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The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead
by taude 8y ago
The questions being asked have nothing to do with solving the types of problems that my experience is indicative of, or of the teams/projects/products I've lead. Nor are they types of questions that even measure for engineer work experience and how they approach solving the types of real world problems that 10 minutes of white boarding a bit counting and funky array manipulations alg won't show. They are questions that are really catered towards recent grads who that I haven't think about or practice since college, and then not getting the job because of that is strange to me. Especially when they could be asking me interesting real-world technical stuff like on multi-threading, concurrency vs parallelism, performance optimization, more solution architecture are parts of the tech stack, project management, team managements, hiring strategies, dealing with low performers, etc. It's also humorous when companies aren't doing anything technically sophisticated, yet their interviewing like they are, for example doing NLP through third-party APIs, or when the most sophisticated part of their stack is using two caching solutions with Mem-Cache and Redis, or just writing APIs the read/write to and from a couple different data storage, systems, etc.
- taude 8y agoTo clarify about my latest alg test, it's not that these types of problems aren't important to interview, but the candidate could definitely have some input on what they know. For example, if all I've used in my real world professional career are some graphing algs, Dijkstra's variations, and Levenshtein string distance type of stuff, asking me a variation on a bubble sort alg on a New Year's Even line waiting problem out of the blue is going to be brutal and likely not test my real world abilities. You could argue that I could study up on all the old stuff, which I'm doing, but it still feels like a time suck and solidifies that these interviews are skewed to the people who left college more recently.
- tacon 8y agoI haven't interviewed in a long time, though I read interviewing advice from Nick Corcodilos at AskTheHeadhunter and it seems to make sense. The basic idea is to take control of the interview and start doing the work right there in the interview, just like if you were on your first day of the job. Yes, this takes all sorts of social skills and preparation, but it sure would make you stand out from the crowd of software developers. At least the hiring manager should perk up at such a strategy. [0] https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics5.htm
- refurb 8y agoThis is actually pretty good advice and I applied it as well. Go into an interview prepared for the expected questions (experience, behavioral, etc), but also go in with some well thought out opinions on the day to day work. I’ve found it makes a big difference even if your opinions are on the naive side since you don’t have insider knowledge.
- taude 8y agoThanks for the link, I'll definitely check it out.