4 ms·

Why would you want to work for a company which asks these question in the interview?

by rimliu 8y ago

chosenbreed 8y ago
> Why would you want to work for a company which asks these question in the interview? Presumably because it is one of the big five (I didn't know there was such a thing). I suspect it looks good on your CV. You'll always be a big five alumni :-)
- rimliu 8y ago
  Seems plausible. Big five stopped to look attractive to me few years ago (Microsoft and Amazon never were, tbh) but I get that people have different opinions. What I do not get is why do big five think this kinds of interview are effective. Or are they?
shaftway 8y ago
I can't speak to other companies, but I do know my [unofficial] experience interviewing (on both sides) at Google. As an interviewee, you know that you're going to have a handful of different interviewers. What you don't know is how much of an effect each of those interviewers is going to have on the hire/no hire decision. Is one bad interviewer enough to torpedo you? Two? And you have no idea what kind of questions each interviewer will ask. So, let's say only 10% of interviewers ask these kinds of questions (I'm guessing that's low). That's a ~41% chance that you're going to have to answer this, and if one bad interviewer is all you need, then you'd be foolish not to prepare just in case. As an interviewer, we're given surprisingly few guidelines on how to interview. You take a one day class, then shadow half a dozen interviews, and that's it. We aren't given specific questions to ask, and specific questions get banned all the time (any time they're "leaked" as a Google interview question). Once someone is hired it's really hard to force them out, so approving someone who talks a smooth game but can't back it up is extremely costly. I've seen teams get stuck with multiple people for well over a year because it takes a long time to get them out, they won't leave willingly. Meanwhile they're taking up headcount and letting them actually touch code is dangerous. In fact, I've seen teams spend an additional engineer training them to the point where they are productive, just because that's cheaper. So you want people to actually prove themselves with some kind of an algorithm question, but you get no real guidance on how to provide these and you constantly have to come up with new ones, but they have to be the kind of question that take less than 45 minutes to explain and solve. I have no doubt that some people fall back on these kinds of questions. Yeah, I get that these questions suck, and I try not to be that interviewer. But as an interviewee I would consider it extremely foolish to not brush up on it, just in case.
- SZJX 8y ago
  Just wondering, do you mean the range of questions covered is too narrow? If "10% of interviewers" ask these kinds of questions, what would the other 90% of interviewers do. Other types of common data structures/algorithms, DS/A questions thought up by themselves, or something in entirely different directions?
- bsvalley 8y ago
  You said it yourself "they're taking up headcount and letting them actually touch code is dangerous". My question is, how did they managed to get into Google if they apparently don't know how to write code? The only way to get into google is to go through a huge set of 45-min whiteborad crap. Not once, not twice, we're talking about 7-8 times! Going over the same stupid 45-min "technical screen" where only the original question varies. You need to know all the CS basic stuff + ability to scale (if possible). Like they all say in Silicon Valley - the only way for us to know if you're a rockstar is if you manage to crack a few meaningless problems on a whiteboard. Oh... and make sure to pick your favorite language. Your Resume tells us you have a MS in CS but we don't believe it. So we're gonna put you back into a college-like exam to make sure your degree isn't fake. To me, that's step zero. I still can't believe companies like Google, etc get stuck at step 0. They don't seem to care about step 1, 2, 3, 4. It doesn't matter if you have 1 year or 10 years of experience, we all go through step zero (again, even though we got an MS in CS a few years back). So, if Google ends up in a situation where "teams get stuck with multiple people for well over a year because it takes a long time to get them out", it's because the hiring process at Google sucks. If it is that costly and painful to hire the wrong people, then why Google hasn't put more resources to actually innovate and think beyond college-like evaluations. It is OK for people with zero experience, it is not OK for people with at least one work experience (which I call step 1). Of course, if you have 10 years of experience they need to use a different language in order to interact with you. So, unless someone just graduated from college looking for a job, you can't hire someone exclusively based on step 0 because it simply doesn't tell you if a candidate knows how to write code, build features, work in a collaborative environment, deal with requirements from product team, reuse exiting code, handle code reviews and feedback from peers, create frameworks or adopt new frameworks. All it tells you is if your CS degree is fake or not...

Why would you want to work for a company which asks these question in the interview?

by rimliu 8y ago

Why would you want to work for a company which asks these question in the interview?

> Why would you want to work for a company which asks these question in the interview? Presumably because it is one of the big five (I didn't know there was such a thing). I suspect it looks good on your CV. You'll always be a big five alumni :-)

rimliu 8y ago
Seems plausible. Big five stopped to look attractive to me few years ago (Microsoft and Amazon never were, tbh) but I get that people have different opinions. What I do not get is why do big five think this kinds of interview are effective. Or are they?

shaftway 8y ago

I can't speak to other companies, but I do know my [unofficial] experience interviewing (on both sides) at Google. As an interviewee, you know that you're going to have a handful of different interviewers. What you don't know is how much of an effect each of those interviewers is going to have on the hire/no hire decision. Is one bad interviewer enough to torpedo you? Two? And you have no idea what kind of questions each interviewer will ask. So, let's say only 10% of interviewers ask these kinds of questions (I'm guessing that's low). That's a ~41% chance that you're going to have to answer this, and if one bad interviewer is all you need, then you'd be foolish not to prepare just in case. As an interviewer, we're given surprisingly few guidelines on how to interview. You take a one day class, then shadow half a dozen interviews, and that's it. We aren't given specific questions to ask, and specific questions get banned all the time (any time they're "leaked" as a Google interview question). Once someone is hired it's really hard to force them out, so approving someone who talks a smooth game but can't back it up is extremely costly. I've seen teams get stuck with multiple people for well over a year because it takes a long time to get them out, they won't leave willingly. Meanwhile they're taking up headcount and letting them actually touch code is dangerous. In fact, I've seen teams spend an additional engineer training them to the point where they are productive, just because that's cheaper. So you want people to actually prove themselves with some kind of an algorithm question, but you get no real guidance on how to provide these and you constantly have to come up with new ones, but they have to be the kind of question that take less than 45 minutes to explain and solve. I have no doubt that some people fall back on these kinds of questions. Yeah, I get that these questions suck, and I try not to be that interviewer. But as an interviewee I would consider it extremely foolish to not brush up on it, just in case.

SZJX 8y ago
Just wondering, do you mean the range of questions covered is too narrow? If "10% of interviewers" ask these kinds of questions, what would the other 90% of interviewers do. Other types of common data structures/algorithms, DS/A questions thought up by themselves, or something in entirely different directions?
bsvalley 8y ago
You said it yourself "they're taking up headcount and letting them actually touch code is dangerous". My question is, how did they managed to get into Google if they apparently don't know how to write code? The only way to get into google is to go through a huge set of 45-min whiteborad crap. Not once, not twice, we're talking about 7-8 times! Going over the same stupid 45-min "technical screen" where only the original question varies. You need to know all the CS basic stuff + ability to scale (if possible). Like they all say in Silicon Valley - the only way for us to know if you're a rockstar is if you manage to crack a few meaningless problems on a whiteboard. Oh... and make sure to pick your favorite language. Your Resume tells us you have a MS in CS but we don't believe it. So we're gonna put you back into a college-like exam to make sure your degree isn't fake. To me, that's step zero. I still can't believe companies like Google, etc get stuck at step 0. They don't seem to care about step 1, 2, 3, 4. It doesn't matter if you have 1 year or 10 years of experience, we all go through step zero (again, even though we got an MS in CS a few years back). So, if Google ends up in a situation where "teams get stuck with multiple people for well over a year because it takes a long time to get them out", it's because the hiring process at Google sucks. If it is that costly and painful to hire the wrong people, then why Google hasn't put more resources to actually innovate and think beyond college-like evaluations. It is OK for people with zero experience, it is not OK for people with at least one work experience (which I call step 1). Of course, if you have 10 years of experience they need to use a different language in order to interact with you. So, unless someone just graduated from college looking for a job, you can't hire someone exclusively based on step 0 because it simply doesn't tell you if a candidate knows how to write code, build features, work in a collaborative environment, deal with requirements from product team, reuse exiting code, handle code reviews and feedback from peers, create frameworks or adopt new frameworks. All it tells you is if your CS degree is fake or not...