21 ms·

For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

247 points by rvivek 11y ago

ideal322 11y ago
"I got into the final interview for an extremely high-growth human resources startup. That was exciting, and I really thought I was going to get an offer. But, eventually, the last round of the interview was super hard. I just failed." Been through this too many times.
exabrial 11y ago
Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
- ideal322 11y ago
  Yes! Don't settle for the wrong culture, and pretend to be someone you are not.
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- EricScottTaylor 11y ago
  Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two reasons: (1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that. (2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes today deal with culture fit at the end, but should it be item 1 and then coding skill item 2?
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    This comment doesn't appear at all troll-like -- not sure why it was flagged.
  - busterarm 11y ago
    Given the trend I'm starting to see in my peer group of (non-asian) minority developers having difficulty finding work at their skill level or with appropriate compensation combined with the number of white developers I know who get turned down and told things "well, you just don't look like a developer" because they aren't frat-bro/hipster enough, I think that matching culture fit at the end instead of the beginning is (consciously or unconsciously) because people don't want to get sued. You can always say that some other candidate was 'objectively better' if you bring everyone in and give them a bunch of arbitrary challenges to complete.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Except when the person you don't really want is objectively best at your arbitrary challenges. Then you just send that person home and pretend they didn't exist, apparently. If I wanted to make suing companies my job, I would have been a lawyer. I'm not going to sue you, even if you deserve it. It takes too much effort. What you should really be afraid of is me posting such a negative interview report on Glassdoor that you start having trouble finding candidates who want to talk to you, and then going to interview with your competitors.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      > (e.g. you're a big open source shop, are they an advocate?). After reading this a few times I think you meant to say "you're a big open-source advocate; are they an open-source shop?" or something similar.
      - busterarm 11y ago
        Huh?
        11y ago
kafkaesq 11y ago
So, how did you get to where you are today? I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college. Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. But that's about it. [1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take). And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze. EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other people put in them. And I'd guess that a good portion of interviewers are completely unaware that non-athletic Olympiad competitions exist. And anecdotally, it seems like tech interviewers wouldn't believe you could code your way out of a paper bag even if you walked into the interview over rose petals thrown on the floor by Kernighan and the ghost of Ritchie. I've had plenty of them remark "you are the only candidate that has answered that question correctly" and then never speak to me again. It really makes me wonder what the point of the technical portion of the interview really is. I have had only one interview where the interviewer actually cut short a technical screen because "clearly, you know your stuff". But no offer there, either.
13of40 11y ago
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment. Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves: Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and say "Hey, I'm not really good at whiteboard coding. Do you mind if I write the code on my laptop here?"
- pklausler 11y ago
  If your interviewer really dings you for the appearance of your scrawled code on the wall, they're being self-defeatingly stupid and you'd probably be happier working with other people. I do lots of tech interviews, and I always make it clear that I don't care how pretty the ink looks. I stick with the whiteboard because it's the best way for candidates to explain their analyses and algorithms before they write the code.
  - craigyk 11y ago
    My Google interview in 2008, one guy asked me to write a binary tree structure and implementations of depth and breadth-first search (maybe also balanced insert?) on the whiteboard in C, which I blew through in no time. He then immediately said it was wrong and let me wither for a few minutes trying to figure out what the problem was before pointing out I forgot a semicolon.
    - pklausler 11y ago
      I hated seeing that kind of crap when I was on the hiring committee, and I think that it's less likely that you'd run into it today.
      - craigyk 11y ago
        Thanks, it does sound like things have changed. I probably would have been a better hire back then than today though. I was younger, cheaper, and had an almost OCD drive to learn everything CS since I had a complex about getting into the game a little late. Today I feel like I wouldn't be able to maintain my current lifestyle with a wife, two kids, two dogs in the bay area. Occasionally I think about it though...
sotojuan 11y ago
Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and linked list operations as well as their complexities. Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a bug.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  Yep! I have been interviewing for fun for the last few years (averaging maybe one or two interviews every few months), and I've seen all kinds of stuff. Way too many whiteboards. In fact, even after all these years, whiteboards still make me nervous, and basically makes it impossible to get into flow, or have a reasonably nice mindset for solving problems. And if I do this for fun, you can bet that people who depend on those interviews for their livelihood aren't feeling much better. I think it's a really stupid way to interview. Anyways, I agree with you: The best and funnest interviews -- and therefore the interviews I feel most comfortable (and therefore able to really show what I know) -- are the pair programming interviews. You build a special rapport with a single developer on the team, who gets a really good idea of the kind of coder you are. It's like a nice, calm conversation about technology.
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  - Scarbutt 11y ago
    nice hobby you got there ;) What do you if the company wants to hire you?
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Obviously, if the offer is better that what you already have, you seriously consider accepting it. Otherwise, you tell them that their offer is not competitive, and maybe the next monkey to come along chasing their peanut can benefit from your feedback.
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tomnikl 11y ago
Excelling in an online programming competitions sounds like a fun, exciting way to showcase myself to multiple companies all at once. Way better than white boards, for sure!
- kbart 11y ago
  That might sound "cool" if you are straight out of a college with plenty of time to spare, no full-time job and family to support. Otherwise, it's not so compelling.
odinduty 11y ago
What do you do to be turned down by 38 companies? Do you turn on your laptop and it's running Windows?
6stringmerc 11y ago
Some really great advice within that forms a foundation for the narrative. I can really appreciate the diligence and apparent 'no hard feelings' kind of pragmatism. I especially liked the closing part: >If you fail 10 interviews in a row, go for the 11th interview. But take a look at all the variables, and see if there’s anything you can do differently to improve. Take the pressure off, and work through problems routinely to keep your muscle memory in shape. That reminds me of being in 'game shape' as I call it for playing and soloing - standing around thinking about notes to play doesn't come off nearly as fluid as being so practiced as to get into the groove and run with it. Good parallel. Nicely framed conversation, glad to read it.
- civilian 11y ago
  Yeah. When I was job hunting ~3 years ago I knew I was going to have to do a lot of whiteboarding problems. I only had two 2 years of coding experience, and for the last six months I had been freelancing, which doesn't often encourage algorithms. I was working through "Cracking the Coding interview" and "programming interview exposed" but I was worried. So I sent an email to everyone in my coworking space that I'd put a six pack in the community fridge for every person who did a mock whiteboard interview with me. Some of them came with their own problems, some of them picked problems from websites or the books that I hadn't done yet. Some of them were doing it as a favor, and some of them wanted to practice interviewing people. I got five mock interviews over a week, many of them with strangers. Best 40 bucks I ever spent. (I nailed the next real interview I had and got a job offer.)
  - kilroy123 11y ago
    That's a damn good idea. I completely agree, a job interview is something that you need to practice to be good at. Just doing code exercises isn't enough. Having someone do a real interview is the best way.
  - wkimeria 11y ago
    This is a brilliant idea
ballpark 11y ago
Does anyone have any insight on this reflecting on a higher supply of devs and/or lower demand of employers (bad market for developers)?
bgribble 11y ago
There's too much missing information in this article. In today's environment, a qualified programmer with the background this guy appears to have should get offers at a much higher percentage of companies.. IF everything is on the level: decent communications skills, applying for jobs whose requirements match skills, realistic compensation expectations, and (my guess in this case) already authorized to work in the US. I would expect this low hit rate from a qualified individual looking for a job AND an H1B sponsor.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  The H1B factor certainly has weight - I can imagine it leading to a 2x factor in his rejection rate. But not the 5x rate he's apparently had to suffer through.
  - basseq 11y ago
    I would also have to imagine most of the H1B fallout is at the initial screen, not after multiple interview rounds.
NTDF9 11y ago
I read the article as: "It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without his pay)" I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers. Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not qualified for the job of interviewing.
- edabobojr 11y ago
  I have done this and have done interviews I did most of the questioning as the interviewee. In my experience, this approach turns off a lot of people.
  - NTDF9 11y ago
    The point is: If the candidate asks a relevant question that the interviewer cannot solve in time, the company failed at its own game because the candidate proved that he/she is better qualified than the company's representative, given the rules of the game. What excuse does the company have for not hiring the candidate now?
    - true_religion 11y ago
      The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed by may be less experienced than you in a particular technology.
      - NTDF9 11y ago
        > The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. In that case, these companies should be ok with registering their names in an online registry saying they rejected a candidate for someone who is better qualified. For the following 6 months, they cannot complain that that cannot find qualified candidates. > Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed by may be less experienced than you in a particular technology. So the interviewer should be asked a question by the candidate in that particular technology and if they can't answer, the candidate should be hired.
dsmithatx 11y ago
One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO interviews. I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills. Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire. You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay motivated as months start to go by.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Eh, I can't pay for interviews right now. Maybe I'm just applying to the wrong jobs, but I feel like you have to be a part-time marketer in this industry right now to get interviews for jobs wherein you do not match the company's laundry list.
- speeder 11y ago
  I am in Brazil. I graduated in 2009, never had a legal job (according to Brazillian laws). Also I too sent thousands of resumes since then, and since 2009 I got like 6 or 7 interviews in total (some that landed me a contract instead of a job...)
- dominotw 11y ago
  >Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. I've noticed that many employers have copied google and have stated to interview with as many people as possible. Lots of them take pride in their acceptance ratio, some even advertising that on their careers page. Def a sign of times but might not in a way that you are suggesting. Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily.
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trhway 11y ago
During the last 10 years i always go for a solution, just a coded solution (and if you do it quickly, or even while doing it, you can frequently improve upon it significantly). Doesn't work for Google/FB - they probably want the elegant super-performant solution that i usually come up with in the next few minutes after the interview is finished :) - yet it works just fine with the rest of the companies. Hint: almost always start with putting the input into a tree, and if tree is completely out of question - into hashmap :)
VikingCoder 11y ago
I realized something a while back... My entire career, if I've made it to an on-site interview, I've only had one company NOT make me a job offer. That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag, okay? Immediately after I sucked at that, they walked me out the door. It was emberasing. Two steps out the door, and my brain is filled with POP AND PUSH! AAAH! I knew the answer, I've KNOWN the answer since I was about 14. No joke. So, I've been on that side of the "every now and then people interview poorly" thing. And I can only blame the jet lag, because I KNOW the ridiculously easy answer to that question. Here's the funny thing - if I would have been offered a job there, I would have accepted. And the company went on to crash and burn in terrible fashion. And two months later, I got a job at a MUCH better company. TL;DR: I've only failed at one interview, and it was arguably the best thing that ever happened to me. (Life is weird!)
- jblow 11y ago
  Except ... reversing a singularly-linked list recursively is trivial. If you can't do this, you are not qualified at basic manipulation of data structures and you should fail the interview if they want someone with basic competence in data structure manipulation. Sorry but that is how it is.
  - laichzeit0 11y ago
    Because so often we are faced with having to implement singularly linked-list reversal. I wouldn't even bother implementing this myself in the real world and I have a degree in computer science and 10 years experience doing dev work. I would type the problem into google, survey a couple of solutions and pick one I liked. Done. Next problem please. This is pedantic crap that is a waste of anyone's time. I can't believe people actually get asked shit like this at interviews? Well, at least none that I've ever been to. They look at my resume "Oh, CS degree at well respected University." and you can deduce that this person can probably work out trivial crap like this or look it up in a book or the internet. At most ask them for their academic records. What a complete waste of time in an interview..
blklane 11y ago
I applied to around 100 jobs over the course of 9 months when starting to learn how to program. For the startups I would get to a phone screen and potentially a technical challenge then be turned away. At the job I am at now, was contacted by CTO online, and had phoned/on-site/started within 5 days of initial contact. I've seen a bunch of blog posts recently about some companies priding themselves on who they turn down versus who they accept and I feel that is one of the bigger problems we have as an industry in hiring.
p4wnc6 11y ago
Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences. It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees. Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power is extremely damaged. For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and actors who are "offer only" -- they won't respond to your inquiry about hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate clearly. Ridiculous. Employers often say they want to "see how you think" -- when they say this, it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success. Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very dysfunctional boss. I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in denial about it). This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.
- extrapickles 11y ago
  Full-stack developers should be generalist in nature to make sure the issues that cross domains (front/backend, etc) are taken care of. Also, they can plug any gaps in the development that crop up from time to time (eg: someone on vacation, or next feature needs more back-end people). The downside is that they will not be spectacular or as quick at any one domain. Basically, a full-stack developers specialization is to be flexible and have knowledge and experience in working the entire application stack. Another way of thinking about it is that they are like a general practitioner doctor/dentist, while they generally don't do surgery, they can refer you to the correct specialists who can and take care of any minor/common ailments. This is also why you don't want an entire team of them is that they don't go into depth in any domain. I don't doubt that the current full-stack education path does a poor job of education on issues that specifically cross domains or when a task is better suited to a specialist.
bargl 11y ago
So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple) which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people who couldn't do the most basic things. I think one of the most important aspects of hiring is getting potential candidates in front of the team and letting them talk to the team, to see how they handle questions from other developers (and yes there is always that guy who tries to make the candidate look dumb for some reason). The most telling question I typically ask when interviewing is what have you worked on recently, why is it cool, and how have you added to the project. This gives the candidate a great opportunity to dive into their own experience. This way if they didn't answer my questions well it will give me some idea of their background. Oh hey this guy didn't know basic Javascript stuff off the top of his head because he's been working on the back end for 3 years. That's cool. I'd personally take someone who can talk to me about practical design decisions they've made on a project rather than knowing how to solve basic algorithms. If you graduated 8 years ago and you STILL know exactly how to implement a Binary Search Tree without needing a 10 min refresher then you are a better man than I am. I forgot that about 3 years ago. I don't mind that we expect developers to study for a tech screen but how much does that really tell us about them? They can study and know the basics, but have the ever worked on a large scale project where you have to make something work now vs, having time to do a perfect implementation? Where is their ability to tell their manager no, or their ability to weight COTS vs Custom Build? Sorry this touched a nerve, I just had a bad interview with a company. The tech screen was outside my IDE, couldn't copy paste (which sucks when you want to move a line or do some refactoring) and it was on topics I haven't looked at in 4 years. Luckily I'd spent 15+ hours studying so one of the questions was a gimme.
- mcv 11y ago
  Still my favourite interview process was a small coding assignment and presenting the resulting code in front of the devs, who got to ask questions about it and then vote in private on whether to hire. Everybody got the same assignment, everybody solves it in a different way, and everybody makes mistakes[0], but how they handle that and explain it tells a lot about how they are as a programmer. [0] Except for one who was insanely thorough and still apologized for really minor imperfections in his code. He got the most enthusiastic votes ever.
kinai 11y ago
"I got turned down by 38 companies, nobody wants to pay me 100k mimimimi" Murican Coders of the 21st Century at the biggest whiners ever...And honestly if you fail to get a job within 3-4 interviews then you are a) doing it wrong or b) applying for the wrong jobs.
- mstrem 11y ago
  I somewhat agree with your statement. Mainly because I personally put a LOT of effort into each job application and I would not be able to apply to more than 2-3 jobs a week. Takes time to find the right company, do research, make a perfect personalized application etc. As a result to that pretty much all applications I have ever made have at the very least gotten back to me. I would never be able to apply to 38 jobs in 2 months. I feel like a lot of copy paste went on and that sets you to a negative start.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Most applications are quizzes + resume. There is only one way of applying for it. I got turned down by over 100 companies before I even had an interview. The process is really random.
    - mstrem 11y ago
      Right, I personally literally change my resume based on each application focusing on the experience which I think would be most relevant for each position. I also change the introduction sentence and when I respond to open ended questions (in the quizzes) I always refer back to the company and relevant examples. Cover letter, when requested, also takes me a lot of time to write up.
      - lqdc13 11y ago
        I did that too. Perhaps it's a skill of some sort. The only thing that worked was making a site that went viral. Then I got like 20 unsolicited messages/requests for an interview.
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tn13 11y ago
Recently came across an example where someone entirely different person went for the interview answered, cleared but the another person reported for the job. I must say I am extremely disappointed at bay area job scene.
deftnerd 11y ago
The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well. Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set. It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare time for personal projects. In essence, a day job of simple Linux administration may pay the bills, while in my spare time I'm working on large infrastructure automation, deep learning, developing new blockchain technologies, etc. I don't know how sustainable this is. I have three children and a wife, and I'm getting tired of only being paid for work I can do while asleep just because I'm afraid of rejection. Any suggestions on how to "toughen up"?
- ars 11y ago
  Have someone else apply for you. Your wife probably. You find the job and tell her you are too nervous to apply, let her know it's OK to apply for you. Sometime seceding that bit of control is enough to get over the problem - especially when you have self awareness of it. Once she applies you will probably feel an urge to take over and continue the conversation with the employer - so do that, and take it to an interview. (Or have her do it for you, while you hover in the background looking worried and telling her what to say :) It's kind of a way of forcing/tricking yourself. (Hopefully she doesn't say something like "man up and do it", ask her not to if you think she might, tell her you need her to help you with this.)
  - labster 11y ago
    How do I apply for a wife? I'm pretty nervous and I get rejected a lot. Honestly getting a job is way easier.
- xirdstl 11y ago
  Do you like working on those things in your spare time? The flip side of what you seek is that with a more challenging day job, you may not have as much energy or desire to tackle those projects in your spare time.
- 11y ago
im_down_w_otp 11y ago
> "Job interviews are difficult by design." In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace. Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology, and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team) capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that organization's constraints are.
- maerF0x0 11y ago
  Would you, kindly, start us off with whichever pieces are best for a company to implement/utilize in interviews?
  - im_down_w_otp 11y ago
    Well, a good first place to start is to survey the various profile models that exist and figure out which one you can get most comfortable using/assessing. http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm I personally use OCEAN because I'm most comfortable with its scaffolding and applying it via field testing. Then move on to how those models can be tracked/verified through neurological study. Dario Nardi @ UCLA is probably the most "renowned" researcher in this field, though there are many more.
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xvolter 11y ago
I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best, but it's important to be honest about your capabilities. I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well, but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of any of them. From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.
- kbart 11y ago
  "if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions." That's not true unless you work with very narrow technology or single framework. For example, good luck trying to remember all these POSIX API functions. I don't even try to remember mundane things by heart, because it takes a precious and very limited resource (brain memory) for a very small gain (few seconds saved that would cost to look it up).
hotcool 11y ago
My comments on HN get shadowbanned for no discernable reason. Does that count?
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  HN has shadowban?
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    Sort of. There is a mechanism to "kill" a user's posts; these are posts that get flagged "[dead]". A logged-in user with showdead checked in their profile can still see them, though. In fact, as of several months ago users can "vouch" for dead posts that should not be dead.
  - hotcool 11y ago
    Comments are shadowbanned too. Just log off on your account and then check your comments and submissions. Are they still all there?
tlogan 11y ago
I have bootstrapped startup and I was rejected by at least 380 companies. Ok I'm not talking about hiring but about sales pitches (with demos and what not). So again if you are looking for a job, think as salesman. And in sales rejections are part of life.
leoc 11y ago
Why not show the questions to the candidates say 45 or 60 minutes in advance of the whiteboard session itself, and let them take notes on pencil and paper in an examination-hall like environment during that interval? Even without Internet access it would still be a lot closer to a realistic test of skill at normal software development activities than a set of surprise questions. If you pipeline the candidates it shouldn't add too much time. Please excuse my ignorance if this is something which is already being done, or has already been tried and given up on.
colordrops 11y ago
Anyone who is a great engineer shouldn't need to go through 38 interviews to get a position. Something is amiss here. Perhaps he has flaws outside of his supposedly amazing coding abilities.
chvid 11y ago
This is just an ad for hackerrank. And yes; it is hard to find a job in Silicon Valley if you are sitting in Kazhakstan and need a visa too. Duh.
- chvid 11y ago
  And honestly; don't spend you time practicing silly brain teasers and programming quiz questions. Write meaningful software that you into production.
  - stuxnet79 11y ago
    I've been struggling with this issue for months. I really want to be hired by Microsoft, Amazon or Google, but I feel like the time required to prepare for the inevitable "hazing" would be better served exploring new technologies and creating new software.
karterk 11y ago
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment. Ironically, HackerRank itself is a part of this problem. All of those are true for HackerRank coding challenges. As another commenter has pointed out here, HackerRank (and other coding test platforms) want to commoditize the hiring process, but in a way that ensures that candidates are the ones who are doing the all the work. The companies just don't want to spend any time in the interviewing process. It's no wonder that so many companies are struggling to hire good engineers. If you as a company throw me an online coding challenge as the first interaction, you can be rest assured that you won't be hiring from me again (and many others).
- TranquilMarmot 11y ago
  My favorite interviews have been ones that started with the company giving me a choice between a few small programming projects. They usually let you do it in your own time, over a week or so. When you turn it in, they can see how cleanly you write code, how careful you are about edge cases, whether or not you write unit tests, etc. etc. Of course, then they call you in to their office and...... give you a whiteboard interview that lasts 5 hours.
sandworm101 11y ago
Lol, 38. Only 38. In today's job market one should expect rejections from dozens, potentially hundreds of companies. With hundreds of qualified people apply for each job (thank you electronic CVs) 99+% of applications, of interviews, result in a rejection. It's the new normal. The days of interviewing only a handful of people are long over. Nobody should take it personally.
strongcrypto 11y ago
When I was first applying for internships (as a college junior with sort-of-interesting projects on my resume but no real experience) I think I applied to 75 positions, heard back from maybe 20 and got to the first round at 5 or 6 (including code challenges). The 6% return rate (application to interview) wasn't exactly encouraging. I made a habit of working hard on each application, sending it out and then immediately assuming that I'd been rejected, putting me right back in that stressful place I'd been before. Being able to leverage that stress into something productive was huge, I'd wake up early and spend my mornings working on cover letters (useless) and researching companies, and eventually took myself across the city to crash another University's career fair to try and meet a recruiter from my then-dream-company (one I'd applied to online months before and never heard back from). That turned out to be one of two offers I got and where I spent my summer. Keeping up a grind on applications and not getting discouraged is huge, getting into the mindset of "constantly apply until I'm employed, don't assume anything will work out" was probably the real reason I got the job I did.
accidc 11y ago
There have been a few articles on the hiring/interviewing practices. As someone who has not worked/interviewed in a startup, I have a few rhetorical yet sincere questions: Does every startup implement their own algorithms etc. from scratch. Isn't it the reason why we have libraries? I thought most software was mostly glue/crud. Do engineers at startup only code? Do they never talk to customers or need to clarify requirements or work on timelines or deal with scope creep, since it seems that these skills aren't evaluated at interviews. If the answer to these questions is what I think it should be, to what end do we have this dog and pony show?
accidc 11y ago
A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and those can be done outside of a startup. Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know. I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.) All of the above is opinion.
innocentoldguy 11y ago
I've come to the point where I walk out of interviews that involve whiteboard questions. I have conducted my fair share of them, and I have been on the interviewee side as well, and in no situation have I ever found any modicum of value in a whiteboard question. They are a complete waste of everyone's time, and to me, they are the hallmark of an incompetent interviewer/manager (and yes, I felt that way about myself back when I used them). There are plenty of companies out there who agree that whiteboard questions are ridiculous, and I'd rather work for one of them.
known 11y ago
Quiz != Interview
known 11y ago
Rejection massively reduces IQ http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051 http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051
known 11y ago
I celebrate my failures
dropit_sphere 11y ago
My current position offered $X to do a pilot project. They then turned me down---and later called me back when the candidate they chose didn't work out. I took the position. Companies that want to hire, will hire. Companies that think, "Oh, it'd be nice to hire Jeff Dean maybe" won't hire.
rvivek 11y ago
Great discussion! HackerRank founder here - in-case anyone would like to ask questions about what we have seen in different hiring practices.
collyw 11y ago
"Even though algorithmic challenges aren’t really used on the job much in production, it’s still really important to keep revisiting your fundamentals. It’s just like a muscle–if you don’t train it, it’ll become weak." So we are testing for stuff that no one actually uses in the job. We are testing for those that have time to practice for interview tests·
leed25d 11y ago
I was laid off from my job as a Python programmer in San Francisco on 07AUG2015. It took me 4 1/2 months to find another job working remotely as a Python programmer. I did not keep an accurate record of the number of resumes that I sent out, but I archived 110 cover letters during that time. I would bet that I probably sent out about 150 resumes. I had scores of phone interviews and a dozen to fifteen in-person interviews a few of which ended abruptly. I will turn 69 years old in October 2016.

247 points by rvivek 11y ago

"I got into the final interview for an extremely high-growth human resources startup. That was exciting, and I really thought I was going to get an offer. But, eventually, the last round of the interview was super hard. I just failed." Been through this too many times.

exabrial 11y ago

Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.

ideal322 11y ago
Yes! Don't settle for the wrong culture, and pretend to be someone you are not.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
EricScottTaylor 11y ago
Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two reasons: (1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that. (2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes today deal with culture fit at the end, but should it be item 1 and then coding skill item 2?
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  This comment doesn't appear at all troll-like -- not sure why it was flagged.
- busterarm 11y ago
  Given the trend I'm starting to see in my peer group of (non-asian) minority developers having difficulty finding work at their skill level or with appropriate compensation combined with the number of white developers I know who get turned down and told things "well, you just don't look like a developer" because they aren't frat-bro/hipster enough, I think that matching culture fit at the end instead of the beginning is (consciously or unconsciously) because people don't want to get sued. You can always say that some other candidate was 'objectively better' if you bring everyone in and give them a bunch of arbitrary challenges to complete.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Except when the person you don't really want is objectively best at your arbitrary challenges. Then you just send that person home and pretend they didn't exist, apparently. If I wanted to make suing companies my job, I would have been a lawyer. I'm not going to sue you, even if you deserve it. It takes too much effort. What you should really be afraid of is me posting such a negative interview report on Glassdoor that you start having trouble finding candidates who want to talk to you, and then going to interview with your competitors.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    > (e.g. you're a big open source shop, are they an advocate?). After reading this a few times I think you meant to say "you're a big open-source advocate; are they an open-source shop?" or something similar.
    - busterarm 11y ago
      Huh?
      - 11y ago

kafkaesq 11y ago

So, how did you get to where you are today? I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college. Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. But that's about it. [1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take). And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze. EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.

logfromblammo 11y ago
If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other people put in them. And I'd guess that a good portion of interviewers are completely unaware that non-athletic Olympiad competitions exist. And anecdotally, it seems like tech interviewers wouldn't believe you could code your way out of a paper bag even if you walked into the interview over rose petals thrown on the floor by Kernighan and the ghost of Ritchie. I've had plenty of them remark "you are the only candidate that has answered that question correctly" and then never speak to me again. It really makes me wonder what the point of the technical portion of the interview really is. I have had only one interview where the interviewer actually cut short a technical screen because "clearly, you know your stuff". But no offer there, either.

13of40 11y ago

> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment. Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves: Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and say "Hey, I'm not really good at whiteboard coding. Do you mind if I write the code on my laptop here?"

pklausler 11y ago
If your interviewer really dings you for the appearance of your scrawled code on the wall, they're being self-defeatingly stupid and you'd probably be happier working with other people. I do lots of tech interviews, and I always make it clear that I don't care how pretty the ink looks. I stick with the whiteboard because it's the best way for candidates to explain their analyses and algorithms before they write the code.
- craigyk 11y ago
  My Google interview in 2008, one guy asked me to write a binary tree structure and implementations of depth and breadth-first search (maybe also balanced insert?) on the whiteboard in C, which I blew through in no time. He then immediately said it was wrong and let me wither for a few minutes trying to figure out what the problem was before pointing out I forgot a semicolon.
  - pklausler 11y ago
    I hated seeing that kind of crap when I was on the hiring committee, and I think that it's less likely that you'd run into it today.
    - craigyk 11y ago
      Thanks, it does sound like things have changed. I probably would have been a better hire back then than today though. I was younger, cheaper, and had an almost OCD drive to learn everything CS since I had a complex about getting into the game a little late. Today I feel like I wouldn't be able to maintain my current lifestyle with a wife, two kids, two dogs in the bay area. Occasionally I think about it though...

sotojuan 11y ago

Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and linked list operations as well as their complexities. Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a bug.

fapjacks 11y ago
Yep! I have been interviewing for fun for the last few years (averaging maybe one or two interviews every few months), and I've seen all kinds of stuff. Way too many whiteboards. In fact, even after all these years, whiteboards still make me nervous, and basically makes it impossible to get into flow, or have a reasonably nice mindset for solving problems. And if I do this for fun, you can bet that people who depend on those interviews for their livelihood aren't feeling much better. I think it's a really stupid way to interview. Anyways, I agree with you: The best and funnest interviews -- and therefore the interviews I feel most comfortable (and therefore able to really show what I know) -- are the pair programming interviews. You build a special rapport with a single developer on the team, who gets a really good idea of the kind of coder you are. It's like a nice, calm conversation about technology.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  nice hobby you got there ;) What do you if the company wants to hire you?
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Obviously, if the offer is better that what you already have, you seriously consider accepting it. Otherwise, you tell them that their offer is not competitive, and maybe the next monkey to come along chasing their peanut can benefit from your feedback.
- deleted 11y ago

tomnikl 11y ago

Excelling in an online programming competitions sounds like a fun, exciting way to showcase myself to multiple companies all at once. Way better than white boards, for sure!

kbart 11y ago
That might sound "cool" if you are straight out of a college with plenty of time to spare, no full-time job and family to support. Otherwise, it's not so compelling.

odinduty 11y ago

What do you do to be turned down by 38 companies? Do you turn on your laptop and it's running Windows?

6stringmerc 11y ago

Some really great advice within that forms a foundation for the narrative. I can really appreciate the diligence and apparent 'no hard feelings' kind of pragmatism. I especially liked the closing part: >If you fail 10 interviews in a row, go for the 11th interview. But take a look at all the variables, and see if there’s anything you can do differently to improve. Take the pressure off, and work through problems routinely to keep your muscle memory in shape. That reminds me of being in 'game shape' as I call it for playing and soloing - standing around thinking about notes to play doesn't come off nearly as fluid as being so practiced as to get into the groove and run with it. Good parallel. Nicely framed conversation, glad to read it.

civilian 11y ago
Yeah. When I was job hunting ~3 years ago I knew I was going to have to do a lot of whiteboarding problems. I only had two 2 years of coding experience, and for the last six months I had been freelancing, which doesn't often encourage algorithms. I was working through "Cracking the Coding interview" and "programming interview exposed" but I was worried. So I sent an email to everyone in my coworking space that I'd put a six pack in the community fridge for every person who did a mock whiteboard interview with me. Some of them came with their own problems, some of them picked problems from websites or the books that I hadn't done yet. Some of them were doing it as a favor, and some of them wanted to practice interviewing people. I got five mock interviews over a week, many of them with strangers. Best 40 bucks I ever spent. (I nailed the next real interview I had and got a job offer.)
- kilroy123 11y ago
  That's a damn good idea. I completely agree, a job interview is something that you need to practice to be good at. Just doing code exercises isn't enough. Having someone do a real interview is the best way.
- wkimeria 11y ago
  This is a brilliant idea

ballpark 11y ago

Does anyone have any insight on this reflecting on a higher supply of devs and/or lower demand of employers (bad market for developers)?

bgribble 11y ago

There's too much missing information in this article. In today's environment, a qualified programmer with the background this guy appears to have should get offers at a much higher percentage of companies.. IF everything is on the level: decent communications skills, applying for jobs whose requirements match skills, realistic compensation expectations, and (my guess in this case) already authorized to work in the US. I would expect this low hit rate from a qualified individual looking for a job AND an H1B sponsor.

kafkaesq 11y ago
The H1B factor certainly has weight - I can imagine it leading to a 2x factor in his rejection rate. But not the 5x rate he's apparently had to suffer through.
- basseq 11y ago
  I would also have to imagine most of the H1B fallout is at the initial screen, not after multiple interview rounds.

NTDF9 11y ago

I read the article as: "It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without his pay)" I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers. Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not qualified for the job of interviewing.

edabobojr 11y ago
I have done this and have done interviews I did most of the questioning as the interviewee. In my experience, this approach turns off a lot of people.
- NTDF9 11y ago
  The point is: If the candidate asks a relevant question that the interviewer cannot solve in time, the company failed at its own game because the candidate proved that he/she is better qualified than the company's representative, given the rules of the game. What excuse does the company have for not hiring the candidate now?
  - true_religion 11y ago
    The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed by may be less experienced than you in a particular technology.
    - NTDF9 11y ago
      > The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. In that case, these companies should be ok with registering their names in an online registry saying they rejected a candidate for someone who is better qualified. For the following 6 months, they cannot complain that that cannot find qualified candidates. > Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed by may be less experienced than you in a particular technology. So the interviewer should be asked a question by the candidate in that particular technology and if they can't answer, the candidate should be hired.

dsmithatx 11y ago

One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO interviews. I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills. Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire. You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay motivated as months start to go by.

vonmoltke 11y ago
Eh, I can't pay for interviews right now. Maybe I'm just applying to the wrong jobs, but I feel like you have to be a part-time marketer in this industry right now to get interviews for jobs wherein you do not match the company's laundry list.
speeder 11y ago
I am in Brazil. I graduated in 2009, never had a legal job (according to Brazillian laws). Also I too sent thousands of resumes since then, and since 2009 I got like 6 or 7 interviews in total (some that landed me a contract instead of a job...)
dominotw 11y ago
>Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. I've noticed that many employers have copied google and have stated to interview with as many people as possible. Lots of them take pride in their acceptance ratio, some even advertising that on their careers page. Def a sign of times but might not in a way that you are suggesting. Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily.
- 11y ago

trhway 11y ago

During the last 10 years i always go for a solution, just a coded solution (and if you do it quickly, or even while doing it, you can frequently improve upon it significantly). Doesn't work for Google/FB - they probably want the elegant super-performant solution that i usually come up with in the next few minutes after the interview is finished :) - yet it works just fine with the rest of the companies. Hint: almost always start with putting the input into a tree, and if tree is completely out of question - into hashmap :)

VikingCoder 11y ago

I realized something a while back... My entire career, if I've made it to an on-site interview, I've only had one company NOT make me a job offer. That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag, okay? Immediately after I sucked at that, they walked me out the door. It was emberasing. Two steps out the door, and my brain is filled with POP AND PUSH! AAAH! I knew the answer, I've KNOWN the answer since I was about 14. No joke. So, I've been on that side of the "every now and then people interview poorly" thing. And I can only blame the jet lag, because I KNOW the ridiculously easy answer to that question. Here's the funny thing - if I would have been offered a job there, I would have accepted. And the company went on to crash and burn in terrible fashion. And two months later, I got a job at a MUCH better company. TL;DR: I've only failed at one interview, and it was arguably the best thing that ever happened to me. (Life is weird!)

jblow 11y ago
Except ... reversing a singularly-linked list recursively is trivial. If you can't do this, you are not qualified at basic manipulation of data structures and you should fail the interview if they want someone with basic competence in data structure manipulation. Sorry but that is how it is.
- laichzeit0 11y ago
  Because so often we are faced with having to implement singularly linked-list reversal. I wouldn't even bother implementing this myself in the real world and I have a degree in computer science and 10 years experience doing dev work. I would type the problem into google, survey a couple of solutions and pick one I liked. Done. Next problem please. This is pedantic crap that is a waste of anyone's time. I can't believe people actually get asked shit like this at interviews? Well, at least none that I've ever been to. They look at my resume "Oh, CS degree at well respected University." and you can deduce that this person can probably work out trivial crap like this or look it up in a book or the internet. At most ask them for their academic records. What a complete waste of time in an interview..

blklane 11y ago

I applied to around 100 jobs over the course of 9 months when starting to learn how to program. For the startups I would get to a phone screen and potentially a technical challenge then be turned away. At the job I am at now, was contacted by CTO online, and had phoned/on-site/started within 5 days of initial contact. I've seen a bunch of blog posts recently about some companies priding themselves on who they turn down versus who they accept and I feel that is one of the bigger problems we have as an industry in hiring.

p4wnc6 11y ago

Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences. It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees. Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power is extremely damaged. For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and actors who are "offer only" -- they won't respond to your inquiry about hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate clearly. Ridiculous. Employers often say they want to "see how you think" -- when they say this, it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success. Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very dysfunctional boss. I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in denial about it). This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.

extrapickles 11y ago
Full-stack developers should be generalist in nature to make sure the issues that cross domains (front/backend, etc) are taken care of. Also, they can plug any gaps in the development that crop up from time to time (eg: someone on vacation, or next feature needs more back-end people). The downside is that they will not be spectacular or as quick at any one domain. Basically, a full-stack developers specialization is to be flexible and have knowledge and experience in working the entire application stack. Another way of thinking about it is that they are like a general practitioner doctor/dentist, while they generally don't do surgery, they can refer you to the correct specialists who can and take care of any minor/common ailments. This is also why you don't want an entire team of them is that they don't go into depth in any domain. I don't doubt that the current full-stack education path does a poor job of education on issues that specifically cross domains or when a task is better suited to a specialist.

bargl 11y ago

So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple) which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people who couldn't do the most basic things. I think one of the most important aspects of hiring is getting potential candidates in front of the team and letting them talk to the team, to see how they handle questions from other developers (and yes there is always that guy who tries to make the candidate look dumb for some reason). The most telling question I typically ask when interviewing is what have you worked on recently, why is it cool, and how have you added to the project. This gives the candidate a great opportunity to dive into their own experience. This way if they didn't answer my questions well it will give me some idea of their background. Oh hey this guy didn't know basic Javascript stuff off the top of his head because he's been working on the back end for 3 years. That's cool. I'd personally take someone who can talk to me about practical design decisions they've made on a project rather than knowing how to solve basic algorithms. If you graduated 8 years ago and you STILL know exactly how to implement a Binary Search Tree without needing a 10 min refresher then you are a better man than I am. I forgot that about 3 years ago. I don't mind that we expect developers to study for a tech screen but how much does that really tell us about them? They can study and know the basics, but have the ever worked on a large scale project where you have to make something work now vs, having time to do a perfect implementation? Where is their ability to tell their manager no, or their ability to weight COTS vs Custom Build? Sorry this touched a nerve, I just had a bad interview with a company. The tech screen was outside my IDE, couldn't copy paste (which sucks when you want to move a line or do some refactoring) and it was on topics I haven't looked at in 4 years. Luckily I'd spent 15+ hours studying so one of the questions was a gimme.

mcv 11y ago
Still my favourite interview process was a small coding assignment and presenting the resulting code in front of the devs, who got to ask questions about it and then vote in private on whether to hire. Everybody got the same assignment, everybody solves it in a different way, and everybody makes mistakes[0], but how they handle that and explain it tells a lot about how they are as a programmer. [0] Except for one who was insanely thorough and still apologized for really minor imperfections in his code. He got the most enthusiastic votes ever.

kinai 11y ago

"I got turned down by 38 companies, nobody wants to pay me 100k mimimimi" Murican Coders of the 21st Century at the biggest whiners ever...And honestly if you fail to get a job within 3-4 interviews then you are a) doing it wrong or b) applying for the wrong jobs.

mstrem 11y ago
I somewhat agree with your statement. Mainly because I personally put a LOT of effort into each job application and I would not be able to apply to more than 2-3 jobs a week. Takes time to find the right company, do research, make a perfect personalized application etc. As a result to that pretty much all applications I have ever made have at the very least gotten back to me. I would never be able to apply to 38 jobs in 2 months. I feel like a lot of copy paste went on and that sets you to a negative start.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  Most applications are quizzes + resume. There is only one way of applying for it. I got turned down by over 100 companies before I even had an interview. The process is really random.
  - mstrem 11y ago
    Right, I personally literally change my resume based on each application focusing on the experience which I think would be most relevant for each position. I also change the introduction sentence and when I respond to open ended questions (in the quizzes) I always refer back to the company and relevant examples. Cover letter, when requested, also takes me a lot of time to write up.
    - lqdc13 11y ago
      I did that too. Perhaps it's a skill of some sort. The only thing that worked was making a site that went viral. Then I got like 20 unsolicited messages/requests for an interview.
- 11y ago

tn13 11y ago

Recently came across an example where someone entirely different person went for the interview answered, cleared but the another person reported for the job. I must say I am extremely disappointed at bay area job scene.

deftnerd 11y ago

The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well. Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set. It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare time for personal projects. In essence, a day job of simple Linux administration may pay the bills, while in my spare time I'm working on large infrastructure automation, deep learning, developing new blockchain technologies, etc. I don't know how sustainable this is. I have three children and a wife, and I'm getting tired of only being paid for work I can do while asleep just because I'm afraid of rejection. Any suggestions on how to "toughen up"?

ars 11y ago
Have someone else apply for you. Your wife probably. You find the job and tell her you are too nervous to apply, let her know it's OK to apply for you. Sometime seceding that bit of control is enough to get over the problem - especially when you have self awareness of it. Once she applies you will probably feel an urge to take over and continue the conversation with the employer - so do that, and take it to an interview. (Or have her do it for you, while you hover in the background looking worried and telling her what to say :) It's kind of a way of forcing/tricking yourself. (Hopefully she doesn't say something like "man up and do it", ask her not to if you think she might, tell her you need her to help you with this.)
- labster 11y ago
  How do I apply for a wife? I'm pretty nervous and I get rejected a lot. Honestly getting a job is way easier.
xirdstl 11y ago
Do you like working on those things in your spare time? The flip side of what you seek is that with a more challenging day job, you may not have as much energy or desire to tackle those projects in your spare time.
11y ago

im_down_w_otp 11y ago

> "Job interviews are difficult by design." In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace. Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology, and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team) capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that organization's constraints are.

maerF0x0 11y ago
Would you, kindly, start us off with whichever pieces are best for a company to implement/utilize in interviews?
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  Well, a good first place to start is to survey the various profile models that exist and figure out which one you can get most comfortable using/assessing. http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm I personally use OCEAN because I'm most comfortable with its scaffolding and applying it via field testing. Then move on to how those models can be tracked/verified through neurological study. Dario Nardi @ UCLA is probably the most "renowned" researcher in this field, though there are many more.

deleted 11y ago

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xvolter 11y ago

I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best, but it's important to be honest about your capabilities. I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well, but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of any of them. From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.

kbart 11y ago
"if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions." That's not true unless you work with very narrow technology or single framework. For example, good luck trying to remember all these POSIX API functions. I don't even try to remember mundane things by heart, because it takes a precious and very limited resource (brain memory) for a very small gain (few seconds saved that would cost to look it up).

hotcool 11y ago

My comments on HN get shadowbanned for no discernable reason. Does that count?

kelukelugames 11y ago
HN has shadowban?
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Sort of. There is a mechanism to "kill" a user's posts; these are posts that get flagged "[dead]". A logged-in user with showdead checked in their profile can still see them, though. In fact, as of several months ago users can "vouch" for dead posts that should not be dead.
- hotcool 11y ago
  Comments are shadowbanned too. Just log off on your account and then check your comments and submissions. Are they still all there?

tlogan 11y ago

I have bootstrapped startup and I was rejected by at least 380 companies. Ok I'm not talking about hiring but about sales pitches (with demos and what not). So again if you are looking for a job, think as salesman. And in sales rejections are part of life.

leoc 11y ago

Why not show the questions to the candidates say 45 or 60 minutes in advance of the whiteboard session itself, and let them take notes on pencil and paper in an examination-hall like environment during that interval? Even without Internet access it would still be a lot closer to a realistic test of skill at normal software development activities than a set of surprise questions. If you pipeline the candidates it shouldn't add too much time. Please excuse my ignorance if this is something which is already being done, or has already been tried and given up on.

colordrops 11y ago

Anyone who is a great engineer shouldn't need to go through 38 interviews to get a position. Something is amiss here. Perhaps he has flaws outside of his supposedly amazing coding abilities.

chvid 11y ago

This is just an ad for hackerrank. And yes; it is hard to find a job in Silicon Valley if you are sitting in Kazhakstan and need a visa too. Duh.

chvid 11y ago
And honestly; don't spend you time practicing silly brain teasers and programming quiz questions. Write meaningful software that you into production.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  I've been struggling with this issue for months. I really want to be hired by Microsoft, Amazon or Google, but I feel like the time required to prepare for the inevitable "hazing" would be better served exploring new technologies and creating new software.

karterk 11y ago

> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment. Ironically, HackerRank itself is a part of this problem. All of those are true for HackerRank coding challenges. As another commenter has pointed out here, HackerRank (and other coding test platforms) want to commoditize the hiring process, but in a way that ensures that candidates are the ones who are doing the all the work. The companies just don't want to spend any time in the interviewing process. It's no wonder that so many companies are struggling to hire good engineers. If you as a company throw me an online coding challenge as the first interaction, you can be rest assured that you won't be hiring from me again (and many others).

TranquilMarmot 11y ago
My favorite interviews have been ones that started with the company giving me a choice between a few small programming projects. They usually let you do it in your own time, over a week or so. When you turn it in, they can see how cleanly you write code, how careful you are about edge cases, whether or not you write unit tests, etc. etc. Of course, then they call you in to their office and...... give you a whiteboard interview that lasts 5 hours.

sandworm101 11y ago

Lol, 38. Only 38. In today's job market one should expect rejections from dozens, potentially hundreds of companies. With hundreds of qualified people apply for each job (thank you electronic CVs) 99+% of applications, of interviews, result in a rejection. It's the new normal. The days of interviewing only a handful of people are long over. Nobody should take it personally.

strongcrypto 11y ago

When I was first applying for internships (as a college junior with sort-of-interesting projects on my resume but no real experience) I think I applied to 75 positions, heard back from maybe 20 and got to the first round at 5 or 6 (including code challenges). The 6% return rate (application to interview) wasn't exactly encouraging. I made a habit of working hard on each application, sending it out and then immediately assuming that I'd been rejected, putting me right back in that stressful place I'd been before. Being able to leverage that stress into something productive was huge, I'd wake up early and spend my mornings working on cover letters (useless) and researching companies, and eventually took myself across the city to crash another University's career fair to try and meet a recruiter from my then-dream-company (one I'd applied to online months before and never heard back from). That turned out to be one of two offers I got and where I spent my summer. Keeping up a grind on applications and not getting discouraged is huge, getting into the mindset of "constantly apply until I'm employed, don't assume anything will work out" was probably the real reason I got the job I did.

accidc 11y ago

There have been a few articles on the hiring/interviewing practices. As someone who has not worked/interviewed in a startup, I have a few rhetorical yet sincere questions: Does every startup implement their own algorithms etc. from scratch. Isn't it the reason why we have libraries? I thought most software was mostly glue/crud. Do engineers at startup only code? Do they never talk to customers or need to clarify requirements or work on timelines or deal with scope creep, since it seems that these skills aren't evaluated at interviews. If the answer to these questions is what I think it should be, to what end do we have this dog and pony show?

accidc 11y ago

A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and those can be done outside of a startup. Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know. I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.) All of the above is opinion.

innocentoldguy 11y ago

I've come to the point where I walk out of interviews that involve whiteboard questions. I have conducted my fair share of them, and I have been on the interviewee side as well, and in no situation have I ever found any modicum of value in a whiteboard question. They are a complete waste of everyone's time, and to me, they are the hallmark of an incompetent interviewer/manager (and yes, I felt that way about myself back when I used them). There are plenty of companies out there who agree that whiteboard questions are ridiculous, and I'd rather work for one of them.

known 11y ago

Quiz != Interview

known 11y ago

Rejection massively reduces IQ http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051 http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051

known 11y ago

I celebrate my failures

dropit_sphere 11y ago

My current position offered $X to do a pilot project. They then turned me down---and later called me back when the candidate they chose didn't work out. I took the position. Companies that want to hire, will hire. Companies that think, "Oh, it'd be nice to hire Jeff Dean maybe" won't hire.

rvivek 11y ago

Great discussion! HackerRank founder here - in-case anyone would like to ask questions about what we have seen in different hiring practices.

collyw 11y ago

"Even though algorithmic challenges aren’t really used on the job much in production, it’s still really important to keep revisiting your fundamentals. It’s just like a muscle–if you don’t train it, it’ll become weak." So we are testing for stuff that no one actually uses in the job. We are testing for those that have time to practice for interview tests·

leed25d 11y ago

I was laid off from my job as a Python programmer in San Francisco on 07AUG2015. It took me 4 1/2 months to find another job working remotely as a Python programmer. I did not keep an accurate record of the number of resumes that I sent out, but I archived 110 cover letters during that time. I would bet that I probably sent out about 150 resumes. I had scores of phone interviews and a dozen to fifteen in-person interviews a few of which ended abruptly. I will turn 69 years old in October 2016.