[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exerc...
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Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the
interviewers
Someone was asking how to determine the quality of coding practices
at places they are interviewing. My mind went on a tangent
wondering if it is fair for interviewees to bring a coding exercise
for the interviewers to complete. I've heard that interviews are an
opportunity for both sides to interview each other? So does the
interviewee have an equal opportunity to determine how the
interviewers work through problems by presenting their own exercise
for the interviewers to complete, and therefore gain insight on the
company's practices? I've never heard of anyone doing this before
and I don't think it would be well received. Has anyone done this?
For anyone who conducts interviews what would you think if someone
did this?
Author : ciwchris
Score : 4 points
Date : 2022-07-04 21:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Conventional job interviews are bad from the viewpoint of the
| interviewees is that even though the function is to hire
| somebody, the process is fundamentally a rejection process. It is
| in everybody's interest to disrupt this process.
|
| One of the greatest job interview hacks is this:
|
| Imagine yourself as a consultant who is there to solve a problem
| for the business right there in the job interview and you can
| tell them that is your goal. Take advantage of "do you have any
| questions for us?" to probe deeply on a problem they have:
| sometimes you can get people talking for hours and get a lot of
| information.
|
| This works best at small firms, say 20 employees, where you can
| talk to the principals. Big companies like Google have a
| structured hiring process precisely to defeat this and other
| interview hacks.
| egfx wrote:
| I've thought about this. It's at best passive aggressive.
| Definitely don't do it. Among the innovative interview techniques
| I have yet to see is one where the interviewee is allowed to
| customize the process. If you have projects you can showcase
| let's see them, if not take this test. Seems simple but alien to
| anyone I've mentioned this too.
| dingosity wrote:
| I tried that one time. I didn't get the job. Or rather... I got a
| job at the same company with a different group. The group I
| thought I wanted to work for turns out was pretty rigid and I
| probably would not have worked out there, so it turns out it was
| a decent thing to do.
| Hatrix wrote:
| I usually look to see if a company has public github repos for
| insight into their code base.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Instead of coding interviews, I suggest asking behavioral
| questions. Why? Because you can easily ask them when they say "Do
| you have any questions for us?" No one will think it out of
| place.
|
| The reason I ask them? To expose the fact that behavioral
| questions are being gamed by candidates. Not _once_ has an
| interviewer given me a good response. If they expect candidates
| to have good responses, they 'll get a lot of candidates who
| memorized scenarios that may never have occurred - and they
| cannot distinguish between the sincere and those gaming it.
|
| To give you an idea: A former Amazon employee was coaching me for
| their behavioral interview. For those unfamiliar: You look up
| Amazon's 14 leadership principles, take each clause in their
| descriptions, and come up with scenarios demonstrating each
| clause. His advice on how to prepare for it? If nothing obvious
| in your work history demonstrates the behavior, make something
| impressive up and memorize it.
|
| Of course, Amazon's behavioral interview is probably the easiest
| to game, as you essentially know most of the questions in
| advance. Probably over half of the ones I was asked were straight
| from their descriptions (e.g. "Give me an example of a time you
| disconfirmed a hypothesis.")
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