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Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior

Great, now can Netflix, Google and Facebook do this, too? Not because I want to work in these places, but because they influence everyone else and as a senior engineer in the systems space I feel I shouldn't need to study days or weeks for fizzbuzz sorting algorithms questions that are designed to test comp sci recent grads. I have a proven career, and was never suddenly stumped in a project due to not being able to.. sort letters in some obscure order based on arbitrary rules. How about we look at that, and compare the candidate's past experience to the current needs and interview based on that -- You DID look at the CV before bringing the candidate in, didn't you?

Swizec 8y ago
This sounds like you're having the wrong conversations. With all your experience, why are you still going into companies through the front door? Where's your network? Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Perhaps my experience as a consultant/freelancer is breaking my perspective. It's been several years since I last had a coding interview as an applicant.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  You still have to go through a standard interview loop at Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc... even if you get in via a recommendation. The recommendation (and your cv) helps you in getting a serious phone screen and in getting a good choice of the team you want to join, but isn’t considered very much during the interview itself.
- wheaties 8y ago
  You shouldn't have to only be able to go through your network to get a job. We should judge based upon the same criteria every other damned job judges ...how well they did their last job.
  - chrisweekly 8y ago
    > "how well they did their last job" Right.... so if you have a mismatched role, that's it, you're done for, huh? Please.
- khazhoux 8y ago
  If you apply for a full-time software engineering position at a large company today, you will be run through the all-day series-of-hourlong-interviews, even if you are a referral. It is possible for the hiring manager to work closely with recruiter and recruiting coordinator to craft a more customized interview process, but that's rare (and, impossible at a place like Google, which decentralizes hiring). The value of network is the candidate wasn't subjected to the usual resume review weeding-out, but their info went straight to one or more hiring managers for consideration.
  - jasonkester 8y ago
    You use the term "apply for a job", which might explain the disconnect. The post you reply to isn't about applying for jobs. You don't want to "apply" for things. You want your google VP to be having a beer with your ex-boss and worrying that his pet project was going to fail because they just can't find a guy who can really $X. But your ex boss knows a guy who absoulutely can $X, and just finished $X'ing his company back from the brink of disaster. Lets give him a call to see if he's available. HR will be told to give that guy an offer and, optionally, collect a resume to keep on file. That's what we're talking about here, and it's where you want to get yourself if you want to build a career as an individual contributor.
    - democracy 8y ago
      We need more stories like this for the New Years eve.
    - jghn 8y ago
      Since you mention Google, my understanding is that you still go through the standard hiring process
      - jasonkester 8y ago
        Again, always? If they buy the company that you built specifically to get access to you, do you think you'll still end up getting screened out by some junior dev on a whiteboard? All policies have exceptions. Your goal is to be exceptional.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  Well said. It occurs to me that my last job interview that involved convincing the other party that I was a good developer was back in 1999 when I had just a few years of experience. Since then every gig has come via an introduction by a former boss or co-worker, or by introducing myself to somebody with hiring authority and using a pile of impressive artifacts to skip the "can this guy do the work" questions. The first several years of your career should be getting yourself into a position where nobody would ever dare ask you to sort things on a whiteboard.
  - democracy 8y ago
    You should also be young, healthy and happy - noone wants the opposite, right?
  - hermitdev 8y ago
    Back in 2004, I interviewed for a FTE position in finance - was my first interview for a full time role post college. I was a referral from a close friend and classmate. They sent me through the ringer. Had to take brainbench tests for C++ and C# (position was for C++, but I'd been working in C# and JS for the prior 2-3 years). IIRC, only got like a 65 percentile in C++, but over 95 in C#. Also had to go through an hour plus phone screen, then a day and a half on site. Got the job, but damned if it wasn't a long process. Lots of whiteboard and verbal questions, was never put in front of a computer except for the brainbench tests ar home.
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago
    Congratulations, you've never wanted to work for a large company. Perhaps your advice isn't relevant to those who do.
- izacus 8y ago
  > Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Because people lie. It's that simple. Referrals lie, CVs lie, friends lie to get friends in a position. Do understand that there's a fundamentally different set of problem a 40.000 FTE company has to deal with in comparison to a 30 person startup. Also is doing a full day interview really such a horrible sacrifice for most paid jobs in the world? Professions like laywers and doctors need to go through significantly longer hazing rituals to get to FAANG income... is a month of study to be essentially among the most paid people in the world REALLY such a horrible thing?
  - viraptor 8y ago
    > Professions like laywers and doctors need to go through significantly longer hazing rituals At least for doctors this isn't universally true. There's continuing education/certification, (which you have to do every $period) there's public reputation, there's lots of networking. From what I've seen the interviews take few hours in one day and people usually already know each other.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Yes, but before that you need years of low-paid jobs and networking to come close to well paid positions. Applying at FAANG requires significantly less.
    - vkou 8y ago
      The hazing the doctors go through is during residency, where they spend years, working like horses, for no money. I'd much rather deal with whiteboard interview bullshit a few times in my life, then go through residency in the medical field.
      - Pokepokalypse 8y ago
        I'd honestly rather have the "bulletproof tenure" that doctors then acquire after they get through the hazing. Getting laid off every time a spreadsheet jockey in accounting makes a bad projection, is pretty disruptive. (as are the times when a competitor buys your employer just to shut them down, and etc: plenty of scenarios where you lose a job due to no fault of your own are rather the rule than the exception) - Most competent engineers can always get another job. But in that process, you end up with a different commute, or even having to relocate, deal with setbacks in financial plans, and etc. The instability some of us experience is kind of not worth the other perks. And after 20+ years, it's kind of annoying to have to apply as if I'm fresh out of school when I have a solid work record on my resume, verifiable by contacting my former co-workers and managers I've provide as references.
smsm42 8y ago
I interviewed at Facebook and the tech part was completely sane and appropriate, the technical task was a bit fizzbuzzy but not something you'd need to spend nights digging into obscure algorithms book, but rather simple task which required some thinking, but not too much of it. No experience with Google or Netflix. As of looking at CV, I've seen people with great CVs that proved utterly useless and of course the opposite too. CV can be very misleading, both unintentionally and intentionally. You need to speak with the person.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on for them last 20 years, both of which are very relevant to the job. Instead, I’m tested on what I knew when I graduated with my BS, and that’s it; it’s like my PhD was a waste.
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    In larger corporations it may not be 100% finalized where you would end up. Knowing that yes, you master compilers (that's usually quickly determined, potentially fast enough for you not to notice it since you live and breath compilers), have basic knowledge in smashing together enough html tags to build a simple dashboard but you never had to deal with processes that spanned multiple computers, allows more flexible allocation: Ideally, they'll give you a compiler related task, but if they find someone even more suited for that one open position in compiler internals, they might offer you a job in the adjacent compiler-as-a-service team where you'd start out doing dashboards and then move to whatever more complex task needs work. But they won't need to bother offering you the distributed systems position that scales up the compiler-as-a-service product across the whole world without sending you to some training first.
    - 8y ago
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Fizzbuzz is a trivial test to detect people who are basically fraudulent in their claims of programming ability. You shouldn’t need to study for it. Sorting algorithms, sure.
- cheschire 8y ago
  You could just ask the candidate to explain how to use modulus correctly, and not even need to break out the markers.
  - cblum 8y ago
    That sets the bar too low for screening IMO. My wife has interviewed people who literally can't write a for loop correctly.
  - robocat 8y ago
    Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?) Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?
    - cheschire 8y ago
      Why make it a trivia game? Explaining the basics of how modulus SHOULD work is a fairly generic concept that is trivial for a lot of coders to describe, but impossible for non-coders. It's an ice-breaker.
      - bdhess 8y ago
        Modular arithmetic ought to be explainable by anyone who’s studied basic number theory. Not just coders.
      - codyb 8y ago
        Hmm, everytime I use modulus I need to double check whether it returns the number of times wholly divisible or the remainder. I'm thinking the former without checking now. Meanwhile, my last project has been to set up an entirely self hosted CI/CD pipeline using digital ocean, docker, jenkins, gitea, and docker registry to make changes to my websites I build with erlang, react, html and sass, so I _think_ I can create projects! (No guarantees). The interview process is tough, and what do you want to root out more false negatives or false positives? It may depend on the size of the company. Google can probably shell out a few bucks to some putz who sounds impressive but isn't in the hopes they'll nab a few more great engineers at the loss of a few paychecks. An early phase startup may not have that luxury. Edit: must be tired since just thinking about fizzbuzz for two seconds clearly gives me the answer to what modulus returns ;-)
izacus 8y ago
Did you, in your "proven career", ever work on the systems the size of Google Cloud and having same amount of users? Because cheap stuff you can run away with on 1mil users suddenly falls apart when you need to serve more across continents and suddenly you kinda need to know what all those words in documentation actually mean. Also, as for CV, everytime I've interviewed people I've gotten more than I few people that lied in their CVs. Persumed "senior developers" who couldn't do a fizzbuzz in their chosen language and tooling. CVs are utterly worthless from interviewers perspective - there will always be someone with exact same CV like you have but will be utterly incompetent.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  A new grad certainly hasn't. Microsoft are saying here that the older interviews didn't test for skills that would actually be used.
scarface74 8y ago
People lie on resumes. Anyone I am responsible for hiring is going to sit down to a computer with an IDE and solve some problems.
- drb91 8y ago
  Hopefully the problems will be relevant to the job.
- ptd 8y ago
  Will you compensate them for this task? Even if they are not hired?
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Do you usually get compensated for interviews?
    - cududa 8y ago
      I pay candidates for doing take home tests
      - scarface74 8y ago
        It’s not a “take home test”. Half the purpose of live pair coding is to see how the candidate thinks. It’s a relatively simple project with a skeleton of a class and failing unit tests. They have to fix the code to make the unit tests pass. If they get through that, I give them a second set of failing unit tests that they have to make pass by fixing the class without breaking the unit tests.
        ptd 8y ago
        Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.
porpoisely 8y ago
The problem is that resumes can be deceiving. If you've worked long enough in the industry, you've met a few incompetent people with stellar resumes. It's why having google on your resume opens a lot of doors. Everyone respects google's vetting/interviewing system. Also, fizzbuzz isn't anything you really need to study for (certainly not for days or weeks). It's something you should be able to work out during the interview if you truly have developing experience. But then again, I've known people with amazing resumes who couldn't even understand the fizzbuzz question itself.
- oblio 8y ago
  The Googles of this world don't fizzbuzz you, they want you to implement (close to optimal solutions!) and use tries and heaps & co. during whiteboard interviews. Neither of which I've ever had to implement in 10+ years.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    I didn't say the googles of the world fizzbuzz you. I just said that fizzbuzz is so basic and simple that a developer shouldn't be studying for days or weeks for fizzbuzz. I said people respect google on your resume because their interviewing process is robust.
  - modwilliam 8y ago
    Not sure if I'm misreading, but you don't have to implement data structures for Google interviews
kronin 8y ago
I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user group and wrote a published book on the java language. Couldn't code a simple reverse string algorithm, nor explain whether, after with help devising an answer, the method was thread-safe. Another data point... A self-described expert in SQL with it all over their resume. Couldn't write a simple join, inner outer or other. Weed-out questions exist because our industry is flooded with people who don't know, nor care to know, their craft. And there are plenty of employers who continue to hire these people, and promote them. I interviewed numerous "architects" (with development experience all over their resume) who couldn't come up with a naive solution, let alone the optimal, to a very simple problem. Want to fix the interview process in our industry? Figure out a way to weed out the liars? I'm all for it. I would rather not have to do basic algorithm questions, but that's the current environment.
- deleted 8y ago
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- dom96 8y ago
  I have very little experience with interviewing candidates, but how can you be certain these people were liars? Maybe they simply were having a bad day, or got too much in their head with stress during the interview. There are many factors at play when it comes to a bad performance and it's not always simply that the engineer doesn't know the answer.
  - kronin 8y ago
    I give them a chance to judge their own skillset. After looking at their resume, I have an idea based on the projects they take credit for, what their experience level should be. If what they state lines up with their resume, and they are unable to answer a simple question, with multiple hints and help, then I absolutely assume they are a liar (edit: or delusional, which is even worse. An expectation I have of seniors and above is to have some idea of knowing what they don't know). It would be unreasonable for me to pass them through an interview that the other members on the team passed through based on "oh, they had a bad day". Since you haven't been on the other side of the table, have you had coworkers who obviously were at a position above their skill level? Who allowed the rest of their team to carry them? I've had periods wherey personal life has affected my productivity. That doesn't preclude my ability to write an algorithm that reverses a string nor write a simple SQL join. I don't ask brain teasers. I ask questions related to what the engineers under me will be expected to solve every day.
kleinsch 8y ago
Netflix already does this. Just interviewed with them for a full stack role. All interviews are dependent on the team, but generally feature less whiteboarding than FB/Google. I did a takehome technical exercise, in person interviews were tailored to my experience. They were mostly about system design, general concepts, and a heavy heavy focus on interpersonal skills. Their approach seems to be: 1. Make sure you actually know what’s on your resume 2. Make sure you have the strategic thinking and interpersonal skills to own the system you’ll be working on 3. Make sure you’re a good match for their fairly unique work culture
burtonator 8y ago
I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds". I no longer keep small tactical issues in my head. It's pointless. Now I try to understand the system as a whole.
- mattnewton 8y ago
  It could be _because_ they read your resume that they asked those questions, to see if they believe it. People heavily embellish their degree of involvement in projects all the time. Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.
- gcb0 8y ago
  I guess people who allowed hacks like adding -1 fridge to get a free tv in earlier online stores could also claim "but they have build online stores that moved thousands of sales every minute" ;)
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  A lot of people will write whatever makes them sound good on their resumes, so we have to ask questions about minutiae to make sure candidates aren’t lying. It sucks, but this is what happens when the job you’re interviewing for has no license or certification requirements (but pays six figures).
- sk5t 8y ago
  Over what period of time did you write 1.5 _million_ lines of code for this one project?
  - kamaal 8y ago
    Nothing to take away from the original posters work. He indeed might have written that much code. But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%. As a matter of fact I would find it a tad little hard to believe that some one wrote that much(1+ million LOC) and didn't find a way to template it or do some metaprogramming work. Patterns always emerge from that kind of pile.
throwaway169169 8y ago
> You DID look at the CV before bringing the candidate in, didn’t you? I would like to speak to this after interviewing at a few places recently, including Google. I don’t think a single interviewer looked at my resume. I’ve developed a sizable open source project that is used by real people for over a decade. If the company really wanted to know if I could write code they could just go and look at it. Instead they ask puzzle questions that I have no interest in and end up failing. These companies expect the candidate to spend weeks preparing for their hoop jumping, but can’t be bothered to actually read the CV. Multiple people didn’t seem to realize where I lived even when my address was at the top of the paper.
- chrisbennet 8y ago
  I think they have a policy of not reading your resume so as not to bias the interviewer. Seems crazy I know.
mancerayder 8y ago
By "fizzbuzz" I wasn't referring to the "divide by 3 and 5" one that seems common, but something much worse. I once interviewed at a place where they presented a jumble of characters, and about 8 rules, and I was on the phone being watched (after an hour of successfully troubleshooting a broken AWS instance with a bunch of quirky Linux issues). The 8 or so rules involved something like, "You must print each line with one character longer than the last / c must never come right before vowel / x's must be on alternate rows / f's and z's ... " while parsing all of this stuff, I had 10 minutes total since we were almost out of time when we started the questioning. The interviewer said, "Don't worry, just do it in pseudocode." That's bad interviewing. I can do the problem easily without someone looking over my shoulder, and I need more than 10 minutes just to think about the 8 or whatever rules he gave me. He failed me, and I ended up working there anyway a year later after the guy quit (true story).

Swizec 8y ago

This sounds like you're having the wrong conversations. With all your experience, why are you still going into companies through the front door? Where's your network? Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Perhaps my experience as a consultant/freelancer is breaking my perspective. It's been several years since I last had a coding interview as an applicant.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
You still have to go through a standard interview loop at Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc... even if you get in via a recommendation. The recommendation (and your cv) helps you in getting a serious phone screen and in getting a good choice of the team you want to join, but isn’t considered very much during the interview itself.
wheaties 8y ago
You shouldn't have to only be able to go through your network to get a job. We should judge based upon the same criteria every other damned job judges ...how well they did their last job.
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  > "how well they did their last job" Right.... so if you have a mismatched role, that's it, you're done for, huh? Please.
khazhoux 8y ago
If you apply for a full-time software engineering position at a large company today, you will be run through the all-day series-of-hourlong-interviews, even if you are a referral. It is possible for the hiring manager to work closely with recruiter and recruiting coordinator to craft a more customized interview process, but that's rare (and, impossible at a place like Google, which decentralizes hiring). The value of network is the candidate wasn't subjected to the usual resume review weeding-out, but their info went straight to one or more hiring managers for consideration.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  You use the term "apply for a job", which might explain the disconnect. The post you reply to isn't about applying for jobs. You don't want to "apply" for things. You want your google VP to be having a beer with your ex-boss and worrying that his pet project was going to fail because they just can't find a guy who can really $X. But your ex boss knows a guy who absoulutely can $X, and just finished $X'ing his company back from the brink of disaster. Lets give him a call to see if he's available. HR will be told to give that guy an offer and, optionally, collect a resume to keep on file. That's what we're talking about here, and it's where you want to get yourself if you want to build a career as an individual contributor.
  - democracy 8y ago
    We need more stories like this for the New Years eve.
  - jghn 8y ago
    Since you mention Google, my understanding is that you still go through the standard hiring process
    - jasonkester 8y ago
      Again, always? If they buy the company that you built specifically to get access to you, do you think you'll still end up getting screened out by some junior dev on a whiteboard? All policies have exceptions. Your goal is to be exceptional.
jasonkester 8y ago
Well said. It occurs to me that my last job interview that involved convincing the other party that I was a good developer was back in 1999 when I had just a few years of experience. Since then every gig has come via an introduction by a former boss or co-worker, or by introducing myself to somebody with hiring authority and using a pile of impressive artifacts to skip the "can this guy do the work" questions. The first several years of your career should be getting yourself into a position where nobody would ever dare ask you to sort things on a whiteboard.
- democracy 8y ago
  You should also be young, healthy and happy - noone wants the opposite, right?
- hermitdev 8y ago
  Back in 2004, I interviewed for a FTE position in finance - was my first interview for a full time role post college. I was a referral from a close friend and classmate. They sent me through the ringer. Had to take brainbench tests for C++ and C# (position was for C++, but I'd been working in C# and JS for the prior 2-3 years). IIRC, only got like a 65 percentile in C++, but over 95 in C#. Also had to go through an hour plus phone screen, then a day and a half on site. Got the job, but damned if it wasn't a long process. Lots of whiteboard and verbal questions, was never put in front of a computer except for the brainbench tests ar home.
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  Congratulations, you've never wanted to work for a large company. Perhaps your advice isn't relevant to those who do.
izacus 8y ago
> Fundamentally: Why are you having the "Can you code your way out of a wet paper bag" conversation instead of the "How much value can you add to this company" conversation? Because people lie. It's that simple. Referrals lie, CVs lie, friends lie to get friends in a position. Do understand that there's a fundamentally different set of problem a 40.000 FTE company has to deal with in comparison to a 30 person startup. Also is doing a full day interview really such a horrible sacrifice for most paid jobs in the world? Professions like laywers and doctors need to go through significantly longer hazing rituals to get to FAANG income... is a month of study to be essentially among the most paid people in the world REALLY such a horrible thing?
- viraptor 8y ago
  > Professions like laywers and doctors need to go through significantly longer hazing rituals At least for doctors this isn't universally true. There's continuing education/certification, (which you have to do every $period) there's public reputation, there's lots of networking. From what I've seen the interviews take few hours in one day and people usually already know each other.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Yes, but before that you need years of low-paid jobs and networking to come close to well paid positions. Applying at FAANG requires significantly less.
  - vkou 8y ago
    The hazing the doctors go through is during residency, where they spend years, working like horses, for no money. I'd much rather deal with whiteboard interview bullshit a few times in my life, then go through residency in the medical field.
    - Pokepokalypse 8y ago
      I'd honestly rather have the "bulletproof tenure" that doctors then acquire after they get through the hazing. Getting laid off every time a spreadsheet jockey in accounting makes a bad projection, is pretty disruptive. (as are the times when a competitor buys your employer just to shut them down, and etc: plenty of scenarios where you lose a job due to no fault of your own are rather the rule than the exception) - Most competent engineers can always get another job. But in that process, you end up with a different commute, or even having to relocate, deal with setbacks in financial plans, and etc. The instability some of us experience is kind of not worth the other perks. And after 20+ years, it's kind of annoying to have to apply as if I'm fresh out of school when I have a solid work record on my resume, verifiable by contacting my former co-workers and managers I've provide as references.

smsm42 8y ago

I interviewed at Facebook and the tech part was completely sane and appropriate, the technical task was a bit fizzbuzzy but not something you'd need to spend nights digging into obscure algorithms book, but rather simple task which required some thinking, but not too much of it. No experience with Google or Netflix. As of looking at CV, I've seen people with great CVs that proved utterly useless and of course the opposite too. CV can be very misleading, both unintentionally and intentionally. You need to speak with the person.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on for them last 20 years, both of which are very relevant to the job. Instead, I’m tested on what I knew when I graduated with my BS, and that’s it; it’s like my PhD was a waste.
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  In larger corporations it may not be 100% finalized where you would end up. Knowing that yes, you master compilers (that's usually quickly determined, potentially fast enough for you not to notice it since you live and breath compilers), have basic knowledge in smashing together enough html tags to build a simple dashboard but you never had to deal with processes that spanned multiple computers, allows more flexible allocation: Ideally, they'll give you a compiler related task, but if they find someone even more suited for that one open position in compiler internals, they might offer you a job in the adjacent compiler-as-a-service team where you'd start out doing dashboards and then move to whatever more complex task needs work. But they won't need to bother offering you the distributed systems position that scales up the compiler-as-a-service product across the whole world without sending you to some training first.
  - 8y ago

b_tterc_p 8y ago

Fizzbuzz is a trivial test to detect people who are basically fraudulent in their claims of programming ability. You shouldn’t need to study for it. Sorting algorithms, sure.

cheschire 8y ago
You could just ask the candidate to explain how to use modulus correctly, and not even need to break out the markers.
- cblum 8y ago
  That sets the bar too low for screening IMO. My wife has interviewed people who literally can't write a for loop correctly.
- robocat 8y ago
  Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?) Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?
  - cheschire 8y ago
    Why make it a trivia game? Explaining the basics of how modulus SHOULD work is a fairly generic concept that is trivial for a lot of coders to describe, but impossible for non-coders. It's an ice-breaker.
    - bdhess 8y ago
      Modular arithmetic ought to be explainable by anyone who’s studied basic number theory. Not just coders.
    - codyb 8y ago
      Hmm, everytime I use modulus I need to double check whether it returns the number of times wholly divisible or the remainder. I'm thinking the former without checking now. Meanwhile, my last project has been to set up an entirely self hosted CI/CD pipeline using digital ocean, docker, jenkins, gitea, and docker registry to make changes to my websites I build with erlang, react, html and sass, so I _think_ I can create projects! (No guarantees). The interview process is tough, and what do you want to root out more false negatives or false positives? It may depend on the size of the company. Google can probably shell out a few bucks to some putz who sounds impressive but isn't in the hopes they'll nab a few more great engineers at the loss of a few paychecks. An early phase startup may not have that luxury. Edit: must be tired since just thinking about fizzbuzz for two seconds clearly gives me the answer to what modulus returns ;-)

izacus 8y ago

Did you, in your "proven career", ever work on the systems the size of Google Cloud and having same amount of users? Because cheap stuff you can run away with on 1mil users suddenly falls apart when you need to serve more across continents and suddenly you kinda need to know what all those words in documentation actually mean. Also, as for CV, everytime I've interviewed people I've gotten more than I few people that lied in their CVs. Persumed "senior developers" who couldn't do a fizzbuzz in their chosen language and tooling. CVs are utterly worthless from interviewers perspective - there will always be someone with exact same CV like you have but will be utterly incompetent.

kurtisc 8y ago
A new grad certainly hasn't. Microsoft are saying here that the older interviews didn't test for skills that would actually be used.

scarface74 8y ago

People lie on resumes. Anyone I am responsible for hiring is going to sit down to a computer with an IDE and solve some problems.

drb91 8y ago
Hopefully the problems will be relevant to the job.
ptd 8y ago
Will you compensate them for this task? Even if they are not hired?
- scarface74 8y ago
  Do you usually get compensated for interviews?
  - cududa 8y ago
    I pay candidates for doing take home tests
    - scarface74 8y ago
      It’s not a “take home test”. Half the purpose of live pair coding is to see how the candidate thinks. It’s a relatively simple project with a skeleton of a class and failing unit tests. They have to fix the code to make the unit tests pass. If they get through that, I give them a second set of failing unit tests that they have to make pass by fixing the class without breaking the unit tests.
      - ptd 8y ago
        Ah, I also thought you meant a take home test. Do you work for a big company? I’m trying to picture how that interview style would scale. Thanks for sharing.

porpoisely 8y ago

The problem is that resumes can be deceiving. If you've worked long enough in the industry, you've met a few incompetent people with stellar resumes. It's why having google on your resume opens a lot of doors. Everyone respects google's vetting/interviewing system. Also, fizzbuzz isn't anything you really need to study for (certainly not for days or weeks). It's something you should be able to work out during the interview if you truly have developing experience. But then again, I've known people with amazing resumes who couldn't even understand the fizzbuzz question itself.

oblio 8y ago
The Googles of this world don't fizzbuzz you, they want you to implement (close to optimal solutions!) and use tries and heaps & co. during whiteboard interviews. Neither of which I've ever had to implement in 10+ years.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  I didn't say the googles of the world fizzbuzz you. I just said that fizzbuzz is so basic and simple that a developer shouldn't be studying for days or weeks for fizzbuzz. I said people respect google on your resume because their interviewing process is robust.
- modwilliam 8y ago
  Not sure if I'm misreading, but you don't have to implement data structures for Google interviews

kronin 8y ago

I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area. One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user group and wrote a published book on the java language. Couldn't code a simple reverse string algorithm, nor explain whether, after with help devising an answer, the method was thread-safe. Another data point... A self-described expert in SQL with it all over their resume. Couldn't write a simple join, inner outer or other. Weed-out questions exist because our industry is flooded with people who don't know, nor care to know, their craft. And there are plenty of employers who continue to hire these people, and promote them. I interviewed numerous "architects" (with development experience all over their resume) who couldn't come up with a naive solution, let alone the optimal, to a very simple problem. Want to fix the interview process in our industry? Figure out a way to weed out the liars? I'm all for it. I would rather not have to do basic algorithm questions, but that's the current environment.

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dom96 8y ago
I have very little experience with interviewing candidates, but how can you be certain these people were liars? Maybe they simply were having a bad day, or got too much in their head with stress during the interview. There are many factors at play when it comes to a bad performance and it's not always simply that the engineer doesn't know the answer.
- kronin 8y ago
  I give them a chance to judge their own skillset. After looking at their resume, I have an idea based on the projects they take credit for, what their experience level should be. If what they state lines up with their resume, and they are unable to answer a simple question, with multiple hints and help, then I absolutely assume they are a liar (edit: or delusional, which is even worse. An expectation I have of seniors and above is to have some idea of knowing what they don't know). It would be unreasonable for me to pass them through an interview that the other members on the team passed through based on "oh, they had a bad day". Since you haven't been on the other side of the table, have you had coworkers who obviously were at a position above their skill level? Who allowed the rest of their team to carry them? I've had periods wherey personal life has affected my productivity. That doesn't preclude my ability to write an algorithm that reverses a string nor write a simple SQL join. I don't ask brain teasers. I ask questions related to what the engineers under me will be expected to solve every day.

kleinsch 8y ago

Netflix already does this. Just interviewed with them for a full stack role. All interviews are dependent on the team, but generally feature less whiteboarding than FB/Google. I did a takehome technical exercise, in person interviews were tailored to my experience. They were mostly about system design, general concepts, and a heavy heavy focus on interpersonal skills. Their approach seems to be: 1. Make sure you actually know what’s on your resume 2. Make sure you have the strategic thinking and interpersonal skills to own the system you’ll be working on 3. Make sure you’re a good match for their fairly unique work culture

burtonator 8y ago

I had a junior/intermediate level engineer start asking me minutiae about HTTP and HTTPS... After about 5 minutes of this I literally said: "Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds". I no longer keep small tactical issues in my head. It's pointless. Now I try to understand the system as a whole.

mattnewton 8y ago
It could be _because_ they read your resume that they asked those questions, to see if they believe it. People heavily embellish their degree of involvement in projects all the time. Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.
gcb0 8y ago
I guess people who allowed hacks like adding -1 fridge to get a free tv in earlier online stores could also claim "but they have build online stores that moved thousands of sales every minute" ;)
booleandilemma 8y ago
A lot of people will write whatever makes them sound good on their resumes, so we have to ask questions about minutiae to make sure candidates aren’t lying. It sucks, but this is what happens when the job you’re interviewing for has no license or certification requirements (but pays six figures).
sk5t 8y ago
Over what period of time did you write 1.5 _million_ lines of code for this one project?
- kamaal 8y ago
  Nothing to take away from the original posters work. He indeed might have written that much code. But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%. As a matter of fact I would find it a tad little hard to believe that some one wrote that much(1+ million LOC) and didn't find a way to template it or do some metaprogramming work. Patterns always emerge from that kind of pile.

throwaway169169 8y ago

> You DID look at the CV before bringing the candidate in, didn’t you? I would like to speak to this after interviewing at a few places recently, including Google. I don’t think a single interviewer looked at my resume. I’ve developed a sizable open source project that is used by real people for over a decade. If the company really wanted to know if I could write code they could just go and look at it. Instead they ask puzzle questions that I have no interest in and end up failing. These companies expect the candidate to spend weeks preparing for their hoop jumping, but can’t be bothered to actually read the CV. Multiple people didn’t seem to realize where I lived even when my address was at the top of the paper.

chrisbennet 8y ago
I think they have a policy of not reading your resume so as not to bias the interviewer. Seems crazy I know.

mancerayder 8y ago

By "fizzbuzz" I wasn't referring to the "divide by 3 and 5" one that seems common, but something much worse. I once interviewed at a place where they presented a jumble of characters, and about 8 rules, and I was on the phone being watched (after an hour of successfully troubleshooting a broken AWS instance with a bunch of quirky Linux issues). The 8 or so rules involved something like, "You must print each line with one character longer than the last / c must never come right before vowel / x's must be on alternate rows / f's and z's ... " while parsing all of this stuff, I had 10 minutes total since we were almost out of time when we started the questioning. The interviewer said, "Don't worry, just do it in pseudocode." That's bad interviewing. I can do the problem easily without someone looking over my shoulder, and I need more than 10 minutes just to think about the 8 or whatever rules he gave me. He failed me, and I ended up working there anyway a year later after the guy quit (true story).