4 ms·

Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been

by parsimo2010 7y ago

Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been done. You run into problems. You find out that requirements or an API spec weren't perfectly written and have to deal with change. You have to work with other people, and they will judge you. Hard coding exercises with a time limit that have an answer that can't be found on Stack Overflow do a pretty good job of simulating real world job pressures in a controlled environment so they can fairly rank order candidates. The technical interviewers that might be biased against you are either the exact people that will have to work with you, or at least they fit in the same company. If they don't like you during the hiring interview, they won't like working with you. Alphabet's market cap is literally a trillion dollars, so I'd love to hear about how they should stop limiting themselves and start hiring people that can't finish an ill-defined task with a deadline looming and other people waiting for you to finish your module.

petagonoral 7y ago
You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments. Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and graded many exams, but only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower. Funny how that works. And it's not like software engineering is some magical pony that is different from other white collar jobs. To get into my current PhD program I had to interview with multiple people, take a 4-hour written exam, do a week-long exam at home, and I wasn't compensated for my time. So I'm not that sympathetic to people that complain about tech job interviews.
  - kyllo 7y ago
    I've held many other white collar jobs in my career. Software engineering is different, the interviews are at least an order of magnitude harder. Google knows and admits that their process has flaws and their HR team does internal studies on it. Just because Google does something, and Google is big, doesn't mean what they do is optimal.
  - petagonoral 7y ago
    > I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, Yet you spoke as if you had worked at some/any software company. Literally zero years dev experience (FAANG or any other). Zero software interviews. You have zero knowledge or experience of what we're talking about. Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is. If GoT was still relevant, I'd wistfully look at you and whisper "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
    - shawabawa3 7y ago
      The inverse of Dunning-Kruger is Dunning-Kruger It states that experts tend to underestimate their ability and amateurs overestimate their abilities
  - swat535 7y ago
    > Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well Actually you do.. It's one thing if you are upset about people questioning your credibility, but you are being disingenuous by making blanket statements with 0 credibility or evidence to back it up. > only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower I'm not sure what this has to do with anything being discussed. Are you implying that people with decades of experience being weeded out by these interviews somehow equate to C- grades? By your definition, ideal0227 and mxcl are subpar.
- dang 7y ago
  On HN, it's not ok to bring in someone else's personal details as ammunition in an argument. That's a form of personal attack and a steep drop in how users here need to treat each other. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22334315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22334315 ("Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is") was even worse. Please don't post like that here, no matter how right you are or feel you are. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22personal%20details%22%20&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - petagonoral 7y ago
    Surely is relevant when the person is commenting on the experience of something when they've never experienced it. I'm all for dogs on the internet but no point in accepting dogs commenting on the life of cats whilst strongly giving the impression that they too are cats.
    - dang 7y ago
      I understand the annoyance, but the problem is that we don't have access to anything like the precision necessary to make such calls well on the internet. There is (vastly) too little information, too many opportunities to get it wrong, and the damage caused by getting it wrong is too great to be worth the risk. Therefore it's the better part of valour just to not go there. Even getting it right doesn't help, because it will encourage other people to pull the same stunt themselves, get it wrong, and cause damage. We just need to not go there as a community.
jayd16 7y ago
But the questions are not "stuff that hasn't been done." They just test whether you've memorized the answer that took someone far more than 15 minutes to find.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
z3t4 7y ago
The market will eventually shift and they will not see it as they are not in touch of reality and everyone there are in the same bubble. It will be something you can not fix with money.

petagonoral 7y ago

You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
parsimo2010 7y ago
I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments. Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and graded many exams, but only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower. Funny how that works. And it's not like software engineering is some magical pony that is different from other white collar jobs. To get into my current PhD program I had to interview with multiple people, take a 4-hour written exam, do a week-long exam at home, and I wasn't compensated for my time. So I'm not that sympathetic to people that complain about tech job interviews.
- kyllo 7y ago
  I've held many other white collar jobs in my career. Software engineering is different, the interviews are at least an order of magnitude harder. Google knows and admits that their process has flaws and their HR team does internal studies on it. Just because Google does something, and Google is big, doesn't mean what they do is optimal.
- petagonoral 7y ago
  > I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, Yet you spoke as if you had worked at some/any software company. Literally zero years dev experience (FAANG or any other). Zero software interviews. You have zero knowledge or experience of what we're talking about. Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is. If GoT was still relevant, I'd wistfully look at you and whisper "You know nothing, Jon Snow"
  - shawabawa3 7y ago
    The inverse of Dunning-Kruger is Dunning-Kruger It states that experts tend to underestimate their ability and amateurs overestimate their abilities
- swat535 7y ago
  > Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well Actually you do.. It's one thing if you are upset about people questioning your credibility, but you are being disingenuous by making blanket statements with 0 credibility or evidence to back it up. > only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower I'm not sure what this has to do with anything being discussed. Are you implying that people with decades of experience being weeded out by these interviews somehow equate to C- grades? By your definition, ideal0227 and mxcl are subpar.
dang 7y ago
On HN, it's not ok to bring in someone else's personal details as ammunition in an argument. That's a form of personal attack and a steep drop in how users here need to treat each other. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22334315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22334315 ("Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is") was even worse. Please don't post like that here, no matter how right you are or feel you are. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22personal%20details%22%20&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- petagonoral 7y ago
  Surely is relevant when the person is commenting on the experience of something when they've never experienced it. I'm all for dogs on the internet but no point in accepting dogs commenting on the life of cats whilst strongly giving the impression that they too are cats.
  - dang 7y ago
    I understand the annoyance, but the problem is that we don't have access to anything like the precision necessary to make such calls well on the internet. There is (vastly) too little information, too many opportunities to get it wrong, and the damage caused by getting it wrong is too great to be worth the risk. Therefore it's the better part of valour just to not go there. Even getting it right doesn't help, because it will encourage other people to pull the same stunt themselves, get it wrong, and cause damage. We just need to not go there as a community.

jayd16 7y ago

But the questions are not "stuff that hasn't been done." They just test whether you've memorized the answer that took someone far more than 15 minutes to find.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

z3t4 7y ago

The market will eventually shift and they will not see it as they are not in touch of reality and everyone there are in the same bubble. It will be something you can not fix with money.