5 ms·

I hope you guys gave the candidate another shot. And maybe an apology.

by jgwil2 7y ago

HarryHirsch 7y ago
Too late. It's an interesting problem, he'll have talked about it with his colleagues and they'll have come to the same conclusions, it's a tough nut. They will conclude correctly that the company is full of arrogant assholes that have no idea what they are talking about.
insulanian 7y ago
Exactly, an apology! It almost sounds like the goal was to find something that a candidate doesn't know. How about finding the things the candidate knows and basing the further discussion on top of that. All this obsession with coding tricks in the interviews is just awful.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
A lot of the dev interview process relies on luck. Sometimes you just get a crappy interviewer (inexperienced, naive, or just malicious), and things won’t go well regardless of your own abilities. In fact, beyond a certain level of competence, interview results are mostly about luck. Sometimes you get a nice set of interviews, sometimes you don’t. Some companies will at least not reject you out of hand for one bad interview slot, but most companies are just so overwhelmed with unreliable signal that they’ll tank you for any kind of hint at incompetence.
- Non24Throw 7y ago
  It’s a pretty wild situation. I’ve been given offers from Google, been rejected by random web shops, and everything in between, all within the same year. The Dunning-Kruger effect is put on steroids during tech interviews. There’s this pretense that the interviewer is smarter than the interviewee, and an expectation that the interviewee will abide by that pretense as a show of respect. That pretense leads interviewers to being unnecessarily ambiguous, and especially leads them to asking overly complicated questions. If you’re an insecure engineer, this allows you to impress your coworkers in the meeting afterward with your complicated question. You can act as if it would have been easy for you, the other engineers in the room won’t disagree because they want people to think they’re smart too, and one thing will be made very clear to everyone: You are smarter than the candidate, and the company is very lucky to have you. It also leads interviewees to fake equivocating and feigning ignorance, and is overall a strong recipe for unconscious or deliberate bias based on the personal and professional insecurities of both parties. From the other side of the table, when you’re the one interviewing candidates, you spend an absolute minimum of 90% of your time screening and interviewing people who are so bad that it literally hurts on an emotional level to interact with them. You develop compassion fatigue, like a nurse in an ER, and it’s very easy to find yourself in a place where you assume the worst of every candidate and don’t even care anymore if they fail. The results of these interviews are influenced far more heavily by the interviewers than by the person being interviewed, in my opinion. And most companies (nearly all in fact) have literally no mechanism by which they grade the quality or subjectivity of their interviewers.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    This sounds about right. At some level, LeetCode can filter out the completely inept bottom fairly quickly, but then it becomes really useless, it is really not much better than fizbuzz in that regard.

I hope you guys gave the candidate another shot. And maybe an apology.

by jgwil2 7y ago

I hope you guys gave the candidate another shot. And maybe an apology.

Too late. It's an interesting problem, he'll have talked about it with his colleagues and they'll have come to the same conclusions, it's a tough nut. They will conclude correctly that the company is full of arrogant assholes that have no idea what they are talking about.

insulanian 7y ago

Exactly, an apology! It almost sounds like the goal was to find something that a candidate doesn't know. How about finding the things the candidate knows and basing the further discussion on top of that. All this obsession with coding tricks in the interviews is just awful.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

A lot of the dev interview process relies on luck. Sometimes you just get a crappy interviewer (inexperienced, naive, or just malicious), and things won’t go well regardless of your own abilities. In fact, beyond a certain level of competence, interview results are mostly about luck. Sometimes you get a nice set of interviews, sometimes you don’t. Some companies will at least not reject you out of hand for one bad interview slot, but most companies are just so overwhelmed with unreliable signal that they’ll tank you for any kind of hint at incompetence.

Non24Throw 7y ago
It’s a pretty wild situation. I’ve been given offers from Google, been rejected by random web shops, and everything in between, all within the same year. The Dunning-Kruger effect is put on steroids during tech interviews. There’s this pretense that the interviewer is smarter than the interviewee, and an expectation that the interviewee will abide by that pretense as a show of respect. That pretense leads interviewers to being unnecessarily ambiguous, and especially leads them to asking overly complicated questions. If you’re an insecure engineer, this allows you to impress your coworkers in the meeting afterward with your complicated question. You can act as if it would have been easy for you, the other engineers in the room won’t disagree because they want people to think they’re smart too, and one thing will be made very clear to everyone: You are smarter than the candidate, and the company is very lucky to have you. It also leads interviewees to fake equivocating and feigning ignorance, and is overall a strong recipe for unconscious or deliberate bias based on the personal and professional insecurities of both parties. From the other side of the table, when you’re the one interviewing candidates, you spend an absolute minimum of 90% of your time screening and interviewing people who are so bad that it literally hurts on an emotional level to interact with them. You develop compassion fatigue, like a nurse in an ER, and it’s very easy to find yourself in a place where you assume the worst of every candidate and don’t even care anymore if they fail. The results of these interviews are influenced far more heavily by the interviewers than by the person being interviewed, in my opinion. And most companies (nearly all in fact) have literally no mechanism by which they grade the quality or subjectivity of their interviewers.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  This sounds about right. At some level, LeetCode can filter out the completely inept bottom fairly quickly, but then it becomes really useless, it is really not much better than fizbuzz in that regard.