[HN Gopher] Wasting time in tech interviews
___________________________________________________________________
Wasting time in tech interviews
Author : carrozo
Score : 46 points
Date : 2022-06-27 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.benjamistan.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.benjamistan.tech)
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| >given me a take-home coding assignment of at least 30hrs of work
|
| It's absolutely astounding to me that people must entertain these
| at a sufficient rate that companies still try to pull this free
| labor nonsense. One company I interviewed with provided a take-
| home assignment and said to bill them for the hours; I found that
| to be a fair offer, although due to other circumstances limiting
| my available time, I declined to continue the interview at that
| point.
|
| If the take-home assignment is expected to take a few hours,
| maybe it's worth considering. Any longer, and they can look
| elsewhere for free labor. That time is much better spent sending
| out more applications, networking, leetcoding for FANG
| interviews, working on personal projects, or simply taking a walk
| outside.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I also learned lately if they wish to record the interview, it
| most likely is for their benefit to prove their "interviewing"
| other candidates. I had an experience earlier this year with a
| famous/popular "equity firm" that when I refused and asked if
| they were recording beforehand, went on a tidbit about how they
| needed too/it's normal.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The author is in DevOps, which seems like it should have its own
| interviews process distinct from general SWE. Seems like putting
| such folks through the Leetcode gauntlet would be a mismatch in
| expectations.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| To be honest I looked at github - there's barely any activity,
| projects have little if any descriptions, the professional
| experience has been 12 years of mix of project management and
| customer support, some 2 years of freelance and contract devops
| work. Medium posts are mostly crypto related. Now compare that
| with LinkedIn about section, and there's an entirely different
| picture.
|
| It could be that the reason you are getting the interviews is the
| Linkedin profile (especially as often companies encourage
| interviewing people with atypical background), but maybe you fall
| short of the image you are projecting? The form of the interviews
| might not help highlight your skills, of course, but it's
| probably not the only factor.
| hondo77 wrote:
| Back in the nineties, I worked for a big company where _lots_ of
| people wanted to work. We had what I called "resume reading
| parties". A half-dozen of us, managers and ICs, would sit around
| a pile of resumes in the middle and start reading. When we
| finished each one we would check either "Y" or "N" and pass the
| resume to our left...except two noes and the resume was put in
| the reject pile. Sometimes they fed us. From there would be phone
| screening then on-site interviews. HR didn't like being cut out
| of the loop but we knew we were better at screening than they
| were.
|
| A benefit of this process is that your resume-writing skills
| improve a lot. Read a hundred or so resumes and you'll learn what
| catches your eye and what gets ignored.
|
| Alas, nobody else does this. I used to mention this process at
| places I worked but people thought I was nuts. It worked, though.
| We rarely had a hire that didn't work out.
| kache_ wrote:
| Just don't bother with amateur companies. Sometimes it means
| doing the FANG leetcode grind. Lesser of two evils IMO
| rocgf wrote:
| While I do understand where this view is coming from, I think
| it's also a major waste of time to complain about it.
|
| Let me put it this way - you are not entitled to a high-earning
| FAANG job. It's really that simple. It's a free market, and
| companies can select the way they recruit their people. You feel
| like it's a waste of time to learn Leetcode questions? Then don't
| do it. Case closed.
|
| I say this as someone who failed multiple algorithm questions
| because I did not invest enough time to be good at them.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| I think OP is saying that 99.9999% of the other companies
| aren't FAANG even though they pretend to be. Their use case is
| displaying JPG images, not creating a new JPG algorithm. You
| don't need multi-dimensional array manipulation leetcode hard
| problems to do that. Yet their interview process is geared
| around that, and the recruiters/management don't know enough to
| know to make a useful decision. And then everybody complains
| "Oh, we can't find competent talent. Give us more visa
| openings!". But the free market eventually is taking care of
| those companies. You're seeing major layoffs in the crypto
| industry because they overhired on leetcoders and apparently
| not enough people who could help them turn a profit.
| mnd999 wrote:
| To be fair most of the people employed at FAANGs are just
| moving things between protocol buffers and hash maps and back
| again. They just make the interview hard because they pay a
| high salary and get too many applicants.
| diehunde wrote:
| People complaining about interviews should be more explicit
| about the companies they interviewed for. It might not be a
| FAANG company, but what if it's a database company? Or an
| MLOps company? Or even a gaming company. They need SWE with
| good algorithm and data structure skills too.
| Clubber wrote:
| >you are not entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. It's really
| that simple.
|
| He's not talking about FAANG jobs. He's talking about Joe Blow
| companies that pays "market rates," and "great benefits!" to
| code really boring stuff with no highlights on the resume.
|
| He said these companies are too lazy to research any references
| and are just copy/pasta leetcode tests to their interviewees;
| tests the hiring people probably can't even validate as correct
| without an answer key.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I think it 's also a major waste of time to complain about
| it._
|
| Why's that? People are obviously taking time out of their day
| to read the complaint, and a non-zero amount of those people
| may be in a position to enact some small changes.
|
| > _Let me put it this way - you are not entitled to a high-
| earning FAANG job._
|
| Not once reading this entire thing did I feel like the author
| felt entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. They actually make
| it pretty explicitly clear that they are talking about non-
| FAANG companies employing FAANG-style (or, what those non-FAANG
| companies _think_ is FAANG-style) interviews. And it 's still
| pretty clear, to me at least, that the author doesn't feel
| entitled to those jobs either.
|
| > _You feel like it 's a waste of time to learn Leetcode
| questions? Then don't do it. Case closed._
|
| That's... That's what they did. And they wrote about it.
| paulcole wrote:
| Kind of an extension of this is that Facebook isn't looking for
| qualified developers. They're looking for qualified developers
| who will bend over backward to make a pile of money.
|
| And many non-Facebook employers are looking for qualified
| developers who will bend over backward to make a much smaller
| pile of money. They might be making a bad decision, but it's
| their bad decision to make.
| Chinjut wrote:
| Of course interviewers are entitled to or able to do these
| kinds of interviews. That doesn't mean one can't complain about
| it, and thereby hope to shift attitudes to where they change
| what they do. There'd be little to talk about or do if we could
| never describe ways in which we want things to change. This
| person is themself entitled to complain, and yet here you are
| complaining about them complaining (which you are entitled to
| as well).
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It took me 5 tries over the span of 3 years to land a lucrative
| job at a FAANG. The effort I put in was very well spent and is
| minimal compared to other types of exams (law, medicine...).
|
| That being said, this is survivor bias and I understand it
| would be very frustrating to work on the preparation and not
| get a position in return. But to those who don't like the
| process, they have many other companies to choose from.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What I don't get is when they ghost you, but with positive
| feedback! I was talking to a guy not long ago, everything was a
| fit, I'd done exactly what they wanted in my previous job, had
| team management experience, and so on. The HM/founder says I
| sound great and we should talk again.
|
| So he goes on holiday.
|
| Then his HR lady goes on holiday.
|
| They get back, apologize for the delay, and want to proceed.
|
| Nothing happens. No response...
|
| He's probably right about homework too. I can't tell if they are
| actually testing for you already having a solution on the shelf
| that you can slightly modify for them. Regardless, if someone did
| a homework assignment for me, I would make sure they got
| feedback. If it wasn't good enough I would think really hard
| about what I said about the conditions (don't spend too much
| time, it's ok if it isn't perfect) before dumping them. At best
| it is just a kind of fizzbuzz: if they can stand up a k8s thing
| in a few hours, they are likely not making this up or even copy
| pasting it.
|
| End of the day software has some odd ideas about what evidence
| is. Just about every other profession is just a CV, some chat, a
| light grilling, then a response. If the person is making it up
| they'll get found out and dumped out soon enough. Software
| somehow manages to do both: several interviewers have told me
| they dumped out a guy after a brief stint, then tried the whole
| Leetcode/homework/tech chat thing.
| geekbird wrote:
| Here's the thing that irks me about things like "standing up
| k8s in a couple hours": It's something that only gets done a
| few times for an entire project - once or twice in dev and
| test, then again in prod. Not even a few times a year - a few
| times per project/code stack.
|
| The actual work will be "tweak this to have six side cars
| instead of five", or "set it to spin up a few more nodes", or
| maybe even "upgrade k8s from version X to version Y without
| downtime, test your solution on dev first". There has to be
| some way to test that.
|
| Instead they give you "Bring up a vpc, resources with terraform
| or cloud formation, spin up k8s, program a webapp that tells me
| my IP in a container, set up a build system to package it,
| configure Route 53, then make it all run." - all in three
| hours.
|
| I don't write scripts or even yaml from scratch that fast. I
| don't know anyone who does. Most people copy/paste old projects
| or stuff off of StackOverflow and then mangle it to try to do
| these silly things.
| [deleted]
| LeffeBrune wrote:
| It is not a waste of hiring team time if we avoid hiring a
| candidate that doesn't meet our standards. We try very hard to
| find good candidates, but it doesn't mean we will stop
| interviewing if the candidate pool runs dry. We'll just have to
| spend more time looking for quality applicants.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > You're never going to check, are you?
|
| I'm definitely going to ask probing questions about the tech. And
| the more familiar I am with it (and the more relevant it is to
| the job), the more detailed and discerning I will be.
|
| It works too. The outcome is usually either, the interviewee is
| rattled and straight up admits that they don't know as much as
| their resume claims; or, we get to have a pretty in depth
| conversation about what the interviewee has actually done
|
| The former is fine with me. I think most developers understand
| it's better to come clean early. When interviewing with me,
| that's the right call, because if I think you don't know you're
| stuff, you'll fail, but if you admit that you aren't so familiar
| with $technology, then I'll shift my questions to something else.
|
| The latter is ideal though, since it segues well into the actual
| job requirements, and the interviewee gets real insight into what
| they are walking into.
|
| The person who wrote this article is a-typical. I've interviewed
| people with github accounts, but most of the time they are full
| of college course work or cloned open source repos, so they
| aren't really worth investigating too deeply. But someone with an
| active open source project on github and a popular blog seems
| like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to
| speak with anyone like that.
| physicsguy wrote:
| We had this recently with a candidate I interviewed. List full
| of technologies but < 5 years of experience. Started probing a
| bit - "can you explain about the project you did with X" and
| for pretty much every one we got back "oh, I haven't done much
| with that". It was almost laughable because it was literally
| every skill listed we asked about, we never got to a point to
| bounce off of.
| alephxyz wrote:
| This is why I wish cover letters were more popular. Having a
| candidate tell you they don't have much experience using X to
| do Y but that they'd love to learn to / have been working on it
| on their spare time is better than having them lie on their
| resume (or miss out on candidates that are too honest for their
| own good).
| quantified wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| > There is no test for debugging SSL certificate chains in
| production at 3am
| xg15 wrote:
| "The next part of your assessment will take place during your
| follow up phone interview at a randomly chosen time slot
| between 10pm and 5:30am this night. Please remember to hold
| yourself ready. Thank you for your time and have a pleasant
| rest of the day."
| tristor wrote:
| >I'm exaggerating the amount of skill that I have. Everyone is. I
| use the right buzzwords on my CV. I inflate the scale of my
| achievements and the depth of my skillset. I even add tasks and
| responsibilities to historical jobs that fit your requirements.
| You're never going to check, are you?
|
| I don't think everyone does this. I certainly have never done
| this. I've never had an issue getting interviews using an honest
| accounting of my work experience, and I know as an interviewer I
| use the candidate's resume as the basis for forming my questions
| to ask them. I would expect others to do the same. Filling your
| resume with things you didn't actually do just makes the
| interview harder.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| > If you want better candidates filling roles, you must stop
| being lazy and relying on Leetcode or lazy CV parsing. Check the
| candidate's portfolio. Pose realistic questions.
|
| Lets be honest. What you want is easier questions. Vague
| questions that can be discussed and argued one way or the other.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| Wow, would never hire this person due to their attitude alone.
| gkop wrote:
| Some kind of minimal helpful feedback upon request after an
| unsuccessful on-site is the big one for me. The hiring manager
| can share one sentence of filtered feedback with the recruiter,
| the recruiter can share that one sentence with the candidate over
| the phone. Five minutes per candidate all in. If you say "but
| legal liability" you have no courage.
| spike021 wrote:
| I don't see why companies can't have some kind of waiver the
| candidate signs in order to get feedback. We already sign NDA's
| before most interviews to not provide the interview questions
| and stuff to people. Feels like something we should be able to
| trade for.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| Best case scenario, they get some good word of mouth... which
| doesn't matter as FAANGs have more applicants than roles
| anyway. Worst case scenario they have an angry rejected
| candidate attempting to dispute the feedback. I doubt any
| large tech company would consider doing this.
| troutwine wrote:
| I've always had an interest in giving people feedback and
| have pushed for it at a few employers. What I've been told
| -- and I have no way to check this, considering I am not a
| lawyer -- is that giving post-interview feedback is legally
| fraught, contingent on the localities involved and would
| impose a review burden on the feedback which would,
| necessarily, be delayed by some weeks, carefully scrubbed
| and written.
|
| Dunno how accurate that is, but I've been told it at more
| than one shop.
| spike021 wrote:
| Again, like I said in the comment that this parent
| comment replied to: provide a waiver that basically says
| the candidate can't use the feedback legally. It's a
| similar thing with the NDA on the reverse end.
| oarabbus_ wrote:
| Firstly, NDAs and waivers are not bulletproof and may not
| hold up in court. And even with a rock-solid NDA
| guaranteeing a victory, going into a courtroom is not a
| desirable situation for any person who isn't being paid
| to be there.
|
| Like I asked in the comment replying to your previous
| one: what benefit does this give the business whatsoever?
| This will cost money, time, and very possibly headaches
| (whether reputational or legal), and for no benefit to
| the business. Why would they consider this?
| gkop wrote:
| In your next employer, if your recruiter is game, just do
| what I suggest upthread, don't bother asking permission.
| spike021 wrote:
| I was surprised that I got feedback from my recruiter a
| few weeks ago when I finished an on-site at Google. To be
| honest I think she was only fine with providing feedback
| if we were on a call, since there's no paper trail.
| troutwine wrote:
| No thanks. What I'm interested in is a _structured_
| program for providing feedback and going off-script into
| potentially legally problematic territory as an
| individual doesn't tip the cost/benefit ratio in the
| right direction.
| gkop wrote:
| Ah that's fair. I do it for the warm and fuzzies, not for
| my own self-interest.
| Hatrix wrote:
| There are also job descriptions that do not state whether it is a
| remote job or where on the planet you are expected to work. City,
| state, country? Anything? You go to their website and also no
| address or clue of where the company is.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I think an ever bigger evil is companies who do not calibrate
| their Leetcode type tests to their hiring needs. I was given a
| take-home test few years ago by a well-to do medical software
| company based out of Verona, WI. Their programming test had a
| question from past ICPC.
|
| Typically Olympiad questions takes well-to-do teamwork & few
| hours of brainstorming - not a 30min timed test you give with a
| proctor watching your monitor
| lapcat wrote:
| > a well-to do medical software company based out of Verona, WI
|
| You might as well just say Epic Systems LOL
| drstewart wrote:
| Epic doesn't expect that you will finish every question on the
| exam. That's actually the point of giving harder questions: the
| ability to calibrate against the entire candidate pool. If the
| test is so easy everyone aces it, how is that calibration going
| to go?
| srvmshr wrote:
| In a 50 min test with 10 min MCQs and two timed questions,
| where one question is a ICPC derivative question & the other
| one is refactor a pseudocode similar to MUMPS language, what
| CS talent is it exactly testing?
|
| I don't mind writing MUMPS if I was hired, but the test is
| not my ability of understanding MUMPS-styled syntax or
| predicting the win percentage in some chess layouts without
| using MCTS.
| zpthree wrote:
| hot take: OP is confusing memorizing "how to debug SSL
| certificates" with problem solving skills
| kitanata wrote:
| I recently went through an interview process where to advance to
| the technical interview I would have to learn Go. I know a ton of
| languages. Haven't done much with Go. Could I learn it? Sure, I
| could. But... I am not going to learn a new language where I am
| comfortable enough to do an interview just so that I have a
| chance to work for your pre-A round company. I am especially not
| going to do it when I have 2 job offers sitting on the table that
| I am currently considering. If you're a startup founder
| recruiting other devs, don't ask them to learn a whole new
| language on spec so they can interview with you. I'm sorry.
| You're just not as hot as you think you are.
| madrox wrote:
| In my experience, interviewing for engineering teams is an
| afterthought that comes from how little interviewers are included
| in designing the interview process they have to use. When I
| approach each opening like a software project with a kickoff,
| buy-in from everyone working on the project, assignment of tasks,
| etc, you get more investment from the interviewers. You also get
| higher quality candidates making it past the recruiting stage,
| because the recruiters better understand what to look for.
| Without that, I think most engineers view interviewing as
| something that takes them away from their "real" job.
| projectazorian wrote:
| > Without that, I think most engineers view interviewing as
| something that takes them away from their "real" job.
|
| This. I don't _want_ to view interviewing as a thankless chore
| because I think it 's important, but hard to view it any other
| way when your interaction with any given new hire will be
| minimal at best - especially since the extra work of
| interviewing usually just ends up as a footnote come review
| time. If you want people to take interviewing seriously, give
| them some skin in the game.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| I agree - for me the idea of shared pipelines is what kills a
| lot of the motivation - I don't who what the person will be
| working with, what on, I might have a passing familiarity with
| another interviewer (but most likely not) - it's difficult to
| treat people as anything else than a calendar appointment.
| qaid wrote:
| I too once scoffed at grinding leetcode. I'd rather work on side
| projects or blog instead.
|
| But after 5 years of failing to get a job offer, I finally caved.
| Putting in the effort to deeply understand DS/algos and grind
| away leetcode led me to getting offers I liked and IMO has made
| me a better engineer.
|
| I now have a "gold star" on my resume and am confident I can
| still answer most leetcode questions. I consider that time spent
| as a great time investment, since landing my next job will be
| much easier.
|
| Money wasn't my original goal when I got into CS, but it
| eventually became my driving force. I regret taking so long to
| notice this, and letting my feelings get in my way (of how it
| "should be") / resisting leetcode for so long.
| tester756 wrote:
| >I'm exaggerating the amount of skill that I have. Everyone is. I
| use the right buzzwords on my CV. I inflate the scale of my
| achievements and the depth of my skillset. I even add tasks and
| responsibilities to historical jobs that fit your requirements.
| You're never going to check, are you?
|
| I don't, I'm honest in my CV and during interviews
|
| I'm selling myself 'as-is' e.g despite using git for longer
| peroid of time, but mostly via GUI, then I'm not going to call
| myself proficient/experienced git user cuz I'd fail some above
| basics question
| doix wrote:
| I put as little as humanly possible on my CV to reduce the
| chance of getting asked about stuff I have pretty much
| completely forgotten about.
|
| I hate preparing for interviews and don't want to brush on my
| past. For example, I spent a year writing an LLVM backend for a
| DSP but I'm pretty sure I couldn't write more than a fizzbuzz
| in C++ now. Nor do I remember much about LLVM. I don't want to
| come across an LLVM enthusiast and have him start grilling me
| on details I have long forgotten.
|
| I try to write just enough to get an interview, anymore
| information makes you more likely to fail your interview in my
| book. Plus writing less makes you mysterious ;p.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Would they think you're inexperienced though?
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Most resumes I see have both a skills section and some sort
| of work history section. You can keep advertised skills
| focused while still listing past projects and work if you
| use a format that makes a similar distinction.
| corrral wrote:
| I don't exaggerate or list things I don't have _significant_
| experience with, but a relative who 's in recruiting keeps
| telling me I'm doing it wrong. But I think they mostly do
| recruiting for big companies with bad automatic filters or
| people who don't understand the job doing the first weed-out
| pass on the resume pile, so maybe that's why.
| lytefm wrote:
| I've also gotten positive feedback for clearly stating what I
| know and what I don't know. I'm using a ,,skill meter" to
| distinguish between ,,I'm an expert in this language" and
| ,,I've used this a couple of years ago".
|
| I got a job offer from a company whose main language is Go and
| I didn't even know the basics. A good software engineer can
| pick up any reasonable language in a reasonable amount of time
| [1].
|
| I usually ignore recruiters who don't contact me via InMail. If
| they convey that they actually took a look at my profile, I'll
| reply.
|
| I've had a very good experience with the three EU companies
| that I've been interviewing with this year. One had a take-home
| assignment that was reasonably scoped for 2-4h and well
| thought. The others asked some basics and some architechture /
| design / business understanding related questions. No leetcode
| or whiteboard coding. Open communication + quick feedback.
|
| Was I just lucky in that regard or are there a lot of companies
| with a sane interview process out there, but some HN readers
| prefer to apply at those who don't?
|
| [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-
| pr...
| woodruffw wrote:
| And to add the other side of things: as an interviewer, I do
| check.
|
| Inflating your skillset is going to get you into the wrong
| interviews, and you'll do poorly in them (and consequently will
| have these kinds of negative experiences). Either accurately
| represent or slightly undersell yourself; it comes off _much_
| better and will save you time and money.
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| This is not universally good advice. An interview is an
| obstacle that takes a limited amount of time. It can only
| approximate someone's true skill set.
|
| One can oversell themselves based on their potential to learn
| and grow.
|
| For example, if someone is a junior and they designed a
| micro-service with a senior but have a solid grasp of the
| process, then it's fair that they claim that they designed a
| micro-service. They can read up on the relevant concepts,
| answer a few questions in the interview and get a very nice
| opportunity in a cool startup. If they can learn to do it
| fast enough to be productive, then both they and the company
| are happy.
|
| On the contrary, by underselling themselves or being
| accurate, they are more likely get a job at their current
| level of knowledge, which can limit their growth potential.
| Still, this can be a good idea if someone is already very
| experienced and doesn't want to spend a lot of energy to
| grow.
| Clubber wrote:
| I hate embellishing on resumes. Unfortunately when the game
| went from humans filtering resumes to automation/keyword
| filtering, it's and unfortunate requirement. Sanitation
| Engineer and all that.
|
| Required keywords "Agile/Scrum" does not appear on this
| resume, rejected.
| woodruffw wrote:
| That's a fair point. We do very little
| algorithmic/automated filtering, so I'm biased in my
| predilection.
| Clubber wrote:
| If you use a headhunting firm, they certainly do.
| woodruffw wrote:
| We don't, at least to my knowledge.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Same... and I got scolded by an recruiter after she asked me
| more questions about my experience.
|
| She basically told me I am underselling some of the experience,
| and I should put some of it more, and perk it up a bit. It was
| very helpful.
|
| Engineers have that. You have to take example a bit from real
| estate agents, on how they describe a place. Always highlight
| the positives.
| brakmic wrote:
| Gatekeeping ceremony is strong with the IT.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-27 23:01 UTC)