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Interviewing is stupid simple. It is your ego moment. You get to sit in a room and talk about yourself. Although you don't control the conversation you can s

Interviewing is stupid simple. It is your ego moment. You get to sit in a room and talk about yourself. Although you don't control the conversation you can steer it in creative enough directions to keep it fun and positive. Maybe if you are a college grad with 0 real life experience then maybe interview prep is necessary... don't know. I could be biased though. The last place I interviewed at they knew who I was, something about my software, and some of my online controversies before I even walked in the door. The best preparation for interviewing at large companies is having a second part-time job somewhere in management. I held my first management position in a part-time job at age 24 and was once a director. I have never held a management position in the primary full-time career, which is a weird inverse of power-distance in some work meetings. Being a parent is also good experience for dealing with people. What they need to provide education on isn't dominating the interview process... but drilling down on the proper information necessary for new candidate retention. I have worked at places that are awesome and really work hard to ensure you are happy and constantly engaged in the work. I have also worked at places that completely suck full of benchwarmers with a million layers of abstractions so that code monkeys can feel a bit more confident. It is helpful to know if you are going to be miserable in the organization. The candidate really does share some of the burden of figuring out if they will be a good fit for the organization, but this is often really hard to interrogate out of the interviewers even for experienced people.

majormajor 10y ago
"Interviewing is stupid simple. It is your ego moment. You get to sit in a room and talk about yourself. Although you don't control the conversation you can steer it in creative enough directions to keep it fun and positive." That would be a nice improvement as a first filter, IMO, but this isn't always the case. For Google, for instance, the very first step might be a 45-minute phone conversation with a bored engineer who just wants you to code up whatever tree-based structure and methods tickle their fancy. They might not even tell you what team they work on, or what they do. They have a script, and they run it from memory, and your experience and past accomplishments are out the window.
- austincheney 10y ago
  Google has the privilege to treat you like an ape, because they know people will take it to work there. "Dance monkey"! If being spanked like a monkey doesn't tickle your fancy then don't interview there. Interview prep isn't going to make that better.
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
    As someone who recently ran the interview gauntlet, the parent comment seems pretty accurate. It matches my experience with interviews at a wide variety of companies.
  - majormajor 10y ago
    Meanwhile, a bunch of non-Google companies think that this must be the right way to do it, so they copy it, and teaching people how to game the system like in the original article give them no reason not to, it just acclimates everyone to playing by stupid rules.
    - austincheney 10y ago
      Then call them out on it during the interview.
      - throwaway18917 10y ago
        Yeah, who needs a job or that pesky /money/.
      - arvinsim 10y ago
        Seriously? Looks like a quick way to get rejected, or at least be regarded negatively.
        austincheney 10y ago
        If you are a afraid of asking valid questions for fear that you will be rejected god help you. It doesn't hurt to simply ask a question. Now I know there are a lot of weak and timid personalities in the world of development, but once you put that blood into the water usually it doesn't take the sharks long to swarm on it. I have never walked away from an interview feeling dejected for asking the interviewer reasonable questions or attempting to qualify their assertions.
sillysaurus3 10y ago
Interviewing is stupid simple. [...] Maybe if you are a college grad with 0 real life experience then maybe interview prep is necessary... don't know. I could be biased though. The last place I interviewed at they knew who I was, something about my software, and some of my online controversies before I even walked in the door. Yes, this is bias. Most candidates aren't being hunted by employers. It's the other way around. It's quite the opposite of "simple." It's a soul-crushing experience of being denied at every interview because you can't think out loud or do whiteboard coding and don't have a social media portfolio presence to fall back on. The only simple part is how simple it is to reject a candidate based on the personal prejudices of just one of the five different interviewers you have to meet with.
- austincheney 10y ago
  > Most candidates aren't being hunted by employers. I call this the talent gap. When you are a newb or completely lack either experience or confidence in your skills life is harder. You have massively increased competition for lower paying jobs filled with more menial tasks. I have been there too. If a candidate doesn't want to be there they will invest in themselves outside the office. I spent as much time as I could writing open source software and language parsers while on military deployments. Most developers I know are frequently hounded by recruiters because the demand for senior developers is stupid ridiculous.
  - danellis 10y ago
    > Most developers I know are frequently hounded by recruiters because the demand for senior developers is stupid ridiculous. Maybe in your bubble. My experience is that very few recruiters are hounding me, because most of them don't know I exist. I don't live or work in a tech hub, I don't work for a famous company, and I haven't published anything. I don't think that's a particularly unusual position to be in. It's absolutely nothing to do with talent or experience, though.
    - netscape101 10y ago
      " I haven't published anything" Don't want to be rude but this is 100% your own fault and problem. What are you doing about this? I have two github profiles with code, I've spoken at conferences and I've got an active linkedin profile(yes I hate linkedin believe me), but this is the art of promoting yourself. If you are not writing open source code or talking on mailing lists or even IRC then how do you expect people to know who you are?

majormajor 10y ago

"Interviewing is stupid simple. It is your ego moment. You get to sit in a room and talk about yourself. Although you don't control the conversation you can steer it in creative enough directions to keep it fun and positive." That would be a nice improvement as a first filter, IMO, but this isn't always the case. For Google, for instance, the very first step might be a 45-minute phone conversation with a bored engineer who just wants you to code up whatever tree-based structure and methods tickle their fancy. They might not even tell you what team they work on, or what they do. They have a script, and they run it from memory, and your experience and past accomplishments are out the window.

austincheney 10y ago
Google has the privilege to treat you like an ape, because they know people will take it to work there. "Dance monkey"! If being spanked like a monkey doesn't tickle your fancy then don't interview there. Interview prep isn't going to make that better.
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  As someone who recently ran the interview gauntlet, the parent comment seems pretty accurate. It matches my experience with interviews at a wide variety of companies.
- majormajor 10y ago
  Meanwhile, a bunch of non-Google companies think that this must be the right way to do it, so they copy it, and teaching people how to game the system like in the original article give them no reason not to, it just acclimates everyone to playing by stupid rules.
  - austincheney 10y ago
    Then call them out on it during the interview.
    - throwaway18917 10y ago
      Yeah, who needs a job or that pesky /money/.
    - arvinsim 10y ago
      Seriously? Looks like a quick way to get rejected, or at least be regarded negatively.
      - austincheney 10y ago
        If you are a afraid of asking valid questions for fear that you will be rejected god help you. It doesn't hurt to simply ask a question. Now I know there are a lot of weak and timid personalities in the world of development, but once you put that blood into the water usually it doesn't take the sharks long to swarm on it. I have never walked away from an interview feeling dejected for asking the interviewer reasonable questions or attempting to qualify their assertions.

sillysaurus3 10y ago

Interviewing is stupid simple. [...] Maybe if you are a college grad with 0 real life experience then maybe interview prep is necessary... don't know. I could be biased though. The last place I interviewed at they knew who I was, something about my software, and some of my online controversies before I even walked in the door. Yes, this is bias. Most candidates aren't being hunted by employers. It's the other way around. It's quite the opposite of "simple." It's a soul-crushing experience of being denied at every interview because you can't think out loud or do whiteboard coding and don't have a social media portfolio presence to fall back on. The only simple part is how simple it is to reject a candidate based on the personal prejudices of just one of the five different interviewers you have to meet with.

austincheney 10y ago
> Most candidates aren't being hunted by employers. I call this the talent gap. When you are a newb or completely lack either experience or confidence in your skills life is harder. You have massively increased competition for lower paying jobs filled with more menial tasks. I have been there too. If a candidate doesn't want to be there they will invest in themselves outside the office. I spent as much time as I could writing open source software and language parsers while on military deployments. Most developers I know are frequently hounded by recruiters because the demand for senior developers is stupid ridiculous.
- danellis 10y ago
  > Most developers I know are frequently hounded by recruiters because the demand for senior developers is stupid ridiculous. Maybe in your bubble. My experience is that very few recruiters are hounding me, because most of them don't know I exist. I don't live or work in a tech hub, I don't work for a famous company, and I haven't published anything. I don't think that's a particularly unusual position to be in. It's absolutely nothing to do with talent or experience, though.
  - netscape101 10y ago
    " I haven't published anything" Don't want to be rude but this is 100% your own fault and problem. What are you doing about this? I have two github profiles with code, I've spoken at conferences and I've got an active linkedin profile(yes I hate linkedin believe me), but this is the art of promoting yourself. If you are not writing open source code or talking on mailing lists or even IRC then how do you expect people to know who you are?