4 ms·

This is totally crazy to me. Why should somebody lose about a month of his life to prepare for the interview? Why should the interview need preparation at all?

This is totally crazy to me. Why should somebody lose about a month of his life to prepare for the interview? Why should the interview need preparation at all? The whole point of the interview is lost if you read books and prepare for that since you are not tested for your real on-the-work skills but you are tested for your interview-answering skills, memorizing trick questions and solving toy problems! I think that this whole interview business is bad for both the candidate and the company (that would hire an interview cruncher instead of somebody who can produce work). Of course it is good for everybody else that promotes this kind of thinking (hr people, interview books, interview coaches, recruiters etc). The whole process as described in this article is offensive to me. I don't want to prove myself by answering trick questions to people whose only skill is asking them! It's too bad we have dropped to that point. (Please forgive my English - not my native language)

linkregister 10y ago
I didn't get the impression that the author took a month off work to do the interview prep; judging by the work load (3 exercises per chapter, a few STAR-format essays), it looks like the amount of time one would have after work and on weekends. For someone working full-time it would be grueling, but no more grueling than the workload in an after-work Master's degree program. I view the interview prep ritual as a necessary evil. Some companies prefer to give a take-home coding assignment. Amazon, Facebook, and the rest use this method to optimize for their interviewers' time. I think that "interview crunchers" DO correlate to developers who can produce work. I emphasize that many fantastic developers who produce great work perform badly in interviews. patio11 and tptacek address this with their recruiting startup, Starfighter. Your English was flawless.
- spapas82 10y ago
  Thank you for your last comment :) I'm not sure about how much time is lost for preparation to the interview in the general case (however I saw people recommending whole books in other comments) but the real issue is that even one day lost to preparing for something that you shouldn't prepare for is way too much! I don't agree in comparing the interview preparation with the work for the Master's degree because, although both will lead somewhere if successful (to a Job offer or to a Master), for the Master you will learn something that is useful or you will advance as a human being (education) while, the preparation for the interview is just that: Preparing for an interview! Why should anybody waste his time like that? I'm not really sure that people that are good at interviews are also good at producing work - this depends on various factors (i.e the interview process - I remember to my horror some legendary interview questions of the type "why is a manhole round"). I believe that such big companies could invent various other, much better methods to hire their stuff. For example after the candidate successfully passes a quick interview with some technical questions (but without any needed preparation) hire them temporarily for some months and evaluate them at the end.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    I hear the temporary-work evaluation advocated on HN frequently, but this is a viewpoint almost exclusively held by junior developers. Those with families would find it difficult to accept the risk they may be terminated after the eval period. Senior developers aren't going to quit their job on the hope they won't be terminated at the end of the evaluation period. Job searching from scratch takes time and is stressful. Companies aren't going to spend half of the eval period training a new hire only to realize many of them aren't good enough (since they didn't screen them in a rigorous interview process). The risks don't align with anyone's incentives except for new grads, who have much less to lose. I hear the argument, "if you know you're good, you'll make it," but if the hiring decision is pushed out to the end of an evaluation period, then the same arbitrary factors that lead interviewers to decline good candidates will also influence the long-eval period method as well. Case in point: Google Finance hires new grads almost exclusively from their pool of interns. Most don't make it, though many are talented. For a student, taking an internship is a no-risk move, since they will be returning to classes anyway. I can't a rational developer with a family accepting a similar arrangement: where the odds suggest she won't make it.
    - spapas82 10y ago
      Agreed to your argument about the temporary-evaluation job being only possible for a junior developer and not to somebody that already has a job. However you should also add to them all the cases of senior developers without jobs (yes, such cases do exist) -- a temporary evaluation job is better than nothing. Senior developers that have jobs won't take the risk of leaving their current job and going to an evaluating position. But these people also shouldn't be interviewed -- since they have already have jobs, a talk about their previous projects and work should be enough for anybody to decide if they are good enough.
      - linkregister 10y ago
        Excellent point. Thanks for reminding me of this very important demographic.
- optimusclimb 10y ago
  > it looks like the amount of time one would have after work and on weekends. If you're single with no children and no hobbies.
CobrastanJorji 10y ago
I agree with you on the idea that is definitely seems crazy to ask for this sort of prep from job seekers, and I also agree that such things do not do a great job of directly testing real world work skills. However, I've worked for a couple of companies that had this sort of interview process, and I've worked for a couple of companies that did not, and I found that the quality of engineers working for the former is substantially higher than the quality of engineers working for the latter. Correlation, of course, is not causation, and there are many other reasons this could be the case. It could be that the sort of companies that tend to attract good engineers happen to all have a cargo cult-like obsession to this interview pattern, and good engineers actively seek it out. Or it could be that the sort of person who does well on these types of questions tend to also do well at programming by chance. Perhaps you could get nearly as good results by just asking candidates to, I dunno, build the tallest structure out of straws that they can manage in fifteen minutes. Whatever the reason that it works, in my experience it definitely seems to. I'd love to hear suggestions for an alternative solution, though. Good ideas I've heard in the past involve things like pair programming on a real assignment for a day, although it's sometimes difficult to scale that to the number of interviews these companies need to conduct.
- spapas82 10y ago
  There are lots of companies that don't ask any technical questions in interviews - these will definitely make many bad hires, that's true - there are lots of "software engineers" that just can't program anything. I'm not against the idea of asking technical stuff in an interview or asking somebody to scratch you a small program. What I'm against is this whole business of needing to prepare for many hour/days just to go to an interview. For the good-engineer going to companies with rigorous interview process argument, a really good engineer with high confidence then definitely wouldn't start reading books about how to answer interview questions and tricks but go to the interview without any preparation. However I'm not sure if he'd be better than a worse engineer that took the time to prepare for the interview...
taurath 10y ago
Here's what they're testing with all the abstract/book knowledge - whether you can properly grow and understand the tradeoffs of common lower level patterns. Having no knowledge as to why say a hash table would be preferred over a binary search tree will lead to a person using one thing without understanding why. Yes, in general you'll be using the same few heuristics probably 90-95% of the time in real programming. In the cases in which you really need to optimize for max performance (because its company $$ on the line) or max consistency in performance (because its company/service reputation on the line) its worth it to find people who can do that. The cost savings of running just a few servers vs many is large, or the product could not be viable if it doesn't perform to a users expectations (see: anything in gaming). For your average application development shop using tools provided, you can do very well by just applying heuristic techniques towards your domain. If you want to get a real competitive advantage in technology, you need to be able to develop systems that are optimized to a point. Granted, in Jr. or normal dev roles you will not be making many of these decisions - often a more senior or prinicple engineer will be working on the mission critical stuff.

linkregister 10y ago

I didn't get the impression that the author took a month off work to do the interview prep; judging by the work load (3 exercises per chapter, a few STAR-format essays), it looks like the amount of time one would have after work and on weekends. For someone working full-time it would be grueling, but no more grueling than the workload in an after-work Master's degree program. I view the interview prep ritual as a necessary evil. Some companies prefer to give a take-home coding assignment. Amazon, Facebook, and the rest use this method to optimize for their interviewers' time. I think that "interview crunchers" DO correlate to developers who can produce work. I emphasize that many fantastic developers who produce great work perform badly in interviews. patio11 and tptacek address this with their recruiting startup, Starfighter. Your English was flawless.

spapas82 10y ago
Thank you for your last comment :) I'm not sure about how much time is lost for preparation to the interview in the general case (however I saw people recommending whole books in other comments) but the real issue is that even one day lost to preparing for something that you shouldn't prepare for is way too much! I don't agree in comparing the interview preparation with the work for the Master's degree because, although both will lead somewhere if successful (to a Job offer or to a Master), for the Master you will learn something that is useful or you will advance as a human being (education) while, the preparation for the interview is just that: Preparing for an interview! Why should anybody waste his time like that? I'm not really sure that people that are good at interviews are also good at producing work - this depends on various factors (i.e the interview process - I remember to my horror some legendary interview questions of the type "why is a manhole round"). I believe that such big companies could invent various other, much better methods to hire their stuff. For example after the candidate successfully passes a quick interview with some technical questions (but without any needed preparation) hire them temporarily for some months and evaluate them at the end.
- linkregister 10y ago
  I hear the temporary-work evaluation advocated on HN frequently, but this is a viewpoint almost exclusively held by junior developers. Those with families would find it difficult to accept the risk they may be terminated after the eval period. Senior developers aren't going to quit their job on the hope they won't be terminated at the end of the evaluation period. Job searching from scratch takes time and is stressful. Companies aren't going to spend half of the eval period training a new hire only to realize many of them aren't good enough (since they didn't screen them in a rigorous interview process). The risks don't align with anyone's incentives except for new grads, who have much less to lose. I hear the argument, "if you know you're good, you'll make it," but if the hiring decision is pushed out to the end of an evaluation period, then the same arbitrary factors that lead interviewers to decline good candidates will also influence the long-eval period method as well. Case in point: Google Finance hires new grads almost exclusively from their pool of interns. Most don't make it, though many are talented. For a student, taking an internship is a no-risk move, since they will be returning to classes anyway. I can't a rational developer with a family accepting a similar arrangement: where the odds suggest she won't make it.
  - spapas82 10y ago
    Agreed to your argument about the temporary-evaluation job being only possible for a junior developer and not to somebody that already has a job. However you should also add to them all the cases of senior developers without jobs (yes, such cases do exist) -- a temporary evaluation job is better than nothing. Senior developers that have jobs won't take the risk of leaving their current job and going to an evaluating position. But these people also shouldn't be interviewed -- since they have already have jobs, a talk about their previous projects and work should be enough for anybody to decide if they are good enough.
    - linkregister 10y ago
      Excellent point. Thanks for reminding me of this very important demographic.
optimusclimb 10y ago
> it looks like the amount of time one would have after work and on weekends. If you're single with no children and no hobbies.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago

I agree with you on the idea that is definitely seems crazy to ask for this sort of prep from job seekers, and I also agree that such things do not do a great job of directly testing real world work skills. However, I've worked for a couple of companies that had this sort of interview process, and I've worked for a couple of companies that did not, and I found that the quality of engineers working for the former is substantially higher than the quality of engineers working for the latter. Correlation, of course, is not causation, and there are many other reasons this could be the case. It could be that the sort of companies that tend to attract good engineers happen to all have a cargo cult-like obsession to this interview pattern, and good engineers actively seek it out. Or it could be that the sort of person who does well on these types of questions tend to also do well at programming by chance. Perhaps you could get nearly as good results by just asking candidates to, I dunno, build the tallest structure out of straws that they can manage in fifteen minutes. Whatever the reason that it works, in my experience it definitely seems to. I'd love to hear suggestions for an alternative solution, though. Good ideas I've heard in the past involve things like pair programming on a real assignment for a day, although it's sometimes difficult to scale that to the number of interviews these companies need to conduct.

spapas82 10y ago
There are lots of companies that don't ask any technical questions in interviews - these will definitely make many bad hires, that's true - there are lots of "software engineers" that just can't program anything. I'm not against the idea of asking technical stuff in an interview or asking somebody to scratch you a small program. What I'm against is this whole business of needing to prepare for many hour/days just to go to an interview. For the good-engineer going to companies with rigorous interview process argument, a really good engineer with high confidence then definitely wouldn't start reading books about how to answer interview questions and tricks but go to the interview without any preparation. However I'm not sure if he'd be better than a worse engineer that took the time to prepare for the interview...

taurath 10y ago

Here's what they're testing with all the abstract/book knowledge - whether you can properly grow and understand the tradeoffs of common lower level patterns. Having no knowledge as to why say a hash table would be preferred over a binary search tree will lead to a person using one thing without understanding why. Yes, in general you'll be using the same few heuristics probably 90-95% of the time in real programming. In the cases in which you really need to optimize for max performance (because its company $$ on the line) or max consistency in performance (because its company/service reputation on the line) its worth it to find people who can do that. The cost savings of running just a few servers vs many is large, or the product could not be viable if it doesn't perform to a users expectations (see: anything in gaming). For your average application development shop using tools provided, you can do very well by just applying heuristic techniques towards your domain. If you want to get a real competitive advantage in technology, you need to be able to develop systems that are optimized to a point. Granted, in Jr. or normal dev roles you will not be making many of these decisions - often a more senior or prinicple engineer will be working on the mission critical stuff.