15 ms·

Show HN: interviewing.io is out of beta and open to engineers of all levels

171 points by leeny 6y ago

the_arun 6y ago
Haven't tried it yet. FYI, blog.interviewing.io is running on HTTP (port 80) as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fadifrancis 6y ago
congratulations!
johnsykes 6y ago
this is great, can't wait to try it
derwiki 6y ago
Congrats!
lukethomas 6y ago
This is awesome! I've really enjoy watching the interviews they publish on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg
leshow 6y ago
This site is amazing. I had a real problem with nerves during interviews, I did about half a dozen practice interviews on the site over about 2 or 3 months, while I was brushing up on algorithms and data structures in my spare time. It was great, if you have issues with interviews I recommend the site. One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by studying first for a few weeks.
- programbreeding 6y ago
  >One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by studying first for a few weeks Once I realized the interviews were done by real people, I realized that would be the case. I was looking around to see if that was something that could be done on their site. It looks like it isn't but I found the following in their FAQ [0]. >If you need a place to start, we heartily recommend Interview Cake [1]. There, you can work algorithmic problems at your own pace and get nice hints as you go. I wanted to post it here for anyone else wondering the same. [0] https://interviewing.io/faq https://interviewing.io/faq [1] I don't want to put the link here but the link from their FAQ does appear to be a referral link, or at least some kind of coupon code. I have absolutely no affiliation with either site but if you want to support this site then I'd recommend checking the FAQ and getting to Interview Cake through there.
- leeny 6y ago
  Founder here. This is so nice to hear. Thank you for sharing it.
- nikhilalmeida 6y ago
  I agree that the site is amazing. It is especially useful since you can take a day off and schedule multiple phone screens in a day. This enables you to get to a point to be able to line up the onsite interviews close to each other, which is what you want to do to get multiple overlapping offers. The only disadvantage is that the site did not have enough mid to senior positions and very little focus on positions for engineering manager and above.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
* in North America and the UK
codingint2009 6y ago
How does this compare to similar sites like Pramp.com, Gainlo.co, and PracticeCodingInterview.com?
- qntty 6y ago
  Pramp is a "mutual interview". You interview someone and they interview you within the same session. This is a one-sided interview.
- volkk 6y ago
  practicecodinginterview seems to be extremely expensive. who pays almost 1000$ for 5 interviews? the way i see these practice interviews is so that i get used to dealing with strangers and rid myself of nerves. why the hell would anyone pay so much for some practice is beyond me even if its "guaranteed" to be someone at FAANG that interviews you. anybody thats a stranger is more than enough for me. and then LC on the side if need be.
- maverick2007 6y ago
  I used interviewing.io and pramp really heavily in my most recent job search. I found that interviewing.io interviews were of a much higher quality in general vs pramp which was pretty hit and miss, some interviewers were well prepared and helpful and some clearly checked out after their half of the interview. But I ended up using pramp a lot more since they had unlimited interviews and used interviewing.io as benchmarks to see how close I was to where I wanted to be. Recommend them both!
- abhilashd 6y ago
  I have used both interviewing.io and pramp. I think interviewing.io is of better quality. But I do think there is value for pramp since it is a mutual interview and we can see how others are answering questions. It helped me a great deal in improving system design interviews.
npiit 6y ago
I don't think practicing interviewing should be encouraged even though I know this has been done for years and years. If you want to end up working on something you actually love in a place you like, you should just learn what is interesting to you. Your "dream" job at a FAANG might be more unpleasant and boring than you've been expecting.
- bra-ket 6y ago
  unfortunately this is the only way to get a job today, almost in any company not just FAANG, no one cares about experience, interests and projects, but only about this randomized IQ test that can be cracked by practice and rote memorization. I think this imperfect filter got widely adopted because of oversupply of people sending resumes.
  - tobib 6y ago
    Absolutely not true, at least in my experience. Could it be a Bay area problem? I'm in Vancouver BC and interviewing right now and it's definitely different here.
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      this is the case in major tech hubs on US coasts with high salaries/competition
    - jameshush 6y ago
      Fellow Canadian, living in California but worked in Canada beforehand. There's still plenty of companies who don't ask leetcode style questions. However, none of them pay even close to what the FAANG companies pay in my experience. You can find offers for similar base salaries (there's startups in LA paying 180k base for roles), but the TC is still nothing compared to the 300k+ packages you're getting from the big boys. It may have changed since I've been living in Canada, but total comp in Toronto at the time were HALF what they were for similar positions in California. Almost all my great engineer friends who still live in my home town in Canada work remote for USA companies for that reason.
gaukes 6y ago
I used this website in my last round of interviewing. The interviewers were hit or miss but I definitely got a lot out of it.
- leeny 6y ago
  If you had any interview experiences you weren't happy with, please email me directly, and we'll make it right. We definitely want to do better than "hit or miss". aline@interviewing.io
  - iio_throwaway18 6y ago
    What counts? I'm reading that this is resume-blind: >Fast-tracking means that you bypass resume screens, scheduling emails, and recruiter calls, and go straight to the technical interview (which, by the way, is still anonymous1) at companies of your choice. Because we use interview data, not resumes, our candidates end up getting hired consistently by companies like Facebook... but I definitely remember all or most of them asking about my resume, at least at the onsite. (FWIW, interviewed two years ago, 8/9 for passing technical screens on interviewing.io, 0/8 for onsite.)
dvt 6y ago
I really wish there was more work done in changing the terrible interview culture in software, instead of doubling-down on bad practices with low signal-to-noise ratios. It's clear that whiteboarding and impromptu coding have little-to-nothing to do with real-life coding capability (let alone with generating real business value), while actual signals (e.g.: GitHub projects, OSS contributions, StackOverflow, take-homes, etc.) are ignored by interviewers. I've interviewed dozens of engineers and it's always been a miserable experience because my hiring manager (or other senior engineers on my team) always insisted on using these kinds of "grilling" methods which were never good signals to begin with. It's a shame how our industry is the only highly-paid professional industry where this kind of sophomoric "intellectual hazing" is not only accepted, but also encouraged. I mean, hell, I have like three books on my bookshelf not about how to write good code, or scalable code, or performant code, but merely about how to pass interviews. Yuck.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Github projects, OSS contributions, and StackOverflow questions, are imperfect measurements and can be inaccessible to a large number of developers. Github is banned in some countries, many OSS projects are english only, and stack overflow moderation needs no introduction, to name a few examples. Imagine if github became a ledger where you are now judged by the shitty code you wrote when you were 20. Remove older repos? You'll be scrutinized for having a "gap in your resume". The system is imperfect but is there actually a better alternative that fits the economic and cultural needs of our society? FWIW I'm on your side, interviewing gives me the worst anxiety in the world even though my career has progressed to the point where I can consistently get an on-site interview.
  - alexandercrohde 6y ago
    Moreover, imagine for just one second that github became the defacto way to interview candidates. Now every candidate starts hacking their github full of all kinds of code, or even paying people to, or copying work to create a perfectly manicured "facebooked" version of what their work looks like (probably with fake timestamps too). Suddenly that signal becomes entirely worthless too. I think tech has one the best interviewing processes of all industries.
k8t 6y ago
I've used interviewing.io a lot and it has been immensely helpful. Not only did I get a lot better at interviewing, I also got a referral from the practice interviewer which eventually led me to my current job at a FAANG.
unkirte 6y ago
Practicing interviewing always seemed to me like studying the day before the exam: if you're lucky and the things you studied actually helped you to pass the exam, you would be lying to yourself because a couple of days/weeks later you won't remember anything of what you just studied. You didn't deserve to pass the exam, but, hey, nobody knows. Similarly, if you practice an interview and you're lucky enough to being questioned the topics you just practiced and they hire you, what kind of impression are you going to give to your future teammates when some weeks/months later they ask you something related to that topic but you don't remember/know? You just Google it? Well, you can google "how to render a template in Golang", that's fine, but you should not google "what's the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language" because there are some things that you should know before starting to work as a professional software developer. I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and personal benefit.
- dintech 6y ago
  You should of course study well in advance, but you should probably revise the day before the exam too.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  > I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and personal benefit. It's not broken for FAANG, because what they're looking for is willingness to spend time studying hard for their interviews over material that's (certainly not all) useful in one's day-to-day job (if it were then this wouldn't measure one's willingness to spend lots of time studying), to whatever degree is required by your raw natural intelligence/ability, to be able to pass their tests. They're looking for (what they consider to be) a sufficient amount of wanting-it + intelligence (IQ, more or less), in whatever proportion is necessary to get the candidate through the gauntlet. That's what the interviews filter for, and it's what they want them to filter for. (yes they're also favoring recent grads and people who have lots of time on their hands—notably those two categories overlap strongly—but I'm pretty sure those are secondary goals, if they're goals at all)
- 6y ago
agentultra 6y ago
I understand there is some value in using a technical screen to see if a candidate has the viable expertise and skills required but how do we find that if everyone is doubling down on generic competitive-programming style hiring sites? After crunching through many leetcode problems I see the problems they give have really poor APIs and many posted solutions people share have memory leaks and other problems that you would absolutely want to avoid on a production code base. Competitive programming is fun for sure but where is the data that it has a high correlation to job success? It seems to me like a completely different skill set. Writing fast, sloppy code in order to solve a puzzle is fun but it's quite another when your library brings down a production server because it leaks memory like a sieve.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  > After crunching through many leetcode problems I see the problems they give have really poor APIs This. The real-world best solution to many leetcode problems is to implement an iterator over their broken interface so that <algorithm> can solve it. Because of how they constrain you, what you end up doing is just sloppily reimplementing portions of the standard library. That's something that you should never want to do in the real world. It completely selects for the wrong thing.
- hysan 6y ago
  leetcode is the StackOverflow for interviews. If all you do is copy paste the problem, you end up with a bad interview process. If instead you use the problem as a base, understand what signals it is trying to test for, and change it to implement your specific needs, you have a much better shot of gauging the right skills. Of course, that requires putting time into designing an interview pipeline full of things like rubrics, bias training, and sometimes realizing that leetcode questions don’t evaluate for the skills you need. Most companies aren’t willing to invest time into this and prefer to just copy <big co X> which is why you hear so many bad stories with what sounds like the exact same interviewers.
azinman2 6y ago
Congrats Aline!
hysan 6y ago
I find it confusing that the software development industry both rejects any sort of standard certification bar, yet there is a fast growing industry built around helping job seekers pass a standard technical interview loop. Given that this overlaps with the HN community, how does everyone feel about the growth of these types of companies?
- diffrinse 6y ago
  Selling shovels to gold miners
forkLding 6y ago
Watched a lot of your youtube videos, really great help :)
mhh__ 6y ago
> Virgin Websafe has blocked this site God Bless David Cameron
P-ala-din 6y ago
As a student, I prefer the interview culture in software because at the very least there is an objective component in the evaluation.
satvikpendem 6y ago
With regards to interviews, there is no free lunch. Interviewees don't want to do at least one of the following: 1. Data structures and algorithm questions - they don't want to study for months 2. Take home exercises - they don't want to spend hours unpaid without knowing whether they got the job 3. GitHub / Stack Overflow / Open source contributions - they don't want to code outside of work One last one, paid interviews about the work itself, may be untenable for employers to pay every single interviewee.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Well, there is the suggestion of the paid lunch- short-term contract-to-hire situations that last a week or two? Of course, this only helps new grads and the unemployed.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    Yeah even for this, if you already have a job, you can't quit your current to work full time for this other job without even getting the actual job.
lukeplato 6y ago
The issues being brought up are very similar to the things talked about in PG's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [1], i.e. "hackable" tests in university. IMO, I don't think there is anything wrong with expecting candidates to be knowledgable about basic algo/data structure for a SWE role -- instead, the issues are with the evaluation process. Namely that it's become hackable using these preperation services (resulting in false-positives), it doesn't capture or indicate a candidate's real-world knowledge/experience/abilities, and the typical questions and whiteboard approach is likely outdated when there are probably better alternatives. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Goodhart's Law, writ large!
allarm 6y ago
Ok I am confused - I am a network engineer, but I could not find anything network related. Is it for software engineers only?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway298471 6y ago
I've been in this industry for a few years and I still don't get it. It seems like people in this industry constantly do things against their own interests to me. In terms of interviews: A lot of these practices are designed and driven by other developers, not PMs or business people. And yet most devs won't work for FAANG, and will likely have a much lower salary. And yet the ask from these dev interviewers is something like this: - "You don't know language A and/or framework B that are very similar to language X and framework Y that you know very well? Sorry we can't hire you. We expect good devs to spend day and night reading up on the latest fashionable library, framework and language and have no life." - "Can you spend several hours every day for the next few months studying leetcode? I hope you don't have performance anxiety, try Valium sometime. No, we won't expect you to solve arbitrary puzzles in front of a semi-hostile interviewer grilling you as your day job, it's just for kicks really." - "Can you spend 4 hours doing this coding assignment as part of the interview?" "We want you to do your best and include x,y,z and the kitchen sink and not just solve the problem (add 4-8+ hours)." "Let's review your work -- you displayed exceptional skills and a deep understanding of our core competency. However, you didn't include our favorite coding style that you didn't happen to guess we would use --that you totally would've just adopted from day one during onboarding-- so we can't hire you." "We didn't see X in your code. No we can't schedule a 15 minute interview for you to explain your 4-14 hour coding project, why you did what you did, and that X is actually in there on L56 -- we're busy and decided to review your code only for 5 minutes after a heavy lunch and already passed on you for someone else. Sorry. We will keep your resume on file to wipe our *sses with." OR (interviewer disappears like a ghost after dropping a 20+ hour coding project for you to do and never follows up after) - "Can you build a full-stack app for us from scratch as the coding project? Oh no, you won't be building a full-stack app from scratch when you start with us, but we want someone who can do it in 5 minutes for the exactly 0-1 times we'll ever need it" - "You haven't learned fancy new library/framework/language X yet? Are you a dinosaur?" ...4 months later... "Fancy new library/framework/language X sucks, it turned out to be a fad. It turned out it doesn't do anything better than dinosaur library/framework/language D and is actually really buggy or complicated. What you _really_ need to know is fancy new library/framework/language Y, that's where it's at. We only want people who keep up with the industry." Me now doing the mental math of how I completely fcked myself over going into this industry The math: Average expected time doing the job after leetcode, coding project interviews, open source, stack overflow, learning fancy library/framework/language/whatever: 60+ hours/week. No you can't reduce that to a normal 40 hours/week unless you want to be a generic Java/Javascript code monkey, sir/madam. Average salary: Not even near enough to justify that, considering the salaries of other engineering and STEM fields. Unless you count FAANG, which you probably won't be working for. What did I get myself into?
former_iio 6y ago
As a former interviewer at interviewing.io, the CEO of this company is committing fraud. She has done the following: - Been consistently late in paying out interviewers. Sometimes over 60 days late. - I am owed over $50k in money for several months earlier this year. She has stopped responding to emails and calls. I am hiring a lawyer to get my money back. This platform is a guise for funneling people through to subpar jobs.
harry-s 6y ago
visited the site - read somewhere - anonymous interview practise - clicked on give it a try - and signup/login screen opened - doubted, if it is really anonymous!

171 points by leeny 6y ago

the_arun 6y ago

Haven't tried it yet. FYI, blog.interviewing.io is running on HTTP (port 80) as well.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fadifrancis 6y ago

congratulations!

johnsykes 6y ago

this is great, can't wait to try it

derwiki 6y ago

Congrats!

lukethomas 6y ago

This is awesome! I've really enjoy watching the interviews they publish on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg

leshow 6y ago

This site is amazing. I had a real problem with nerves during interviews, I did about half a dozen practice interviews on the site over about 2 or 3 months, while I was brushing up on algorithms and data structures in my spare time. It was great, if you have issues with interviews I recommend the site. One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by studying first for a few weeks.

programbreeding 6y ago
>One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by studying first for a few weeks Once I realized the interviews were done by real people, I realized that would be the case. I was looking around to see if that was something that could be done on their site. It looks like it isn't but I found the following in their FAQ [0]. >If you need a place to start, we heartily recommend Interview Cake [1]. There, you can work algorithmic problems at your own pace and get nice hints as you go. I wanted to post it here for anyone else wondering the same. [0] https://interviewing.io/faq https://interviewing.io/faq [1] I don't want to put the link here but the link from their FAQ does appear to be a referral link, or at least some kind of coupon code. I have absolutely no affiliation with either site but if you want to support this site then I'd recommend checking the FAQ and getting to Interview Cake through there.
leeny 6y ago
Founder here. This is so nice to hear. Thank you for sharing it.
nikhilalmeida 6y ago
I agree that the site is amazing. It is especially useful since you can take a day off and schedule multiple phone screens in a day. This enables you to get to a point to be able to line up the onsite interviews close to each other, which is what you want to do to get multiple overlapping offers. The only disadvantage is that the site did not have enough mid to senior positions and very little focus on positions for engineering manager and above.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

* in North America and the UK

codingint2009 6y ago

How does this compare to similar sites like Pramp.com, Gainlo.co, and PracticeCodingInterview.com?

qntty 6y ago
Pramp is a "mutual interview". You interview someone and they interview you within the same session. This is a one-sided interview.
volkk 6y ago
practicecodinginterview seems to be extremely expensive. who pays almost 1000$ for 5 interviews? the way i see these practice interviews is so that i get used to dealing with strangers and rid myself of nerves. why the hell would anyone pay so much for some practice is beyond me even if its "guaranteed" to be someone at FAANG that interviews you. anybody thats a stranger is more than enough for me. and then LC on the side if need be.
maverick2007 6y ago
I used interviewing.io and pramp really heavily in my most recent job search. I found that interviewing.io interviews were of a much higher quality in general vs pramp which was pretty hit and miss, some interviewers were well prepared and helpful and some clearly checked out after their half of the interview. But I ended up using pramp a lot more since they had unlimited interviews and used interviewing.io as benchmarks to see how close I was to where I wanted to be. Recommend them both!
abhilashd 6y ago
I have used both interviewing.io and pramp. I think interviewing.io is of better quality. But I do think there is value for pramp since it is a mutual interview and we can see how others are answering questions. It helped me a great deal in improving system design interviews.

npiit 6y ago

I don't think practicing interviewing should be encouraged even though I know this has been done for years and years. If you want to end up working on something you actually love in a place you like, you should just learn what is interesting to you. Your "dream" job at a FAANG might be more unpleasant and boring than you've been expecting.

bra-ket 6y ago
unfortunately this is the only way to get a job today, almost in any company not just FAANG, no one cares about experience, interests and projects, but only about this randomized IQ test that can be cracked by practice and rote memorization. I think this imperfect filter got widely adopted because of oversupply of people sending resumes.
- tobib 6y ago
  Absolutely not true, at least in my experience. Could it be a Bay area problem? I'm in Vancouver BC and interviewing right now and it's definitely different here.
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    this is the case in major tech hubs on US coasts with high salaries/competition
  - jameshush 6y ago
    Fellow Canadian, living in California but worked in Canada beforehand. There's still plenty of companies who don't ask leetcode style questions. However, none of them pay even close to what the FAANG companies pay in my experience. You can find offers for similar base salaries (there's startups in LA paying 180k base for roles), but the TC is still nothing compared to the 300k+ packages you're getting from the big boys. It may have changed since I've been living in Canada, but total comp in Toronto at the time were HALF what they were for similar positions in California. Almost all my great engineer friends who still live in my home town in Canada work remote for USA companies for that reason.

gaukes 6y ago

I used this website in my last round of interviewing. The interviewers were hit or miss but I definitely got a lot out of it.

leeny 6y ago
If you had any interview experiences you weren't happy with, please email me directly, and we'll make it right. We definitely want to do better than "hit or miss". aline@interviewing.io
- iio_throwaway18 6y ago
  What counts? I'm reading that this is resume-blind: >Fast-tracking means that you bypass resume screens, scheduling emails, and recruiter calls, and go straight to the technical interview (which, by the way, is still anonymous1) at companies of your choice. Because we use interview data, not resumes, our candidates end up getting hired consistently by companies like Facebook... but I definitely remember all or most of them asking about my resume, at least at the onsite. (FWIW, interviewed two years ago, 8/9 for passing technical screens on interviewing.io, 0/8 for onsite.)

dvt 6y ago

I really wish there was more work done in changing the terrible interview culture in software, instead of doubling-down on bad practices with low signal-to-noise ratios. It's clear that whiteboarding and impromptu coding have little-to-nothing to do with real-life coding capability (let alone with generating real business value), while actual signals (e.g.: GitHub projects, OSS contributions, StackOverflow, take-homes, etc.) are ignored by interviewers. I've interviewed dozens of engineers and it's always been a miserable experience because my hiring manager (or other senior engineers on my team) always insisted on using these kinds of "grilling" methods which were never good signals to begin with. It's a shame how our industry is the only highly-paid professional industry where this kind of sophomoric "intellectual hazing" is not only accepted, but also encouraged. I mean, hell, I have like three books on my bookshelf not about how to write good code, or scalable code, or performant code, but merely about how to pass interviews. Yuck.

tmpz22 6y ago
Github projects, OSS contributions, and StackOverflow questions, are imperfect measurements and can be inaccessible to a large number of developers. Github is banned in some countries, many OSS projects are english only, and stack overflow moderation needs no introduction, to name a few examples. Imagine if github became a ledger where you are now judged by the shitty code you wrote when you were 20. Remove older repos? You'll be scrutinized for having a "gap in your resume". The system is imperfect but is there actually a better alternative that fits the economic and cultural needs of our society? FWIW I'm on your side, interviewing gives me the worst anxiety in the world even though my career has progressed to the point where I can consistently get an on-site interview.
- alexandercrohde 6y ago
  Moreover, imagine for just one second that github became the defacto way to interview candidates. Now every candidate starts hacking their github full of all kinds of code, or even paying people to, or copying work to create a perfectly manicured "facebooked" version of what their work looks like (probably with fake timestamps too). Suddenly that signal becomes entirely worthless too. I think tech has one the best interviewing processes of all industries.

k8t 6y ago

I've used interviewing.io a lot and it has been immensely helpful. Not only did I get a lot better at interviewing, I also got a referral from the practice interviewer which eventually led me to my current job at a FAANG.

unkirte 6y ago

Practicing interviewing always seemed to me like studying the day before the exam: if you're lucky and the things you studied actually helped you to pass the exam, you would be lying to yourself because a couple of days/weeks later you won't remember anything of what you just studied. You didn't deserve to pass the exam, but, hey, nobody knows. Similarly, if you practice an interview and you're lucky enough to being questioned the topics you just practiced and they hire you, what kind of impression are you going to give to your future teammates when some weeks/months later they ask you something related to that topic but you don't remember/know? You just Google it? Well, you can google "how to render a template in Golang", that's fine, but you should not google "what's the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language" because there are some things that you should know before starting to work as a professional software developer. I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and personal benefit.

dintech 6y ago
You should of course study well in advance, but you should probably revise the day before the exam too.
karatestomp 6y ago
> I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and personal benefit. It's not broken for FAANG, because what they're looking for is willingness to spend time studying hard for their interviews over material that's (certainly not all) useful in one's day-to-day job (if it were then this wouldn't measure one's willingness to spend lots of time studying), to whatever degree is required by your raw natural intelligence/ability, to be able to pass their tests. They're looking for (what they consider to be) a sufficient amount of wanting-it + intelligence (IQ, more or less), in whatever proportion is necessary to get the candidate through the gauntlet. That's what the interviews filter for, and it's what they want them to filter for. (yes they're also favoring recent grads and people who have lots of time on their hands—notably those two categories overlap strongly—but I'm pretty sure those are secondary goals, if they're goals at all)
6y ago

agentultra 6y ago

I understand there is some value in using a technical screen to see if a candidate has the viable expertise and skills required but how do we find that if everyone is doubling down on generic competitive-programming style hiring sites? After crunching through many leetcode problems I see the problems they give have really poor APIs and many posted solutions people share have memory leaks and other problems that you would absolutely want to avoid on a production code base. Competitive programming is fun for sure but where is the data that it has a high correlation to job success? It seems to me like a completely different skill set. Writing fast, sloppy code in order to solve a puzzle is fun but it's quite another when your library brings down a production server because it leaks memory like a sieve.

nickysielicki 6y ago
> After crunching through many leetcode problems I see the problems they give have really poor APIs This. The real-world best solution to many leetcode problems is to implement an iterator over their broken interface so that <algorithm> can solve it. Because of how they constrain you, what you end up doing is just sloppily reimplementing portions of the standard library. That's something that you should never want to do in the real world. It completely selects for the wrong thing.
hysan 6y ago
leetcode is the StackOverflow for interviews. If all you do is copy paste the problem, you end up with a bad interview process. If instead you use the problem as a base, understand what signals it is trying to test for, and change it to implement your specific needs, you have a much better shot of gauging the right skills. Of course, that requires putting time into designing an interview pipeline full of things like rubrics, bias training, and sometimes realizing that leetcode questions don’t evaluate for the skills you need. Most companies aren’t willing to invest time into this and prefer to just copy <big co X> which is why you hear so many bad stories with what sounds like the exact same interviewers.

azinman2 6y ago

Congrats Aline!

hysan 6y ago

I find it confusing that the software development industry both rejects any sort of standard certification bar, yet there is a fast growing industry built around helping job seekers pass a standard technical interview loop. Given that this overlaps with the HN community, how does everyone feel about the growth of these types of companies?

diffrinse 6y ago
Selling shovels to gold miners

forkLding 6y ago

Watched a lot of your youtube videos, really great help :)

mhh__ 6y ago

> Virgin Websafe has blocked this site God Bless David Cameron

P-ala-din 6y ago

As a student, I prefer the interview culture in software because at the very least there is an objective component in the evaluation.

satvikpendem 6y ago

With regards to interviews, there is no free lunch. Interviewees don't want to do at least one of the following: 1. Data structures and algorithm questions - they don't want to study for months 2. Take home exercises - they don't want to spend hours unpaid without knowing whether they got the job 3. GitHub / Stack Overflow / Open source contributions - they don't want to code outside of work One last one, paid interviews about the work itself, may be untenable for employers to pay every single interviewee.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Well, there is the suggestion of the paid lunch- short-term contract-to-hire situations that last a week or two? Of course, this only helps new grads and the unemployed.
- satvikpendem 6y ago
  Yeah even for this, if you already have a job, you can't quit your current to work full time for this other job without even getting the actual job.

lukeplato 6y ago

The issues being brought up are very similar to the things talked about in PG's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [1], i.e. "hackable" tests in university. IMO, I don't think there is anything wrong with expecting candidates to be knowledgable about basic algo/data structure for a SWE role -- instead, the issues are with the evaluation process. Namely that it's become hackable using these preperation services (resulting in false-positives), it doesn't capture or indicate a candidate's real-world knowledge/experience/abilities, and the typical questions and whiteboard approach is likely outdated when there are probably better alternatives. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html

Apocryphon 6y ago
Goodhart's Law, writ large!

allarm 6y ago

Ok I am confused - I am a network engineer, but I could not find anything network related. Is it for software engineers only?

deleted 6y ago

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throwaway298471 6y ago

I've been in this industry for a few years and I still don't get it. It seems like people in this industry constantly do things against their own interests to me. In terms of interviews: A lot of these practices are designed and driven by other developers, not PMs or business people. And yet most devs won't work for FAANG, and will likely have a much lower salary. And yet the ask from these dev interviewers is something like this: - "You don't know language A and/or framework B that are very similar to language X and framework Y that you know very well? Sorry we can't hire you. We expect good devs to spend day and night reading up on the latest fashionable library, framework and language and have no life." - "Can you spend several hours every day for the next few months studying leetcode? I hope you don't have performance anxiety, try Valium sometime. No, we won't expect you to solve arbitrary puzzles in front of a semi-hostile interviewer grilling you as your day job, it's just for kicks really." - "Can you spend 4 hours doing this coding assignment as part of the interview?" "We want you to do your best and include x,y,z and the kitchen sink and not just solve the problem (add 4-8+ hours)." "Let's review your work -- you displayed exceptional skills and a deep understanding of our core competency. However, you didn't include our favorite coding style that you didn't happen to guess we would use --that you totally would've just adopted from day one during onboarding-- so we can't hire you." "We didn't see X in your code. No we can't schedule a 15 minute interview for you to explain your 4-14 hour coding project, why you did what you did, and that X is actually in there on L56 -- we're busy and decided to review your code only for 5 minutes after a heavy lunch and already passed on you for someone else. Sorry. We will keep your resume on file to wipe our *sses with." OR (interviewer disappears like a ghost after dropping a 20+ hour coding project for you to do and never follows up after) - "Can you build a full-stack app for us from scratch as the coding project? Oh no, you won't be building a full-stack app from scratch when you start with us, but we want someone who can do it in 5 minutes for the exactly 0-1 times we'll ever need it" - "You haven't learned fancy new library/framework/language X yet? Are you a dinosaur?" ...4 months later... "Fancy new library/framework/language X sucks, it turned out to be a fad. It turned out it doesn't do anything better than dinosaur library/framework/language D and is actually really buggy or complicated. What you _really_ need to know is fancy new library/framework/language Y, that's where it's at. We only want people who keep up with the industry." Me now doing the mental math of how I completely fcked myself over going into this industry The math: Average expected time doing the job after leetcode, coding project interviews, open source, stack overflow, learning fancy library/framework/language/whatever: 60+ hours/week. No you can't reduce that to a normal 40 hours/week unless you want to be a generic Java/Javascript code monkey, sir/madam. Average salary: Not even near enough to justify that, considering the salaries of other engineering and STEM fields. Unless you count FAANG, which you probably won't be working for. What did I get myself into?

former_iio 6y ago

As a former interviewer at interviewing.io, the CEO of this company is committing fraud. She has done the following: - Been consistently late in paying out interviewers. Sometimes over 60 days late. - I am owed over $50k in money for several months earlier this year. She has stopped responding to emails and calls. I am hiring a lawyer to get my money back. This platform is a guise for funneling people through to subpar jobs.

harry-s 6y ago

visited the site - read somewhere - anonymous interview practise - clicked on give it a try - and signup/login screen opened - doubted, if it is really anonymous!