I do notice
| it.
|
| Many people with social anxiety are excellent writers and I
| make sure we always have a written portion of our evaluation
| to give them.
| servercobra wrote:
| This is really interesting! What kind of questions do you
| ask in the written portion?
| kube-system wrote:
| The written portion is part of our take-home coding test.
| We have the candidate do a short and simple coding
| exercise, and at the end, there's a couple open-ended
| questions about their approach, what they could have done
| better, etc.
|
| I find it _really_ insightful to give people a simple
| exercise to complete and then ask them to talk about it.
| The answers to the questions are almost more telling than
| the code itself. You can easily see who is struggling to
| understand the concepts, versus someone who just didn 't
| have much time to complete it, just by reading their
| responses.
|
| Even for the same exact code, someone might answer "I
| completed all of the requirements", and another person
| might answer "I wrote this in a hurry and it doesn't meet
| requirement [x] all of the time, but to handle
| circumstances like [y], I'd implement [z]". The latter
| person is always a better engineer.
| weq wrote:
| Yes exactly! If you need to have a take home coding test,
| do something simple and then use that as you discussion
| starter! Your developer is making decisions everyday on
| problems they may not have experience with. They are
| never making decisions in isolation without any internet
| connection.
| agent327 wrote:
| If you want a job, about the last thing you are going to
| want to say is that you were in a hurry (meaning "I
| didn't care about this job enough to pay proper attention
| to this"). This is going to be your calling card, so it
| has to look great! You make it appear as if you are
| penalizing people for going the extra mile to complete
| all the requirements.
| kube-system wrote:
| The key phrase above is:
|
| > for the same exact code
|
| And I'm in no position to expect candidates to treat a
| take-home code test like a real job. These are all
| experienced engineers that already have good jobs. They
| don't need my job.
|
| I 1000% prefer someone who didn't spend much time on my
| code test but knows what they're talking about, to
| someone who spent a bunch of time and is a bad engineer.
| The time constraint will be resolved when they quit their
| existing full time job.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I also do interviews, but find it is really hard to adjust
| for this. If a person repeatedly locks up and you give them
| space to come down from their anxious position for example,
| you simply get less signal than the person who confidently
| talks through their thought process the whole time and
| arrives at the right answer.
|
| Is the written portion the way to offset this in your
| experience? In addition to being hard to squeeze into
| typical 45 minute interview chunks, I'm not sure that would
| calm my anxiety personally. But I'm certainly willing to
| try.
| kube-system wrote:
| I've had some candidates who were mediocre in the verbal
| portion who blew me out of the water with their writing.
| They were clearly smart and capable people but were just
| anxious. I recommend these people be hired.
|
| I've also had people who did great in the verbal portion
| completely make a fool of themselves in the written
| portion. They have the confidence and social ability, but
| they often show they're missing the skills. They'd
| probably make better sales people than engineers.
|
| I haven't yet had someone who totally bombed the verbal
| do a good job in the written portion. All of the ones
| I've had were just overall poor communicators. If you
| can't communicate an idea verbally or written, it's going
| to be tough to work with a team of people who like to
| self-organize.
|
| I don't put the written portion in any time-block, if
| that's what you're saying. I normally give it via email
| and give people a week to get back to me.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Do you really want to work for any outfit that believes
| that's a tactic that brings out the best in someone?
|
| Hard pass.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I really don't think it's what is being intentionally
| tested. Evaluating people is a necessarily stressful
| process to some extent, and it just takes a lot to
| counteract how different people handle it.
|
| Just like I wouldn't want to be written off for a place for
| being nervous I wouldn't write off a place for doing the
| standard tech interview day-of-45-min-white boarded-
| questions.
| wpietri wrote:
| This is a really important point. Many of the best
| programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious
| people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with
| that.
|
| When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at
| their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too
| many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual
| skill.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Agree with this. The way I start every interview is
| attempting to disarm the other person and making them feel
| at ease. I kick back and try and make the conversation as
| casual and amicable as possible, even if I notice that they
| aren't a good fit along the way.
| jader201 wrote:
| Thanks for being empathetic. Not everyone is lucky enough
| to have empathetic interviewers, and it makes it a really
| tough experience for them.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. The upside, though, is that an unempathetic
| interviewer is a hint that it's not a good place to work
| at. So if I ever walk out of an interview feeling it was
| awful or unfair, in some sense it's a blessing. Better to
| know in the interview than after you're hired.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Thank you for existing and for being what you are.
| roland35 wrote:
| That's a great approach. I try to do the same thing, maybe
| try to get them to laugh with a witty joke or light comment
| to lower the stress level. I don't think it helps anybody
| to put candidates through stress.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. I'm also explicit that the goal of the process
| is to see them at their best. So they should ask for
| accommodations. Split it into two parts? Sure! Specific
| time or day? Sure! Video off or on? Whatever suits you.
| If they want to look something up, they can look it up. I
| also try to give them open-ended questions so they can
| steer toward their strengths.
|
| And their strengths are what I care about. Everybody has
| weaknesses, so finding them in an interview is
| uninteresting to me unless it's something truly fatal. I
| want to see them shine, as a) that gives me an idea of
| their capacity for growth, and b) that's what I'm going
| to play to when pointing them at work.
| Jensson wrote:
| > extremely conscientious people, and I think interview
| anxiety goes naturally with that.
|
| No, conscientiousness doesn't correlate that much with
| neuroticism. You can care about the results without getting
| cripplingly anxious, the anxiety isn't a good thing.
| [deleted]
| jmchuster wrote:
| You definitely want to have a couple of warmup interviews to
| get back into practice, into shape. So queue up your
| "practice" companies first and save the ones you really want
| for later.
|
| You can keep this shape up to some extent by doing a lot of
| interviewing of candidates at your current job. It really
| helps you understand what interviewers are looking for, what
| they expect, how a good interview should feel and flow.
|
| But there are just some things you don't practice until your
| own interviews. So you'll want to have your answers to
| questions, and stories, and narratives all planned out. And
| make sure you practice them out loud, multiple times, until
| it's flowing naturally and easily.
|
| And I just accept ahead of time that I'll fail 60% of the
| interviews that I apply for that I'd be perfect for.
| Sometimes things click and sometimes things don't. So make
| sure you've got warm leads and schedule your first rounds at
| an appropriate number of companies.
| foobiekr wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I no longer interview for
| things, I interview people who want to hire me. At this point
| in my career, as an engineering IC, my initial conversations
| are with the VP/GMs of business units.
|
| Younger me would have been very surprised how much i actually
| enjoy these conversations with manager types. In my experience,
| _most_ of the VP GM and CEO types are much broader and more
| interesting than most engineers tend to believe, at least
| younger me.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I am at the same point in my career. I don't interview. I
| have a conversation with the person who wants to hire me.
| I've had two formal job interviews in the past 14 years, both
| at a FANG. Did not enjoy the interview experience at all. Got
| offers for both, and turned down both offers.
| LASR wrote:
| Above a certain level of expertise, ICs are far harder to
| hire than management-like positions.
|
| This is definitely surprising to younger ICs in the industry
| - who seem to want to become engineering managers any way
| they can.
|
| The ceiling of genius you can possibly spike to as an
| engineer is far higher. I've seen single engineers at smaller
| startups perform the work of entire teams at big companies.
| And these folks get paid maybe 3x-4x the standard engineer
| salary. Huge savings. But hard to hire these folks.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| LASR, you seem to be shadowbanned, but your history doesn't
| show anything weird. I vouched for this post to make it
| visible to everyone, but I don't know if vouching lifts the
| shadowban entirely or just makes visible this particular
| post. You might want to reach out to dang just in case to
| figure this out.
| User23 wrote:
| If you're not willing to walk away from the deal then you're
| not actually negotiating.
| zz865 wrote:
| If you have a great paying job you like, why do you interview?
| Is it when someone cold calls you?
|
| I'm in a similar job and haven't interviewed for years but want
| to start and not sure how to go about it.
| discordance wrote:
| I was in a similar position. I made a prioritized list of
| target companies and projects, and then 'practiced'
| interviewing from the bottom up.
|
| One surprising thing I learned from the initial interviews
| with my lower priority targets was that my prioritization was
| wrong, in terms of challenges, interests and compensation.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Doesn't mean there isn't an even better option out there :-)
|
| Also I'd like to work on something related to tackling
| climate breakdown, so I'll almost always chat to companies in
| that space. Sadly I need to pay off some debt before I can
| take a paycut to work on these problems (or risk a startup).
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's because you're coming from a position of abundance. Works
| wonders in dating as well. The trick is realizing you don't
| actually need to have abundance to take a position of
| abundance.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great
| paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a
| shit what interviewers think.
|
| I've interviewed people who have resched this point. It makes
| for a chill interview. In some cases, the interviewee is overly
| "chill" and is bored with the challenges described in the job.
| I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges
| they will face in the job.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| I don't really understand why software engineers need to be
| EXCITED about their profession. I don't think the same would
| be expected from a lawyer or a doctor.
|
| I also think that excitement =/= passion. For example, if you
| look at the top chess player - Magnus Carlsen - he always
| looks bored talking about chess, and yet that's what he does
| all the time and is the best at it.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, I don't care about people being excited about their
| job, as long as they do it well. Why would I?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >For example, if you look at the top chess player - Magnus
| Carlsen - he always looks bored talking about chess, and
| yet that's what he does all the time and is the best at it.
|
| Serious question: Does Magnus have a team of people that he
| works with? Do they enjoy working with him? Do they think
| he is boring? Is he the type of person you want to work
| along side?
| throwawaythekey wrote:
| Yes Magnus has a team (all top players do).
|
| Whenever I've observed him seeming bored I've assumed it
| comes from him being mentally so many steps in front of
| the interviewer. He's already evaluated all the
| positions, variations ad nauseum prior to being asked
| about them. Even if he did have something interesting to
| say it's unlikely he could put it into words that would
| resonate with the audience. I assume if he actually
| didn't have passion for chess he would've retired by now
| as his record is already good enough to be one of the all
| time greats.
|
| Take the above with a grain of salt though, as it's
| probably just me projecting from my own experience as an
| IC that spends a lot of time working in a fairly
| specialist/abstract role.
| smsm42 wrote:
| _EXCITED_ may be a bit overdoing it. I 'm a geek, have been
| all my life. I've been programming since I was 13 yo. I still
| love what I am doing. But I am not automatically _EXCITED_
| about everything. I like my job, I care about my craft, and
| without false modesty, I do my job quite well. But you can 't
| expect me be jumping all over myself at the chance of doing
| what I've been doing for 30+ years. I'm not a puppy anymore.
| There may be once in a while things I'm really interested in,
| and sometimes a task comes around that gets me working until
| late hours just because I want to figure out something tough
| - but you can't maintain bubbling excitement over that long,
| it's just not happening.
| weq wrote:
| Just cause your not excited about every single problem,
| doesnt mean you are not excited. I a few years under you
| but would describe myself the same but also as never
| working a day in my life cause its a passion I had b4 the
| exchange of money. making computers do sh _t is only
| bettered by growing older and seeing them do more sh_ t
| then we ever _thought possible_.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the
| challenges they will face in the job.
|
| Anybody who looks excited about things they they have no
| stake in is just pretending and is likely a ace imposter.
|
| I'd be very vary of hiring such a person.
| whakim wrote:
| In addition to the points made in sibling comments, I want to
| point out that "showing excitement" (particularly in an
| interview context) can be culturally conditional. You may in
| fact be selecting for candidates with a European American
| cultural background more than anything else.
| isoos wrote:
| It is much better to face boring challenges with interesting
| people than interesting challenges with boring people. Maybe
| focusing on the team would excite these kind of persons.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >It is much better to face boring challenges with
| interesting people than interesting challenges with boring
| people.
|
| I absolutely agree. I like to work with interesting people,
| too.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Sounds like it's just as well, the interview is a useful
| filter for you. Conversely, I like to work with companies
| tackling meaningful problems.
|
| If I might ask, what do you do to excite your candidates
| about the challenges involved?
| nbzso wrote:
| Please, stop. This EXCITEMENT you cannot apply as a Golden
| rule. You can use it for junior position, may be junior to
| senior transitions but there is no sane professional with
| EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE that will communicate and show
| excitement in a natural way. It is not logical.
|
| When you have 20+ career, filled with success and failures,
| from which you can learn how to see and seek BALANCE, the
| last thing on your mind is excitement. You tend to see the
| world with realistic and moderate lens. And this is not only
| good for companies, this is a golden opportunity.
|
| Sadly, more and more I look at the startups as a kindergarten
| party with serious consequences. Some VC's are playing the
| game and some lucky kids are taking this as a validation for
| knowledge and expertise. Selecting teams with "cultural fit"
| and "excitement" to fulfill a hollow visions of "changing the
| world".
|
| P.S. I don't feel excitement. I consider myself a craftsman
| with a passion and deep love for my work. And your way of
| thinking is positioning you in the group of "thank you for
| your time" crowd. Automatically.
| russelldjimmy wrote:
| As I near the entry into my 30s, I begin to see this more
| and more clearly. I used to be EXCITED about my job, about
| a project, about a task. It also made me very stressed and
| made me take things personally when they didn't go
| according to "my vision". Back then, I'd have read this
| sentiment as "jaded" and "cynical". But as I mature, I find
| the balance, and I find truth in these words.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Oh yes. Getting genuinely excited about a project is a
| recipe for burnout, especially when the project doesn't
| go in a direction that continues to excite you. I'd argue
| that an employee who can work on a project despite his
| lack of excitement is better than one who needs this
| excitement to function.
|
| What excites me are things like enjoying time with my
| family, the idea of making enough money to retire in my
| 50s instead of 70s, working on my hobbies, and so on. Not
| my JIRA tickets, sorry.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| > I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the
| challenges they will face in the job.
|
| In this case your pipeline is optimized for hiring great
| actors.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Or highly-outwardly energetic types.
|
| I'm outwardly very dull, but also very willing to have a
| thorough and deep conversation on just about anything.
|
| It just happens that...well...I happen to sound like Ben
| Stein from that scene in _Ferris Bueller_ when I talk.
| xyzelement wrote:
| >> "honestly I'm really happy where I am, but every man has his
| price, what can you offer?" does wonders.
|
| I would be very surprised if you say _literally_ this and get
| results. No self-respecting company or manager is going to
| invest in talking to you if you describe yourself so overtly
| mercenary.
|
| Obviously, when you're happy where you are, money is part of
| the equation to get you to move, but making it seem like the
| only motivator is super gauche and culture-centric companies
| (which are the good ones) would hang up on this answer.
|
| So curious - are you actually literally saying this and people
| aren't hanging up on you?
| justinlloyd wrote:
| On LinkedIn, when approached, and I am approached very often:
| My very first question is: "What is the compensation range
| for this position?"
|
| And if it is below what I am seeking, I say "Thank you for
| making me aware of this opportunity. At the compensation
| range you stated it is a hard pass from me. If you can come
| back with a realistic number I might be open to a discussion.
| Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
|
| Or if they ask me what I want, I say: "I'm currently making
| $230k base. Can you come up with a number higher than that
| which would convince me to move from a job I am happy with?"
|
| It quickly removes the time wasters and the starry eyed
| dreamers and the cheap skates, and the people who are
| serious, then we have a conversation and see where it leads.
| And I have plenty of conversations every month. Yes, it's
| effective. It's a business negotiation, and the person on the
| other side of the conversation either understands that
| inherently or is trying to convince me that my labour is
| worth less.
| civilized wrote:
| If you're afraid of telling a company you'd move for more
| money, you've subordinated yourself and abdicated your own
| economic agency before negotiations even begin.
|
| I tell every recruiter my price right off the bat and get
| plenty of interview offers. Unconditional devotion is
| reserved for my wife, who actually deserves it.
|
| I wouldn't respect a company that expects me to stick around
| at below-market pay for "the culture". Tech companies already
| appropriate your labor on the cheap and keep the (enormous)
| difference. No culture makes up for that. They should at
| least pay market rate. I'm not a dupe.
| User23 wrote:
| This is total loserthink. Saying literally that will
| assuredly get results.
|
| Mature managers and owners are well aware that hiring is a
| commercial act and that commercial acts are about money.
| Signaling that you're willing to walk from the negotiation is
| key to getting good compensation. Strategically, you wait
| until they've already invested thousands of dollars in labor
| costs interviewing you first.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Right, if you have a good BATNA then you will actually be
| negotiating and not just bluffing.
|
| I think lots of people get hung up on thinking of business
| interactions as personal ones, just because they have been
| interacting with people. Small businesses may act in more
| personal ways but most larger companies will generally be
| pretty faceless and make decisions they think are good
| without bearing grudges because people treated them like a
| faceless corporation trying to make good business
| decisions.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Strategically then, wait until you are 4 months in the job,
| when they've paid the commission to the recruiter (finding
| and contacting interesting people is a job, paid ~20% of
| the gross salary), and THEN you raise the price.
|
| Expect to receive a flying chair. If you get out of it
| alive, you'll get a better salary.
| User23 wrote:
| I assume you're being sarcastic, but if you change 4
| months to a year and play hardball in your first review
| it's not a terrible plan. This is assuming you spent that
| first year creating big value.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I've said a variation of it, and it works exceptionally well
| if the other side is also mercenary.
|
| A mercenary working for another mercenary can be a very
| educational experience, and I have found that it is far
| easier to work with other mercenaries because they can be
| focused and aligned quicker than people that need to be
| inspired.
|
| Honestly, if I was a hiring manager, then I'd try to only
| hire mercenaries keeping things professional.
| jen20 wrote:
| > culture-centric companies (which are the good ones)
|
| This depends on what you are looking for.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > This depends on what you are looking for.
|
| I am open to learning other sides here because this is so
| foreign to me. What are the cases where you don't want to
| work in a place where people care about the mission and
| culture and want coworkers who do as well?
|
| What are the cases where you're happy working for the
| company whose attitude is "we don't care who you are and
| what you value, as long as you have the basic skills and
| are willing to take what we pay, welcome aboard?" Do such
| companies become great places to work and if so how?
|
| I am asking genuinely curious because I've always looked
| for high culture high mission companies because that's what
| I am like.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > "we don't care who you are and what you value, as long
| as you have the basic skills and are willing to take what
| we pay, welcome aboard?"
|
| Why just "basic" skills? How does that fit in with the
| rest?
| confidantlake wrote:
| Having worked on teams that super duper care about the
| mission it isn't always roses. Why are you leaving work
| at 5pm or taking a vacation? Don't you care about the
| mission? If you aren't drinking the coolaid you don't fit
| in. Also I have met a fair number of people who think the
| mission is so important that it gives them a license to
| be rude. After all what are a few hurt feelings compared
| to the MISSION.
|
| Where as working at a bank or a retail company no one is
| there because they are super into banking or selling
| generic household items. They are there to do good work
| and leave at the end of the day. They are professionals.
| jen20 wrote:
| There are plenty of people in this boat 1 the so-called
| "dark matter" developers. There are lots of people who
| find their fulfillment via means other than work, and
| work is a necessary evil that pays the rent. I personally
| couldn't stand that kind of place, but understand why
| others are fine with it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> "dark matter" developers_
|
| I like that. I'm probably one.
|
| A few years ago, my company finally wound up my team, and
| brought all their development over to The Old Country (I
| am in the US, and it was a Japanese company). The jury's
| out, on whether or not it was a good idea for that
| company.
|
| For me, I had plenty of investments and savings, that I
| didn't need to work, if I didn't want to, but I _wanted_
| to work. I love working on teams; the more eclectic, the
| better. I have a fairly unusual confluence of skills,
| experience and character that I _know_ is quite valuable,
| and quite rare. I was a manager for a long time (
| "discussion" interviews were the way I worked). That
| means that I'm quite aware of the value of my skills. I'm
| not God's gift to SWE, but I'm no slouch.
|
| I also have a _very big_ portfolio, to _prove_ what I
| say. I 'm not blowing up my CV with padding and BS. In
| fact, I had to remove a great deal of stuff, in order to
| keep it to a couple of pages.
|
| I know that not everyone has a portfolio like mine, but
| it's what I have. It's dozens and dozens of _completed_ ,
| _ship-ready_ , _ultra-high-quality_ projects that can
| easily be examined, installed, built, run, and, in some
| cases, submitted to the App Store. There's at least a
| decade of commit history, across these codebases, and a
| _ton_ of documentation. Anyone can look at it. I make it
| very easy to find.
|
| Couple that with many, _many_ blog postings, training
| modules, essays, tutorials, etc., and you have a pretty
| damn good idea of who I am, what drives me, and what I
| can bring to the table.
|
| You really can't get more solid than that.
|
| In my experience, this was _completely_ ignored, when I
| was searching for work. I understand the excuses that
| many managers use for this, and, in some cases, I can 't
| argue against them, but, in other cases, they really
| missed the boat. I could have actually made a significant
| difference to their bottom line; especially a couple of
| smaller companies.
|
| In the end, I just gave up looking, and went to work on
| my own. I found some folks doing nonprofit work, that
| looked like they could use some help, and I've been
| working with them, for free. I'm also making that
| "significant difference" that I mentioned earlier.
|
| I have absolutely no intention of looking for work in the
| corporate rat race anymore. I'm quite disappointed in the
| zeitgeist of the modern software development industry,
| and don't want to darken my spirit.
|
| It took me a few years to realize just how bad it was for
| me, and how much better it is, now. It would be nice to
| have the extra money that a continued paid career would
| give, but I've become used to feeling good about my work,
| and I work _a lot_.
|
| It's like the scales fell from my eyes.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm a very mission-oriented person, so I understand where
| you're coming from. But there are a lot of places where
| people don't care very much, and people who work in those
| circumstances long enough tend to pick up those values.
|
| The most obviously mercenary industry is finance. I did
| that for a few years and then got the fuck out. But I've
| met plenty of mercenary people in tech, especially in
| startups and BigCos. For plenty of people programming is
| a job like any other; they're going to come in, do
| whatever the boss wants (however little sense it makes),
| and go home. I would die from that, but a lot of people
| either find their meaning elsewhere or just don't care
| much about meaning.
| akomtu wrote:
| Companies don't have self-respect and competent managers are
| necesserarily hypocritical, but your point is right for
| another reason: someone who speaks truth to power like that
| won't fit a typical team of hypocrites. A hiring manager
| would think: "if this dude disrespects my authority now, why
| is he going to respect it later? better to hire that less
| stellar candidate who at least will be manageable."
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Why wouldn't that get results? If you're happy where you are
| then there needs to be a good reason to move. It's the
| interviewer/company's job to convince you to move, it's their
| effort being wasted.
|
| If you're comfortable in your existing job then you are
| ALWAYS in the commanding seat during negotiations. If they
| want you then they will need to make an offer good enough.
| Otherwise you walk straight out and nothing changes.
|
| Also, this isn't something you'd say on the phone. It's what
| you'd say during the interview, when they can't just hang up
| on you. You've done the interview, they ask "So, what sort of
| compensation are you looking for?", then you hit them with
| that.
|
| If you show a weakness (a job you are actively trying to
| leave) then you will get lowballed. Showing that you have
| nothing to lose is a wall they have to scale and puts you in
| the best position possible for negotiations.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I said this to recruiter at $currentjob and they pay me ~50%
| more than the last place.
| xenihn wrote:
| >I would be very surprised if you say literally this and get
| results. No self-respecting company or manager is going to
| invest in talking to you if you describe yourself so overtly
| mercenary.
|
| that depends entirely on how badly they need you
| sushsjsuauahab wrote:
| I prefer a "real" interview. A discussion is nice, but is not as
| focused as a "normal" interview. I would like to be able to guess
| roughly how well I have done based on the answers I have given.
|
| Lastly, I don't want to have to guess what we should talk about
| so that you can feel you know I can do the job.
| soheil wrote:
| > Do they ask clarifying questions when they don't feel judged
|
| Sure, you can tell yourself fairytale stories, but you and the
| other person both know there will be generated a number right
| after the call ends that can only range from 1 to 4 and you will
| be assigned it.
|
| Also if you treat this as a discussion you may come off as
| arrogant. After all everyone else is showing nervousness so the
| interviewer probably thinks "what's with this person who acts
| like they're already on my team?"
| austincheney wrote:
| The biggest challenge with software interviews is that you don't
| know when to lie. The process is maximally biased and so you have
| maximum incentive to lie. The only reason to not lie is
| reputation damage in the highly unlikely case you are caught. In
| the end you are either hired for more money or you are just
| wasting your time as a candidate.
|
| Most of us really want to be as honest as possible, not just
| because we are good people, but because went want to ensure
| maximum compatibility. This is incredibly deceptive in itself
| because employer compatibility doesn't really matter. As an
| employee you do things the company way or you don't work there.
|
| So, just lie. I really hate that, but there is no reason not to
| and every reason to do so. It's just the nature of conforming to
| system of inherent implicit bias.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > So, just lie.
|
| I think this is bad advice. I have never lied in an interview.
| I've also never had a job not offered to me if I made it to the
| in person interview part. This isn't to say that I have magical
| job-getting powers, but only that not lying has not hurt my
| chances.
|
| In one job I applied for, I didn't have a lot of domain
| knowledge, but I had knowledge in an adjacent domain and wanted
| to to jump over to this one. I told this to the interviewer up
| front, and the interview was a bit rough but I managed to do
| OK. What I did was explained my thinking process and in many
| cases arrived at the right solution, or close to it. In others
| I didn't. The interviewer was sufficiently happy with my
| ability to solve problems on the spot that they hired me. It
| wasn't hard to acquire that new domain knowledge, but I had to
| work at it. I also took a level down in the new job, but they
| increased my pay over my old job, so I didn't care about the
| leveling. Long term, that helped me as my salary ended up being
| higher as a gained levels in the new place.
|
| So being honest about not being the perfect fit has worked out
| for me. I think it can work out for you, too.
| mark-r wrote:
| I once failed an interview, and I think it was because the
| interviewer laid a trap for me. He asked if I would use such-
| and-so algorithm to solve a particular problem, and I said
| sure. I had never heard of such-and-so algorithm, but I
| figured that I could look it up once I had the job. When I
| didn't get the job, I realized that such-and-so was probably
| made up by the interviewer to see if I was trying to BS my
| way into the job. Being honest would have been a better
| approach.
| austincheney wrote:
| Think about it like this. The goals are attain employment and
| maximize compensation. That's it.
|
| That said you are probably best off training machine learning
| to do this for you. It won't suffer the nonverbal faults
| associated with dishonesty, because truth to a machine is how
| effectively it completes the assigned goal.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Think about it like this. The goals are attain employment
| and maximize compensation. That's it.
|
| Meh, I think devoting 30-40% of your life to something is
| more than just maximizing compensation. In tech, at least,
| you normally have quite a few options about where you will
| work and what you will do. If you feel you need to lie just
| to get into the door and are convinced that you wont get
| the job unless you do lie, then consider that this might
| not be the best job.
|
| On the other hand, if you are too afraid to tell the truth
| even in the interview, it doesn't bode well for when you
| need to deal with other people in the corp bureaucracy
| (which is inevitable once you go past the junior engineer
| level).
| austincheney wrote:
| The reality is that most people are not completely
| honest. Extreme honesty is shocking and casually
| associated with extreme personality types or behavior
| disorders.
| spurgu wrote:
| I recently accepted a position with 20% lower pay, because
| the work is more interesting, challenging and rewarding.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe this works in big companies, but many small companies
| that I've worked at, you'd be caught, even lying on silly
| little things. The people reading your resume are the same ones
| you're going to be working beside, and they'll absolutely ask
| you about things you said you knew.
|
| And once they find out that you lied about your volunteering
| experience at your local little league team, your whole resume
| goes under the microscope. I've seen it happen.
| b20000 wrote:
| what is it with lying on resumes? is that a thing? i went
| through some interviews a while ago. everyone assumed i lied
| on my resume without any basis to do so.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Very frequent, sometimes it's straight up lying, more often
| it's overstating what they did on the CV. To give you an
| example, when recruiting for a devops positions recently,
| during phone screen easily 1 in 4 people with several years
| of AWS experience on their CV had no idea whatsoever about
| very basic IAM concepts (e.g. roles vs users, that explicit
| deny always takes precedence over explicit allow).
|
| That being said being civil and ensuring positive
| experience even for poor candidates is one of the
| fundamentals of interviewing. In the cases I described I
| didn't call them liars, I simply stated that for this role
| we expect them to independently support development teams,
| and that we consider IAM to be part of the fundamentals (it
| was explcitly listed in the job posting), and sent them
| some resources for studying up.
| austincheney wrote:
| There is a couple of problems with that. More than half the
| time I have interviewed nobody reads resumes. They know your
| name and kind of how long you have been employed.
|
| Second, you control what appears on your resume. You can spin
| it how you want by the facts you include and omit. You list
| the great selling points about yourself and none of the bad.
| Don't lie on a resume because its already under your control
| and it's a document of record that can follow you from any
| point in the past.
|
| This tread isn't about resumes. It's about interviewing,
| specifically as a discussion.
| kube-system wrote:
| When I interview, I don't spend much time reading the
| resume beforehand, but I'll ask a few specific questions
| about it during the interview.
|
| If one assumes nobody reads their resume, however, then
| what benefit would they get from lying?
| austincheney wrote:
| A resume is not an interview.
| lwouis wrote:
| I read a lot of anti-diplomas ideology, especially from US
| culture. Over the years I've realized that the multi-years
| selection people go through in academia is a decent and most
| importantly long process to select people.
|
| A lot of the conversation is on interviews these days, on the
| idea that anyone can be a genius programmer after a bootcamp.
| While I don't deny it's possible, I think traditional selection
| based on the school people went to, and building a relationship
| between companies and school is a good thing.
|
| Trying to holistically evaluate a worker in a few hours is not
| nice. It's very intense for candidates to have such opportunities
| to unlock in such a short time. People prepare for interviews
| intensely, and can live rejections as a deep traumas as a result.
| Having this process happen over years in academia seems
| healthier, and more accurate.
|
| Companies would benefit from having their HR spend time studying
| curriculums of some schools, and build relationships. That
| guarantees a steady flow of qualified workers.
|
| I see this where I live here in Japan, and I'm quite found of the
| work culture / society it produces.
| waisbrot wrote:
| That's good except, as you point out, in the US where schools
| are paid by the individual. At least some of the anti-diploma
| sentiment here in the US is because we understand that it would
| just result in "people born rich are the only ones who can get
| hired for good jobs".
| swman wrote:
| I wish I could a 2-3 hour interview where I (or the candidate)
| showcase one of my projects and explain the architectural details
| and decisions in addition to showing any cool/hairy/insane code
| that got the job done. We can discuss those things and see how to
| improve them, or laugh at the crazy solutions.
|
| Honestly how many times do I need to rehearse these dumbass algos
| (blah blah blah, so I'll optimize for space with blah blah blah)
| okay already. I would much rather show you real world code that
| I've built, or passion projects I spend my free time on. I want
| to bring me to your company/projects, so get to know what I'm
| about holistically as an engineer. I think you can best
| understand that by looking at actual work done and judging
| whether or not the person is capable of contributing to your
| needs.
|
| Whenever we face challenges, we learn from them. At scale, we
| learn everyday. So just hire people who are passionate about
| facing challenges and learning from them. Not someone who can
| spend 8 hours a day like a college student playing leet code
| instead of building something useful. It really isn't that hard
| to memorize a dozen essential data structures and algorithms. But
| then what? So cringe.
| weq wrote:
| 100% give me a convo with a dev like this anyday of the week
| over this crammer whiteboarding l33tcode problems.
| bvm wrote:
| This is how I interview.
|
| Show me something you've done that you're proud of. Take me
| through it in depth. Answer some questions on it.
|
| Doesn't have to be a free-time project. If you don't have a
| free-time project and you're too NDA'd to discuss previous
| work, then present some language feature or something.
| twic wrote:
| I often administer a 45 minute version of this (talking about
| any/all past work, not necessarily side projects), as part of a
| half-day of interviews. We'd never be able to get into the
| depth you could in two hours, but we can get somewhere.
|
| My experience has been that a lot of candidates can't even fill
| 45 minutes. I ask "what was the most interesting part?", "what
| was most technically complex?", "what would you do differently
| if you did it again?", and they just don't have nontrivial
| answers.
| vsareto wrote:
| >and they just don't have nontrivial answers.
|
| Yeah, because you can have a career where you're just gluing
| stuff together to make business apps for, usually, simple
| business problems. You're looking for craftsmen but you're
| interviewing plumbers.
| logfromblammo wrote:
| To extend the plumber analogy, prospective employers will
| frequently look for plumbers with specific experience in
| copper pipe, rigid PVC pipe, or flexible PEX pipe, as
| though fragmenting the plumbing space in this fashion has
| any bearing on whether or not the result will conform to
| building codes, ensure that all the drains and faucets work
| as expected, and generally solve any fluids transport
| problems that may come up without having to push the
| calendar to the right.
|
| Most people look up the local business listings, pick
| anyone advertised as "plumber", and call to make a service
| appointment. Or they use a general contractor that already
| has a list of approved subs. Master plumbers don't have to
| answer little trick questions about brazing copper or about
| finding lead pipes in an old building. People somehow trust
| them to know what their job is, and do it.
|
| Rarely, one might encounter an unreliable plumber. They
| might not get paid, and any other plumber is usually able
| to fix their botched jobs without hurting the budget much.
| Review sites exist to track building-trades business
| reputations.
|
| But the analogy breaks, because no one trusts software and
| IT folks to do their jobs competently. The default
| assumption is that we are all know-nothing hacks who could
| destroy the company with one keystroke. All our knowledge
| is assumed to be tightly siloed, and does not transfer
| between similar technologies. C++ people can't do Rust or
| Go. Java people can't do C#. Desktop people can't do the
| cloud. Back-end people can't do UI. CMMI people can't be
| Agile.
|
| It's madness.
| twic wrote:
| Quite often, though, you hire tradesmen and they're
| bloody terrible. More often than not. So i'm not sure
| this is a very motivating analogy.
| jmchuster wrote:
| I don't think that style of interview provides as much signal
| as you think it does. I would probably say that watching
| someone work through a problem provides more signal than having
| someone explain a problem they have already solved. That's why
| I feel that all of the companies I've been at, eventually ended
| up shifting the interview process to do less "explain a
| project" and converging more on "talk us though these different
| types of problems". And then the past experience is what is
| being demonstrated when they show off how deeply and quickly
| they can think through the different types and bring their
| experience to bear.
|
| I also just generally do not think that most people can even
| put together a 2-3 hour presentation of their past work that
| goes over well. Most of the time people can't really talk more
| than 30 minutes about past projects. That requires a whole
| different set of skills, which there are certain contexts where
| I'd value that more highly. But my initial impression is that
| if we set up our interviews this way, we'd also end up
| filtering out a lot of people who'd be great, since not picking
| the perfect project to demo basically dooms the entire
| interview to be a flop. With multiple interview types, you
| increase the chance that there's an interview they really shine
| in.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The challenge with this approach as that many very competent
| people are not allowed to discuss their prior work in that
| level of detail. More practical variants of this approach use a
| straw man software design problem to talk to that will exercise
| diverse areas of experience.
| b20000 wrote:
| yeah, and some very competent people have no time or interest
| in timed coding tests and know that great software is not
| built that way.
|
| if you have been through a CS program you have worked on
| probably at least 10 projects. and then there are your
| personal projects. if you have any experience you can talk
| about at least some of these apart from the stuff under NDA.
|
| so, this approach is much better than timed coding interviews
| and is a much more fair system as it rewards and takes into
| account experience.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _if you have been through a CS program you have worked on
| probably at least 10 projects_
|
| That's fine for a new graduate, but many of us are decades
| out of college. What we did then has almost zero relevance
| to jobs we might seek today.
| b20000 wrote:
| the same goes for leetcode interviews. the key difference
| is that you don't need to prepare to talk about your own
| projects. or at least much less. and you are probably
| working on stuff after hours anyway.
| twic wrote:
| I do experience-based interviewing, and i have never
| encountered this problem. The great majority of the time,
| people are able to talk about anything. Sometimes, there are
| sensitive parts of prior work, but a candidate can just talk
| around those bits and focus on the rest. Even if someone had
| been working somewhere super-secret, if they aren't a junior,
| they have other experience to talk about.
|
| If all your career experience so far has been at the NSA,
| yeah, you might want to do a side project before looking for
| work.
| nostrebored wrote:
| I've worked at some large companies and would say this is
| wrong. I can't talk about most of my best examples because
| they're still roadmap items.
| ctvo wrote:
| You can't remove the identifying details and talk about
| the technical challenge and usage in a generic sense?
| Your system or software is that specific? Can you give a
| now public example?
| nostrebored wrote:
| I can, and that's usually what I do, but there are
| identifying details about the very specific domain which
| AWS only has a single product in.
|
| So I can talk about architecting a system, about customer
| feedback and redesigns, but I can't talk about work I did
| that will span another three years.
|
| I think at FAANG it's usually fine -- most people have
| good enough examples even without their full repertoire.
| But at mid enterprise or F500 companies I could see this
| being a bit impactful.
| b20000 wrote:
| it is not less wrong than timed leetcode BS interviews
| scottLobster wrote:
| As someone who's done classified work, the general guidance
| we got is that we can speak in generalities.
|
| So I can't say what the code specifically does or who it's
| for, but I can talk about how I worked on a c++ engine
| wrapped in a Java server that was responsible for
| coordinating a large group of non-homogeneous assets, as
| well as various architectural details (what libraries did
| we use, database, messaging setup, etc). So it's not like I
| have nothing to talk about in an interview, plus the fact
| that I can't get too specific adds mystique. It's kinda
| fun, because in my experience there's an assumption most
| engineers/engineering managers make about what I've worked
| on from that first statement, particularly if they know
| where I work, and it's actually not that. :)
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| This follows what I think of as the best technical interview
| I ever had. It was for a more junior role, but it was pretty
| good.
|
| Here's a basic straw man rails controller. There are a few
| things wrong with it. Apply suggestions. It was nice.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yep, 100% this. Particularly if you've worked for big firms
| in the past, those NDAs do not mess around.
| neverminder wrote:
| You can make it even more generic than that. A rather simple at
| first glance, but discussion provoking question: "What do you
| like and what do you dislike about the Technology X?". A good
| candidate who has experience with the said Technology X would
| not shut up on this subject. A bad one however will struggle.
| This is of course provided that you are hiring for some
| specific stack.
| webdood90 wrote:
| The bias in this approach is obvious. In your mind, you think
| a candidate "not shutting up" is a green flag, but the
| reality is you are trying to hire someone who thinks like
| you.
|
| There are a million reasons why this approach doesn't work.
| Maybe they just don't like talking that much. Maybe they
| don't like the technology you're discussing. Maybe they just
| don't care enough to have an opinion on it.
|
| None of the above are good reasons to pass on a candidate.
| neverminder wrote:
| > but the reality is you are trying to hire someone who
| thinks like you.
|
| Not really. If someone can present solid reasoning and
| argue their point well, they don't have to think like me.
| Three's more than one way to skin a cat.
|
| > Maybe they don't like the technology you're discussing.
| Maybe they just don't care enough to have an opinion on it.
|
| You mean the technology they are being hired for? Yeah,
| hating, not caring about it is probably not a good
| motivator to go for the job then, wouldn't you agree?
|
| > None of the above are good reasons to pass on a
| candidate.
|
| Beats the whiteboarding. I was hired like that in my last 3
| jobs and I have used the same approach myself with rather
| consistently good results.
| webdood90 wrote:
| Oh, well it sounds like you're doing everything right.
| This also probably scales really well.
|
| Thanks for sharing - hopefully a lot of people will use
| your anecdotal evidence to impact the way they hire
| people too!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > experience with the said Technology X would not shut up on
| this subject
|
| I've learned the hard way to be very reserved when giving
| opinions about technology X because interviewers sometimes
| get really defensive about the thing they like about
| technology X.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| As an interviewee I'd like this too, but as an interviewer I
| wonder if it actually has enough signal. One of the problems
| I've found with these kinds of conversations is that people can
| plausibly BS quite a bit about projects, or their role in them.
|
| Maybe I started a new compiler or something at my company but
| didn't have the chops for it and the project flamed out. If I
| lie and said that all my goals were achieved and all the hard
| technical challenges were overcome, how can you tell?
|
| Or maybe the project did succeed but someone else came up with
| the idea and led the efforts. I was there for the technical
| discussions and grilled the lead on why he made the choices he
| did, so now I can answer your questions and sound like I know
| what I'm talking about.
|
| Software engineers can make a lot of money, the incentives to
| game the interview process are high and people attempt it
| often...
| mattkrause wrote:
| Other fields seem to do just fine with this approach.
|
| If you interview for an R&D position at (e.g.,) a biotech
| company, in academia, or one of the National Labs, you're
| usually asked to prepare a 30-45 minute presentation about
| your past work. New grads usually use their MS/PhD thesis
| defense slides; other folks often have a conference talk they
| can expand. Some places also do "chalk talks" where you
| describe how you'd approach a new problem of your or their
| choosing.
|
| This presentation is the jumping-off point for the rest of
| your interviews. If you talked about building a compiler,
| someone is going to ask for details about the lexer, maybe
| have you do implement a very simple tokenizer on a white
| board. Another person will ask how you measured its
| correctness/performance. Yet another may dig into how you
| organized the team doing the work, etc.
|
| Maybe, as you propose, someone else helped with parts of the
| work. This wouldn't necessarily weed that out. Nevertheless,
| I'd argue that being able to justify the decisions that were
| made--and cogently explain when/why they might be different--
| isn't actually BS; it's understanding.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| There is a hysteria that's plaguing the world of tech: The
| fear that incompetent people might "BS" their way to a
| position.
|
| Everyone you talk with, has probably one or two anecdotal
| stories of such. "Yeah I worked with this CS grad that
| couldn't even write FizzBuzz" - yet we ignore the hundreds of
| other that do their work just fine.
|
| And this is fought with setting up ridiculous 8-part
| technical interviews where you'll have to whiteboard some
| leetcode questions ( _" Given a problem, show us a working
| O(Log N), or preferably O(1) solution. You have 45 minutes"_)
| or design questions ( _" Show us how you would design slack /
| discord / zoom / etc."_) that drags over 6 months.
|
| For someone to be truly incompetent, or even not good enough
| to meet the company standards, the current system is
| overkill.
| native_samples wrote:
| Sadly this isn't some sort of mass hysteria but based on
| practical experience. Yes, it's hard to believe. New
| interviewers are routinely shocked the first few times they
| are asked to take a candidate through a coding test. That's
| why everyone should just ignore the advice in the article -
| it's wrong. If you want to hire competent programmers, you
| need to test them rigorously by watching them code, in
| front of you. _Every_ time I have been tempted to stray
| from this path the results have been bad. The world is full
| of people who are very good at seeming affable, friendly
| and competent but who then fall to pieces the moment you
| ask them to write a program. Any program. That does
| anything at all.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The glaring problem (IMO) with throwing hard LC-style
| questions at interviewees, is that it's a fundamentally
| stressful and high-stakes situation - which is so far
| removed from the actual working environment.
|
| What are you actually inferring from the situation - how
| well the candidate can write software? How well they
| tackle stress and anxiety? How much spare-time they have
| to grind these types of questions? etc.
|
| Probably a mix of them all, but there's a lot of
| irrelevant noise - if you're just looking for one thing.
| snickerer wrote:
| I am an interviewer for C++ job candidates in the
| automotive industry.
|
| I do a coding task first and a Q&A afterwards -- because
| these are the requirements.
|
| I did many interviews. My experience is: I could skip the
| Q&A completely. Most candidates could answer the
| questions just fine after reading the Wikipedia article
| for 10 minutes. In the interview I can see if they
| already read it or not. But I don't think it matters.
|
| What matters are the coding skills. The coding task is
| quite simple and half of the candidates (with master
| degrees and 'years of industry experience') fail. But
| these candidates are often good talkers when they are
| chatting about the benefits of agile methodology and so
| on.
|
| I totally agree with you that a candidate should just
| write any program. I believe I know after 15 minutes if
| they are developers or not.
|
| But I also agree with the idea that we interviews must
| calm down the interviewee and remove the nervousness. I
| don't want to see if they stay cool in an exam situation
| because daily work is not an exam situation. I want to
| see if they can code when they are relaxed.
| Clubber wrote:
| >half of the candidates (with master degrees and 'years
| of industry experience') fail.
|
| If half the candidates with a master's degree in CS are
| failing your test, that should be a pretty huge red flag
| to you that your test might have an issue. What question
| are they failing?
| snickerer wrote:
| They don't have problems with the questions. They are not
| able to write a simple C++. And they are applying for a
| C++ dev job.
| Clubber wrote:
| I would think that could get filtered out on the resume
| check with no relevant experience. Are they lying on the
| resume?
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Then why ask candidates to solve a leetcode hard or two
| mediums in 45 mins? If you're afraid of people who can't
| code any program then ask for leetcode easy.
| native_samples wrote:
| Sure but the article isn't about difficulty of coding
| challenges, or where you get them from, but about doing
| them at all.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| It's a vicious cycle.
|
| As companies ask 'Leetcode easy' questions, there came to
| be thousands of online blogs, youtube channels etc..
| which trained even the n00bs who can't write good code
| otherwise. If they train very well they can solve 2sum or
| write binary tree level order traversal without
| understanding much. Of course not all interviews can use
| novel exclusive questions, and these have a non-
| negligible chance of passing.
|
| Now if you are hiring, you would think, "If these n00bs
| can solve Leetcode easy with practice, the good ones are
| solving Leetcode medium with same level of practice. So
| let's raise the level of questions so that we don't end
| up hiring these rote-learning noobs". And it continues.
|
| I don't think there's an obvious solution to this, if you
| don't want to lose the statistically good heuristic of
| problem solving skills, in order to weed out candidates.
| philwelch wrote:
| The vast majority of people you actually work with are
| competent, sure. But the problem with interviewing is that
| it adversely selects for incompetent people, because
| competent people are more likely to have jobs and not be
| currently interviewing.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the
| Cost/Benefit for the company. How empowered are new senior
| hires, and how expensive is the time of the team? At larger
| companies senior engineers are often _phenomenally
| expensive_ and at smaller companies controls over
| potentially business ending operations are usually minimal.
|
| A friend of mine at a FAANG recently dealt with a bad hire.
| Their guess was that in the 6 months the bad hire was there
| they cost the company maybe ~5 million between wasted
| engineer time and delayed release schedules after people
| kept having to put out their fires. On the other end of
| companies, I've heard of seniors corrupting the database
| and its backup and ending an entire startup.
|
| This is not a defense of whiteboard interviews per se, just
| an observation on why companies desperately want to avoid
| bad hires.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Their guess was that in the 6 months the bad hire was
| there they cost the company maybe ~5 million between
| wasted engineer time and delayed release schedules after
| people kept having to put out their fires.
|
| I've worked with one or two of those, but I've also been
| on interview loops that rejected candidates who went on
| to massively successful careers at a different FAANG.
|
| The cost of false positives is relatively easy to
| quantify, the cost of false negatives significantly
| harder. Which is higher?
| afarrell wrote:
| There is also a cost to hiring folks via an interview
| process that does not clearly signal, "we have thought
| about it and decided you belong here." It reduces their
| willingness to ask for help and admit ignorance.
| dgb23 wrote:
| In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge
| / whiteboard process?
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Across all examples I can think of - some yes, some no.
|
| It's not material to my point either way. I was only
| arguing that for some company's being very afraid of bad
| hires may be sensible and dismissing their concerns as
| hysteria does not seem obviously correct to me.
| Clubber wrote:
| >In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge
| / whiteboard process?
|
| I think he was trying to point out that if some of the
| bad candidates had passed a whiteboard test, it brings in
| to the questions of the effectiveness of whiteboard tests
| to filter out bad candidates.
|
| I remember a guy we hired years ago who answered all the
| tech questions we asked with flying colors. He was lazy
| and unmotivated and ended up dumping all his work on
| other people (me). I would have much rather had a
| motivated person who I had to teach some stuff to rather
| than him.
| hippyup wrote:
| Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so
| it's useless is not a great argument. Reality is that bad
| hires are really expensive (as argued above) and that
| current interview methods are somewhat - admittedly not
| 100% - effective at avoiding those while mostly - again
| not 100% - effective at admitting the great hires. Maybe
| this "convert to discussion" method is more effective (I
| have my doubts), and I'm sure there are more effective
| methods out there and we should look for them, but let's
| recognize the reasons for what we have while we look for
| something better.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so
| it's useless is not a great argument.
|
| Who said that?
| csydas wrote:
| Honestly, one of the safest and most powerful tools is
| just to continually ask "why" questions as a result of
| whatever they say in regards to technical details, with a
| scattering of "how?" questions.
|
| Others in the comments have expressed some legal concerns
| about "discussions" instead of Interviews, but I feel
| this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons
| interpretation of US hiring law. The law requires you ask
| the same set of questions of all candidates, yes, but it
| reasonably understands that questions on past
| projects/work of course will never be the same, and these
| are legal and valid areas to go off-script.
|
| So suppose in your situation you have a candidate and
| they talk about the project they worked on. To hear about
| their contribution, you ask (as you would all
| candidates):
|
| "Tell me about a problem you encountered on this project
| that was particularly challenging from a technical
| perspective"
|
| The candidate will tell you and likely their solution,
| and then you can start with the why's and how's.
|
| "Why did you choose this approach? What are the
| benefits?"
|
| "How did you arrive at this conclusion?" (you can further
| restate the question with "explain how you got to the
| idea that you needed to get here")
|
| Make it a hard rule for yourself that you must be able to
| build the entire timeline and understand the candidate's
| role in that timeline. I find that even if it turns out
| they mostly were receiving orders from a more senior
| resource but could reasonably explain in their own words
| now why they ended up doing what they did, this is still
| a good candidate for me as they used available resources
| and took away a good lesson. If there is ambiguity, you
| can even just ask "why do you think your senior colleague
| had the right idea here?"
|
| The idea of a discussion versus a checklist is you want
| to learn how a person thinks and how they approach
| issues. Even as a follow up to more factual check-list
| questions, "why" is very important as it helps you to
| understand the current state of the person. Just be
| honest with yourself that not everyone will have the same
| background and be honest on whether the "why" is relevant
| for the position. For example, some trivial linux kernel
| knowledge I would consider "nice to know", but it's by
| far not essential unless they're doing specific dev work
| on that field or claim to know it.
|
| The other big catch you need to train yourself for is
| accepting that people will do things far differently than
| you do, even things that you consider wrong, but they
| work. The important part to focus on isn't about how
| close their answer is to yours, but to make sure you
| understand how and why someone reached that conclusion.
|
| Why and how are very safe and legal questions as a follow
| up to a very straight-forward technical question.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > The law requires you ask the same set of questions of
| all candidates
|
| Does it? I have never heard of such a requirement in a
| law (though I'm not a lawyer). That might be an
| employer's decision on _policy they use to ensure
| compliance_ with the law, but I couldn't quickly find any
| law requiring the questions to be uniform across
| candidates. (It's also a difficult set of terms to
| quickly and confidently exclude the possibility that one
| exists.)
|
| I guess that's a longer (and hopefully more polite) way
| of saying "citation, please."
| csydas wrote:
| Sure:
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-
| recruitin...
|
| Screen applications consistently. Apply the same
| standards to everyone applying for the same position.
|
| Effectively, you should have the exact same criterion for
| all candidates for the same position and avoid "on the
| fly" questions/too heavily customizing it.
|
| The legal discussion on all of this has basically boiled
| down to that you must ensure you're going through the
| same process for each candidate with the expected
| variances based on their employment/personal history (as
| it's relevant to the position)
|
| I may overstate the situation slightly with that
| statement, but the idea is that if you ask about a
| networking stack for candidate A, you should ask the same
| probing questions for candidate B also. (Consider maybe
| you know that candidate B doesn't know this stack and
| will look "negative" on a review to the hiring managers,
| but you really like candidate B for other reasons)
|
| Ultimately the idea is less about the specific questions
| and more that Candidate A and B are both reasonably
| considered in the same fashion for all of the
| requirements of the position, and that you aren't
| adding/omitting elements that may influence the
| applicability of the candidate in any fashion.
|
| So let me restate: It's not required you ask verbatim the
| same words for each candidate (this is the lay-person
| over-read).
|
| But for a given position, it should be established in
| advance a series of competencies that are necessary for
| the position and that are to be asked of each candidate.
| How you go about investigating it may vary from candidate
| to candidate, but should two interviews be reviewed, it
| should be expected that both interviews cover the same
| topics to a reasonable degree. (e.g., it is reasonable
| that if you ask "have you ever worked with library X" and
| the candidate flat out says they cannot answer questions
| on library X, you have reasonably covered that topic with
| this candidate. If you ask another candidate and they do
| have experience with library X and you ask some
| additional questions, you have not violated the spirit or
| letter of the requirement in this case.)
| nostrebored wrote:
| This is dramatically more complicated than it actually
| is. It does come back to competencies and structures. For
| instance, at AWS, this boils down to wide technical
| competencies and leadership principles. Of the nearly 100
| interviews I did at AWS, I probably never had two that
| were very close, just due to people's resumes, prior
| experience, and breadth of interests.
|
| But, if you wanted to ask the recruiting team to add an
| interview to get more feedback, this would be a clear no.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I wonder how much of the last point is a high tolerance
| for false negatives? If a candidate is _that close_ to a
| no-hire, maybe a rational choice is to say "No, you're
| welcome to re-apply in N months."
| nostrebored wrote:
| It was always cited as a legal risk.
|
| Stripe handled this by having an extra interview baked in
| by default. People who were viewed as no risk hires
| didn't have to do it, but the default was an extra
| interview to cover risks. Because it wasn't an
| aberration, it wasn't giving a candidate preferential
| treatment.
|
| I honestly think it's one of the smartest interview loops
| I've seen. I think they are one of the few large
| companies gambling a bit on the false positive side of
| things to shave off false negative points. And honestly,
| I was impressed with the people I interacted with at
| stripe more than AWS. They're doing something right.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Reading this again, it was more confrontational than I
| wanted it to be and lacked details about why I think
| super structured interviews are a bad idea.
|
| Some of the best candidates I've been involved with
| hiring have been compelling for reasons you'd never get
| to in a very structured way.
|
| For instance, a candidate who was just out of university.
| They were very shy about technical topics, and their tech
| depth wasn't great. They went to a university in Africa
| that I knew taught people more stuff that was wrong than
| right, and they were starting at a disadvantage. To get
| him out of his shell I asked about things he'd done
| outside of academics. He told me that he had not done
| much because he was very busy. Busy with what?
|
| Oh, just starting a real estate investing side business
| with his family where he'd been responsible for their
| international expansion into the UK. With no finance
| background, he'd spent his time understanding the
| financial, legal and tax implications of their expansion
| and successfully launched in his third year of
| university.
|
| And I'd done a bit of finance so we talked about concepts
| there and he was able to walk me through complex topics
| in simple terms.
|
| My job for that interview was judging bias for action,
| curiosity, and diving deep into metrics. He couldn't show
| that for tech because he went to a horrible university
| and had been very busy with other extra circulars.
|
| He apologized to me for spending so much time talking
| about non tech subjects. And here is the problem: people
| who are bad at interviewing are punished by rigid
| processes. There's a lot of data to show that women and
| immigrants from certain backgrounds are more reserved on
| average. You have to be a much better interviewer to pull
| off a structured interview that lets these candidates
| shine.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a
| laypersons interpretation of US hiring law
|
| Making definitive statements about liability is not
| trivial. I can confirm that at some very large companies
| legal has banned this style of interview citing
| discrimination concerns. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't
| comment on whether they're call is more or less correct
| but it certainly doesn't seem settled.
| csydas wrote:
| I believe you can see in my quote I even wrote "I feel"
| ;)
|
| Also working for a "large" US company and discussing with
| peers from others, no such banning exists. There is very
| clear training and a heavy restriction on who can perform
| interviews, but this is not the same as outright banning
| it.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing
| the Cost/Benefit for the company
|
| I'm always curious how people interview doctors. As bad
| as getting a bad programmer might potentially be, getting
| a bad doctor must be exponentially worse, so you'd think
| they'd have vetting the unqualified folks down to a
| science by now.
| efaref wrote:
| In most countries doctors and other health professionals
| are registered and licensed, and must submit to strict
| examinations.
|
| Mistakes can also be career-ending and potentially result
| in criminal prosecution.
|
| It's way harder to get hired as a doctor than "do a bit
| of leetcode on a whiteboard".
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly. Somehow there is this impression that software
| engineers are having it really hard and they face worst
| job requirements/interviews.
|
| I'd imagine software/IT might be only place where people
| who have delivered a couple of toy sized, half-assed
| webapps are now experts commenting on 'engineering
| challenges' and 'industry trends' with profundity.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I think about the time my manager dismissed an interviewee
| as not understanding map-reduce because he couldn't solve
| some problem in 2 passes, but rather needed 3.
|
| I asked him to explain how to do it in 2. And he was like,
| "what? It's easy!" Then another person on the team who over
| heard it also asked.
|
| Eventually the whole team was there, asking him to prove
| it, and he spent over an half an hour trying to explain it,
| and none of us were getting it. The consensus from everyone
| (except the manager) that it was an unfair question that
| relied on a a very subtle assumption about the data that
| wasn't obvious at all, and that 3 passes was the minimum
| required Without the that assumption.
|
| Of course the manager said everyone was stupid and it was a
| good question.
|
| That manager remains my counter example of what a good
| manager is.
| popcube wrote:
| this example display the advantage of leetcode. if your
| recruiters just can not work, leetcode style still can
| offer some useful data for decision.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| An awful lot of the datastructure-style questions rely on
| specific knowledge of the optimal approach. I dislike
| asking questsions because they are more a test of whether
| you took a particular style of datastructure course than
| a test of problem solving
| swman wrote:
| What happened to references? That's an easy way to verify if
| someone is bullshitting. It is possible to bullshit your way
| through interviews (there's a whole industry to help you do
| just that) and not know good software engineering patterns.
| twiddling wrote:
| Most companies won't do references beyond verifying
| employment. Then you relying on professional references,
| and are they lying?
| Jensson wrote:
| Yeah, any member of a team that isn't completely clueless
| will be able to convincingly claim that all of the
| achievements done by the team was achieved by the person
| alone.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| This is almost exactly how I hold interviews, except they are
| usually < 1hr. I ask a person to tell me about a recent project
| and then keep asking more detailed questions about things until
| one of us hits our limit of understanding. No gotcha questions
| or random trivia. I only ask questions about something they
| claim to have done. Occasionally I'll ask a category question
| like, "Have you done any work with multi-threading?" And if
| they say yes, I ask about that project.
|
| I've found this technique to be extremely successful. It's
| possible I may have had some false negatives, but I've never
| had a false positive. Everyone I've recommended for hiring has
| been successful.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Same here. I've never had a dud in terms of ability when
| doing a technical chat interview. People who don't know how
| things work will hit a wall in this format, it's not actually
| that easy to BS what your thoughts on the CPP memory model
| are.
|
| The fear of BSers seems to be what holds people back from
| this approach though, and I can see that it wouldn't work for
| certain non technical fields.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Everyone I 've recommended for hiring has been successful._
|
| It's possible you're good at spotting good people, and
| rejecting bad people, but it's also possible that hiring is
| just easier than you think it is, and most people are capable
| of doing the jobs you hire for. You have no way to tell if
| you'd have the same result just hiring people by picking
| random resumes. Maybe negatives are just rare.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| It's unlikely that hiring is easier than I think it is,
| because I think it's pretty easy. The people who think it's
| hard are the HN consensus and the large corporations we
| keep reading about coming up with these convoluted
| interview standards/metrics.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I've found this technique to be extremely successful. It's
| possible I may have had some false negatives, but I've never
| had a false positive.
|
| This is the impossible problem with hiring. Every interviewer
| wants to minimize false positives (they're expensive!), but
| every interviewee thinks they're a false negative.
| Jensson wrote:
| Which is funny since I bet most who thinks they are a
| "false negative" also would claim to have "impostor
| syndrome". Anyone with impostor syndrome would view
| themselves as a true negative.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I bet most who thinks they are a "false negative" also
| would claim to have "impostor syndrome"
|
| I don't think this could be true? If you think you don't
| belong/deserve the job (imposter)... why would you think
| you deserved the job (false negative).
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I've found this technique to be extremely successful.
|
| That's just survivorship bias waiting to explode. Also,
| they're successful by some arbitrary metric that is
| applicable only to your company.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| It's entirely likely I will one day hit a false positive.
|
| I've been on the hiring team for every employer I've had
| for the last 15 years and have hired dozens of people.
| philbert101 wrote:
| This is pretty pretty much what I tried to achieve here
| https://github.com/philbert/take-home-tech-test
|
| The point is to have a conversation about a project that the
| candidate understands well and is passionate about rather than
| asking them a bunch of questions that we already know the
| answers to.
|
| Before the interview we review the code base and try to
| understand what it's doing by the documentation provided in the
| readme. During the interview we get the candidate to demo the
| project and any questions that came up in our code review we
| ask at the stage of execution in the project demo. The
| interview lasts for 2 hours and we've had several rounds of
| candidates put through this process.
|
| Both we as interviewers and the feedback from candidates has
| been very positive. The interview ends up being a day-to-day
| normal experience within the team and this really helps us to
| gauge the team fit. I think this helps to hire people that
| compliment and expand our skill set rather than hire people who
| are basically ourselves.
| haspok wrote:
| This is a really bad take-home exercise, because it is way
| too vague. This vagueness makes it very hard for me to decide
| how much time to devote to it, and what task is complex
| enough so that you will consider it, but not too small so
| that you don't throw it away. Instead of giving me a bar to
| jump over, you make the bar invisible, then expect me to jump
| just above it. So I hope you do have a default project for
| those who are not "creative"... at least not for the purposes
| of a job interview...
| yvrev wrote:
| I feel like this is a pretty big ask to do for an interview,
| unless you happen to have it lying around already.
| cutthegrass2 wrote:
| Yep, agree. 95% of the code I write is owned by my employer
| and is under NDA various other privacy / IP laws. The 5%
| that isn't, has no place in an interview. It's a bunch of
| brittle glue code automating and backing up data between my
| devices.
|
| "Passion projects" in my "spare time"... maybe once the
| kids have grown up and flown the nest...
|
| Leetcode is easy... I memorise a bunch of stuff, do the
| dance and pass the interview. If i'm lucky I get a problem
| i've not seen before and actually have to use my brain
| during the interview.
| cj wrote:
| > 95% of the code I write is owned by my employer and is
| under NDA various other privacy / IP laws.
|
| True, but would your employer care (if they found out) if
| you copy/pasted a small portion of code that's not
| considered critical IP (like util functions, and an
| integration syncing records from your backend the
| Salesforce, or something tangential to the business
| outside the core product)
|
| May technically be breaking your employment agreement,
| but I can't imagine it would be too hard to pluck out a
| decent amount of code, and re-write portions of it if
| necessary to "anonymize" it for interviewing purposes.
|
| Or if you happen to be interviewed by someone like me, my
| approach is simply "if you can't show me the code, show
| me the UI and explain how the backend / frontend works,
| and a discussion ensues.
| haspok wrote:
| > would your employer care (if they found out) if you
| copy/pasted a small portion of code that's not considered
| critical IP
|
| Who decides what is "critical IP" and what is not?
|
| This is a terrible advice, and no, you should never copy
| code from a work project without being pre-authorized to
| do it.
|
| It's not just common sense, but you also might trip up
| over unexpected legal issues (licences etc) that you may
| not even be aware of.
| david_allison wrote:
| > True, but would your employer care (if they found out)
| if you copy/pasted a small portion of code that's not
| considered critical IP
|
| What? Yes. I expect I'd be in prison for a few years.
| Your interview approach selects for people who don't
| follow their NDAs
|
| Sergey Aleynikov went to prison over copying GPL code.
| cj wrote:
| As mentioned in my original comment, if someone isn't
| comfortable showing me the source code I simply ask for
| them to describe how it works, challenges in building it,
| how they built it, etc.
| cutthegrass2 wrote:
| I could do this and would welcome this type of interview
| experience. I'd be able to talk in general terms about
| the problems I work on and their solutions but not the
| low level specifics.
|
| To add some context, my work is in Financial Services,
| trading systems and whatnot.
| soneca wrote:
| Isn't the time spent memorizing leetcode similar to the
| time spent building a side-project?
|
| I took a look at leetcode when I was interviewing and
| decided it was a waste of time for me to learn that
| dance. I was happy with my chances with the companies
| that didn't use it in their interviews. And it worked out
| fine.
| nostrebored wrote:
| No, it's not, because take home assignments are not
| typically reusable. Learn leetcode and it is valuable at
| most companies you will apply to. It's more respectful of
| your time.
| soneca wrote:
| I was comparing leetcode to sideprojects, not take home
| assignments. The parent company was also talking about
| side projects.
|
| Side projects will help you learn useful skills and it is
| the suggestion of OP that it should be used by more
| companies in place of leetcode interviews.
|
| Btw, a lot of companies don't use leetcode for hiring. In
| my last job hunting season, I would guess than less than
| 20% of processes used leetcode. Pretty far from "most"
| companies.
| cutthegrass2 wrote:
| Completely agree re the value of having side projects. I
| wish I had the luxury of time right now, maybe in a few
| years once the kids are older.
|
| The leetcode dance is, at least for me at this point,
| much lower effort than starting a side project on the
| understanding the code I produce will be reviewed during
| interviews. It's like Sudoku, once you've done a "few",
| you get to the point where you're able to solve them
| quickly.
| zsmi wrote:
| > Isn't the time spent memorizing leetcode similar to the
| time spent building a side-project?
|
| The nice thing about leetcode it is easy to bound the
| time to what you can handle. I do one puzzle a week and
| set a timer for 20 minutes. Then I get the answer and
| browse the forum. It's basically the equivalent of
| solving the Sunday crossword for me, and it keeps my
| algorithm skills sharp. Probably no worse than burning a
| lunch hour on HN.
| soneca wrote:
| I do my side projects the same way
| chresko wrote:
| Red flag test. Vague, no guidance around how much time to
| spend, no guidance around where to focus from a technical
| perspective (i.e. build anything/everything), bias towards
| someone who already has some related code completed. Given
| the lack of clarity, accurately assessing one candidate vs
| another would be difficult. It also comes off as lazy.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| I would immediately end my interest in a company if I was
| asked to do this. This is far too general a problem, which
| will harm the interviewer as much as it will harm the
| interviewee.
|
| Contrast it to giving a candidate some slightly broken code
| in a framework related to the role and then asking them to
| a)fix it and b)implement a new feature of their choosing and
| document it.
|
| The advantages of the latter approach:
|
| * The interviewer doesn't need to prep beforehand as they
| already know both the problem and the codebase. This means
| they can ask much more interesting questions and don't have
| to invest significant time in reviewing a project that might
| be in a field in which they have no experience. This in turn
| leads to better discussions which in turn leads to better
| interviews.
|
| * The candidate is given a much tighter problem definition
| and isn't required to come up with something a)novel, b)not
| covered by their current employer's NDAs.
|
| * The candidate's time is respected because they can be told
| how long it should take them up front.
|
| * Each candidate gets a standardised problem and so it's
| easier to compare between them.
|
| When I give take-home assignments, I'm just looking to
| quickly confirm that someone has a working home dev
| environment (i.e. they don't just code inside environments
| that other people give to them) and that they can understand
| a small codebase and write clean code and document it.
| Everything beyond that I can find out by talking to them
| during the interview.
|
| When I actually used this technique in interviews it was
| interesting to see how many supposed senior engineers would
| reply with things like "I'm getting a %JAVA_HOME NOT FOUND
| error, please can you fix the repo and let me know when it's
| ready for me to work on?".
| philbert101 wrote:
| We've been using it for DevOps roles which are not highly
| specialised in any particular technologies and require
| ability to solve problems at a general level.
|
| The test is intentionally designed to filter out candidates
| who cannot meet or do not want to meet the technical
| requirements.
| dataengineer56 wrote:
| Fair enough, maybe that works better in devops, but it
| seems like it will filter out candidates who have a good
| work/life balance.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| oh for fucks sake its a job of messing around with digital
| files for a paycheck.
| saithir wrote:
| > You do not have to start a new project from scratch. It's
| perfectly fine to submit something you have previously
| created yourself. Maybe it's something you work on in your
| spare time, just for yourself!
|
| Yeah, no, nobody is or should be giving you their own
| personal work. It's offensive and probably illegal that you'd
| even ask.
|
| > The novelty and creativity of your submission
|
| Yeah, no.
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't like it, but I get it. You can train for the algos, so
| just do what needs to be done and train for it. Maybe you don't
| like to do what needs to be done? Well, that filter worked.
|
| Also, putting the emphasis on the interviewer understanding the
| candidates code instead of the other way around is never going
| to be popular ;-)
| zsmi wrote:
| > Also, putting the emphasis on the interviewer understanding
| the candidates code instead of the other way around is never
| going to be popular
|
| It's also hard to scale it, make it objective, and keep the
| efficiency high (most developers prefer not spending their
| time on either side of the interview table)
|
| There is another advantage to the "algos". If you can learn
| algorithms then perhaps you can learn other things as well.
|
| Every new job I've had involved quite a lot of learning in a
| very short period of time.
|
| Learning whatever language, and whatever standard library is
| almost always trivial. They're usually not all that
| different, well documented, some with textbooks even.
|
| Learning to navigate and reason about the huge number of
| undocumented, often arbitrary, system architecture decisions,
| design decisions, code layout, etc. etc. that make up real
| code bases.
|
| That's hard. Really hard.
| jstx1 wrote:
| "Discussion interviews" can suck because they're a lie. You're
| still being examined, and now you have to pretend that you aren't
| being examined in addition to performing well.
|
| Some of my best interviewing experiences have been when as part
| of the interview I ended up having a discussion about something.
| But the interview didn't explicitly start with that format in
| mind.
|
| Some of the worst interviewing interviewing experiences that I've
| had is when they say that it will be a discussion, and it is, up
| to the point when they spring an algorithm question out of the
| blue... it feels so scummy and fake. Ask me about the algorithm
| if you want, but mixing your question into 40 minutes of
| discussing other things and pretending that you aren't examining
| me is a farce.
|
| The intention seems to be to make the experience more authentic
| and it often ends up having the exact opposite effect.
|
| If your criteria for hiring boil down to "did I like talking to
| this person", you're probably not hiring well and you're allowing
| all kinds of biases to influence your decision. If your criteria
| are specific but you're hiding them behind the pretense of
| "discussion", you're doing everyone involved a disservice.
| midasuni wrote:
| You're being examined at an interview, but you're also
| examining the person you may choose to work for. If you don't
| _need_ to take the job you're in a much more powerful position
| and you can have an honest discussion to come to a mutually
| beneficial arrangement.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I've never had the benefit of not needing a job while doing
| interviews. Doing interviews while I'm at a job isn't viable
| for me.
| monocasa wrote:
| Discussion style interviews aren't about pretending they're not
| interviewing you though.
| jstx1 wrote:
| The title is "Don't do interviews, do discussions". That's
| repeated in the main text. The author seems to be concerned
| about the feeling of "I am being evaluated". I think that's
| counterproductive because it's false - being evaluatated is
| the whole point of the conversation and it's better if both
| sides were honest about it instead of lying to each other and
| playing games.
| pdpi wrote:
| "Interview" is ambiguous here. No matter what you do, it's
| always true that you're interviewing the candidate in the
| "assessing a candidate" sense, but you don't have to do
| this by interviewing them in the sense of "question and
| answer format you'd see a journalist use".
| kube-system wrote:
| The tone of an evaluation can change the experience and
| isn't boolean.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Which is another way of saying "life isn't boolean"
| honestly.
| monocasa wrote:
| In context, I take it to mean "don't do the normal format
| of interviewing, use discussions". No amount of phrasing is
| going to convince you that you aren't sitting in an
| interview. I wouldn't want to convince you you're not in an
| interview anyway, that seems pretty dishonest. There's just
| way more value in having a (albeit can be fairly technical)
| discussion rather than typical call/response style of
| interview that consists pretty much solely of "did you
| memorize what I'm looking for". Particularly because I
| don't expect the person I'm interviewing to be a master of
| everything, having a discussion can lead to some common
| ground where we can go in deep on some of your actual
| previous experience.
| vmception wrote:
| Exactly, if you lead with some obscure or polarizing hobby
| thinking its a casual discussion its a big mistake
|
| "Hiking, trips to the beach" those are the answers. Any
| behavioral interview training will say the same
|
| Everyone is lying (or actually boring and unambitious)
| flyinglizard wrote:
| I interview quite a bit of people. I always do it in a laid
| back, conversational style. When I ask technical questions,
| somewhere towards the middle or end of the session, I do it
| because I just want to know that the person I talked with
| understands some fundamentals (it's never a tricky question;
| just something basic like creating some threads, etc).
|
| I talk with them about their previous work, stuff they're proud
| of, their hobbies and other things. I've recruited teams that
| excelled compared to their peers, and were certainly more fun
| than others.
| dtoms wrote:
| threading is your basic question at the end of an interview?
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Yes, but really simple. It can get progressively worse
| though. Like: 1. Make a loop which counts and prints up to
| N 2. Now make it run in a thread 3. Now make another thread
| which only prints once this var hits modulo X == 0 etc
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Actual fizzbuzz-level questions! Kudos for keeping the
| tradition alive.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| Ah! What you describe drives me bonkers!
|
| I've had interviews which start very casually, "we just want to
| have a high-level conversation, no crazy whiteboard coding or
| anything", then, absolutely randomly in the middle of said
| "high-level" discussion, I get
|
| > "well we did prepare a question to test your quantitative
| reasoning skills; so assume we have a bug that is detected by
| an analyzer with a false-negative rate of 0.3% and the
| probability of a bug existing at all is 7% and <sea of numbers>
| what's the probability that a given test will report blah blah
| blah"
|
| Of course this is communicated purely verbally.
|
| > "This looks like a typical Bayes rule problem. Is that what
| you want me to calculate?"
|
| > "Maybe, maybe not. That could be an approach. We just want
| the final percentage. Feel free to pull out your phone and use
| the calculator."
|
| Then of course, on the spot, I'm fumbling around with whether
| you divide by P(A) or P(B) or ... to find P(B|A), and mucking
| around on a 4-function calculator like a dweeb.
|
| So much for the "high-level discussion."
| somberi wrote:
| Been on the hiring side for more than a decade. In addition to
| other advice in this thread, I would like to add -
|
| I treat the interview as my chance to help the candidate pass the
| interview. This bent of thought may seem subtle, but makes all
| the difference in meeting the candidate in their terrain, and
| seeing the world from their point of view. Consequently, the case
| studies given explicitly state that if the candidate finds
| something else that intrigues them, I am happy to take that as a
| case study instead - gives them something to flaunt and for me to
| learn about.
|
| Some candidates are shy to open up, or just not comfortable
| conversing with strangers, or misread the power asymmetry in the
| interview and get anxious - I spend a fair bit of time just
| conversing human to human.
|
| For the really uncommunicative candidates, I make a slight of
| what they built (fake slight) and this gets the conversation
| going like a star. The good candidates exhibit a great amount of
| "Builder's Pride" and defend what they built. They really good
| ones admit to the possibility that there were other better ways
| to have built, or explain to me the constraints under which they
| made the choices they did.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > I treat the interview as my chance to help the candidate pass
| the interview
|
| Yes! This is exactly how I treat interviews as well (as the
| interviewer) and would make a good addition to this already
| solid article. It really opens candidates up when you treat
| them like you're in an actual scenario at work. Let them ask
| for help, google for ideas, ask about different solutions, and
| ask them what they think of your own solutions. How they deal
| with these things are the real markers of what they'll be like
| to work with, not how quickly they can remember how to reverse
| an array while you sit there staring at them.
| harry8 wrote:
| > They really good ones admit to the possibility that there
| were other better ways to have built, or explain to me the
| constraints under which they made the choices they did.
|
| Does anyone just clam up because you are making slights about
| something where you don't know the constraints and make
| inferences about you from that? Most of us have dealt with
| utterly terrible, opinionated, under-skilled, supercilious and
| rude interviewers. How do you avoid coming off at least a
| little bit like that? Generally speaking there's zero point
| picking fights with an interviewer no matter how wrong they
| are.
| named-user wrote:
| Clearly people don't like the fact that you're making a very
| valid point.
|
| This site is almost as bad as Reddit, go with the status quo
| and polish each others ego or you're downvoted or flagged.
| somberi wrote:
| Yes, what you said exactly happens, but not often enough to
| negate the value of opening up the otherwise clammed up
| candidate.
|
| Hopefully, the first part where the human<>human chat
| happens, the candidate is able to see that the intent is to
| have a genuine conversation, albeit with a more senior person
| (aka older) person on the other side.
|
| Where I differ from you is the zero-payoff framing. There
| have been cases where the candidate put me in my place,
| rightfully so, and ended up getting hired.
|
| This is subjective territory, but I actually prefer a
| candidate that spars. It gives me a chance to explain my
| position as well as hear his/hers.
| harry8 wrote:
| Yours looks like a classic "yes but I'm different"
| response. Maybe you really are different. I couldn't
| possibly say. Just be aware of it? Or maybe there's a way
| to have your cake and eat it too? Like put on a stupid hat
| and say "I'm going to play 'Joe Obnoxious the Arrogant' and
| be critical, this is not how we talk design around here in
| general but it cuts us the to the chase about something you
| know. Stand up to anything you don't like hearing. Back
| it." Hat on. "Why did you do something so sucky as ..." And
| just maybe there's like a big smile, but heavy content? Eh
| just a thought. The way you described it would have me
| thinking I don't want to be there in the room, let alone
| working with, beside, for, in charge of, you. But I can't
| and hear the tone of what you describe so who knows..?
| Sammi wrote:
| This does not seems like a generous interpretation of
| what op said. The slight that op mentioned could have
| been surgical and precise, and just enough to kick off a
| conversation, and not enough to trample the interviewee.
| harry8 wrote:
| Well you don't know the interviewee to make any
| assumption at all. I've given /my/ honest response to the
| description of it. Framed as a question, while noting
| some of the shortcomings of that. Then provided a
| suggestion of how OP might get what they want without
| causing the problem I suggested might, and OP confirmed
| actually _does_ , occur.
|
| So yeah I think that's pretty productive and positive as
| these conversations go. I don't see you adding anything
| of utility or value to it by suggesting bad faith or lack
| of generosity that I don't think exists on either side.
| "Surgical and precise" slights by definition can't be
| either from a position of ignorance, about the person
| you're slighting or the context and constraints of the
| work they've done. But you might get lucky. Even without
| luck it might not matter, maybe nobody else in the world
| would tell you to boil your head other than me? And
| nobody whose opinion or work you'd care about? YMMV.
| slingnow wrote:
| It sounds like the OPs method not only allows people to
| shine by diving into what they've built, but it would
| also filter out people like yourself, who are so
| unbelievably sensitive that it would be a nightmare to
| work around all of your triggers.
| harry8 wrote:
| Possibly so. But it's a hell of an assumption to make and
| not a very kind one. Maybe you were triggered yourself
| and so that's not entirely fair.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| I love it, love the way principal engineers in google said that.
| I know how nervous some candidates are, also how nervous I am
| when I want to change jobs to big tech companies and being
| interviewed like that (man live coding sucks).
|
| Wished more companies are implementing this way of interviews
| metters wrote:
| Not the main topic of the article, but in my opinion an
| interview/discussion also is supposed to answer another (third)
| question: Does the company fulfill the expectations of the
| potential employee? Not only the candidate has to sell their own
| service/skill during the interview/discussion, the company is
| being evaluated, too.
| cema wrote:
| One of the business for interviewers our company has is to
| leave a good impression even on a weak candidate. This makes
| for an overall better experience and, should the candidate
| become a better fit in the future, we do not want to lose them.
| amirkdv wrote:
| This so much. This would be on the syllabus of the missing
| Employment 101 course. Very few people I've seen try to
| evaluate the company as much as they're being evaluated.
|
| We all grow up with the false, ingrained assumption that it's
| some sort of one-way privilege for you, the employee, to rent
| your time/body/mind to the employer.
| midasuni wrote:
| That's because in most interviews for most people the company
| holds far more power than the applicant.
|
| For those who have done well in tech and don't need to take
| the next job offered to pay for the next months food bill,
| because they have the savings, because they have 2 or 3
| offers already, we may have the luxury of interviewing the
| company.
|
| Most people aren't in that situation, especially early in the
| career
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I just got a development job where there was no whiteboarding, no
| linked list implementing, no balancing a red-black tree, etc.
| They just asked me to talk about some of my previous projects
| that interested them. Maybe things are changing. Or maybe it's as
| the CTO said to me "it's hard to hire people right now". At any
| rate, I was pretty happy with this kind of interview.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Depends on the role and the candidate. If I'm hiring for a lower
| skill position and the candidate has a strong resume I just might
| want to verify the resume and confirm they have a basic grasp of
| the relevant skills.
|
| If I'm hiring for a high-output FANG job, you bet your ass we're
| going to the whiteboard. Sure, I hate it too(on either side of
| the table), but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can
| think on your feet and solve hard problems if that's what the job
| is.
|
| I generally tend to have discussions because I'm not very
| confrontational and also because I hate the modern coding
| interview. After moving to a FANG though, I now understand why
| the process is so hard. I also get that a lot of folks are
| frustrated because they've been told their whole career that
| they're smart, and they probably are, but for some roles the bar
| is just set higher. My 30 year old self, who thought he was hot
| shit because of all the praise I got for doing basic work(shake
| and bake linux embedded work, deep dive bugfixing, mostly writing
| glue code), was in no way qualified to exist in the world I
| (barely manage to) work in now.
| throwaway98az8 wrote:
| Typical FANG employee... Hates whiteboard interviews until they
| get into FANG, then thinks that anyone outside of FANG is
| actually delusional about their skills and must whiteboard to
| prove themselves worthy of handling the incredibly challenging
| world which is FANG-engineering.
|
| More likely that you've drank the kool aid that you are somehow
| special and smarter for working at a FANG...
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why are you so upset that somebody considers themselves
| smarter than you? Serious question.
| slingnow wrote:
| Interesting that you decided that the OP:
|
| 1. Is upset
|
| 2. Interpreted the parent comment as being smarter than OP
|
| Serious question: where did you infer these things from?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Is upset
|
| Nobody is going to write such a rant if they're not
| upset.
|
| >> Typical FANG employee... Hates whiteboard interviews
| until they get into FANG, then thinks that anyone outside
| of FANG is actually delusional about their skills and
| must whiteboard to prove themselves worthy of handling
| the incredibly challenging world which is FANG-
| engineering.
|
| > Interpreted the parent comment as being smarter than OP
|
| >> More likely that you've drank the kool aid that you
| are somehow special and smarter for working at a FANG...
|
| ???
| throwaway98az8 wrote:
| Nope, not upset. Just trying to make OP aware of their
| contradictory behavior.
|
| OP might be smarter than me, who knows. I don't really
| care, I feel pretty good about my intelligence level even
| though I know there are plenty of folks smarter than me out
| there.
|
| What I am is annoyed at the elitism that OP shows. I work
| at a FANG, have worked at a couple SV unicorns too. There
| is plenty of work happening here that is not as challenging
| as OP makes it out to be. I've seen a lot of people with
| the attitude OP has and I think it makes for a toxic and
| unwelcoming environment.
|
| As someone who has used complex algorithms research in my
| work, I agree white boarding has some carryover to some
| FANG work. But my experience is that there is vastly more
| boring CRUD work to do and you must generally fight with
| others to get the interesting/challenging algorithmics
| work. No need to filter out a ton of qualified people
| because they can't perform a tiny fraction of the work
| happening here.
| throwaway67834 wrote:
| Why are you so mad that someone allegedly considers
| themselves smarter than you?
| hfjkdh790sn wrote:
| > More likely that you've drank the kool aid that you are
| somehow special and smarter for working at a FANG...
|
| The USD $250K/year compensation, 0 YOE, fresh bachelor grad
| kool aid. Sure.
|
| Sorry, but some people in society are strictly inferior to
| others -- defined by an age-adjusted combination of family,
| friends, health, finances, and happiness, both current and
| future trajectory.
| badcomment111 wrote:
| Ranking people like this is sickening.
| cema wrote:
| "Some people are ... inferior to others." Don't you want to
| qualify your statement a little?
| neeleshs wrote:
| I'm honestly curious to know. Can you say more about what your
| current work entails?
| 01100011 wrote:
| HPC programming library. It has to be fast, correct, secure
| and has strong compatibility guarantees so design decisions
| can have never ending repercussions.
|
| Previous to this job I laughed at the goofy CS questions
| asked in interviews. "I've been doing this 30 years and never
| needed A* or a graph algorithm." I have to retract that
| statement now. Not that the modern coding interview isn't a
| little overdone, but there is a point to it.
|
| There's also the question of dedication. When you work on a
| very driven team you have to show a similar level of drive or
| you're just going to get burnt. I'm not saying the level of
| work/life balance is fair or the way it should be, but it's
| the way it is and it has taken me quite a bit to get used to.
| It's a toxic environment on many levels. That said, it's by
| far the most impactful job I've ever had. I'm immensely
| grateful for the opportunity to contribute 0.0000000001 pct
| to some amazing work.
| neeleshs wrote:
| Thank you! That is a very interesting world indeed.
|
| But, just focusing on the algorithms part of it, I never
| could answer how exactly a specific algorithm worked, but
| I've had to use many algorithms in my "normal" job. I just
| know "oh this needs a modified DFS, or A*, with custom
| heuristics, or a priority based permutations generator". I
| cannot answer how any of this works in detail on the fly,
| but I know where to look. Isn't that sufficient? I
| certainly would fail a FANG interview, but have gone toe to
| toe or even better when pow-wowing on some real problems
| with googlers. Wouldn't consider myself any inferior
| because I don't know how a specific algorithm works in the
| interview. Just my two cents
| 01100011 wrote:
| Is it sufficient? Depends on your interviewer and other
| factors. I personally wouldn't fail anyone for not
| knowing absolute specifics(unless they claimed to know as
| much). I would expect some 'algorithmic thinking' and
| basic familiarity. The interview is also based on a fair
| bit of luck. In my case, I was asked about virtual
| memory, and I had literally just days before done a deep
| dive through the Linux VM subsystem. If they asked me a
| week before I wouldn't have gotten the job.
|
| When I started interviewing, I couldn't even do tree
| traversal. It just wasn't something I was familiar with,
| and never directly used in decades of coding. I don't
| blame Amazon for passing on me then.
|
| > gone toe to toe or even better when pow-wowing on some
| real problems with googlers
|
| I don't think making blanket statements like this is a
| good idea. Sure, you might be able to code better then
| them, but can you think of a new solution which is better
| than the current best practice based on some practical
| consideration(behavior of your HW, caching behavior, some
| niche use case, etc)? I think a lot of people are great
| coders in many ways but that's not always the skill folks
| are looking for. We don't necessarily crank out a lot of
| code, but it has to be really good code. You also are
| expected to come up with self-driven innovations and ways
| to push the industry forward. It would be nice if there
| was just a set of problems someone handed me and had me
| solve, but that's really not what they're paying me for.
| brailsafe wrote:
| How did you transition between the previous state you
| describe and when you found success getting into your
| current role, in terms of prepping to do that sort of
| testing, as well as motivation?
|
| I'm very close to 30 now, and have been burnt out enough
| times that it's a struggle to imagine how I could care
| about tech enough to attempt to re-transition into almost
| only caring about sort of climbing that ladder.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I got divorced, lost almost everything, and had to do it
| or accept living on sustenance net pay for the rest of my
| life. I really didn't want to do this. I had a cozy gig
| in my past life, but I couldn't make it on the
| engineering salary in my town.
|
| I don't come from a CS background. I'm a EE. I just
| happened to get an embedded job right out of college and
| kept getting more and more software work. The only
| algorithms I'd dealt with were linked lists, circular
| buffers, and synchronization.
|
| Burn out is a constant worry. I still question if my
| chosen path is even worth it. If I didn't still have hope
| of having a child someday... I don't know. I don't think
| I could find the motivation to keep going.
|
| I don't try to climb the ladder. I hit a level I'm more
| than happy with and now I just need to try to stay on. I
| find I'm much more compatible with my team because I'm
| not trying to make the next level. I can share advice
| freely with the younger folks because I'm not trying to
| block them. On the contrary, I want my teammates to go
| far and kick ass.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I'll also add that the first couple of _years_ of my code
| reviews were a bloody mess. It 's frustrating to have
| people who _constantly_ out-think you and provide better
| ways of doing nearly everything you come up with. I was
| lucky to get my foot in the door and then built my skills
| up even more with a lot of pain and extra hours put it to
| get things right. I 'm a better programmer now than I
| ever was, but I still have so, so much to learn and
| practice.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Thanks for your reply. I'm sorry you had to go through
| that, truly, divorce is a traumatic experience unlike any
| other, but it does bring some solace to know I'm not the
| only one who's either been in or is in some sticky
| situations. Unfortunately I haven't been as lucky in
| finding something early on to build on. I was about a
| year and a half into my first position after diploma, and
| was laid-off, then terminated from my next 3 months in,
| then again, then again, then again. The only light in
| that dark being a decent python oriented thing in a
| research department. Reflecting on that, I might have
| been in over my head, too cocky as well, with really
| nothing to base it on other than a passing capability
| with programming and intense motivation to produce good
| results. But I was also in the wrong places that I wasn't
| well-suited for; a constant learning process that has
| taught me a bit about myself. Looking at the future seems
| rather bleak, as I'm sure you've felt many times, and I'm
| pretty much just counting on getting lucky at some point.
|
| I am curious though, what were the more mechanical
| aspects of how you made that transition? Did you have a
| plan to practice algorithms in a certain way and then
| wait till you were contacted by the right recruiter? How
| did you go about it? Did you more simply just try and do
| 1 problem a day and then build that up, or did you find
| useful projects to apply more obscure algorithms to, that
| might be more interesting and motivating?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Mechanical aspects... I grabbed Cracking the Coding
| Interview. I started doing online coding tests. I started
| studying modern C++. I was fortunate that I had a
| relatively easy, 40 hour day job at the time so the
| nights and weekends weren't too bad. It took a few
| months. I interviewed with Amazon and it opened my eyes
| to how much I didn't know(Also, I am so incredibly glad I
| didn't get that job). I kept studying. I kept
| interviewing. I tried to think of things I would be
| expected to know. As an older engineer with a lot of
| Linux driver experience I had to refresh my knowledge of
| the Linux kernel's various subsystems. It was a lot of
| work. It helped that I've been at this game a few decades
| though so it wasn't like this stuff was exactly new. The
| algorithm stuff was, but I'd done a fair amount of Linux
| stuff, C++(but C++ pre 11), lots of C and Python... I
| wish I could say I still remember a lot of what I
| learned.
|
| As far as interviews go, I think I tend to interview
| pretty well when it comes to social skills. Problem
| solving is tough. I had to do a lot of whiteboard
| practicing. I probably over practiced this part because,
| in my experience, you're not really writing tons of code
| on the whiteboard. Yes, you need to write some, but it's
| typically short snippets or pseudocode.
|
| I remember telling my interviewers that I didn't think I
| was a good fit for the job. It seemed more 'CS' than I
| could handle. I don't know why they went with me. I know
| the company was rapidly growing at the time so I probably
| just got lucky. Not what you want to hear, I know.
| mehphp wrote:
| Mostly reversing binary trees obviously
| tchalla wrote:
| > Sure, I hate it too(on either side of the table), but it's
| not too much to ask to prove that you can think on your feet
| and solve hard problems if that's what the job is.
|
| That's a big IF.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > think on your feet and solve hard problems > if that's what
| the job is. > That's a big IF.
|
| My experience with FAANGS is that their bar is universal.
| Even if you're going to a team which somehow won't require
| solving hard problems collaboratively under pressure, ability
| to do so is the bar for working at the company.
|
| As the person you're replying to says, they use the interview
| style that gives them signal about this. And in general,
| unless one work at a FAANG and understands the roles, how
| does one think they have the correct perspective on how FAANG
| ought to be hiring for their roles?
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| >but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on
| your feet and solve hard problems if that's what the job is.
|
| Because the most common say to day issue is needing to think of
| an algorithm on the spot...
|
| You hate it because you know that's not true. Yet you're using
| it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Because the most common say to day issue is needing to
| think of an algorithm on the spot...
|
| Are you trolling? Everything that you do as an engineer is
| coming up with an algorithm.
|
| Algorithm is how you solve a problem, how you think about
| constraints and requirements.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| You're being pedantic. You know what I mean.
|
| There's plenty of algorithms I know and I can see relevant
| business contexts to use them in. Do I know all of their
| implementations off the top of my head to regurgitate onto
| a whiteboard? No, because I don't need to. When the time
| comes I will just look that up. The easy part is the
| implementation. This isn't a school exam testing your
| memory.
| wiseowise wrote:
| When was the last time somebody asked you to implement
| some text book algorithm?
|
| All the FAANG interviews I had were about some leetcode
| problem where you had to be familiar and use some
| algorithm, not write it from scratch.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Not every day, but my experience is at least every month-
| quarter. And since you're not primed like in an interview
| context these ideas need to be inside your wheelhouse to spot
| them within a business context. I would not describe myself
| as _particularly_ technical for my org and in the past year I
| 've made use of the following at work:
|
| -Depth first search
|
| -Binary Search
|
| -Topological Sort
|
| -Dynamic programming in a graph context
|
| -Union Find
|
| -Merkle Trees
|
| -Fenwick (binary indexed) trees
|
| Maybe I'm in an unusually technical area but it doesn't feel
| that way talking to my colleagues.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Yes, and there's plenty of times in my work where I've put
| algorithms to good use.
|
| But out of all those algorithms how many could you
| regurgitate onto a whiteboard given 5 minutes to do so?
|
| Knowing the use of each algorithm is good enough. You don't
| need to know the implementation until you want to use it.
| And nowhere in your day to day work is this going to be
| with no internet access or reference.
|
| So why do interviewers suggest this is the case? Why aren't
| they just happy with you describing how a Merkle Tree can
| solve a particular issue. Why do you need to write that
| down?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Should companies set their hiring bar to match the average
| difficulty of problems they encounter, or should they try to
| find people who can solve their difficult challenges?
|
| Is your view of programming that good programmers spend the
| majority of their time writing boilerplate code or doing
| grunt work?
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Your average software developer isn't going to be solving
| the most difficult problems.
|
| My view isn't that good programmers spend the majority of
| their time writing boilerplate code. But my view also isn't
| that the average programmer _isn't_ doing that.
|
| I'd expect way more demonstrated knowledge for an interview
| in a higher level role than an mid level developer role.
| But the higher you go the less you actually need to
| demonstrate that. Why?
| dtoms wrote:
| so there is no glue code at FAANG? Or you have overqualified
| folks doing, and getting bored, and jumping ship between FAANG
| every 1.5 years...
| swman wrote:
| It's perfect code with 105% test coverage and there are
| amazing meetings and everyone is as smart as they think they
| are.
| 01100011 wrote:
| So if I'm understanding your cynicism correctly, the code
| at FANGs sucks and so the solution is to lower the hiring
| bar?
| 01100011 wrote:
| Sure there's some of it, but not in my group and it's not
| something I'd be tasked with hiring for. Occasionally there's
| some infrastructure related task but I'd prefer someone on
| the team who actually has to use that stuff be the one to
| work on it.
|
| We don't have a lot of glue code because we don't glue things
| together. We write the things other people glue together.
| That's why this is fundamentally different than 90% of
| anything I've ever done.
|
| I also don't mean to say that all FANG work is like this. I
| could see some roles at, say, Google working on Android where
| it very much would be the kind of gluey work I've done
| before.
| opportune wrote:
| There is no "this engineer should only touch glue code" and
| "this engineer should work on the really hard cool stuff".
| For category A, if something is expected to be extremely
| tedious drudgery, usually vendors/contractors are used rather
| than full time employees.
| wiseowise wrote:
| There's glue code, but nobody wants to work with people only
| capable of doing glue code.
| Jensson wrote:
| There is a lot of glue code at FAANG, but there are a lot of
| cutting edge libraries and services that you need to
| understand before you know how to properly glue them
| together. That is very different from mostly gluing together
| well documented standard public libraries.
|
| From an efficiency standpoint, it is probably a lot cheaper
| to hire smarter users of those libraries than to ensure all
| new libraries can be used by less smart engineers. Especially
| since many smart engineers who can write great libraries
| doesn't necessarily have the ability to document those
| libraries well, so by removing the need for great
| documentation they can get a ton of such engineers that other
| companies with lots of mediocre engineers cannot find a good
| use for.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There are also a lot of developers working on the internal
| payroll, HR activity scheduler, communications apps, among
| others. I still remember an interview when someone was
| expounding about the wonderful opportunities to work on the
| site that Google employees use to book yoga classes and
| other offerings.
|
| That said, I understand that in the interest of fairness
| and allowing equitable access to the highly lucrative RSUs,
| it's important to give interviews equally rigorous to
| candidates for the AdWords team as those who end up pushing
| protobufs all day.
| rimliu wrote:
| For a long time I am considering anything coming out of F an
| anti-pattern and an example of bad engineering.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| I interviewed a guy who had this approach. He seemed to think it
| was a great way to avoid answering actual questions, needless to
| say it wasn't a positive result.
| tchalla wrote:
| In the attempt of bias removal, interviewers now want to ask the
| same question to everyone and leave the effort to the
| interviewer. Take for example, the standard behavioural question
| which is expected to answer in a STAR format [0]. The question
| will go as "Tell me about a time you did .... ". Now, it all
| sounds fine and dandy but you are basically offloading everything
| to the poor interviewee. You want them to (1) think of an
| instance in their past and (2) think of a good, relevant instance
| in their career and (3) follow a format for your convenience. I'd
| say that's a lot of pressure. Even if you want to stick to the
| STAR format - you can still be consistent and ask the same
| question with a twist.
|
| "Did you have any conflict at work? Tell me about such
| situations"
|
| "What was the impact of the conflict?"
|
| "What steps did you take to resolve it?"
|
| "What changed after you took those steps?"
|
| Well, it's the same line of questioning and addresses all needs
| of the interviewer. Yet, most of them wouldn't do that. It's
| still a discussion format and win-win.
|
| [0] https://careercenter.lehigh.edu/node/145
| akomtu wrote:
| Don't experienced candidates know that behavioral questions is
| bs and just make things up on the fly? You ask them about a
| conflict in past, they invent a story about a small
| disagreement with coworkers that got resolved in a model
| textbook way, leaving everyone better and wiser? It's not a
| deposition under oath, after all.
| mark-r wrote:
| You're probably right, but it pains me to admit it. I would
| never make up some BS just to get through an interview, it's
| not in my nature.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Any interview should be simple. You just have to not be a jerk:
|
| -threat the guy as a human being, showing respect and kindness
|
| -try to understand his mental processes
|
| -try to asses his knowledge level by meaningful discussions, no
| "tricky questions" or "leetcode"
|
| -ask to explain what he work on, what decisions he took and why
|
| -explain some of your actual work issues and ask how he would
| address them
|
| -do not try to make yourself look smart while trying to make your
| interlocutor look stupid
| coygui wrote:
| This works for me.
| xwdv wrote:
| Imagine a hellish interview process where multiple candidates are
| brought in for a "discussion" at the same time and based on the
| impression they give one could get the job.
| tpxl wrote:
| No need to imagine, group interviews are a thing.
| synergy20 wrote:
| Good idea on paper, not practical in real. FAANG etc are
| whiteboard/leetcode-ing everyone, I believe it's one way to
| filter out the seniors. Be senior's definition it means people
| don't spend a few months on algorithms to pass interviews because
| they had no need to use them in the past 20+ years of their
| career. It's intentional, talking about 'dont do interviews, do
| discussions' is missing the point.
|
| By the way, I do think whiteboard/leetcode is important, just not
| that important.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I hate leetcode-style interviewing, but I see no reason to
| believe that FAANG companies use then primarily because of
| ageism.
|
| The reasons they're used are simpler. First, these companies
| need MANY programmers, so they're mostly hiring generalists
| without a regard for the specific work they'll be doing.
| Second, they need to conduct many thousands of interviews per
| week. These two fairly unusual conditions make for a situation
| where you want a controlled, quantifiable, and simple approach.
| A leetcode-style interview hits those marks much more easily
| than other styles. Plus, you can teach someone how to do it in
| an hour or two (not how to interview well, but how to ask a
| leetcode problem while not making any headaches for legal in
| the process).
|
| While I agree that this is probably at least slightly biased
| against more senior devs, I think senior developers actually
| get an advantage here. In my experience, as you apply for
| loftier positions, the technical questions become much more of
| a conversation.
| [deleted]
| joelbondurant wrote:
| To enforce the mandatory level of diversity, all tax cattle
| communications must be standardized and final hiring decisions
| must be based on gender and race.
| ab_testing wrote:
| I think the author has not really interviewed in the past couple
| of months / years. Now-a-days I see interviewers skipping the
| pleasantries and straight jumping on to LC style questions. In
| fact, in a lot of companies, the first couple of rounds are
| online assessments where you try to pound on LC mediums or hards
| without even talking to anybody else
| version_five wrote:
| Do you think this is a response to tech salaries getting
| higher, and more unqualified people who interview well applying
| for jobs?
|
| A couple years ago we were hiring data scientists, and started
| with a chat with the hiring manager, and then at some point a
| technical evaluation. We attracted business grads and others
| for the position (in addition to cs folks), and a lot of them
| talked a good game but couldn't do basic data science stuff. So
| we ended up switching the process to have some kind of table
| stakes technical evaluation up front, and then do the
| interviews.
|
| I don't think it's ideal, but the filter has to be somewhere,
| and companies want to optimize hiring to cut people as quickly
| as possible rather than do a bunch of interviews and drop them
| later.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think it's a result of the cost of technical testing
| reducing to a negligible amount, and then as you say, an
| unhealthy relationship with risk aversion. If any company can
| open a funnel to the entire timezone or world and put
| everyone through a HackerRank test they bought off the shelf,
| they have sunk no real cost by the time they interview
| someone and potentially no shortage of people who'll go
| through with it. This is proven out by how little of a signal
| these cost-of-entry tests apparently provide, because they go
| on to do other tests anyway, and inevitably reject candidates
| who passed all of them for any reason they can come up with.
| version_five wrote:
| > I think it's a result of the cost of technical testing
| reducing to a negligible amount
|
| This is a good point that I overlooked and definitely agree
| is also present. The same thing is happening with other
| types of interviews - I have seen companies hiring now
| where the candidate is asked to record video answers to
| prompted question, that from what I remember are evaluated
| by some kind of machine learning. They can open up the
| funnel without having to do anything (except forgo
| candidates that either have some self respect or are not
| desperate for work)
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. I've bumped into literally random people
| out in the world, outside of tech, who have experienced
| and complained (unprompted) about those creepy AI
| interviews and they find it dystopian.
|
| I've been asked at least 3 times to do a similar thing,
| and every time I've just refused, it's a few steps too
| far for me to even participate in, even though I am
| almost completely out of options at this point.
| tester34 wrote:
| >Now-a-days I see interviewers skipping the pleasantries and
| straight jumping on to LC style questions
|
| lmao software houses in Eastern EU jump straight into day-to-
| day stuff, 99% of the stuff was normal development, that 1% was
| just for lulz, to check whether you heard about stuff.
|
| 0 algo questions.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > This makes me (and I guess most of us) nervous.
|
| It doesn't me nervous. It makes me wonder if they know what year
| it is. :)
|
| Ultimately, it's a relationship. Yes, it has to work for them.
| But it has to work for me as well. Fit matters.
|
| If they're doing all the asking and I'm doing all the answering
| that's a red flag. If we get to the end and they say "We have a
| couple minutes left...do you have any questions?" That's another
| red flag.
|
| Put another way, as I've said before:
|
| How you hire is who you hire.
|
| So if you're hiring ppl that can't see your red
| flags...well...um...that's a red flag ;)
| Jugurtha wrote:
| There usually is not a table between us. I sometimes sit on a
| couch, or we both go to the balcony and talk facing the sea
| (balcony view:https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/145136819
| 388953805...). If they smoke they'll have a cigarette there. We
| sometimes hack on a project together right there.
|
| I use the term conversation or dialogue often to do away from
| discussion's root of 'breaking' or 'stomping'. I offer to make
| them coffee. We talk about pretty much everything. I ask
| questions. They ask questions.
|
| We try to quickly get rid of the interview vibe by making them
| feel comfortable. We've refined this over the years.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| A discussion is fine, but I'm too easily fooled by people.
| kerng wrote:
| A friend once told me that he is interviewing Google.
|
| I found that mindset very powerful.
|
| And the best part, he got an offer but didnt accept it.
| andrekandre wrote:
| yes! 1000x this.
|
| don't let the power asymmetry get to you, take that attitude
| and you wont easily made nervous or uneasy and instead projects
| confidence
|
| prepare insightful and incisive questions about how decisions
| are made, tech stacks, even how executives think about dev
| process and the business etc etc
|
| as it turns out, many companies really appreciate the
| thoughtfulness!
| spicyramen wrote:
| In my experience I have seen some candidates that work very hard
| and mainly do boiler plate code in their projects, they struggle
| in the Algos/data structures but at the end of the day they get
| the job done. Others perform very good in Algos/data structures
| but produce very little at work, and also people that do good and
| perform above expectations. Is hard for me to actually filter
| good candidates, and at the end of the day, I value output and
| some quality.
| mark-r wrote:
| I recently had the best interview experience of my life from an
| interviewer who had this philosophy. He's a professional
| interviewer who's done thousands of interviews over the past few
| years. He feels that the best way to gauge a candidate is not by
| their knowledge of minutia, but by whether you can trust the
| things they claim about themselves.
|
| He's so passionate about the subject that he created a Youtube
| channel. It's aimed at both interviewers who want to do a better
| job and interviewees who want to influence their chances of
| success.
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhCnsRMXhadbiHsTcxMCg...
| christkv wrote:
| I usually would do three things. One show me or tell me about
| some code you are proud off, some code you are not proud off and
| what your learned from it and finally teach me something
| interesting that can be code or something else.
|
| I'm looking for confidence, ability to accept making mistakes and
| improving and finally the ability to convey information in a
| teachable fashion.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| Depending on the interview I always try to make it light hearted
| and a discussion
|
| One of the best times this happened is when I was being
| interviewed by the future manager and he said after 5 minutes you
| clearly know more than me and we started talking about the best
| places to go for a drink in the area.
|
| I got the job and he was a fantastic manager and good friend
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Same! In a few situations I didn't ask a single technical
| question, it was just obvious they knew what they were doing
| and showed great insights.
| wayanon wrote:
| Interviews have the benefit of appearing equal at least -
| everyone is asked exactly the same questions. Discussions might
| run the risk of appearing to give some people an easier ride than
| others.
| [deleted]
| inertiatic wrote:
| As a person who used to take interviews, I thought discussions
| were the best way to figure out if someone is competent. I mean,
| when I ended up in a discussion with someone, I felt like I did
| great. I had a good time and it frequently led to an offer.
|
| As someone who's now interviewing a person or more every week
| (during a hiring surge), I still don't know of a better way to
| interview someone, but I'm not convinced this is great. A lot of
| people, who are unquestionably smart, coming into the interview
| after long careers in big companies, have a lot of trouble
| expressing themselves (especially if it's not in their native
| language), let alone selling themselves. They come in trying to
| find the correct answer for each question, even if it's open
| ended questions to trigger discussion. And when asked for a
| concrete answer to something, they will instead fumble around,
| only touch upon the answer, and talk about something that
| distracted them.
|
| We still frequently hire people who interview like that, but it
| takes a lot of thinking and extrapolating.
|
| I'm still not sure what to do.
| Jensson wrote:
| The problem is that "Summarise a project you have worked on in
| a few minutes" isn't a task you normally do at your job either,
| software engineers job is to care about the full picture and
| ensure it all works together without missing any details,
| making quick explanations that are fit for small talk has
| nothing to do with it. If the engineer is expected to talk to a
| lot of non-engineers then that might be a good signal, but for
| other more technical roles it isn't needed at all.
|
| So your process will select for people who love to smalltalk
| about stuff, they will look great. But many great engineers
| doesn't love to smalltalk about stuff, it isn't a part of being
| good at the job.
| jschrf wrote:
| I love this thread and the comments in it.
|
| I just had a useless interview with a company that pops up here
| from time to time. The only thing I liked about the experience
| was that the itinerary at least tried to make it clear what the
| key values seemed to be: listening to customers, outcomes,
| evolving vision. I tried to "map" my experience with their
| potential customers and how they could think about the "box" and
| listen and solve.
|
| There's a 10 billion dollar problem in this particular industry
| and if you take the time to understand customers, it's pretty
| obvious. I watched first-hand the biggest competitor of this org
| pivot for this after being around for decades.
|
| The "discussions" I had were not discussions at all. They all
| seemed rushed. There was no "deep dive" into tech at all.
|
| Next time I interview, I'm going to try a radically different
| approach: I am going to undershare rather than overshare.
|
| As an interviewer, I'm going to start asking people about
| cucumbers rather than speak about particular tech or follow some
| form-based process.
| dboreham wrote:
| This is the way.
| greenail wrote:
| I'm not sure why but it seems that most of my "interviews" end up
| with me asking lots of tough questions along with the reasoning
| behind my questions. I end up leading the discussion. I don't
| have numbers but it seems I get offers when I take the lead and
| ask tough questions about the business, what challenges exist,
| and how the interviewer deals with them. Anecdotally when I've
| been passive in the past I've not moved forward in the process.
|
| On the flip side, when doing the interview and when I'm
| answering/explaining something to a candidate, I'm not really
| able to think ahead to the next tougher question in a chain of
| questions. I wonder how that impacts my assessments. I used to do
| 3-5 interviews per week, it is a shame I didn't take notice of
| this and compare to the group's consensus and outcome.
| indymike wrote:
| I'm not even sure what an interview that is not a discussion
| would look like and even less sure it would provide value,
| especially when it comes to technical talent. There's far too
| much time spent on validating "can this person do X that they
| claim they do." That can be easily tested or validated with
| reference checks. What is hard is knowing if an interviewee knows
| when to do X, when to do Y, and can they coordinate with teams A
| and B to get it done.
| pezzana wrote:
| > Here are some tips for converting interview into the discussion
| as an interviewer ...
|
| Two ideas follow. I don't think they'll work very well.
|
| Here's the #1 thing you can do as a candidate to turn the
| interview into a discussion: Come prepared with some
| interrogative-led questions. These usually begin with the words
| "who"; "where"; "what"; "when"; and "why". Then ask your
| questions at appropriate times. A good time might be, for
| example, right after you answer a question on a topic related to
| the question you're about to ask. Another good time might be when
| the interviewer asks "Do you have any questions for me?" Having
| been on the other side of the interviewing table a lot, it's
| quite surprising how few candidates have anything to ask about
| one of the biggest decisions they'll ever make.
|
| The quality of your questions will determine what you get out of
| the interview. To prepare good question, you'll need to
| understand the following at more than just surface level:
|
| - the position
|
| - the company/group/pod
|
| - the interviewer
|
| Research these three things before the interview. The questions
| you bring to the interview should be designed to gather relevant
| and missing information on these points.
|
| What's "relevant information"? You'll need some goals to figure
| that out. Don't set foot in the interview until you have some
| goals that make sense for you.
|
| Reversing the above into a process for preparing for an
| interview:
|
| 1. figure out why you're interviewing at all, and interviewing at
| that company in particular
|
| 2. research the position, the company/group/pod, and your
| interviewers
|
| 3. draft questions you'll ask during the interview
|
| 4. ask your questions at appropriate times during the interview
| tchalla wrote:
| > ere's the #1 thing you can do as a candidate to turn the
| interview into a discussion: Come prepared with some
| interrogative-led questions.
|
| Yes, the candidate should come prepared to (1) resolve Leetcode
| Medium/Hard problems with obscure data structures and
| algorithms, (2) have a Github profile and demonstrate their
| side projects and (3) have best instances of their past careers
| to answer behavioural questions in the STAR format. In the same
| time, we want to demonstrate how the candidate "thinks of their
| feet" and now we have interrogative style questions. The way I
| see it - we don't really require interviewers at all. I don't
| see any benefit of an interviewer. We can replace them with
| robots.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| Discussion will only be possible/advantageous if the interviewer
| decides to engage in a less strict and structured approach. I've
| had interviewers sticking to very specific questions and wanting
| very specific answers (not necessary what they needed to know me,
| but what they wanted to complete a form).
|
| A discussion means an organic, constructive exchange. If anyone
| is too stuck-up, it way not work well.
|
| Obviously getting to know the candidate through discussion is
| best.
| arketyp wrote:
| I've been involved in interviews for new hires a couple of years
| now. I'm pretty sure I could have the interviewee talk about
| cucumbers for 10 minutes and I could determine if its a good hire
| or not. It's all about getting insight about how the person
| thinks.
| ragona wrote:
| To be honest I sometimes get better signal from things like
| cucumbers than I do with technology. Tech has a real issue with
| biasing towards people who happen to have worked on a
| particular topic, and as we all know we get bounced to
| unfamiliar topics constantly.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm sure you believe that, but I'd bet you don't have data.
| That's a fantastic way to introduce unconscious bias into the
| process.
| jstx1 wrote:
| If I'm kind of stiff in conversations with strangers but decent
| at programming, does that mean that your company doesn't have a
| place for me?
| jfengel wrote:
| The problem with "decent at programming" is that it's often
| only a fraction of the job. You rarely get formal
| specifications and clear orders. Nearly everything involves
| discussion of the user's needs or eliciting the circumstances
| of a bug.
|
| Real programming is very little like they teach in school and
| even less like coding competition. Being good at programming
| is great, and mandatory, but if you can't also have a
| conversation then you can't actually do most jobs.
| jstx1 wrote:
| In my experience there's a big difference between an
| interview and talking/communicating/collaborating with
| coworkers. I don't think that you can use one as a reliable
| predictor of the other.
| jfengel wrote:
| I think that's the point of TFA. You can never predict
| perfectly but it might be a closer approximation than a
| traditional interview.
|
| At least you're talking about programming, something you
| should know about. In the actual job you'll have to talk
| about the subject domain, which you aren't always an
| expert in.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > I don't think that you can use one as a reliable
| predictor of the other.
|
| It's pretty hard to claim that there's no _signal_ from
| this kind of interview.
|
| Candidate A: was able to have a conversation with me,
| asked good questions, explained their thinking well, was
| easy to follow, etc.
|
| Candidate B: seemed to not understand what I was
| saying/asking, his answers were rambling and incoherent,
| and unless I led the conversation he just sat there in
| awkward silence.
|
| You can't make a prediction about which of these _is more
| likely_ to communicate well at the office?
| Jensson wrote:
| All else being equal on paper, the better their social
| skills the worse all their other skills will be since
| otherwise the guy with social skills would have had a way
| stronger career than the guy without and then they
| wouldn't be equal on paper.
|
| The problem is the halo effect here. Candidate A has
| likely gotten preferential treatment throughout their
| entire life thanks to his social skills, possibly all the
| achievements they listed were just because they were good
| at talking and never had to perform in previous jobs?
| While if candidate B has similar achievements but acts
| like that then you know he earned them, since nobody
| would give such a guy a pass unless they knew their shit.
|
| On average a new employer will rate the persons work the
| same as the persons old employers, since these are the
| same set. So if both the socially savy person and the
| socially inept person got the same rating at previous
| employers, then you should expect to rate these two the
| same as well. If in these cases your process prefers the
| first over the second then you will over select for
| social savviness and under select for technical acumen.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > gotten preferential treatment throughout their entire
| life thanks to his social skills
|
| First, I am talking about _communication_ skills, the
| ability to receive and present information.
|
| Second, this skills can be practiced and developed, it's
| not something you have or don't have. I assume that the
| person who is presenting well, does it because they _put
| effort into it._
|
| Third, I don't get this "all else equal" thing. I don't
| have access to their rankings from their old boss, nor do
| I have reason to expect their old jobs required the same
| thing my role does. Maybe their boss "did their talking"
| for them. Maybe someone gave them a spec and they just
| implemented it without any back and forth. But that
| wouldn't fly here.
| kovac wrote:
| This right here is the kind of company any self-respecting
| engineer shouldn't join unless they are transparent about
| the fact that they have issues with their processes/don't
| have people to deal with these issues that they need your
| help.
|
| If they have a whole arsenal of project managers,
| architects, product managers, engineering managers,
| business/product analysts and still give this kind of lousy
| excuse, I'd probably stay away. Chances are they don't have
| any real expertise in the domain they are working in.
|
| And btw, requirement gathering and writing technical
| specifications are taught in school.
| jfengel wrote:
| Project managers, product managers, etc. are still human
| beings. They can insulate you from the users themselves,
| but they still rarely turn everything into formally
| specified requirements. The job still involves a lot of
| discussions with co-workers, managers, etc. about exactly
| what it is that needs to be done.
|
| It even shows up in the code. Code will one day be read
| by another human being, for maintenance, and maintainable
| code is often more important than mere correctness.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| At least in SV, not having the support staff to fully
| insulate engineers from these kinds of conversations is
| the norm, not the exception. If you are a run of the mill
| senior engineer at the highest paying companies in the
| the area you're expected to be able to have these
| conversations. My experience is that exceptions are only
| made for people who are true technical wizards.
| kube-system wrote:
| To the contrary, I avoid any company that has an arsenal
| of project managers insulating me from the problems I'm
| solving. I don't want to be trapped in a cubicle churning
| out code. We all have preferences about the types of
| teams we like to work with.
| kube-system wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have a similar experience. Being "stiff in
| conversations" is not really enough detail to answer the
| question. I don't care about whether people are social
| butterflies. I care about whether they can accomplish the
| work as a part of a team. I know that sounds cliche but it's
| the truth. I just want people who are accepting to feedback,
| don't act unprofessionally, and can effectively work in a
| team.
| cema wrote:
| Accepting feedback, but also providing feedback, also
| asking for it. So being able to initiate a conversation
| when needed is an important skill.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Are you stiff when talking about programming? Regardless what
| you're talking about, you're going to have to work with a
| team and communicate the problems at hand. I think that's
| really the crux of "having a conversational interview". Can
| you communicate technical things, both broadly and in depth,
| effectively.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| In all likelihood, you've rejected phenomenal candidates and
| you didn't even realize it.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This is the thing I most hate about being an experienced
| interviewer. I've interviewed hundreds of people. Am I
| getting better? Who knows! I get no feedback. I can find out
| whether other interviewers come to the same conclusions that
| I do, so I can learn to conform, but I will never find out if
| the person I rejected would've been fine, and I won't even
| find out if the person we hired did well.
|
| How can ANYONE confidently proclaim that they're great at
| interviewing without some way of measuring the people they
| reject?
| Jensson wrote:
| Google still hires people even if one interviewer rejects
| them, so at least the people doing statistics there knows
| the difference between having 1 rejection, no rejections
| and how well each interviewer performs.
|
| But I agree, I interviewed some at Google and we can see
| the stuff that happened in every other interview. And I was
| really surprised many times, ultimately I realized that I
| can't really make good judgements based on an hours worth
| of data and stopped caring.
| chrisabrams wrote:
| This is why I have candidates do a take home. We'll (speaking
| across entire career not just current employer) have people
| who do mediocre in the video interviews but then turn in a
| great take home submission. Not everyone performs their best
| on the spot. I've hired so many talented people just by
| trying alternative formats to the traditional "today you're
| gonna interview with 6 people hope you did your leet code."
| Aeolun wrote:
| But did they hire any terrible ones?
| dtoms wrote:
| Don't do interviews, do take home tests. Do what's representative
| of the work you will be doing. I highly doubt even at google that
| it's a life or death situation that you correctly code an obscure
| algorithm in 30 minutes. Folks think you "cheat" on take home,
| but all they are doing is selecting for folks who "cheat" by
| being able to memorize massive amount of leetcode questions, its
| still a poor signal. 6-8 400-500K interviewees, likely costs more
| than 2 folks reviewing a take home for 2 hours.
| ernst_10 wrote:
| > all they are doing is selecting for folks who "cheat" by
| being able to memorize massive amount of leetcode questions
|
| This takes an extremely high level of cognitive ability, which
| is a far, far better signal than a take-home test.
| Daishiman wrote:
| To me it comes down to the following: you're not going to advance
| your career at a place you don't do your best in, and the best
| way to find out is to see how well you do with future _peers_.
| Treating your interview as talking with your peers frames your
| thinking in a much more productive manner.
|
| Life's too short to be stuck with mediocre employers.
| axegon_ wrote:
| > Life's too short to be stuck with mediocre employers.
|
| Billboard worthy quote right there.
| emodendroket wrote:
| At the risk of sounding cynical it sounds exactly like a
| slogan that would appear on billboards for one of those low-
| rent employment agencies.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I get what you mean, but I totally agree with the message
| itself.
| dudul wrote:
| > you're not going to advance your career at a place you don't
| do your best in
|
| Hard disagree. I've worked at a lot of places where I was
| frustrated, didn't give a damn and felt like I was completely
| underperforming. And yet, my career has been advancing both in
| terms of title and earnings. So, unless you have a different
| metric for "advancing your career" I disagree.
|
| That being said, I agree with your main point :)
| OJFord wrote:
| But how do you know you wouldn't have advanced more if you'd
| been doing better?
|
| It seems sort of trivially true to me, excepting any
| workplaces that are simultaneously soul-sucking and growth-
| prospect-full, in such an outsized way that it's better to
| underperform there than overperform elsewhere...
| dudul wrote:
| Irrelevant. The parent didn't say "optimally advance your
| career".
| Daishiman wrote:
| You can advance your title and earnings while also
| simultaneously not lose your will to live.
|
| I've done the whole money+title things at places where my
| work barely made any impact. You'll pay for it later on; 40+
| hours of weekly grind takes a toll on your mind and body.
| dudul wrote:
| I dont disagree. The parent's only metric was "advancing
| your career". Not being happy or feeling fulfilled or
| anything else.
|
| If the only thing you focus on is career advancement, you
| don't _need_ to be at a great place that makes you the most
| productive.
| sevagh wrote:
| Agreed with this.
|
| Oftentimes, you even _have_ to painfully grind out
| advancements in your career from unfulfilling, unhappy
| places, because amazing jobs aren't abundant and you have
| to eat (and also you have to have experience and a resume
| to apply for amazing jobs).
| EGreg wrote:
| I do that on my own show, when I interview Noam Chomsky, former
| regulators etc. I don't like to fawn over them and ask the same
| questions as everyone. I try to bridge what they talk about and
| modern technology, and see if we can have a meaningful DISCUSSION
| about freedom of speech or sociopolitics or economics or
| regulations. Here are some episodes:
|
| Economics: Thomas Greco, community currency economist
| https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-thomas-h-gr...
|
| Regulations: Sara Hanks, former SEC regulator and author of
| Regulation S https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-
| sara-hanks-...
|
| Freedom of Speech: Noam Chomsky, sociopolitical commentator and
| linguist https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-
| capitalis...
|
| I don't hold back, in the Noam Chomsky discussion I accuse him
| for example of having a lot of social capital (followers and
| influence is a form of capital that is convertible to other
| forms) and he brushes it off. Overall the discussions tend to
| focus 99% on substance, and deal with the Web, Social Platforms,
| Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, how they can change the world and
| the issues surrounding them.
|
| PS: I know that for now no one has heard of Intercoin or Qbix or
| my interviews and I am OK with that. Eventually it will be
| discovered once our products are more mainstream. I am looking
| forward to interviewing Edward Snowden and a few other people
| next.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-08 23:02 UTC)