3 ms·

Curious to know if anyone has had a "good" interview? So good that you'd actually apply that approach to candidates you're interviewing?

by vrt77 7y ago

lacker 7y ago
In my experience, most people who are hired by Google or Facebook consider the interview process to be good, and generally approve of applying that same interview process to find new candidates. However, that set of people is outnumbered by the set of people who applied to Google or Facebook and got rejected.
- shivawu 7y ago
  I was hired by these big company before. I don't consider them good. I just know how it works. Probably don't want to go through this process again, unless there's some amazingly good opportunities there.
cr0sh 7y ago
I had one great interview once that worked out very well; it's only downside was the length of time it took. I went to the interview, did a sit-down back-and-forth in-person discussion about my past work and resume; the usual. No whiteboard. Then I was told I had to do a practical exam; they basically gave me a laptop (MBP with MAMP - this was for a PHP/MySQL position), sat me in a cube with the rest of their development team, and gave me a test to work thru. First half was just question-and-answer (multiple choice and t/f - maybe some written too IIRC). The second was to code up a simple CRUD app using PHP and MySQL. They said I could use any resource I wanted - google, etc. This was about 3pm, and I had until 5pm (quittin' time) to finish. During this time I was working in the area I would be normally working, among potential future colleagues, with all the office distractions normally found at this place. Oh - I forgot to mention where: Fender, in their marketing department. So - randomly - people would start to play amplified bass guitars, or a drum solo out of nowhere. At one point, someone rang a cowbell and stuck a triangle. Fortunately, there wasn't any artists being introduced, but that was a possibility too. Various people on the team came up and introduced themselves. Distraction galore! But that was how it was going to be - so that's how they tested you. 5pm rolled around, and they came by asked how I was doing - I let them know things were coming along well, but that if I had another 15 minutes I could get things more solid. They said, sure - take your time, we sometimes stay late - no problem. So I finished, and gave it back to them. Went into a separate f2f with the director of the department and some of the team, chatting about my experience and such. The SWE supervisor and lead SWE came over, shut the door - and basically made me an offer right there. I worked there for a couple of years before they did a downsizing and I had to "move on". But during that time, I found that this kind of test was actually very, very difficult for more than a few people. Some didn't even do anything - they just sat there. One guy sat for a few minutes, then got up and left, never to be seen again. Some would complete the first half of the practical, but completely blank on the second half. All of this, despite having a completely set up system in front of them, plus ability to reference the entire internet. If they didn't know PHP or MySQL, it wasn't for a lack of resources that they couldn't or didn't write anything... Then again - I've heard of people failing to write fizzbuzz, so... But overall - that was one of the top interviews I've ever had for an SWE position. I guess it was partly the practical testing, but also putting you "on the floor" to see how you'd fair in that environment (and yes, the whole instrument playing thing was a daily thing). I guess some people couldn't handle it. Others might've just not wanted to do the practicals feeling it was beneath them or something? And still others might have actually just "frozen up" for one reason or another - or really couldn't do what they claimed. For me, it was one of the easiest and relaxing interviews I had ever done, and I would do again - and would love to give a similar interview to someone, if I were in that position.
twic 7y ago
When i got hired by Pivotal Labs, i had: 1. A phone conversation with a manager to see if we were on the same page. 2. A one-hour on-site coding test, writing a fairly simple class using very strict TDD (i think we did this in the evening, after my day at my previous job had finished). 3. A whole day on site, spending each half of the day pairing with someone on something. In the morning we wrote a little demo app for using Redis on Cloud Foundry (in Ruby, which i didn't know!), and in the afternoon it was some made-up webapp (using Spring, which i also didn't know). Both things either were or were very like real development (on the Spring thing, we spent half an hour setting up the environment, fifteen minutes coding, then two hours debugging and reading Spring docs to find out why it wasn't working, so exactly like real Spring development). The first two stages were pretty undemanding, which was good for me. The final stage took a lot of time and energy, but i got to spend the whole day with two current employees, both of whom really impressed me (shouts out to Chris B and Nick S), and that was really good for me. In general, i really like to be given a stringent interview, because it indicates i'll be working with high-calibre people who have passed it. But it does have to be effective in its stringency, not just unpleasant. Amazon Instant Video's hiring process was the latter (and not just because it took a whole day with no break for lunch).
suzzer99 7y ago
Yes - my best interview was with an online flower shop. We walked though building a "like" widget that other sites could embed - from the front end architecture, to middle layer to database choices. It was exactly like something you'd expect a lead engineer/architect to design.
neilv 7y ago
One of them that worked out very well: the hiring manager was highly technical (very strong developer, who later got an applied-mathy PhD), looking for a sort of technical partner on a big new technical system. He knew of me from some open source, had seen my resume with lots of experience. When we met, he said "obviously, you know how to program", and we went immediately to talking about what he was building, asked my ideas about it, etc. We covered working style and values and such, too. That turned into several years of very successful work. I'd be happy to interview people that way. When you can't talk enough about your project, nor about stuff they've worked on before, you can still engage them in a discussion of a hypothetical but real-world problem (not CS101 problem sets), and go from there. If you know your own technical stuff, IME, it's pretty easy to tell from talking with someone that they can fizzbuzz, without a hazing gauntlet of whiteboard exercises that give little sense of anything (other than that the company thinks hazing experienced people is a good idea, and that the person will submit to hazing).

Curious to know if anyone has had a "good" interview? So good that you'd actually apply that approach to candidates you're interviewing?

by vrt77 7y ago

Curious to know if anyone has had a "good" interview? So good that you'd actually apply that approach to candidates you're interviewing?

lacker 7y ago

In my experience, most people who are hired by Google or Facebook consider the interview process to be good, and generally approve of applying that same interview process to find new candidates. However, that set of people is outnumbered by the set of people who applied to Google or Facebook and got rejected.

shivawu 7y ago
I was hired by these big company before. I don't consider them good. I just know how it works. Probably don't want to go through this process again, unless there's some amazingly good opportunities there.

cr0sh 7y ago

I had one great interview once that worked out very well; it's only downside was the length of time it took. I went to the interview, did a sit-down back-and-forth in-person discussion about my past work and resume; the usual. No whiteboard. Then I was told I had to do a practical exam; they basically gave me a laptop (MBP with MAMP - this was for a PHP/MySQL position), sat me in a cube with the rest of their development team, and gave me a test to work thru. First half was just question-and-answer (multiple choice and t/f - maybe some written too IIRC). The second was to code up a simple CRUD app using PHP and MySQL. They said I could use any resource I wanted - google, etc. This was about 3pm, and I had until 5pm (quittin' time) to finish. During this time I was working in the area I would be normally working, among potential future colleagues, with all the office distractions normally found at this place. Oh - I forgot to mention where: Fender, in their marketing department. So - randomly - people would start to play amplified bass guitars, or a drum solo out of nowhere. At one point, someone rang a cowbell and stuck a triangle. Fortunately, there wasn't any artists being introduced, but that was a possibility too. Various people on the team came up and introduced themselves. Distraction galore! But that was how it was going to be - so that's how they tested you. 5pm rolled around, and they came by asked how I was doing - I let them know things were coming along well, but that if I had another 15 minutes I could get things more solid. They said, sure - take your time, we sometimes stay late - no problem. So I finished, and gave it back to them. Went into a separate f2f with the director of the department and some of the team, chatting about my experience and such. The SWE supervisor and lead SWE came over, shut the door - and basically made me an offer right there. I worked there for a couple of years before they did a downsizing and I had to "move on". But during that time, I found that this kind of test was actually very, very difficult for more than a few people. Some didn't even do anything - they just sat there. One guy sat for a few minutes, then got up and left, never to be seen again. Some would complete the first half of the practical, but completely blank on the second half. All of this, despite having a completely set up system in front of them, plus ability to reference the entire internet. If they didn't know PHP or MySQL, it wasn't for a lack of resources that they couldn't or didn't write anything... Then again - I've heard of people failing to write fizzbuzz, so... But overall - that was one of the top interviews I've ever had for an SWE position. I guess it was partly the practical testing, but also putting you "on the floor" to see how you'd fair in that environment (and yes, the whole instrument playing thing was a daily thing). I guess some people couldn't handle it. Others might've just not wanted to do the practicals feeling it was beneath them or something? And still others might have actually just "frozen up" for one reason or another - or really couldn't do what they claimed. For me, it was one of the easiest and relaxing interviews I had ever done, and I would do again - and would love to give a similar interview to someone, if I were in that position.

twic 7y ago

When i got hired by Pivotal Labs, i had: 1. A phone conversation with a manager to see if we were on the same page. 2. A one-hour on-site coding test, writing a fairly simple class using very strict TDD (i think we did this in the evening, after my day at my previous job had finished). 3. A whole day on site, spending each half of the day pairing with someone on something. In the morning we wrote a little demo app for using Redis on Cloud Foundry (in Ruby, which i didn't know!), and in the afternoon it was some made-up webapp (using Spring, which i also didn't know). Both things either were or were very like real development (on the Spring thing, we spent half an hour setting up the environment, fifteen minutes coding, then two hours debugging and reading Spring docs to find out why it wasn't working, so exactly like real Spring development). The first two stages were pretty undemanding, which was good for me. The final stage took a lot of time and energy, but i got to spend the whole day with two current employees, both of whom really impressed me (shouts out to Chris B and Nick S), and that was really good for me. In general, i really like to be given a stringent interview, because it indicates i'll be working with high-calibre people who have passed it. But it does have to be effective in its stringency, not just unpleasant. Amazon Instant Video's hiring process was the latter (and not just because it took a whole day with no break for lunch).

suzzer99 7y ago

Yes - my best interview was with an online flower shop. We walked though building a "like" widget that other sites could embed - from the front end architecture, to middle layer to database choices. It was exactly like something you'd expect a lead engineer/architect to design.

neilv 7y ago

One of them that worked out very well: the hiring manager was highly technical (very strong developer, who later got an applied-mathy PhD), looking for a sort of technical partner on a big new technical system. He knew of me from some open source, had seen my resume with lots of experience. When we met, he said "obviously, you know how to program", and we went immediately to talking about what he was building, asked my ideas about it, etc. We covered working style and values and such, too. That turned into several years of very successful work. I'd be happy to interview people that way. When you can't talk enough about your project, nor about stuff they've worked on before, you can still engage them in a discussion of a hypothetical but real-world problem (not CS101 problem sets), and go from there. If you know your own technical stuff, IME, it's pretty easy to tell from talking with someone that they can fizzbuzz, without a hazing gauntlet of whiteboard exercises that give little sense of anything (other than that the company thinks hazing experienced people is a good idea, and that the person will submit to hazing).