18 ms·

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb and I'm increasingly unwilling to go through with it. That's a hurdle. But in many careers the hiring processes are walls, as in there is 0% chance you'll get hired. Because you don't know someone, because you didn't go to the right school. The barriers have little correlation with ability to do the job, and more importantly after some milestone has been crossed it's impossible for you to improve your chances.

agumonkey 7y ago
Maybe due to the importance of soft skills ? or maybe a shift into the belief that they are important ? How was it in the 80s or 90s ? could you be hired just because you can fix or implement something even if you don't fit that well with a group ?
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  80s: we need to hire somebody who can code 90s: we need to hire everybody who can code
fossuser 7y ago
It’s largely still that way - you need to know someone to get the referral to get the whiteboard interview (after two phone screens). That said it’s at least a partially objective skill check and I don’t know a better way.
- kamikaz1k 7y ago
  Plenty of people freely offer referrals, since they get referral bonuses (or feel like they wanna help people out).
  - fossuser 7y ago
    Maybe for FAANG (though even that isn’t super easy if you don’t know them personally), but it’s harder for interesting smaller companies.
- dripton 7y ago
  Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    Yeah it's not impossible, but it's not easy. Did you go to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, a different highly selective University? Were you previously working at another highly selective/famous company? If so it's pretty easy to get the interview, if not it's pretty hard without a referral.
    - yitianjian 7y ago
      I work at a FAANG right now - I received interviews for FAANG, top unicorns (Palantir, Uber, Lyft), quant/finance (Citadel, TS, Jane St), with an unrelated degree (Biochem), average school (top Canadian school), and 2ish YOE at a no-name startup. So I would say it's better than I had expected.
    - xxpor 7y ago
      At the time I started, my university had a 75% acceptance rate. I didn't do any interesting side projects or have amazing extra curriculars. I just went to the jobs page and clicked the "I'd like a job please" button. And what do you know, a recruiter contacted me a few days later to setup an interview. I think people underestimate how desperate big tech companies are for warm bodies right now. It's not that hard to get an interview.
      - fossuser 7y ago
        Maybe things have changed then (or you went to a highly selective brand name school in which case it’s easy). I went to RPI which isn’t a bad place, but isn’t MIT. I had a good gpa and decent projects but got ignored or instant rejections from Google and Facebook, I was able to get other interviews (Twitter, Palantir) and after working at a famous company now it’s easy to get interviews, but there’s a randomness to it. If you don’t have a brand name school or don’t know someone it’s still difficult. Not the fault of the companies really, there are just too many applicants. Since I was in school there are more companies tackling this like triple byte so maybe it’s better now?
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., and those same credentials / connections are what get you hired over everyone else who completed the technical assessments just as well as you did. The tech screens exist as a political gatekeeper filter. It allows people who are fighting over petty authority among codemonkeys way down the food chain to enforce arbitrary and capricious standards, especially on cultural capitulation, to ensure they are hiring people that meet a good mix of (a) competent, (b) don’t know what they are worth, and (c) can’t quickly politically outrank you because you forced them to comply with your tribal pecking order bullshit on the way in the door. That’s all it has ever been about. It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      In my experience, this has been rather selective. Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. > You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. I think it stops being seen as a breath of fresh air when e.g. Google's explicit expectation is that you will spend multiple months studying for the privilege before interviewing with them.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Google ≠ the industry. If you're not a fresh graduate, likely you've had much of the preparation as part of your previous job experience.
  - harshalizee 7y ago
    You get to grind leetcode at your job?
    - nine_k 7y ago
      Half the leetcode becomes obvious when you actually solve engineering problems as a part of the job.
      - klipt 7y ago
        That wasn't my experience at a FANG - the joke was that we spent most of our time moving protocol buffers around. Very rarely encountered anything as challenging algorithm wise as leetcode medium. On the other hand working at FANG encourages developing soft skills (cross team wrangling etc) that no amount of leetcode would teach you.
        nine_k 7y ago
        That's why I don't work for FAANG any more.
      - yibg 7y ago
earthtourist 7y ago
It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire. Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school". Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.
- solveit 7y ago
  > They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.
  - Drew_ 7y ago
    "Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.
- dontreact 7y ago
  Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
  - ghostcluster 7y ago
    > Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
TrackerFF 7y ago
On the positive side: As business gets more intertwined with tech, workers need more technical competency - in parallel with automation of traditional jobs. My take is that the more traditional companies will have to compete with tech firms on attracting talent, which in turn means that they'll have to change their ways when it comes to hiring, on how they do their hiring. I think the old days of "We only hire Harvard / Yale / Princeton / Stanford grads with 3.5+ GPA and top internships" are starting to die out. Yes - some of the most competitive jobs will probably continue to use proxies like that, but even firms with the worst gatekeepers are starting to see that there's talent everywhere, and that modern tools can help identifying them. (Remember, one major reason that prestigious firms only hire candidates from top schools and programs, is that they only do their campus recruitment at those schools, because it's a pretty labor and resource costly activity - you can't visit every school in the country, and check out the top students there)
ravenstine 7y ago
While I'm pro meritocracy(and think that, contrary to an increasingly popular opinion, anyone of any background is capable of showing merit in this field), technical interviews can be done very poorly and swing so far the other way that they dehumanize the candidate. Years ago, I had an interview for Yellow Pages. I know, who the hell still uses Yellow Pages? Well, this was back in 2014, though I'm still wondering this now. Anyway, the entire interview process was very depersonalizing. Nobody asked me about my background, why I was interested in working for them, or anything like that. They had me go into a room and sit down at a computer with someone who was presumably an engineer. I had to solve several code problems in JavaScript and Ruby, each one having to be solved in under a minute. If you didn't finish one, it would just erase what you worked on and moved on to the next problem. After those shenanigans, they brought me into a board room with 6 other people, and I they asked me to solve several brain teasers, including the "burning rope" problem. These people were stone cold! No humor about them. Fortunately, I memorized most of these brain teasers from the internet and previous interviews, so this part wasn't so much difficult as I had to act like I hadn't heard those questions before. I didn't get hired, and it was for the best because I'm not a robot, and I don't like brain teasers. YellowPages.com looks a lot better than it did in 2014, but let's be honest, it's a glorified ripoff of Yelp with shitty search results. In fact, it looks nearly identical to Yelp. I wouldn't have been proud to work on that.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Yelp actually ripped off the Yellow Pages. The name comes from YEL-low-P-ages. The Yellow Pages was a paper-based business telephone directory that started decades earlier.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    Oh, for sure, but comparing the state of Yellowpages.com now to its state in 2014, it's clear that someone decided to make the design and UX uncannily similar to that of Yelp. Of course Yellow Pages the concept was around before Yelp. However, YellowPages.com ripped off the concept of yellow pages just as much as Yelp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Bombthecat 7y ago
We do whiteboarding, but not because we want to see how God your are to draw neat things. How mucb right you (sure bonus points for vetting it 100 percent right) but if you get it 60 percent right. Explain it nice, asks the right questions. And say where you have no idea. How to go abkit something and maybe even suggest two or three ways to figure it out (or workaround the missing knowledge, technology) the better. Thats what we want to see.
austincheney 7y ago
I like white boarding for only one reason: so I can really ask questions that makes the interviewer uncomfortable. I don’t like jQuery. I don’t like your big stupid framework or your bullshit design patterns. I am a developer because I like writing code to solve real problems. I want to see, in the flesh, how scared and uncomfortable you are at seeing a candidate write original solutions to real problems. I want to see that arrogant look on your face when I violate your unmentioned code style rules. If that scares the shit out of you, as is so often the case, I know I don’t want to work there. Unfortunately, I have also found that looks impressive during interviews only to not work out in practice once being hired. Not matter what, as a JavaScript developer, people are scared to death if you write original code.
- dirtydroog 7y ago
  > I want to see, in the flesh, how scared and uncomfortable you are at seeing a candidate write original solutions to real problems. I've no doubt your code is the best in the world (have you a github repo?), but with that attitude you'd be shown the door quite soon.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    Earlier the better. I am not there to waste your time.
- SaxonRobber 7y ago
  Damn you’re edgy
  - austincheney 7y ago
    That depends on the audience. Sometimes that sentiment, here on HN, is downvoted to oblivion and other times it gets 60 up votes. Yesterday a different comment that said almost the exact same thing got 37 up votes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821318 I suspect certain threads, by title, attract different population segments that differ on their programming interests, sensitivity, defensiveness, individuality, and so forth. Hiring threads normally have increased sensitivity, and I suspect the sensitivity is ramped up right now with many people being out of work. As for my personal bias software hiring is horribly subjective. When I am interviewing the technical considerations of the interview are generally time consuming substance of no practical value in the consideration of candidate selection. Knowing that going in I prefer to watch the interviewer to gleam what decisions that forming and not disclosing.
aries1980 7y ago
I personally find whiteboarding / diagram drawing very irritating, for the same issue as most physics exercise: given a complex problem and you have to discard 95% of the problem to come up with a result that the teacher might thought. The same with diagram drawing, 10 boxes and arrows, but missing most aspects of the architecture that actually matter. As a hiring manager I much more prefer to talk through the problem to see if the candidate can ask the right questions, thinks about NFRs, can suggest alternative solutions in light of new information.
- OkayPhysicist 7y ago
  Understanding models at several levels is a crucial skill to possess in engineering. It's not that you're "discarding 95%" it's that you are adding only as much as you need. In a problem about a block on a spring, for instance, you might start with a system that's just a point mass on a spring. Then maybe you need to account for friction losses, so you crudely model friction as a constant term. Then maybe air resistance is significant, so you model that as a function of velocity. As you keep adding to the model if your model is a good one, your predicted results should asymptotically approach the physical ones. Problem solving on a whiteboard is the same process. You start with the simplest model, and add complexity.
dominotw 7y ago
Oh good weekly 'hiring is broken' thread. I was stuck in stages 2 and 4 ( anger and depression) of 'unable to land a faang(ish) job grief' for years and would make angry comments on this weekly thread. I think I've made peace with it and I hope to be in stage 5 acceptance. I've been leetcoding every single day for last 3 months, 300 problems in I can hit my target of one easy and one medium with 1 hr goal. I hope to reach my target of 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard within one hr. I regret not doing this sooner. Even if don't land a faag job, this process has led to me accept the process and make peace with it. I really don't care if hiring is 'broken', it is what it is, its an obstacle i need to overcome. Bring on 'trapping rain water' , 'describe one time you had conflict with your team' garbage. I am ready!!
- rafiki6 7y ago
  I'm guessing you're being downvoted because your response hasn't offered anything terribly constructive to the conversation, but I have to actually commend your attitude as I have reached a similar mentality. I am Leetcoding, still suck at it but persisting. I'll play the game because I'm not sure what other choice I have. I don't enjoy my current job and in order to get the jobs I want with the people I want to work with this is the price. That being said, it's absurd we have to do this EVERY DAMN TIME. Even moving between FAANG requires you to do this. That in and of itself is a clear indication of how bad of a signal this interview process is. Reviewing reddit and team blind and HN, it seems many folks working at a big tech company still need to leetcode to move to another big tech company despite already passing the bar at one! If that isn't a clear indication of the type of information these interviews provide I don't know what other evidence we need. Considering how standard it is, we might as well just make it a part of a software developer certification/license that you have to do once to break into the industry. Then maybe companies can actually focus on hiring for the job? Even then, I've started to ask what "hiring for the job" means. General aptitude in our field should be a good indicator of ability to learn and pick up skills in different specialties. The funny thing is, despite our best efforts to not become a real standard profession we are behaving a lot like one, except we don't realize it and keep making candidates jump through the same hoops repeatedly. Getting many software jobs is still about network and recommendations. Getting many software jobs is about a standardized base level skillset and knowledge (i.e. leetcoding). Getting many software jobs is about specializing in a domain and skillset (for e.g. ML or finance or cyber security and all their respective languages and frameworks). And as many commentors have mentioned we aren't as meritocratic as we would like to believe. We still bring our biases to the hiring process. We still hire people we like for subjective reasons over others. My point is this. Maybe, just maybe, it's time we as an industry standardized the profession officially and codified what it takes to get certain positions. That's what I can offer to this conversation constructively. Yes, knowing algorithms and data structures IS imporant to being a good software developer, even if you are building CRUD or mobile apps. But, how many times to do I need to prove I know them? Yes, showing leadership skills IS important to being a good software developer. But isn't being a leader mostly about conflict management, moral obligation and being ethical? Maybe we can stop fearing becoming a real profession that is beholden to standards and public scrutiny and embrace it. It will end up being better for everyone. Then we can revisit the criteria regularly to make sure the tests we need to pass represent what it means to be do our jobs and do them well.
beamatronic 7y ago
There is a spectrum of whiteboarding interviews. When I was 20, I loved whiteboarding interviews. Writing perfect compilable C code to insert into a linked list was awesome! I thought that was super fun. But now days it’s more difficult / intense at some companies.
asdfman123 7y ago
Well, it's problematic to me. I can ace any test on written paper, but my social anxiety is configured in such a way that I become a blubbering idiot if someone is looking at the back of my head. My ability to do really well on written tests actually got me into Stanford, despite coming from a pretty normal middle class background -- my dad worked for suburban city government. If I had majored in CS instead of science, I would be a shoe in, but alas I didn't. If they could just do the tests slightly differently I could ace them. Instead, I'm mainly just avoiding the FAANG world. If I spent another 80 hours practicing them I might have a shot, but eh...
UncleOxidant 7y ago
> Because you don't know someone Let's be honest. It totally helps to know someone even in tech even with technical interviews. If you know someone in a group you're interviewing in they'll often give you hints about what the questions will be. They'll even give the exact questions that will be asked. This helps a lot in narrowing down your studying for the test... err... interview.
drngdds 7y ago
I'd be 100% fine with difficult technical interviews if they actually reflected the job I was going to do. I wouldn't resent spending time outside work studying things that will help me in my day-to-day anyway. What sucks is having to bust your ass studying things that you'll never use.
jgwil2 7y ago
Thank you for eloquently articulating my feelings on the subject. Yes, technical interviews can be infuriating. But in many ways they are more egalitarian than the hiring processes in other professions. Anyone with an internet connection can start practicing leetcode problems today and give themselves a shot at landing a job.

agumonkey 7y ago

Maybe due to the importance of soft skills ? or maybe a shift into the belief that they are important ? How was it in the 80s or 90s ? could you be hired just because you can fix or implement something even if you don't fit that well with a group ?

jackcosgrove 7y ago
80s: we need to hire somebody who can code 90s: we need to hire everybody who can code

fossuser 7y ago

It’s largely still that way - you need to know someone to get the referral to get the whiteboard interview (after two phone screens). That said it’s at least a partially objective skill check and I don’t know a better way.

kamikaz1k 7y ago
Plenty of people freely offer referrals, since they get referral bonuses (or feel like they wanna help people out).
- fossuser 7y ago
  Maybe for FAANG (though even that isn’t super easy if you don’t know them personally), but it’s harder for interesting smaller companies.
dripton 7y ago
Counterexample: I got an interview at Google a few months ago, with no referral and one phone screen.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Yeah it's not impossible, but it's not easy. Did you go to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, a different highly selective University? Were you previously working at another highly selective/famous company? If so it's pretty easy to get the interview, if not it's pretty hard without a referral.
  - yitianjian 7y ago
    I work at a FAANG right now - I received interviews for FAANG, top unicorns (Palantir, Uber, Lyft), quant/finance (Citadel, TS, Jane St), with an unrelated degree (Biochem), average school (top Canadian school), and 2ish YOE at a no-name startup. So I would say it's better than I had expected.
  - xxpor 7y ago
    At the time I started, my university had a 75% acceptance rate. I didn't do any interesting side projects or have amazing extra curriculars. I just went to the jobs page and clicked the "I'd like a job please" button. And what do you know, a recruiter contacted me a few days later to setup an interview. I think people underestimate how desperate big tech companies are for warm bodies right now. It's not that hard to get an interview.
    - fossuser 7y ago
      Maybe things have changed then (or you went to a highly selective brand name school in which case it’s easy). I went to RPI which isn’t a bad place, but isn’t MIT. I had a good gpa and decent projects but got ignored or instant rejections from Google and Facebook, I was able to get other interviews (Twitter, Palantir) and after working at a famous company now it’s easy to get interviews, but there’s a randomness to it. If you don’t have a brand name school or don’t know someone it’s still difficult. Not the fault of the companies really, there are just too many applicants. Since I was in school there are more companies tackling this like triple byte so maybe it’s better now?

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., and those same credentials / connections are what get you hired over everyone else who completed the technical assessments just as well as you did. The tech screens exist as a political gatekeeper filter. It allows people who are fighting over petty authority among codemonkeys way down the food chain to enforce arbitrary and capricious standards, especially on cultural capitulation, to ensure they are hiring people that meet a good mix of (a) competent, (b) don’t know what they are worth, and (c) can’t quickly politically outrank you because you forced them to comply with your tribal pecking order bullshit on the way in the door. That’s all it has ever been about. It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy.

nine_k 7y ago
Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say or do something so silly to be rejected; this happens very rarely.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  My experience as a hiring manager disagrees with yours. Large system design interviews are par for the course - everyone knows how to do them and everyone has lots of experience. They don’t tell you really anything about a candidate, to the point that we should stop using them.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    In my experience, this has been rather selective. Some people have very little idea about load-balancing, DNS, database scaling (replication, sharding, etc), fault tolerance, graceful degradation, queues, throttling, caching, you name it.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. > You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. I think it stops being seen as a breath of fresh air when e.g. Google's explicit expectation is that you will spend multiple months studying for the privilege before interviewing with them.

nine_k 7y ago
Google ≠ the industry. If you're not a fresh graduate, likely you've had much of the preparation as part of your previous job experience.
- harshalizee 7y ago
  You get to grind leetcode at your job?
  - nine_k 7y ago
    Half the leetcode becomes obvious when you actually solve engineering problems as a part of the job.
    - klipt 7y ago
      That wasn't my experience at a FANG - the joke was that we spent most of our time moving protocol buffers around. Very rarely encountered anything as challenging algorithm wise as leetcode medium. On the other hand working at FANG encourages developing soft skills (cross team wrangling etc) that no amount of leetcode would teach you.
      - nine_k 7y ago
        That's why I don't work for FAANG any more.
    - yibg 7y ago

earthtourist 7y ago

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast about how many "top school" candidates they hire. Tech companies are hugely biased in favoring the upper class. And then they misguidedly try to pay a recompense for this unethical bias by discriminating on the basis of race in favor of "unrepresented minorities". Of course, they still really want those "URMs" to come from a "top school". Their goal is to counter their active classism through active racism. As if they somehow cancel each other out.

solveit 7y ago
> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.
- Drew_ 7y ago
  "Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.
dontreact 7y ago
Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
- ghostcluster 7y ago
  > Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

TrackerFF 7y ago

On the positive side: As business gets more intertwined with tech, workers need more technical competency - in parallel with automation of traditional jobs. My take is that the more traditional companies will have to compete with tech firms on attracting talent, which in turn means that they'll have to change their ways when it comes to hiring, on how they do their hiring. I think the old days of "We only hire Harvard / Yale / Princeton / Stanford grads with 3.5+ GPA and top internships" are starting to die out. Yes - some of the most competitive jobs will probably continue to use proxies like that, but even firms with the worst gatekeepers are starting to see that there's talent everywhere, and that modern tools can help identifying them. (Remember, one major reason that prestigious firms only hire candidates from top schools and programs, is that they only do their campus recruitment at those schools, because it's a pretty labor and resource costly activity - you can't visit every school in the country, and check out the top students there)

ravenstine 7y ago

While I'm pro meritocracy(and think that, contrary to an increasingly popular opinion, anyone of any background is capable of showing merit in this field), technical interviews can be done very poorly and swing so far the other way that they dehumanize the candidate. Years ago, I had an interview for Yellow Pages. I know, who the hell still uses Yellow Pages? Well, this was back in 2014, though I'm still wondering this now. Anyway, the entire interview process was very depersonalizing. Nobody asked me about my background, why I was interested in working for them, or anything like that. They had me go into a room and sit down at a computer with someone who was presumably an engineer. I had to solve several code problems in JavaScript and Ruby, each one having to be solved in under a minute. If you didn't finish one, it would just erase what you worked on and moved on to the next problem. After those shenanigans, they brought me into a board room with 6 other people, and I they asked me to solve several brain teasers, including the "burning rope" problem. These people were stone cold! No humor about them. Fortunately, I memorized most of these brain teasers from the internet and previous interviews, so this part wasn't so much difficult as I had to act like I hadn't heard those questions before. I didn't get hired, and it was for the best because I'm not a robot, and I don't like brain teasers. YellowPages.com looks a lot better than it did in 2014, but let's be honest, it's a glorified ripoff of Yelp with shitty search results. In fact, it looks nearly identical to Yelp. I wouldn't have been proud to work on that.

onion2k 7y ago
Yelp actually ripped off the Yellow Pages. The name comes from YEL-low-P-ages. The Yellow Pages was a paper-based business telephone directory that started decades earlier.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Oh, for sure, but comparing the state of Yellowpages.com now to its state in 2014, it's clear that someone decided to make the design and UX uncannily similar to that of Yelp. Of course Yellow Pages the concept was around before Yelp. However, YellowPages.com ripped off the concept of yellow pages just as much as Yelp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Bombthecat 7y ago

We do whiteboarding, but not because we want to see how God your are to draw neat things. How mucb right you (sure bonus points for vetting it 100 percent right) but if you get it 60 percent right. Explain it nice, asks the right questions. And say where you have no idea. How to go abkit something and maybe even suggest two or three ways to figure it out (or workaround the missing knowledge, technology) the better. Thats what we want to see.

austincheney 7y ago

I like white boarding for only one reason: so I can really ask questions that makes the interviewer uncomfortable. I don’t like jQuery. I don’t like your big stupid framework or your bullshit design patterns. I am a developer because I like writing code to solve real problems. I want to see, in the flesh, how scared and uncomfortable you are at seeing a candidate write original solutions to real problems. I want to see that arrogant look on your face when I violate your unmentioned code style rules. If that scares the shit out of you, as is so often the case, I know I don’t want to work there. Unfortunately, I have also found that looks impressive during interviews only to not work out in practice once being hired. Not matter what, as a JavaScript developer, people are scared to death if you write original code.

dirtydroog 7y ago
> I want to see, in the flesh, how scared and uncomfortable you are at seeing a candidate write original solutions to real problems. I've no doubt your code is the best in the world (have you a github repo?), but with that attitude you'd be shown the door quite soon.
- austincheney 7y ago
  Earlier the better. I am not there to waste your time.
SaxonRobber 7y ago
Damn you’re edgy
- austincheney 7y ago
  That depends on the audience. Sometimes that sentiment, here on HN, is downvoted to oblivion and other times it gets 60 up votes. Yesterday a different comment that said almost the exact same thing got 37 up votes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821318 I suspect certain threads, by title, attract different population segments that differ on their programming interests, sensitivity, defensiveness, individuality, and so forth. Hiring threads normally have increased sensitivity, and I suspect the sensitivity is ramped up right now with many people being out of work. As for my personal bias software hiring is horribly subjective. When I am interviewing the technical considerations of the interview are generally time consuming substance of no practical value in the consideration of candidate selection. Knowing that going in I prefer to watch the interviewer to gleam what decisions that forming and not disclosing.

aries1980 7y ago

I personally find whiteboarding / diagram drawing very irritating, for the same issue as most physics exercise: given a complex problem and you have to discard 95% of the problem to come up with a result that the teacher might thought. The same with diagram drawing, 10 boxes and arrows, but missing most aspects of the architecture that actually matter. As a hiring manager I much more prefer to talk through the problem to see if the candidate can ask the right questions, thinks about NFRs, can suggest alternative solutions in light of new information.

OkayPhysicist 7y ago
Understanding models at several levels is a crucial skill to possess in engineering. It's not that you're "discarding 95%" it's that you are adding only as much as you need. In a problem about a block on a spring, for instance, you might start with a system that's just a point mass on a spring. Then maybe you need to account for friction losses, so you crudely model friction as a constant term. Then maybe air resistance is significant, so you model that as a function of velocity. As you keep adding to the model if your model is a good one, your predicted results should asymptotically approach the physical ones. Problem solving on a whiteboard is the same process. You start with the simplest model, and add complexity.

dominotw 7y ago

Oh good weekly 'hiring is broken' thread. I was stuck in stages 2 and 4 ( anger and depression) of 'unable to land a faang(ish) job grief' for years and would make angry comments on this weekly thread. I think I've made peace with it and I hope to be in stage 5 acceptance. I've been leetcoding every single day for last 3 months, 300 problems in I can hit my target of one easy and one medium with 1 hr goal. I hope to reach my target of 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard within one hr. I regret not doing this sooner. Even if don't land a faag job, this process has led to me accept the process and make peace with it. I really don't care if hiring is 'broken', it is what it is, its an obstacle i need to overcome. Bring on 'trapping rain water' , 'describe one time you had conflict with your team' garbage. I am ready!!

rafiki6 7y ago
I'm guessing you're being downvoted because your response hasn't offered anything terribly constructive to the conversation, but I have to actually commend your attitude as I have reached a similar mentality. I am Leetcoding, still suck at it but persisting. I'll play the game because I'm not sure what other choice I have. I don't enjoy my current job and in order to get the jobs I want with the people I want to work with this is the price. That being said, it's absurd we have to do this EVERY DAMN TIME. Even moving between FAANG requires you to do this. That in and of itself is a clear indication of how bad of a signal this interview process is. Reviewing reddit and team blind and HN, it seems many folks working at a big tech company still need to leetcode to move to another big tech company despite already passing the bar at one! If that isn't a clear indication of the type of information these interviews provide I don't know what other evidence we need. Considering how standard it is, we might as well just make it a part of a software developer certification/license that you have to do once to break into the industry. Then maybe companies can actually focus on hiring for the job? Even then, I've started to ask what "hiring for the job" means. General aptitude in our field should be a good indicator of ability to learn and pick up skills in different specialties. The funny thing is, despite our best efforts to not become a real standard profession we are behaving a lot like one, except we don't realize it and keep making candidates jump through the same hoops repeatedly. Getting many software jobs is still about network and recommendations. Getting many software jobs is about a standardized base level skillset and knowledge (i.e. leetcoding). Getting many software jobs is about specializing in a domain and skillset (for e.g. ML or finance or cyber security and all their respective languages and frameworks). And as many commentors have mentioned we aren't as meritocratic as we would like to believe. We still bring our biases to the hiring process. We still hire people we like for subjective reasons over others. My point is this. Maybe, just maybe, it's time we as an industry standardized the profession officially and codified what it takes to get certain positions. That's what I can offer to this conversation constructively. Yes, knowing algorithms and data structures IS imporant to being a good software developer, even if you are building CRUD or mobile apps. But, how many times to do I need to prove I know them? Yes, showing leadership skills IS important to being a good software developer. But isn't being a leader mostly about conflict management, moral obligation and being ethical? Maybe we can stop fearing becoming a real profession that is beholden to standards and public scrutiny and embrace it. It will end up being better for everyone. Then we can revisit the criteria regularly to make sure the tests we need to pass represent what it means to be do our jobs and do them well.

beamatronic 7y ago

There is a spectrum of whiteboarding interviews. When I was 20, I loved whiteboarding interviews. Writing perfect compilable C code to insert into a linked list was awesome! I thought that was super fun. But now days it’s more difficult / intense at some companies.

asdfman123 7y ago

Well, it's problematic to me. I can ace any test on written paper, but my social anxiety is configured in such a way that I become a blubbering idiot if someone is looking at the back of my head. My ability to do really well on written tests actually got me into Stanford, despite coming from a pretty normal middle class background -- my dad worked for suburban city government. If I had majored in CS instead of science, I would be a shoe in, but alas I didn't. If they could just do the tests slightly differently I could ace them. Instead, I'm mainly just avoiding the FAANG world. If I spent another 80 hours practicing them I might have a shot, but eh...

UncleOxidant 7y ago

> Because you don't know someone Let's be honest. It totally helps to know someone even in tech even with technical interviews. If you know someone in a group you're interviewing in they'll often give you hints about what the questions will be. They'll even give the exact questions that will be asked. This helps a lot in narrowing down your studying for the test... err... interview.

drngdds 7y ago

I'd be 100% fine with difficult technical interviews if they actually reflected the job I was going to do. I wouldn't resent spending time outside work studying things that will help me in my day-to-day anyway. What sucks is having to bust your ass studying things that you'll never use.

jgwil2 7y ago

Thank you for eloquently articulating my feelings on the subject. Yes, technical interviews can be infuriating. But in many ways they are more egalitarian than the hiring processes in other professions. Anyone with an internet connection can start practicing leetcode problems today and give themselves a shot at landing a job.