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I LOLed at your comment! I still remember a recent interview I had with a team at Amazon. That team had accomplished NOTHING (and I mean NOTHING OF SIGNIFICAN

by NTDF9 9y ago

I LOLed at your comment! I still remember a recent interview I had with a team at Amazon. That team had accomplished NOTHING (and I mean NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE) in past 3 years, went through re-orgs and new managers, high attrition, nothing to show for. Here I am with successful products, published code and a track record of delivering. I have the skills to help them out. What happens? I get rejected because I didn't remember how to use a comparator in merging k sorted arrays and write that perfect code on a whiteboard. WTF??!! Did hiring rote memorizers really help that team in Amazon? Why do they not have something productive in 3 years despite having hired experts at tree traversals?

nine_k 9y ago
Good thing you did not end up in a lame team like that, with unreasonable decision-making like you've seen. Interviews are a mutual process, where the hiring team must do their best to persuade me to join. (The same way I do my best to persuade them to accept me.) Some of them utterly fail, even if they make an offer.
geebee 9y ago
This is a good comment. One thing I'd like to point out is that people often defend technical interview exams on the notion that if someone can't write a factorial function, that's a bad sign. Well, sure, but my experience has been that the technical interview exam is far more elaborate than this. My questions were more along the lines of finding all permutations of a set (usually with some twist, like find all permutations that, when combined, match another member of the set). Or finding all matching sub trees in an binary tree, or something depending on merge sort or quick sort. That sort of thing. Nothing impossible, but considerably more involved than simple recursion. And the teams that interviewed me clearly did expect to see largely working code written on a whiteboard. Overall, it's elaborate enough that people do need to study substantially for their interview exams, and good developers may simply decide they don't want to waste the time on a job that might not even come through anyway. I once learned to do intricate integration by parts in calculus, but I wouldn't be especially interested in training up to do it for a data science interview. If it comes up for reals, I'll deal with it. This is something the industry has inflicted on itself, which is why I feel a lot of irritation when I hear the same companies talk about a severe shortage of talented software developers.

by NTDF9 9y ago

nine_k 9y ago

Good thing you did not end up in a lame team like that, with unreasonable decision-making like you've seen. Interviews are a mutual process, where the hiring team must do their best to persuade me to join. (The same way I do my best to persuade them to accept me.) Some of them utterly fail, even if they make an offer.

geebee 9y ago

This is a good comment. One thing I'd like to point out is that people often defend technical interview exams on the notion that if someone can't write a factorial function, that's a bad sign. Well, sure, but my experience has been that the technical interview exam is far more elaborate than this. My questions were more along the lines of finding all permutations of a set (usually with some twist, like find all permutations that, when combined, match another member of the set). Or finding all matching sub trees in an binary tree, or something depending on merge sort or quick sort. That sort of thing. Nothing impossible, but considerably more involved than simple recursion. And the teams that interviewed me clearly did expect to see largely working code written on a whiteboard. Overall, it's elaborate enough that people do need to study substantially for their interview exams, and good developers may simply decide they don't want to waste the time on a job that might not even come through anyway. I once learned to do intricate integration by parts in calculus, but I wouldn't be especially interested in training up to do it for a data science interview. If it comes up for reals, I'll deal with it. This is something the industry has inflicted on itself, which is why I feel a lot of irritation when I hear the same companies talk about a severe shortage of talented software developers.