4 ms·

I know this is going to come across as a stupid question, but I would like to ask what the point is of studying for an interview? I am self-taught (under guidan

I know this is going to come across as a stupid question, but I would like to ask what the point is of studying for an interview? I am self-taught (under guidance from a mentor) with no formal training, and don't understand why one would prepare for an interview by studying. Isn't that dishonest in a way? Shouldn't an interview determine if you are comfortable providing a service and (ultimately) generating profit for the company hiring you?

fsloth 8y ago
Um, yeah, not everything is completely rational. But look at it this way: if you want to hire a musician to a band, and you do large scale hiring, you probably want to put some minimum requirments like being able to play, and maybe handling rudimentary musical theory and being able to read sheet music. CS 101 stuff is exactly this - you understand the fundamental concepts and are capable of conversing in them. Musicians who have formal degrees are understood to handle the basic theory and everything that matters is how well they can play. There is no degree in CS that would guarantee you understand the fundamentals or you know how to combine the basic concepts into practice. I presume this is one of the rationales for whiteboarding. Of course, there are all sorts of weird and wacky bands that have other hiring policies but the big five are not weird nor wacky. Apparently how well the hiring went does not predict anything abouy on-job performance, but probably some whiteboarding will not let those people in who would be totally incapable of operating with basic CS theory. Sure, this leaves lot of potential talent out, but often hiring a bad apple is lot more expensive than discarding an ok candidate.
- meggar 8y ago
  Actually bands hire the musician who has the look, sound and personality that fits whatever they're going for. Most of them don't know any theory beyond blues and folk chords. They might test them by jamming with them, but the decision has nothing to do with musical skills. So it's actually very similar to hiring in tech.
dewey 8y ago
It's not always about what you know, it's if you are able to read up on something and teach yourself. There's a high chance that you'll experience a lot of things at your job that you didn't know before and you'll have to read up on the topic and figure out how it works. Not much different from studying for a code interview.
rwnspace 8y ago
I'm not a programming professional, but as I understand it: you study for interviews because the biggest tech companies used to ask difficult data structure & algorithms-based questions, plus some difficult/tricky questions which require a particular style of thinking. Now nearly everyone does it, and YouTube and textbooks offer lots of help... Which has started an 'arms race' in knowledge about DS&A and answers to tricky problems between interviewers and interviewees. At some point I think it was intended to be like a 'coding-oriented IQ test', after you'd passed a set of HR checkboxes. Obviously an IQ test you study carefully for is not a broadly applicable measure of relative performance. As far as I understand, many of the top companies are shifting away from this interview paradigm, but it'll take the rest of the industry which adopted it a long time to catch up (I imagine).
- hocuspocus 8y ago
  You're mostly right. Also, big companies want to * Minimize the time spent by their engineers interviewing candidates, * Standardize the process as much as possible, so that anyone can run the interview. I'm convinced there are many reasons for smaller shops not to blindly follow Google's practices. But as a candidate, what can you do... it's their loss, I guess.
expertentipp 8y ago
There is a different world out there where people study months and months all kinds of academic problems to get a grunt position at the major ad companies.
- MoBattah 8y ago
  You're insinuating FAANG = ad companies?
  - expertentipp 8y ago
    We run ads, Sir to quote a certain guy during a recent hearing.
    - chosenbreed 8y ago
      > We run ads, Sir to quote a certain guy during a recent hearing. Gold
  - hocuspocus 8y ago
    This acronym makes zero sense and covers companies with wildly different interviewing practices.
  - atmosx 8y ago
    FAANG = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, N, Google. Who's 'N'? If it were an 'M', I would imagine Microsoft, but nothing comes to mind except 'Netflix', which I don't consider to be on par with the rest of the group by any means.
    - GFischer 8y ago
      It actually is Netflix. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp
    - MoBattah 8y ago
      As the other commentter pointed out, it's a term from Wall Street.
Jian-Yang 8y ago
It's what the culture has turned into. You are expected to do a white board test. It is more of a test to filter out those who are passionate enough to study for weeks before an interview than anything else. But it's part of the game.
frou_dh 8y ago
> what the point is of studying for an interview? I am self-taught (under guidance from a mentor) with no formal training, and don't understand why one would prepare for an interview by studying. Isn't that dishonest in a way? You are competing against other people. If you are not particularly interested in winning then by all means don't do any training. Same deal for athletics.
- gaius 8y ago
  Athletes train and are selected for teams in a way that is directly relevant to their job. Programming interviews are unrepresentative of the actual work of programming. No other industry to my knowledge does this.
  - frou_dh 8y ago
    Then don't do the training. And volunteer your thoughts on the game to the interviewers. Very honest!
    - gaius 8y ago
      Sure. An interview is a two way process. Do I want to work for a company with a broken hiring process like that? A company that doesn’t respect a candidates time prior to the interview certainly won’t after they are hired. It’s implicitly an ageism filter too - looking for recent graduates or people with few out of work commitments. Similarly extensive homework assignments. All red flags.
  - bsaul 8y ago
    Weight lifting doesn’t have any direct use for any sport ( excpet weight lifting), and yet they do it pretty much in every preparation. Brain is a muscle, so showing that your brain is able to manipulate some moderately complex algorithms is always a good thing.
    - scns 8y ago
      Sprinters do Deadlifts to increase their strength. Makes them run faster.
hackandtrip 8y ago
The profit you can generate for the company depends on your likeliness to solve problems in an efficient way, and to learn how to solve problems in new efficient ways. Company knows how the interview prep is, and the candidate that understand more how to solve non-trivial problems can be the right service provider for that company. I'm not talking by experience but what I was taught, I'm currently finishing my university but the Data Structure and Algorithm course is one of the most difficult to pass and that's only basic structure. A candidate able to think fastly about dynamic programming or structure a possible solution for a NP-complete problem can provide a service that others candidate can't.
pjc50 8y ago
There are no stupid questions, only people who failed to prepare for the questions. Interviews are a sales process. The test can never really be an accurate assessment of how well you work - we don't even have that for full-time employees over a year, so how well it works over a couple of hours is never going to be that great. Also, preparation is part of the test. Some interviewers like to ask questions about what you know about the company to see if you've prepared by reading their website etc. I've seen people be marked down with "obviously he didn't prepare for this interview, so he wasn't that motivated".
hanselot 8y ago
To clarify, I don't consider studying and preparing for an interview to be interchangeable. Preparing by investigating the tech stack and doing background research on the company seems logical. However, to study for an interview seems disingenuous, both on the interviewee and interviewer's part. It seems a bit like saying, we expect you to be able to solve this rubick's cube in under 10 seconds to prove that you understand the fundamentals of recursively solving abstract problems.
dnomad 8y ago
The entire idea is a bit wacky. But then it really demonstrates why "coding interviews" that consist entirely of algorithm questions and puzzle questions are pointless. If your interview can be studied for then you're not hiring the best engineers, you're hiring the people willing to devote the most time to studying such things. At that point why not just ask the person to turn over a grade transcript?
- GFischer 8y ago
  My current theory is that it's a form of signalling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

fsloth 8y ago

Um, yeah, not everything is completely rational. But look at it this way: if you want to hire a musician to a band, and you do large scale hiring, you probably want to put some minimum requirments like being able to play, and maybe handling rudimentary musical theory and being able to read sheet music. CS 101 stuff is exactly this - you understand the fundamental concepts and are capable of conversing in them. Musicians who have formal degrees are understood to handle the basic theory and everything that matters is how well they can play. There is no degree in CS that would guarantee you understand the fundamentals or you know how to combine the basic concepts into practice. I presume this is one of the rationales for whiteboarding. Of course, there are all sorts of weird and wacky bands that have other hiring policies but the big five are not weird nor wacky. Apparently how well the hiring went does not predict anything abouy on-job performance, but probably some whiteboarding will not let those people in who would be totally incapable of operating with basic CS theory. Sure, this leaves lot of potential talent out, but often hiring a bad apple is lot more expensive than discarding an ok candidate.

meggar 8y ago
Actually bands hire the musician who has the look, sound and personality that fits whatever they're going for. Most of them don't know any theory beyond blues and folk chords. They might test them by jamming with them, but the decision has nothing to do with musical skills. So it's actually very similar to hiring in tech.

dewey 8y ago

It's not always about what you know, it's if you are able to read up on something and teach yourself. There's a high chance that you'll experience a lot of things at your job that you didn't know before and you'll have to read up on the topic and figure out how it works. Not much different from studying for a code interview.

rwnspace 8y ago

I'm not a programming professional, but as I understand it: you study for interviews because the biggest tech companies used to ask difficult data structure & algorithms-based questions, plus some difficult/tricky questions which require a particular style of thinking. Now nearly everyone does it, and YouTube and textbooks offer lots of help... Which has started an 'arms race' in knowledge about DS&A and answers to tricky problems between interviewers and interviewees. At some point I think it was intended to be like a 'coding-oriented IQ test', after you'd passed a set of HR checkboxes. Obviously an IQ test you study carefully for is not a broadly applicable measure of relative performance. As far as I understand, many of the top companies are shifting away from this interview paradigm, but it'll take the rest of the industry which adopted it a long time to catch up (I imagine).

hocuspocus 8y ago
You're mostly right. Also, big companies want to * Minimize the time spent by their engineers interviewing candidates, * Standardize the process as much as possible, so that anyone can run the interview. I'm convinced there are many reasons for smaller shops not to blindly follow Google's practices. But as a candidate, what can you do... it's their loss, I guess.

expertentipp 8y ago

There is a different world out there where people study months and months all kinds of academic problems to get a grunt position at the major ad companies.

MoBattah 8y ago
You're insinuating FAANG = ad companies?
- expertentipp 8y ago
  We run ads, Sir to quote a certain guy during a recent hearing.
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    > We run ads, Sir to quote a certain guy during a recent hearing. Gold
- hocuspocus 8y ago
  This acronym makes zero sense and covers companies with wildly different interviewing practices.
- atmosx 8y ago
  FAANG = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, N, Google. Who's 'N'? If it were an 'M', I would imagine Microsoft, but nothing comes to mind except 'Netflix', which I don't consider to be on par with the rest of the group by any means.
  - GFischer 8y ago
    It actually is Netflix. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp
  - MoBattah 8y ago
    As the other commentter pointed out, it's a term from Wall Street.

Jian-Yang 8y ago

It's what the culture has turned into. You are expected to do a white board test. It is more of a test to filter out those who are passionate enough to study for weeks before an interview than anything else. But it's part of the game.

frou_dh 8y ago

> what the point is of studying for an interview? I am self-taught (under guidance from a mentor) with no formal training, and don't understand why one would prepare for an interview by studying. Isn't that dishonest in a way? You are competing against other people. If you are not particularly interested in winning then by all means don't do any training. Same deal for athletics.

gaius 8y ago
Athletes train and are selected for teams in a way that is directly relevant to their job. Programming interviews are unrepresentative of the actual work of programming. No other industry to my knowledge does this.
- frou_dh 8y ago
  Then don't do the training. And volunteer your thoughts on the game to the interviewers. Very honest!
  - gaius 8y ago
    Sure. An interview is a two way process. Do I want to work for a company with a broken hiring process like that? A company that doesn’t respect a candidates time prior to the interview certainly won’t after they are hired. It’s implicitly an ageism filter too - looking for recent graduates or people with few out of work commitments. Similarly extensive homework assignments. All red flags.
- bsaul 8y ago
  Weight lifting doesn’t have any direct use for any sport ( excpet weight lifting), and yet they do it pretty much in every preparation. Brain is a muscle, so showing that your brain is able to manipulate some moderately complex algorithms is always a good thing.
  - scns 8y ago
    Sprinters do Deadlifts to increase their strength. Makes them run faster.

hackandtrip 8y ago

The profit you can generate for the company depends on your likeliness to solve problems in an efficient way, and to learn how to solve problems in new efficient ways. Company knows how the interview prep is, and the candidate that understand more how to solve non-trivial problems can be the right service provider for that company. I'm not talking by experience but what I was taught, I'm currently finishing my university but the Data Structure and Algorithm course is one of the most difficult to pass and that's only basic structure. A candidate able to think fastly about dynamic programming or structure a possible solution for a NP-complete problem can provide a service that others candidate can't.

pjc50 8y ago

There are no stupid questions, only people who failed to prepare for the questions. Interviews are a sales process. The test can never really be an accurate assessment of how well you work - we don't even have that for full-time employees over a year, so how well it works over a couple of hours is never going to be that great. Also, preparation is part of the test. Some interviewers like to ask questions about what you know about the company to see if you've prepared by reading their website etc. I've seen people be marked down with "obviously he didn't prepare for this interview, so he wasn't that motivated".

hanselot 8y ago

To clarify, I don't consider studying and preparing for an interview to be interchangeable. Preparing by investigating the tech stack and doing background research on the company seems logical. However, to study for an interview seems disingenuous, both on the interviewee and interviewer's part. It seems a bit like saying, we expect you to be able to solve this rubick's cube in under 10 seconds to prove that you understand the fundamentals of recursively solving abstract problems.

dnomad 8y ago

The entire idea is a bit wacky. But then it really demonstrates why "coding interviews" that consist entirely of algorithm questions and puzzle questions are pointless. If your interview can be studied for then you're not hiring the best engineers, you're hiring the people willing to devote the most time to studying such things. At that point why not just ask the person to turn over a grade transcript?

GFischer 8y ago
My current theory is that it's a form of signalling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory