7 ms·

The article could be a_lot_ more concise. Here’s what I got out of it as the takeaway: > And that helps us understand why Recursive Cactus spends so much time

The article could be a_lot_ more concise. Here’s what I got out of it as the takeaway: > And that helps us understand why Recursive Cactus spends so much time practicing. He’s training himself partially because his current company isn’t developing his skills. Exactly. Recursive Calculus wants a better job, (a lot) higher pay, a better environment. So he spends time prepping for this. And companies who can offer all of this, and get a lot of interest already, they are selective, minimising false positives in the hiring process. They expect working code in the coding challenge, a good attitude and some other skills like demonstrating decent systems design. Recursive Calculus also preps so much as his interview process to his current place was different and he _really_ wants to nail these interviews, get a bunch of offers and get into a bidding war before saying bye to his current workplace he’d love to leave for something better. There wasn’t really any actionable thing in this article that I found, or applicable advice. The end.

twomoretime 7y ago
>And that helps us understand why Recursive Cactus spends so much time practicing. He’s training himself partially because his current company isn’t developing his skills. I develop software full time and have some 10 years of experience depending on how you count it, and I'm absolutely terrible at leetcode style problems and find whiteboard questions difficult for non programming reasons. I know it wasn't the point of the article, but there's a deeper problem here that most FAANG programming questions aren't actually testing work related code skills. At my company we give two very basic tests, takehome. Both can be completed in 15 minutes if you're rushing. Far more useful of a tool than any of leetcode style questions.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  How is your test proven to be better than the others ? Can't the FAANGs be more selective ?
  - twomoretime 7y ago
    We can't reasonably priced which is superior for selection, but in our opinion the process is much saner and less resource intensive on our part. I wonder if the modern interview process at large orgs is built on a false sense of security. They are possibly overly selecting and perhaps successfully choosing above average candidates but missing exceptional cases who fail to conform to their rigid criteria.
    - mav3rick 7y ago
      In the numbers game they are okay with false negatives.
- dvirsky 7y ago
  The big companies don't care if some great candidates can't do these kinds of problems, there are many others who can. They care about not hiring bad candidates, period. Anyway, I've done both types and for me the false positive rate for take-home assignments is far greater. I've seen people ace home assignments and later turn out to be mediocre engineers. Maybe they were cheating. Maybe not. But I've never seen anyone really ace an on-site coding question and not being great (I'm sure there are some, this is just my own experience).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- austincheney 7y ago
  I remember one time I was hiring for a JavaScript developer. The most important technical competency was a brief working knowledge of the DOM. The actual position required modifications to pages for A/B tests and jQuery was either too slow or broke in production when other developers used it for their test code. Of everybody that passed through HR to me I sent out a notice that there would be a minor code assessment and they could not use jQuery. 6 or 7 people instantly dropped out. There were 22 people left that I actually talked to which only three could pass the code assessment. The assessment was never designed to be challenging. Candidates were using their home computers had access to any reference material. There was no hurry. They could look things up. I also told them if they got stuck just ask me and I would point them in the right direction without any penalty, but only 2 candidates tried that. The assessment was an hour long phone call. At the start of the call I would send out a static HTML page for the candidates to open in their browser and for them to write an answer in whatever tool they wanted but it had to execute in the console of a browser on that page. Tasks were things like take this item out of the page and reinsert at some other location or change the color of a particular paragraph to red. Stupid simple stuff that you would expect any UI developer to do easily. After all these were beginner skills and this was a senior level position. I did ask to see the code they wrote only to make sure they completed the tasks. I would drop their code in my browser console and run. I never looked at code style or sloppiness. It’s a job interview where people are rushed and nervous. Their code is allowed to be sloppy. Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically. That experience really shocked me. I did everything I could think of to make this relaxing and take the edge off because there is always pressure during a job interview. No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than help. Very bizarre experience.
  - monksy 7y ago
    > No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than help. Because they felt that it was a false help. If they take it they're disqualifying themselves because they didn't know something.
stuxnet79 7y ago
Perhaps there wasn't any actionable advice, but it's a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring. Based on the article you can assume that Recursive Cactus is already in Big-Tech ("well known tech company") so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point and quite frankly it's unlikely that the daily tasks involved in the next job will bear a strong resemblance to the kind of synthetic tasks or problems you are asked about in an interview setting. The article did raise more questions than answers, but that was by design. A lot of the assumptions that go into most tech interview processes don't withstand scrutiny. Interviewing is a hard problem to solve, but we shouldn't be satisfied with the status quo.
- dominotw 7y ago
  >so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point no its not. I know ppl who quit MS and reapply later to get placed into a higher tier after they interviewed there again. Jumping jobs into a higher tier is easier way to get a raise than grinding at the same job.
  - runawaybottle 7y ago
    Just adding I had to do this at a large non-faang corp. Just curious how common this is, it seems like the only work around to strict HR caps on raises.
    - cvlasdkv 7y ago
      Extremely common. Interviewing is a tiring and arduous process and companies have all the power. They make the bet that the majority of people are not willing to leave (esp. once they have families).
    - omar_a1 7y ago
      Jumping ship for a promotion at the original company is a super common strategy in other sectors too.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Very common. It’s called salary compression or even worse salary inversion.
karatestomp 7y ago
None of my jobs have done much to exercise the skills I’d need to get exactly the same job in every way at a place that does whiteboard quizzes, language trivia questions, and/or leetcode stuff. It’s not even about moving “up”, necessarily.
pc86 7y ago
> There wasn’t really any actionable thing in this article that I found, or applicable advice. The end. This could honestly be a single-line summary for every blog post I've read on interviewing.io.
commandlinefan 7y ago
It seems like a lot of these discussions end up being something along the lines of "the standards are bad because they exclude me, therefore there shouldn't be any standards at all" (just with a lot more words).
- runawaybottle 7y ago
  Most of the criticism probably should be articulated again to probe whether these standards are realistically something one can work towards. If we’re out of the running no matter how much you practice, no matter how much job experience, and if there really is this mysterious value G, with the right combination of Ivy League CS program, then I can see how these discussions mirror the notion of ‘the bar’ - that is, a forgone conclusion.
  - cousin_it 7y ago
    You could start a company and hire people on other standards, and I suspect it would work, as long as the "other standards" are painful in the same way as the current ones. For example, you could require candidates to learn ten pages of Chinese poetry by heart, or anything else that tests their ability to keep their mind on-task for long stretches of time. In my experience, people with that ability can become good programmers if they're inclined to. What won't work though is hiring based on only past experience. The bullshitters will eat you alive. You really do need some kind of "underwater basket weaving" as a test.
- strken 7y ago
  The standards (e.g. algorithmic questions) are bad because A) they're only tangentially related to the work, meaning they include bad hires and exclude good hires B) they put a huge workload on employees who must practice tens or hundreds of hours of underwater basket weaving, time which would be better spent doing almost anything else C) they systemically exclude anyone who can't play the dumb game due to a lack of time, including but not limited to older people and poorer people
  - zozbot234 7y ago
lapnitnelav 7y ago
Those companies probably also value attention to detail and would realise that our hero is called Recursive Cactus, not Calculus ;)
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The actionable thing is the graph about two thirds of the way down - passthrough rate vs performance. That's the whole point of the article. Two possible conclusions: One is that companies are cargo-culting hiring, and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Clearly whatever the process is supposed to do, it's not hiring the "best people" by any realistic metric. The other is that the process is working as intended, but the actual goals are not stated. This might be true if the aim is to hiring difficult and stressful for candidates to discourage job hopping. (Other interpretations are also possible. [1]) If a company wants the "best people" it needs to follow up hiring with performance tracking, and identify and reward the people and hiring practices which increase performance. [2] If companies want hiring to continue as a social/political game which stresses and discourages developers, the system is working for them, and they don't need to change it. Startups need to decide what kind of company they want to be. [3] [1] IMO there may be a strong element of corporate narcissism in the process. It's not about hiring good people, it's about allowing the CEO and senior management to feel that their company is better than those other companies which hire these people. In reality "these people" may be a bit more than averagely competent, but with a few standouts most won't be insanely great or A players or 10X or whatever the goal is supposed to be. [2] Which assumes it's possible to measure performance, which is a whole other issue. [3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV.
- majormajor 7y ago
  > If a company wants the "best people" it needs to follow up hiring with performance tracking, and identify and reward the people and hiring practices which increase performance. [2] And that's glossing over a ton of massive difficulty, which is one of the biggest reasons things move slowly and are more based on opinion than data.
- loganfrederick 7y ago
  > [3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV. And outside of SV, seen this in the Midwest at both tech and non-tech focused companies.

twomoretime 7y ago

>And that helps us understand why Recursive Cactus spends so much time practicing. He’s training himself partially because his current company isn’t developing his skills. I develop software full time and have some 10 years of experience depending on how you count it, and I'm absolutely terrible at leetcode style problems and find whiteboard questions difficult for non programming reasons. I know it wasn't the point of the article, but there's a deeper problem here that most FAANG programming questions aren't actually testing work related code skills. At my company we give two very basic tests, takehome. Both can be completed in 15 minutes if you're rushing. Far more useful of a tool than any of leetcode style questions.

mav3rick 7y ago
How is your test proven to be better than the others ? Can't the FAANGs be more selective ?
- twomoretime 7y ago
  We can't reasonably priced which is superior for selection, but in our opinion the process is much saner and less resource intensive on our part. I wonder if the modern interview process at large orgs is built on a false sense of security. They are possibly overly selecting and perhaps successfully choosing above average candidates but missing exceptional cases who fail to conform to their rigid criteria.
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    In the numbers game they are okay with false negatives.
dvirsky 7y ago
The big companies don't care if some great candidates can't do these kinds of problems, there are many others who can. They care about not hiring bad candidates, period. Anyway, I've done both types and for me the false positive rate for take-home assignments is far greater. I've seen people ace home assignments and later turn out to be mediocre engineers. Maybe they were cheating. Maybe not. But I've never seen anyone really ace an on-site coding question and not being great (I'm sure there are some, this is just my own experience).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
austincheney 7y ago
I remember one time I was hiring for a JavaScript developer. The most important technical competency was a brief working knowledge of the DOM. The actual position required modifications to pages for A/B tests and jQuery was either too slow or broke in production when other developers used it for their test code. Of everybody that passed through HR to me I sent out a notice that there would be a minor code assessment and they could not use jQuery. 6 or 7 people instantly dropped out. There were 22 people left that I actually talked to which only three could pass the code assessment. The assessment was never designed to be challenging. Candidates were using their home computers had access to any reference material. There was no hurry. They could look things up. I also told them if they got stuck just ask me and I would point them in the right direction without any penalty, but only 2 candidates tried that. The assessment was an hour long phone call. At the start of the call I would send out a static HTML page for the candidates to open in their browser and for them to write an answer in whatever tool they wanted but it had to execute in the console of a browser on that page. Tasks were things like take this item out of the page and reinsert at some other location or change the color of a particular paragraph to red. Stupid simple stuff that you would expect any UI developer to do easily. After all these were beginner skills and this was a senior level position. I did ask to see the code they wrote only to make sure they completed the tasks. I would drop their code in my browser console and run. I never looked at code style or sloppiness. It’s a job interview where people are rushed and nervous. Their code is allowed to be sloppy. Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically. That experience really shocked me. I did everything I could think of to make this relaxing and take the edge off because there is always pressure during a job interview. No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than help. Very bizarre experience.
- monksy 7y ago
  > No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than help. Because they felt that it was a false help. If they take it they're disqualifying themselves because they didn't know something.

stuxnet79 7y ago

Perhaps there wasn't any actionable advice, but it's a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring. Based on the article you can assume that Recursive Cactus is already in Big-Tech ("well known tech company") so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point and quite frankly it's unlikely that the daily tasks involved in the next job will bear a strong resemblance to the kind of synthetic tasks or problems you are asked about in an interview setting. The article did raise more questions than answers, but that was by design. A lot of the assumptions that go into most tech interview processes don't withstand scrutiny. Interviewing is a hard problem to solve, but we shouldn't be satisfied with the status quo.

dominotw 7y ago
>so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point no its not. I know ppl who quit MS and reapply later to get placed into a higher tier after they interviewed there again. Jumping jobs into a higher tier is easier way to get a raise than grinding at the same job.
- runawaybottle 7y ago
  Just adding I had to do this at a large non-faang corp. Just curious how common this is, it seems like the only work around to strict HR caps on raises.
  - cvlasdkv 7y ago
    Extremely common. Interviewing is a tiring and arduous process and companies have all the power. They make the bet that the majority of people are not willing to leave (esp. once they have families).
  - omar_a1 7y ago
    Jumping ship for a promotion at the original company is a super common strategy in other sectors too.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Very common. It’s called salary compression or even worse salary inversion.

karatestomp 7y ago

None of my jobs have done much to exercise the skills I’d need to get exactly the same job in every way at a place that does whiteboard quizzes, language trivia questions, and/or leetcode stuff. It’s not even about moving “up”, necessarily.

pc86 7y ago

> There wasn’t really any actionable thing in this article that I found, or applicable advice. The end. This could honestly be a single-line summary for every blog post I've read on interviewing.io.

commandlinefan 7y ago

It seems like a lot of these discussions end up being something along the lines of "the standards are bad because they exclude me, therefore there shouldn't be any standards at all" (just with a lot more words).

runawaybottle 7y ago
Most of the criticism probably should be articulated again to probe whether these standards are realistically something one can work towards. If we’re out of the running no matter how much you practice, no matter how much job experience, and if there really is this mysterious value G, with the right combination of Ivy League CS program, then I can see how these discussions mirror the notion of ‘the bar’ - that is, a forgone conclusion.
- cousin_it 7y ago
  You could start a company and hire people on other standards, and I suspect it would work, as long as the "other standards" are painful in the same way as the current ones. For example, you could require candidates to learn ten pages of Chinese poetry by heart, or anything else that tests their ability to keep their mind on-task for long stretches of time. In my experience, people with that ability can become good programmers if they're inclined to. What won't work though is hiring based on only past experience. The bullshitters will eat you alive. You really do need some kind of "underwater basket weaving" as a test.
strken 7y ago
The standards (e.g. algorithmic questions) are bad because A) they're only tangentially related to the work, meaning they include bad hires and exclude good hires B) they put a huge workload on employees who must practice tens or hundreds of hours of underwater basket weaving, time which would be better spent doing almost anything else C) they systemically exclude anyone who can't play the dumb game due to a lack of time, including but not limited to older people and poorer people
- zozbot234 7y ago

lapnitnelav 7y ago

Those companies probably also value attention to detail and would realise that our hero is called Recursive Cactus, not Calculus ;)

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

The actionable thing is the graph about two thirds of the way down - passthrough rate vs performance. That's the whole point of the article. Two possible conclusions: One is that companies are cargo-culting hiring, and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Clearly whatever the process is supposed to do, it's not hiring the "best people" by any realistic metric. The other is that the process is working as intended, but the actual goals are not stated. This might be true if the aim is to hiring difficult and stressful for candidates to discourage job hopping. (Other interpretations are also possible. [1]) If a company wants the "best people" it needs to follow up hiring with performance tracking, and identify and reward the people and hiring practices which increase performance. [2] If companies want hiring to continue as a social/political game which stresses and discourages developers, the system is working for them, and they don't need to change it. Startups need to decide what kind of company they want to be. [3] [1] IMO there may be a strong element of corporate narcissism in the process. It's not about hiring good people, it's about allowing the CEO and senior management to feel that their company is better than those other companies which hire these people. In reality "these people" may be a bit more than averagely competent, but with a few standouts most won't be insanely great or A players or 10X or whatever the goal is supposed to be. [2] Which assumes it's possible to measure performance, which is a whole other issue. [3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV.

majormajor 7y ago
> If a company wants the "best people" it needs to follow up hiring with performance tracking, and identify and reward the people and hiring practices which increase performance. [2] And that's glossing over a ton of massive difficulty, which is one of the biggest reasons things move slowly and are more based on opinion than data.
loganfrederick 7y ago
> [3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV. And outside of SV, seen this in the Midwest at both tech and non-tech focused companies.