26 ms·

Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

456 points by leeny 6y ago

x87678r 6y ago
I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a blog will give me some feedback.
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal. Some basic red flags: * Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences * Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking * Inability to communicate * Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't do "adversarial" interviewing, but I do throw a lot of spanners into their answers to see if they can vary their approach) * Inability to demonstrate handling challenges and negative experiences constructively * Poor decorum - "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel." There's not always one single thing that becomes a red flag, but things like badmouthing 3rd parties, airing of grievances, extreme arrogance, and so on. The proverbial "Would I like to work with this person?"
  - azangru 6y ago
    I'm 100% on board with the "would I like to work with this person" criterion, but I wonder how well it fares now, in the age that, at least on the surface of it, wages a crusade against all and every biases. If I am biased against a particular group, I probably wouldn't like to work with a person from that group, would I? How does the "would I like" criterion hold against this?
    - kthejoker2 6y ago
      I completely agree it can be misused - the best way to counteract biases in interviewing is have a standardized process. So for example, we don't actually phrase it as "Would I like to work with this person?" we just ask for feedback on "General Behavior and Attitude" If they pass the other components of the interview but fail that one, we usually send them on to a second interview and directly look to confirm or refute the poor behavior / attitude assessment. We also ask recruiters specifically to reach out between interviews for "small talk" to discern behavioral findings. In terms of training interviewers, I couch it in terms of decorum and "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel" and that it's a box-ticking exercise, not a psychological study - that is, 90% or more of the subpopulation of qualified candidates with sustained work history know how to "behave professionally", and this isn't a differentiator.
  - starfallg 6y ago
    The worst candidates know the exact way to act in the interview process. Once they're in, it's really difficult to get them out. I've seen some pretty terrible behaviour, all performed absolutely fine in interviews. So much so that I believe that interviews are only useful to establish basic suitability and that most companies should hire loosely with a long probationary period. Employees that don't perform would be let go.
    - confidantlake 6y ago
      That is definitely one model. The downside is that people are less likely to go to a company with high turnover (high turnover is a red flag for candidates).
  - confidantlake 6y ago
    Different interviewers look for different things. Just watched moneyball, one thing the scouts looked at was the attractiveness of the candidates girlfriend. Low attractiveness equals low confidence and was a mark against the player. If the movie is to be believed, such inane metrics were used be people whose entire job was scouting candidates. I would not be shocked if there are similar dumb metrics used by a hiring manager when hiring candidates may just be one of many roles they perform.
- azangru 6y ago
  Me too. When I read the title, I took it to mean a retrospective after interviewing 60 candidates. Little did I know.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  I could write one, but I'd have to ask about breaching NDA.
irrational 6y ago
Why is the font on this article so hard to read? Maybe it’s not the font, but the weight. I had a hard time reading it and stopped part way through.
- tantalor 6y ago
  font-weight: 300 is a bit light. Bump it up to 500!
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Open Sans (which it looks like it is) is a perfectly decent humanist font. But he uses the extra-light weight and a fairly small font size so it's pretty hard to read. Unfortunately, this represents a lot of typography in 2020 pretty well.
  - minxomat 6y ago
    Dear website creators: Just leave it alone. The default font width is just fine!
- angio 6y ago
  In my experience it's because people test their websites only on Mac + Chrome, where thin fonts look fine. Case in point, this website is hard to read on FF + Linux but it's much better on Mac + Chrome.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It's meant to look pretty, not be read.
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    Silly me... :))
- enlyth 6y ago
  document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(el => { el.style.fontWeight = 600; el.style.color = 'black'; });
sna1l 6y ago
"Not Enough Clarity about your Role" - Like the author mentions, this can definitely signify that the role is not important. The other thing I've noticed over my career is that it could be that the role involves "grunge" work (awful oncall shifts, doing backend work when you want to do only frontend, etc). Companies hide behind cool titles/department names/etc, promising whatever you want to hear to get you in.
- erikerikson 6y ago
  Or you are interviewing "for the company" (e.g. Google or Facebook). While it fits their processes, it's always seemed a way to create and reinforce lock in.
  - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    "lock-in" of _____ to ____ ? Do you mean making it more difficult for the employee to eventually leave / how?
    - RobRivera 6y ago
      Branding has its power over certain people.
    - erikerikson 6y ago
      Once committed to a company (as the "apply to company, do orientation, team-match" onboarding pattern forces), it is considered bad form or indicative of failure to move on quickly. You're additionally now engaged where you are and have sunk cost and social commitment having probably bragged or at least told people you care about where you're going to work. Still you haven't even really figured out what you'll be doing with your life/time. The sell is "big name" as a end unto itself not an thoughtful evaluation of your predicted experience in what your days will be spent obsessing over.
- duxup 6y ago
  IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'. Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me? Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance, but they can't tell me what they want... There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but it's a really bad foot to start off with / makes me worry.
lgleason 6y ago
I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.
- nickff 6y ago
  On the other hand, there often needs to be a time limit, or else they will be too late to make an offer to the runner-up (when the leader turns it down). I am not sure what a 'reasonable period' is.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    That only applies when the company needs to fill a specific position. Specific positions that need a particular person are a minority of SWE roles. In fact it is bad management to let your team get in a situation where there are individual hyper-specialized roles with no knowledge shared.
    - nkingsy 6y ago
      Even if the roles aren’t specialized, there may not be enough headcount for multiple offers to be out at once.
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      I think it also depends on the size of the company/department. A company with 4 people might be looking to bring on a 5th to fill some specific role. In that case, the offer to the second choice depends on the response to the first. On the other hand, a department with 300 people might be looking to increase head count by 10-20%, in which case the offers to each person are quite independent.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Although the reality is that a lot of hires will still be hired by a manager targeting a specific need. When I was hired the job description was even written for me. I'm in more of a marketing organization but if I look around me, there are positions for vastly different skill sets, backgrounds, and preferences. Most of the people in the larger team couldn't do my job well and I couldn't do theirs.
yowlingcat 6y ago
Great list. For big companies, I'd also add looking out for tenure in the management chain that you'll be reporting into (although this information can be a bit tough to get). Walking into a musical chairs situation above your head may land you in a position where gravity lands you in harms way.
president 6y ago
These red flags are the norm in the last decade that I have been interviewing in SV. Issue is that everybody is in the game to further themselves first and foremost rather than helping the company or the candidate. I have talked to many colleagues and managers who are only looking for people that can be "used" to get them promoted and this mindset shapes how they interview candidates.
- zwieback 6y ago
  Unfortunately, not just the last decade and not just SV. I've encountered most of these red flags over the past 30 years and I haven't even interviewed that often.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I am a career switcher who did code "for fun" and only figured out that I would like my life more if I did it as my job in my 30s. Somehow, I had built my life around the assumption that your job had to be "hard" as in "you need to constantly force yourself to do the work" as some kind of masochistic virtue, and it took me that long to realize that I could actually enjoy my work AND get paid well for it if I just did what I loved (software). Anyway, to your comment: there are people like this everywhere, in all industries. The more money there is involved in a domain, the more you will find people that are only in that domain for the money. Doesn't mean those people wont have legit skills that can be utilized, but there are some downsides as you note.
iratewizard 6y ago
This article seems like another example of mid-level people giving advice to junior-level people. There are far more red flags you can expect from a company by asking the right questions. The article doesn't dive into any of that and reads more like a few gripes from a guy who did way too many interviews and became jaded by it. The technical interview itself is not likely to be a good indicator of what work looks like at the company, and without experiencing the other side of things these red flags become 'things that rubbed me the wrong way.' Questions you ask are what dig up the red flags. Who am I replacing and why did they leave? What's the largest obstacle the engineering team is trying to overcome? How do you (the manager) manage your team differently? Is there anything you as a manager would like to improve at? 90% of workplace satisfaction can be attributed to (or sabotaged by) one's direct manager. Make sure you'll appreciate their style.
- leeny 6y ago
  there's a link at the bottom of the post to a list of questions you can ask: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewers/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interview... hope that helps.
- vp8989 6y ago
  Welcome to the Internet. Hot takes about interviewing are a dime a dozen because it's an easy thing to have an opinion about, and as long as you punch up then your takes will generally be accepted. What's always missing from these articles is any empathy for the people on the other side.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I think this article demonstrates some empathy for the people on the other side. For example, the "Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers" and "Your interviewers aren’t prepared for the interview" sections take the point of view of the interviewers into consideration.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
abhinai 6y ago
Some of these points make me feel that this person is trying to read too much from few data points in a rather noisy world.
- erikerikson 6y ago
  Sounds like what's required by the constructed circumstance on both sides.
ThePadawan 6y ago
I complained about there being very few posts about how companies (not applicants) fail interviews only two weeks ago [0]. Thanks for showing off this side! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816
StillBored 6y ago
Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire. At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like "you get to define your role". Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than "evolve our huge product, and justify it". Which is frequently just make work, and you won't be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn't good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower/political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1/2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.
- shuntress 6y ago
  I get that Microsoft is a huge company but the inconsistency in quality is something I find quite comical. To pile on to the Windows control panel for a minute: If you open the start menu and search updates, you bring up the settings menu for updates. Likewise for network settings or any other section of the control panel successor. But if you open network settings from the start menu while you already have updates open, the updates window is replaced by the network settings. Maybe they are working towards renaming the OS "Window".
  - sjg007 6y ago
    I am amazed when I see older style windows pop up alongside the windows 10 styling.
    - vkou 6y ago
      As am I, because the older style settings windows tend to actually be able to solve my problems. What truly blows my mind is when the same settings are scattered among four different windows. See: Anything to do with sound.
compiler-guy 6y ago
The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do. One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture. So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase. I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.
  - dddbbb 6y ago
    Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort. Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks. Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.
mroche 6y ago
To the page author: if you adjust the following link (logo) to be the https variant, the site should read as fully secure: http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/just-logo.png http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/just-... Also, maybe add a redirect from http to https?
NewOrderNow 6y ago
I would just be happy to get an interview.
- Tade0 6y ago
  Now is the perfect opportunity. Q4 is coming and while the company you're interviewing for may not think in quarters, their client or somebody further in the food chain definitely is.
NHQ 6y ago
How did they get 60 interviews? Do I really need to join LinkedIn?
- _t0du 6y ago
  Live in a tech hub, get a good recruiter, say yes to everything. 60 is probably extreme, and a good recruiter would probably actually turn you down for this type of behavior, but it's def possible.
- ericmcer 6y ago
  He is exactly what most tech companies are trying to hire. Very strong resume, masters from respected college, clearly passionate about tech, and a PoC to top it off, he literally checks every box.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Is that actually a helpful comment, its certainly not in the sprit of HN
- bradlys 6y ago
  Beyond this person being very desirable... probably just applied and responded to a lot of recruiters. I don’t think I’ve interviewed with 60 places in a month but I’ve certainly done around 60 interviews in a month. (10+ days of onsites, lots of phone calls) But, I think it’s quite rare. I was desperate for a job and sucked at interviewing. (Ahem, and I still suck at it)
- ptmcc 6y ago
  Doing 60 interviews is certainly not my style of job-hunting, but I think it'd be pretty dang easy (but a ton of work) to line up that many interviews in a few month period if you are not overly selective in companies you interview with. Yes, a good LinkedIn profile with the right resume items helps with that. Also living in (or relocating to) a tech hub.
WhyKill 6y ago
Red flags: ask if they have a standard operating procedure document or employee handbook. Basic stuff like where to go for healthcare, who to talk to about sick leave etc. This sort of logistical stuff is a weight on employee's to have to constantly be asking direct reports about. It's a bad sign when a company can't take the time to do a basic doc like this.
deleted 6y ago
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toxicFork 6y ago
Regarding this > Undue pressure to accept an offer Sometimes the recruiters may do this even the company may be cool about you taking your time. So don't take the recruiter's attitude being representative of the company. Especially if it's a third party recruiter.
justinzollars 6y ago
> If through all the different stages of the interview process, you experience a consistent lack of interest or low morale from your interviewers, you might want to pay attention This is good advice. I certainly have a different perspective of a number of companies, where my outlook of those companies has changed are after witnessing this. It was easy to pass on those companies.
- rurp 6y ago
  Agreed and I want to add that it can go the other way as well. I've interviewed with a few companies that I was ambivalent about going in, but after interacting with some extremely sharp and pleasant interviewers I got quite a bit more excited about the job.
dehrmann 6y ago
I generally agree with the points, but have a few places of disagreement: > Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way If this is someone you'll be working closely with, it's a yellow flag, but the common complaint you read here about algorithmic interviews not being the best way to evaluate someone for a job, this really just tells you how good this person is at either that problem or interviewing. > Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers Normally, I'd agree fully, and as an interviewer, I go in with a sales hat on over my technical hat. During covid, I have no idea how to read low morale. > based in Palo Alto...a six-figure offer definitely didn’t seem like a bad start This is table stakes for a software engineer in the Bay Area, now. Not sure why it was worth adding.
- blablabla123 6y ago
  If the interviewer has no flexibility in understanding algorithmic solutions, it means they accept that applicants spend a month or more exercising whiteboard riddles while the interviewer just compares the solution with existing notes. I think there is a valid case for whiteboard interviews, especially when the company needs to optimize code a lot.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressful work to prove myself to you. The vibe I get from that is: they're not interested in senior or experienced talent. What they want is new grads. So I just tell them I am not interested. Either that or the hiring market isn't nearly as tight as people claim. There must be a surplus of talent if companies can get away with this. I don't like whiteboard coding exercises, but would be willing to do them for the right position. We need to see if this is the right position for me/them before we proceed to that phase. That means that that process comes as one of the last steps, before an offer. If they're not willing to do that, I just politely decline.
- skohan 6y ago
  I get the feeling a lot of this is cargo-cultism: I.e. people want to work at the kind of place which only hires geniuses who can dazzle with their real-time problem solving, but they don’t actually get the reasoning behind such an interview
  - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
    The funniest part of this I've found is that in the rush to replicate FAANG white board interviews most companies end up with poorly thought out questions, with interviewers who are rushed to prep meaning that the question often contain technical errors and the interviewers can barely solve the problem themselves. I've been on the other side of this process where the "solution" to a technical case study is flat out wrong, but most of the people training to do the interview didn't realize this to the point where the most skilled candidates would likely (and luckily for them) fail the interview by giving the correct answer! This means that for many interviews at these wannabe-FAANG companies, if you really know your shit, you often have to proactively guess what the interviewer thinks is the correct answer.
- 6y ago
geebee 6y ago
Thanks for writing and posting this article. Technical interviews are one of the more essential topics in our field right now, and I do think 1) they're badly handled, and 2) difficult to get right. A couple of thoughts on two points raised here: 1) Pressure to accept an offer. I may have lost out on an offer from a promising company by asking for a decision too quickly, and I did this because I was under pressure to accept a different offer. I believe the company's policy is that 1) they'll never rush their own decision to make an offer and 2) they'll never rush a candidate to accept. They figure that if they want to hire you, that won't change a month from now. This position has a lot of integrity, but it does come from a position of great stability. Small companies may have only enough funding for one position, and they're terrified that by waiting for a strong candidate who is unlikely to accept, they'll lose out on another excellent candidate. The company I applied to was well established and well funded enough that they could hire anyone they felt was an excellent candidate. They were, in short, always recruiting, never desperately. The scenario I can't really respect is the company that takes weeks or longer about getting to an offer and then wants an answer in 3 days. I suspect that it's always usually best to pass on a company that is so desperate it needs to do this. 2) Not enough clarity about your role, and underprepared interviewers. I think this can result from the "always recruiting" mentality. When it's tough to hire, and you have the money to hire, it really becomes about finding people when you find them. Companies are less concerned about exactly how to use a new hire, they're more concerned about finding someone they believe can make a strong contribution. As a result, they don't really hire for a specific role. Now, this is understandable as a motivation, but it leads to interview that are bewildering to a candidate. I've had full day whiteboard interviews covering data structures, SQL, and math, but without having read the company's website in advance, I'd be damned if I knew what they did, at all. That just can't happen. It shouldn't be possible for a candidate to go through an entire day of draining exam style interviews and not have the faintest idea what the company does. Even my interview at Google, which was very whiteboard-examish, the interviewers still took the time to explain what they work on before saying "so, suppose the search space were no longer rectangular or convex, how would you modify your code to find all matrices with positive determinants". They aren't thinking about a role, they're thinking that if you can solve difficult code/math problems at the whiteboard, present and explain your ideas clearly, and seem professional in your interactions with people, they'll find something worthwhile for you to do (or, perhaps, they have confidence you'll find something worthwhile to do). It does make a certain amount of sense, but it leaves the candidate in the dark, and I don't want to join a company where my only interactions have been algorithm and data science questions at a whiteboard.
dkarp 6y ago
Tech interviewing articles seem to do well on HN. I'm guessing because it's something most of us can relate to and that's what made me click on it. But I feel like I've read this same content in different articles, that I've found on HN, multiple times.
- sdfhbdf 6y ago
  I like to think that it's one of the few factors that really unite the whole HN community - most of us lurkers here have gone through or will go through a tech interview at some point. So it's universally educational for the HN audience and it's not a polarizing topic. It's also kind of like somebody posting true life pro tips because it's useful for most of us hence why it gathers so mony upvotes probably.
  - dkarp 6y ago
    That's a nice way of seeing it and there's definitely good information being shared in these comments, which may help many people. Maybe these transparent content marketing articles ignite my skepticism
hinkley 6y ago
I sometimes feel self-conscious asking deep questions about morale, especially when I'm on the fence about working at a place and am just being polite in case I need this as a Plan C. There are some questions where if you get the person to take them seriously you may pop whatever bubble they're living in that helps them get through the day. One place, I was not doing so great. I was participating in the interview process, mostly trying to make sure our candidates were better than our status quo, so new people would make my life better. This one kid asks, "what do you like about working here?" and I froze. I didn't have an answer. Luckily there were three of us, and I had time to come up with a half-assed answer that didn't consist of "Run!" Shortly after that I decided to leave, and just making that decision let me make it to the next bonus payout, which was something on the order of 10% of salary after taxes (so ~8 weeks?), plus a few more options vesting. And then I was out the door, along with about 1/5th of the engineering department. It's like people forget there's a door until someone else goes through it. Afterward, the members of the exodus sat around over beers to celebrate the check clearing. Someone (possibly me) asked if sticking around for the bonus was worth it. Almost all of us said no.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Interesting. It seems almost immoral to interview new hires when you know there are insurmountable problems at the company that make you consider leaving. Not saying you are immoral here -- just that it does seem to pose a dilemma. I have not had to interview someone for a company that I want to leave. It sounds like it would suck and require some level of internalized rationalization to go through with it.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Two things. One, you don't always know the answer to a question until someone asks it, and then you can't un-hear the question. I thought I was just grouchy until asked, and then I realized I was properly unhappy in this role. Which I said makes me uncomfortable about asking hard questions of people I don't know and probably will never work with. Two, it's easier to leave a place when you know you've left a project in good hands, instead of knowing things will unravel if you do. Mostly, it's an ethical problem if you sabotage the hiring. But I'll agree that there is a tension between professionalism and social responsibility. What do I owe to my employer, what do I owe to the local developer community? The next time I interviewed, a guy I had a lot of respect for referred me to a used-car-salesman of a recruiter for a place he was leaving. I did contract-to-hire, walked away from that one. Felt a bit like a meat shield to cover his retreat. I realized all the things I respected him for were past tense, and honor that but stay the hell away from him now.
subsubzero 6y ago
Some of my hall of shame interviewers: - Everyone I interviewed on my would-be team felt like they were attending a funeral, never met a more depressed unenthusiastic bunch. - One of the interviewers wondering why I wanted this job as it was terrible, he stated he was looking to leave and warned me about the company. - Meeting room of interview room(conference room) reeked of sweat(when no one was there), it was disgusting, this from a company that was heavily funded(going public this year!) also trash on the floor and interviewers unprepared as well. - Interviewer saying there was not much work here, the company mainly collects royalties from IP and the position would see alot of downtime/doing nothing(manager saying this!).
- jacquesm 6y ago
  These are all very good reasons why you want to talk to your future team mates, rather than to HR and some manager. The team mates are the ones that you will be working with every day, the manager you will likely see once or twice a year and HR you will only see when there is a problem (or when they perceive you are a problem). The lower on the totem pole you go, the better the information about what it is to actually work for a particular company. The people at that level are more honest , more plain spoken and generally simply nicer and will look at you as a partner rather than as a resource.
- starfallg 6y ago
  Why hall of shame? 2 and 4 are top mates.
  - JimTheMan 6y ago
    I once had a manager try to hire me back from another position: 'Look you will be overworked and underpaid, but you will get to do really cool hands on things here.." I appreciated the honesty.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Had one where they did a bunch of interviews with me in the same conference room. The job was in Foster City , so a pretty high CoL area. Whiteboarding, bit of code, etc. My manager-to-be then left me in the room for a phone call with HR about salary. The guy on the other end said that the salary was $50k, no negotiating. I turned then down, of course, but then was left alone in the conference room. I wandered about until security came and found me when I got stuck in an elevator with no RFID pass to let me out. The other bad one was a smaller firm that decided they were going to do a 'super hard' Google c. 2005 interview, in 2018. But they didn't know the answers to the questions either. Lots of 'how many piano tuners...' style questions they were looking for exact numbers with. Tried to have me debug code they had printed out. Turns out I should have known that their Python 2.7 functions wouldn't run on the 3.2 version they compile with. Yes, from a code print-out. Half way through a few just bail to go surf reddit, with me in full view of their monitors. The remaining people just start answering emails and aren't listening to me anymore, but still are asking questions. The snide remarks were the cherry on top.
deleted 6y ago
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moxylush 6y ago
I found this article inspiring. Thanks!
sbussard 6y ago
Mic drop
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dang 6y ago
The HN thread this article refers to is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555.
Tade0 6y ago
Good observations. I have a few things I watch out for on top of that: - Foul language during the interview. I once had a guy tell me "I will not tolerate faggotry in my project". I never got to know what exactly he meant by that. - Asking about compensation expectations before further explaining the role and responsibilities, even though the ad itself had compensation brackets, so it can be assumed that the candidate accepts them. - Having "one person teams". Usually means that the company is understaffed and there's no real chance for any time off. Tolerable only in start-ups where this is to be expected. - When having multiple interviewers, obvious signs that they don't communicate with each other. I recall one situation where I had to relay info back and forth between interviewers.
xtracto 6y ago
> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way Haha, I've happily been in the "interviewer" side of this two times: One time, as part of a DevOps interview I asked the candidate to run something in a POSIX OS every 15 seconds using a cronjob (that was the general idea). Crontab granularity is only in minutes, so you have to use your head or Google to get a Cronjob answer. The interviewee however told me about the 1 minute granularity of CronJob, and offered instead to create a small service on init.d. with a while/sleep 15. I loved his response :-) The other was someone who, while solving a binary search problem without a ceiling integer value, used the fact that his language of choice C++ has an INT_MAX macro defined to set the limit of the search... TOUCHE. As an interviewer I personally love when these sort of things happen because it shown the interviewee is really thinking about the problem.
- user5994461 6y ago
  That's the first thing I thought reading your sentence, cron cannot do seconds granularity (I think the lowest was 1 hour on the last OS I was working with). Why would you ask questions which you know are impossible? That's setting up the candidate to fail.
  - twinkletwinkle_ 6y ago
    It's not "impossible", just not natively obvious. The solution I remember using is 0 * * * * foo() 0 * * * * sleep 30; foo() It's not the prettiest but is a reasonable imitation of a 30 second cron.
    - xtracto 6y ago
      You got it! the main idea is for it to be a "solve the problem" thing with certain framework. I've got guys that just google it, others that do a script and sleep within the script, and the guy that suggested the while. All of them are "right" answers for me... I don't really care about how they do it, but the process perform while doing it. Fact is, during the life of a DevOps, they will need to solve things that they don't know how to, so they'll need to be able to at least Google-fu themselves out of the problem.
guhcampos 6y ago
I had already accepted a position in a local bank when they called me again because one of my future colleagues wanted to ask me some further questions. I got there and met with a guy who had 3 or 4 "AWS Certified" pins attached to his shirt. He wanted to know how I had learned AWS since I did not have any courses or certifications on my resume. I dropped the position immediately after.
- nomagicbullet 6y ago
  The disregard for proper process would already a red flag, but the prospect of working with that coworker would make me nope out of that job before I left the building.
tilolebo 6y ago
One of my unmentioned red flags is a company with significant funding, no monetization plan and caring only about growth. That's 100% personal taste, as I'd rather work for a "calm company".
mberning 6y ago
I do take exception with “no clear direction on where the company is headed”. You have to consider who is interviewing you and the size of the company you are interviewing at. I don’t expect a low level hiring manager inside of a fortune 500 company to give some amazing elevator pitch. If they could they would likely be a C level exec. Everybody knows where companies like P&G or Coca-Cola are headed. The candidate might reasonably assume they intend to keep developing and selling new shampoo and drinks.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mcguire 6y ago
"Not enough clarity about your role" :-) Back when I interviewed at Google, this was their signature. If they made you an offer, it could be to work on any team, anywhere. Their choice. "Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers" And this is why I never got a research job. Telcordia Research, 2004. The only group actually hiring was really doing product development. Everybody else left in the big, empty building were the people who hadn't already escaped.
BJBBB 6y ago
A view from another side. I am not a recruiting specialist, but have been retained by clients to "screen the candidates for someone like me". Greed and avarice typically win, so I tend to accept these follow-up gigs. The types of engineering that I do are not the most technically difficult. But it is a very small piece of the engineering pie, so there are not many out there with my combination of skill-set and education and experience. That is, I may not be representative of what the client probably needs in the long-term, as I was hired by the client to solve a particular and unique problem. So I typically screen for someone under 45 (I am over 60) that has done and is interested in certain types of math, programming, test, and hardware design. This is how interviews need to be structured - and just devolving algorithms and citing random information and doing circuit node calculations from schematics will be less likely to identify the engineer that you need. As for the problems cited by the writer - they are relevant, but are structural and should be self evident to anyone out of school for more than one or two years.
m0zg 6y ago
Take this with a grain of salt, however. You will see some of these "red flags" in a Google or Facebook interview (I've done both), and yet they're some of the world's best places to work, and you can have a _great_ time there.
stephc_int13 6y ago
I don't like this company. Their business model is parasitic.
site-packages1 6y ago
This is a really good list, and I don’t think I can add much to the discussion already here. But the article introduces the author as “passionate about architecting and building scalable software systems.“ Is _anyone_ passionate about this, or is this just marketing speak. It’s like introducing someone as “passionate about customer service,” give me a break.
- jdgiese 6y ago
  Maybe it depends on what you mean by “passionate,” but I would say I’m passionate about customer service and about architecting and building scalable software systems. I cofounded a professional services firm, and it makes me happy to provide our clients a lot of value, and I do really enjoy thinking about scalable systems.
repler 6y ago
Yes
nunez 6y ago
This is a solid list of red flags. Thank you!
nunez 6y ago
I’ll add one more red flag: your team is comprised mostly of contractors [1]. This is a common occurrence in big-co corporate engineering. Often times, this indicates that tech comes third fiddle to sales and accounting and that you will not only work with every enterprise-y tool you can think of, but you’ll work crap hours with little time for learning. [1] This doesn’t apply for those new to tech or, well, contractors!
jl2718 6y ago
At first I was surprised that he didn’t mention companies that interview many candidates endlessly and never actually intend to hire. But then I realized, he was the other side of that.
Seb-C 6y ago
With experience I have learned to stop relying on how the interview feels, but look more at the facts instead. Some companies who did feel strict during the interviews actually were really good companies. The opposite is true, I interviewed a company that seemed open minded and fun. The interview in appearance was quite enjoyable, but with huge red flags. The CTO was always talking (super fast) and just wouldn't let me speak. I could ask only one question (during 1h) and was rudely interrupted in the end because he had no more time. The CTO also said something like "If you join this company you will work with very competent engineers, smarter than you". To which I humorously answered while defending my pride, but probably ended up looking like someone full of himself. Clearly this is not someone I would enjoy working with on a daily basis.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I applied for jobs last year, after having been on the reviewing side of technical interviews for a good while (at my second job). I found a few things. One, wrt the companies I worked for, I didn't feel like they were vetting my technical skills enough; at best it was an hour of chatting and going through some of the code I wrote, but in my head there's just so much more to it. I felt like they were easily impressed. I also felt like I was cheating because I had reviewed so many interviews, so I knew what to look out for. Second, I initially went in there just to orient myself, to prove myself in technical interviews, but for both recruiters and employers, it felt like going into the process already meant I really wanted to work there. I never felt like I learned enough about the job to make that decision yet (although there is usually a one month grace period where you can quit or get fired without cause). Third, wages varied wildly. One job that was interesting was right across the street from me, flew through the interviews easily etc, but their offer was at best 2/3rds of what I earned at the time, it would have put me back years. I wonder if their wages were just not that great in general, or if they were betting on me preferring a one minute commute over a decent wage. I couldn't afford to live here on what they were offering so I declined. They did get back to me a few months later, I wonder if they changed their wage structure. I might reconsider if they can go over my current income. I did find a new job in the end, one where I didn't actually do a technical interview, but where I felt like they actually needed me (instead of just an ass on a seat), like I had a Mission to accomplish. Still working on that, slowly. What also helped is that while I work 4 hours / week less now (I was looking for that), I still earn the same as I did at my previous job - less taxes for a lease car, and income tax laws changed.
rkangel 6y ago
I want to make the point that I always make on this topic - as software engineers we are very lucky to be in a sellers market. We get to pick and choose companies and have the luxury of rejecting 10 companies based on small negative signals (however valid). It is important when thinking about social issues that the VAST majority of the population have very much the opposite experience - they might have to apply to 20 jobs to get one interview and if they get an offer they have to take it or they won't be able to make rent. The knock on effects on that on their work life are enormous.
paulyy_y 6y ago
Is it just me or did he Photoshop those glasses into his pic?
hagoseyu 6y ago
I had technical phone interview with one big electronics company. At the end of the interview when I asked the interviewer his daily work and how it looks like, he was honest and told me something that he don't like it. Something the problem is ill-defined with the manager only cares about end result. He seems very depressed from how he talked about the company, and at the end asked me if I am still interested working for such kind of problems. Decided then not to move to next step.
tor291674 6y ago
> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers Describes my experience with Conoco-Phillips 7 years ago.

456 points by leeny 6y ago

x87678r 6y ago

I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a blog will give me some feedback.

kthejoker2 6y ago
Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal. Some basic red flags: * Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences * Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking * Inability to communicate * Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't do "adversarial" interviewing, but I do throw a lot of spanners into their answers to see if they can vary their approach) * Inability to demonstrate handling challenges and negative experiences constructively * Poor decorum - "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel." There's not always one single thing that becomes a red flag, but things like badmouthing 3rd parties, airing of grievances, extreme arrogance, and so on. The proverbial "Would I like to work with this person?"
- azangru 6y ago
  I'm 100% on board with the "would I like to work with this person" criterion, but I wonder how well it fares now, in the age that, at least on the surface of it, wages a crusade against all and every biases. If I am biased against a particular group, I probably wouldn't like to work with a person from that group, would I? How does the "would I like" criterion hold against this?
  - kthejoker2 6y ago
    I completely agree it can be misused - the best way to counteract biases in interviewing is have a standardized process. So for example, we don't actually phrase it as "Would I like to work with this person?" we just ask for feedback on "General Behavior and Attitude" If they pass the other components of the interview but fail that one, we usually send them on to a second interview and directly look to confirm or refute the poor behavior / attitude assessment. We also ask recruiters specifically to reach out between interviews for "small talk" to discern behavioral findings. In terms of training interviewers, I couch it in terms of decorum and "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel" and that it's a box-ticking exercise, not a psychological study - that is, 90% or more of the subpopulation of qualified candidates with sustained work history know how to "behave professionally", and this isn't a differentiator.
- starfallg 6y ago
  The worst candidates know the exact way to act in the interview process. Once they're in, it's really difficult to get them out. I've seen some pretty terrible behaviour, all performed absolutely fine in interviews. So much so that I believe that interviews are only useful to establish basic suitability and that most companies should hire loosely with a long probationary period. Employees that don't perform would be let go.
  - confidantlake 6y ago
    That is definitely one model. The downside is that people are less likely to go to a company with high turnover (high turnover is a red flag for candidates).
- confidantlake 6y ago
  Different interviewers look for different things. Just watched moneyball, one thing the scouts looked at was the attractiveness of the candidates girlfriend. Low attractiveness equals low confidence and was a mark against the player. If the movie is to be believed, such inane metrics were used be people whose entire job was scouting candidates. I would not be shocked if there are similar dumb metrics used by a hiring manager when hiring candidates may just be one of many roles they perform.
azangru 6y ago
Me too. When I read the title, I took it to mean a retrospective after interviewing 60 candidates. Little did I know.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
I could write one, but I'd have to ask about breaching NDA.

irrational 6y ago

Why is the font on this article so hard to read? Maybe it’s not the font, but the weight. I had a hard time reading it and stopped part way through.

tantalor 6y ago
font-weight: 300 is a bit light. Bump it up to 500!
- ghaff 6y ago
  Open Sans (which it looks like it is) is a perfectly decent humanist font. But he uses the extra-light weight and a fairly small font size so it's pretty hard to read. Unfortunately, this represents a lot of typography in 2020 pretty well.
- minxomat 6y ago
  Dear website creators: Just leave it alone. The default font width is just fine!
angio 6y ago
In my experience it's because people test their websites only on Mac + Chrome, where thin fonts look fine. Case in point, this website is hard to read on FF + Linux but it's much better on Mac + Chrome.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It's meant to look pretty, not be read.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  Silly me... :))
enlyth 6y ago
document.querySelectorAll('p').forEach(el => { el.style.fontWeight = 600; el.style.color = 'black'; });

sna1l 6y ago

"Not Enough Clarity about your Role" - Like the author mentions, this can definitely signify that the role is not important. The other thing I've noticed over my career is that it could be that the role involves "grunge" work (awful oncall shifts, doing backend work when you want to do only frontend, etc). Companies hide behind cool titles/department names/etc, promising whatever you want to hear to get you in.

erikerikson 6y ago
Or you are interviewing "for the company" (e.g. Google or Facebook). While it fits their processes, it's always seemed a way to create and reinforce lock in.
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  "lock-in" of _____ to ____ ? Do you mean making it more difficult for the employee to eventually leave / how?
  - RobRivera 6y ago
    Branding has its power over certain people.
  - erikerikson 6y ago
    Once committed to a company (as the "apply to company, do orientation, team-match" onboarding pattern forces), it is considered bad form or indicative of failure to move on quickly. You're additionally now engaged where you are and have sunk cost and social commitment having probably bragged or at least told people you care about where you're going to work. Still you haven't even really figured out what you'll be doing with your life/time. The sell is "big name" as a end unto itself not an thoughtful evaluation of your predicted experience in what your days will be spent obsessing over.
duxup 6y ago
IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'. Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me? Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance, but they can't tell me what they want... There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but it's a really bad foot to start off with / makes me worry.

lgleason 6y ago

I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.

nickff 6y ago
On the other hand, there often needs to be a time limit, or else they will be too late to make an offer to the runner-up (when the leader turns it down). I am not sure what a 'reasonable period' is.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  That only applies when the company needs to fill a specific position. Specific positions that need a particular person are a minority of SWE roles. In fact it is bad management to let your team get in a situation where there are individual hyper-specialized roles with no knowledge shared.
  - nkingsy 6y ago
    Even if the roles aren’t specialized, there may not be enough headcount for multiple offers to be out at once.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    I think it also depends on the size of the company/department. A company with 4 people might be looking to bring on a 5th to fill some specific role. In that case, the offer to the second choice depends on the response to the first. On the other hand, a department with 300 people might be looking to increase head count by 10-20%, in which case the offers to each person are quite independent.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Although the reality is that a lot of hires will still be hired by a manager targeting a specific need. When I was hired the job description was even written for me. I'm in more of a marketing organization but if I look around me, there are positions for vastly different skill sets, backgrounds, and preferences. Most of the people in the larger team couldn't do my job well and I couldn't do theirs.

yowlingcat 6y ago

Great list. For big companies, I'd also add looking out for tenure in the management chain that you'll be reporting into (although this information can be a bit tough to get). Walking into a musical chairs situation above your head may land you in a position where gravity lands you in harms way.

president 6y ago

These red flags are the norm in the last decade that I have been interviewing in SV. Issue is that everybody is in the game to further themselves first and foremost rather than helping the company or the candidate. I have talked to many colleagues and managers who are only looking for people that can be "used" to get them promoted and this mindset shapes how they interview candidates.

zwieback 6y ago
Unfortunately, not just the last decade and not just SV. I've encountered most of these red flags over the past 30 years and I haven't even interviewed that often.
IggleSniggle 6y ago
I am a career switcher who did code "for fun" and only figured out that I would like my life more if I did it as my job in my 30s. Somehow, I had built my life around the assumption that your job had to be "hard" as in "you need to constantly force yourself to do the work" as some kind of masochistic virtue, and it took me that long to realize that I could actually enjoy my work AND get paid well for it if I just did what I loved (software). Anyway, to your comment: there are people like this everywhere, in all industries. The more money there is involved in a domain, the more you will find people that are only in that domain for the money. Doesn't mean those people wont have legit skills that can be utilized, but there are some downsides as you note.

iratewizard 6y ago

This article seems like another example of mid-level people giving advice to junior-level people. There are far more red flags you can expect from a company by asking the right questions. The article doesn't dive into any of that and reads more like a few gripes from a guy who did way too many interviews and became jaded by it. The technical interview itself is not likely to be a good indicator of what work looks like at the company, and without experiencing the other side of things these red flags become 'things that rubbed me the wrong way.' Questions you ask are what dig up the red flags. Who am I replacing and why did they leave? What's the largest obstacle the engineering team is trying to overcome? How do you (the manager) manage your team differently? Is there anything you as a manager would like to improve at? 90% of workplace satisfaction can be attributed to (or sabotaged by) one's direct manager. Make sure you'll appreciate their style.

leeny 6y ago
there's a link at the bottom of the post to a list of questions you can ask: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewers/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interview... hope that helps.
vp8989 6y ago
Welcome to the Internet. Hot takes about interviewing are a dime a dozen because it's an easy thing to have an opinion about, and as long as you punch up then your takes will generally be accepted. What's always missing from these articles is any empathy for the people on the other side.
- snazz 6y ago
  I think this article demonstrates some empathy for the people on the other side. For example, the "Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers" and "Your interviewers aren’t prepared for the interview" sections take the point of view of the interviewers into consideration.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago

abhinai 6y ago

Some of these points make me feel that this person is trying to read too much from few data points in a rather noisy world.

erikerikson 6y ago
Sounds like what's required by the constructed circumstance on both sides.

ThePadawan 6y ago

I complained about there being very few posts about how companies (not applicants) fail interviews only two weeks ago [0]. Thanks for showing off this side! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816

StillBored 6y ago

Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire. At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like "you get to define your role". Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than "evolve our huge product, and justify it". Which is frequently just make work, and you won't be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn't good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower/political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1/2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.

shuntress 6y ago
I get that Microsoft is a huge company but the inconsistency in quality is something I find quite comical. To pile on to the Windows control panel for a minute: If you open the start menu and search updates, you bring up the settings menu for updates. Likewise for network settings or any other section of the control panel successor. But if you open network settings from the start menu while you already have updates open, the updates window is replaced by the network settings. Maybe they are working towards renaming the OS "Window".
- sjg007 6y ago
  I am amazed when I see older style windows pop up alongside the windows 10 styling.
  - vkou 6y ago
    As am I, because the older style settings windows tend to actually be able to solve my problems. What truly blows my mind is when the same settings are scattered among four different windows. See: Anything to do with sound.

compiler-guy 6y ago

The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do. One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but it's still a part of the culture. So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler phase. I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when the team is restructured, etc.
- dddbbb 6y ago
  Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort. Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks. Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.

mroche 6y ago

To the page author: if you adjust the following link (logo) to be the https variant, the site should read as fully secure: http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/just-logo.png http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/just-... Also, maybe add a redirect from http to https?

NewOrderNow 6y ago

I would just be happy to get an interview.

Tade0 6y ago
Now is the perfect opportunity. Q4 is coming and while the company you're interviewing for may not think in quarters, their client or somebody further in the food chain definitely is.

NHQ 6y ago

How did they get 60 interviews? Do I really need to join LinkedIn?

_t0du 6y ago
Live in a tech hub, get a good recruiter, say yes to everything. 60 is probably extreme, and a good recruiter would probably actually turn you down for this type of behavior, but it's def possible.
ericmcer 6y ago
He is exactly what most tech companies are trying to hire. Very strong resume, masters from respected college, clearly passionate about tech, and a PoC to top it off, he literally checks every box.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Is that actually a helpful comment, its certainly not in the sprit of HN
bradlys 6y ago
Beyond this person being very desirable... probably just applied and responded to a lot of recruiters. I don’t think I’ve interviewed with 60 places in a month but I’ve certainly done around 60 interviews in a month. (10+ days of onsites, lots of phone calls) But, I think it’s quite rare. I was desperate for a job and sucked at interviewing. (Ahem, and I still suck at it)
ptmcc 6y ago
Doing 60 interviews is certainly not my style of job-hunting, but I think it'd be pretty dang easy (but a ton of work) to line up that many interviews in a few month period if you are not overly selective in companies you interview with. Yes, a good LinkedIn profile with the right resume items helps with that. Also living in (or relocating to) a tech hub.

WhyKill 6y ago

Red flags: ask if they have a standard operating procedure document or employee handbook. Basic stuff like where to go for healthcare, who to talk to about sick leave etc. This sort of logistical stuff is a weight on employee's to have to constantly be asking direct reports about. It's a bad sign when a company can't take the time to do a basic doc like this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

toxicFork 6y ago

Regarding this > Undue pressure to accept an offer Sometimes the recruiters may do this even the company may be cool about you taking your time. So don't take the recruiter's attitude being representative of the company. Especially if it's a third party recruiter.

justinzollars 6y ago

> If through all the different stages of the interview process, you experience a consistent lack of interest or low morale from your interviewers, you might want to pay attention This is good advice. I certainly have a different perspective of a number of companies, where my outlook of those companies has changed are after witnessing this. It was easy to pass on those companies.

rurp 6y ago
Agreed and I want to add that it can go the other way as well. I've interviewed with a few companies that I was ambivalent about going in, but after interacting with some extremely sharp and pleasant interviewers I got quite a bit more excited about the job.

dehrmann 6y ago

I generally agree with the points, but have a few places of disagreement: > Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way If this is someone you'll be working closely with, it's a yellow flag, but the common complaint you read here about algorithmic interviews not being the best way to evaluate someone for a job, this really just tells you how good this person is at either that problem or interviewing. > Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers Normally, I'd agree fully, and as an interviewer, I go in with a sales hat on over my technical hat. During covid, I have no idea how to read low morale. > based in Palo Alto...a six-figure offer definitely didn’t seem like a bad start This is table stakes for a software engineer in the Bay Area, now. Not sure why it was worth adding.

blablabla123 6y ago
If the interviewer has no flexibility in understanding algorithmic solutions, it means they accept that applicants spend a month or more exercising whiteboard riddles while the interviewer just compares the solution with existing notes. I think there is a valid case for whiteboard interviews, especially when the company needs to optimize code a lot.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressful work to prove myself to you. The vibe I get from that is: they're not interested in senior or experienced talent. What they want is new grads. So I just tell them I am not interested. Either that or the hiring market isn't nearly as tight as people claim. There must be a surplus of talent if companies can get away with this. I don't like whiteboard coding exercises, but would be willing to do them for the right position. We need to see if this is the right position for me/them before we proceed to that phase. That means that that process comes as one of the last steps, before an offer. If they're not willing to do that, I just politely decline.

skohan 6y ago
I get the feeling a lot of this is cargo-cultism: I.e. people want to work at the kind of place which only hires geniuses who can dazzle with their real-time problem solving, but they don’t actually get the reasoning behind such an interview
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  The funniest part of this I've found is that in the rush to replicate FAANG white board interviews most companies end up with poorly thought out questions, with interviewers who are rushed to prep meaning that the question often contain technical errors and the interviewers can barely solve the problem themselves. I've been on the other side of this process where the "solution" to a technical case study is flat out wrong, but most of the people training to do the interview didn't realize this to the point where the most skilled candidates would likely (and luckily for them) fail the interview by giving the correct answer! This means that for many interviews at these wannabe-FAANG companies, if you really know your shit, you often have to proactively guess what the interviewer thinks is the correct answer.
6y ago

geebee 6y ago

Thanks for writing and posting this article. Technical interviews are one of the more essential topics in our field right now, and I do think 1) they're badly handled, and 2) difficult to get right. A couple of thoughts on two points raised here: 1) Pressure to accept an offer. I may have lost out on an offer from a promising company by asking for a decision too quickly, and I did this because I was under pressure to accept a different offer. I believe the company's policy is that 1) they'll never rush their own decision to make an offer and 2) they'll never rush a candidate to accept. They figure that if they want to hire you, that won't change a month from now. This position has a lot of integrity, but it does come from a position of great stability. Small companies may have only enough funding for one position, and they're terrified that by waiting for a strong candidate who is unlikely to accept, they'll lose out on another excellent candidate. The company I applied to was well established and well funded enough that they could hire anyone they felt was an excellent candidate. They were, in short, always recruiting, never desperately. The scenario I can't really respect is the company that takes weeks or longer about getting to an offer and then wants an answer in 3 days. I suspect that it's always usually best to pass on a company that is so desperate it needs to do this. 2) Not enough clarity about your role, and underprepared interviewers. I think this can result from the "always recruiting" mentality. When it's tough to hire, and you have the money to hire, it really becomes about finding people when you find them. Companies are less concerned about exactly how to use a new hire, they're more concerned about finding someone they believe can make a strong contribution. As a result, they don't really hire for a specific role. Now, this is understandable as a motivation, but it leads to interview that are bewildering to a candidate. I've had full day whiteboard interviews covering data structures, SQL, and math, but without having read the company's website in advance, I'd be damned if I knew what they did, at all. That just can't happen. It shouldn't be possible for a candidate to go through an entire day of draining exam style interviews and not have the faintest idea what the company does. Even my interview at Google, which was very whiteboard-examish, the interviewers still took the time to explain what they work on before saying "so, suppose the search space were no longer rectangular or convex, how would you modify your code to find all matrices with positive determinants". They aren't thinking about a role, they're thinking that if you can solve difficult code/math problems at the whiteboard, present and explain your ideas clearly, and seem professional in your interactions with people, they'll find something worthwhile for you to do (or, perhaps, they have confidence you'll find something worthwhile to do). It does make a certain amount of sense, but it leaves the candidate in the dark, and I don't want to join a company where my only interactions have been algorithm and data science questions at a whiteboard.

dkarp 6y ago

Tech interviewing articles seem to do well on HN. I'm guessing because it's something most of us can relate to and that's what made me click on it. But I feel like I've read this same content in different articles, that I've found on HN, multiple times.

sdfhbdf 6y ago
I like to think that it's one of the few factors that really unite the whole HN community - most of us lurkers here have gone through or will go through a tech interview at some point. So it's universally educational for the HN audience and it's not a polarizing topic. It's also kind of like somebody posting true life pro tips because it's useful for most of us hence why it gathers so mony upvotes probably.
- dkarp 6y ago
  That's a nice way of seeing it and there's definitely good information being shared in these comments, which may help many people. Maybe these transparent content marketing articles ignite my skepticism

hinkley 6y ago

I sometimes feel self-conscious asking deep questions about morale, especially when I'm on the fence about working at a place and am just being polite in case I need this as a Plan C. There are some questions where if you get the person to take them seriously you may pop whatever bubble they're living in that helps them get through the day. One place, I was not doing so great. I was participating in the interview process, mostly trying to make sure our candidates were better than our status quo, so new people would make my life better. This one kid asks, "what do you like about working here?" and I froze. I didn't have an answer. Luckily there were three of us, and I had time to come up with a half-assed answer that didn't consist of "Run!" Shortly after that I decided to leave, and just making that decision let me make it to the next bonus payout, which was something on the order of 10% of salary after taxes (so ~8 weeks?), plus a few more options vesting. And then I was out the door, along with about 1/5th of the engineering department. It's like people forget there's a door until someone else goes through it. Afterward, the members of the exodus sat around over beers to celebrate the check clearing. Someone (possibly me) asked if sticking around for the bonus was worth it. Almost all of us said no.

pnw_hazor 6y ago
Interesting. It seems almost immoral to interview new hires when you know there are insurmountable problems at the company that make you consider leaving. Not saying you are immoral here -- just that it does seem to pose a dilemma. I have not had to interview someone for a company that I want to leave. It sounds like it would suck and require some level of internalized rationalization to go through with it.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Two things. One, you don't always know the answer to a question until someone asks it, and then you can't un-hear the question. I thought I was just grouchy until asked, and then I realized I was properly unhappy in this role. Which I said makes me uncomfortable about asking hard questions of people I don't know and probably will never work with. Two, it's easier to leave a place when you know you've left a project in good hands, instead of knowing things will unravel if you do. Mostly, it's an ethical problem if you sabotage the hiring. But I'll agree that there is a tension between professionalism and social responsibility. What do I owe to my employer, what do I owe to the local developer community? The next time I interviewed, a guy I had a lot of respect for referred me to a used-car-salesman of a recruiter for a place he was leaving. I did contract-to-hire, walked away from that one. Felt a bit like a meat shield to cover his retreat. I realized all the things I respected him for were past tense, and honor that but stay the hell away from him now.

subsubzero 6y ago

Some of my hall of shame interviewers: - Everyone I interviewed on my would-be team felt like they were attending a funeral, never met a more depressed unenthusiastic bunch. - One of the interviewers wondering why I wanted this job as it was terrible, he stated he was looking to leave and warned me about the company. - Meeting room of interview room(conference room) reeked of sweat(when no one was there), it was disgusting, this from a company that was heavily funded(going public this year!) also trash on the floor and interviewers unprepared as well. - Interviewer saying there was not much work here, the company mainly collects royalties from IP and the position would see alot of downtime/doing nothing(manager saying this!).

jacquesm 6y ago
These are all very good reasons why you want to talk to your future team mates, rather than to HR and some manager. The team mates are the ones that you will be working with every day, the manager you will likely see once or twice a year and HR you will only see when there is a problem (or when they perceive you are a problem). The lower on the totem pole you go, the better the information about what it is to actually work for a particular company. The people at that level are more honest , more plain spoken and generally simply nicer and will look at you as a partner rather than as a resource.
starfallg 6y ago
Why hall of shame? 2 and 4 are top mates.
- JimTheMan 6y ago
  I once had a manager try to hire me back from another position: 'Look you will be overworked and underpaid, but you will get to do really cool hands on things here.." I appreciated the honesty.
Balgair 6y ago
Had one where they did a bunch of interviews with me in the same conference room. The job was in Foster City , so a pretty high CoL area. Whiteboarding, bit of code, etc. My manager-to-be then left me in the room for a phone call with HR about salary. The guy on the other end said that the salary was $50k, no negotiating. I turned then down, of course, but then was left alone in the conference room. I wandered about until security came and found me when I got stuck in an elevator with no RFID pass to let me out. The other bad one was a smaller firm that decided they were going to do a 'super hard' Google c. 2005 interview, in 2018. But they didn't know the answers to the questions either. Lots of 'how many piano tuners...' style questions they were looking for exact numbers with. Tried to have me debug code they had printed out. Turns out I should have known that their Python 2.7 functions wouldn't run on the 3.2 version they compile with. Yes, from a code print-out. Half way through a few just bail to go surf reddit, with me in full view of their monitors. The remaining people just start answering emails and aren't listening to me anymore, but still are asking questions. The snide remarks were the cherry on top.

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moxylush 6y ago

I found this article inspiring. Thanks!

sbussard 6y ago

Mic drop

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dang 6y ago

The HN thread this article refers to is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555.

Tade0 6y ago

Good observations. I have a few things I watch out for on top of that: - Foul language during the interview. I once had a guy tell me "I will not tolerate faggotry in my project". I never got to know what exactly he meant by that. - Asking about compensation expectations before further explaining the role and responsibilities, even though the ad itself had compensation brackets, so it can be assumed that the candidate accepts them. - Having "one person teams". Usually means that the company is understaffed and there's no real chance for any time off. Tolerable only in start-ups where this is to be expected. - When having multiple interviewers, obvious signs that they don't communicate with each other. I recall one situation where I had to relay info back and forth between interviewers.

xtracto 6y ago

> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way Haha, I've happily been in the "interviewer" side of this two times: One time, as part of a DevOps interview I asked the candidate to run something in a POSIX OS every 15 seconds using a cronjob (that was the general idea). Crontab granularity is only in minutes, so you have to use your head or Google to get a Cronjob answer. The interviewee however told me about the 1 minute granularity of CronJob, and offered instead to create a small service on init.d. with a while/sleep 15. I loved his response :-) The other was someone who, while solving a binary search problem without a ceiling integer value, used the fact that his language of choice C++ has an INT_MAX macro defined to set the limit of the search... TOUCHE. As an interviewer I personally love when these sort of things happen because it shown the interviewee is really thinking about the problem.

user5994461 6y ago
That's the first thing I thought reading your sentence, cron cannot do seconds granularity (I think the lowest was 1 hour on the last OS I was working with). Why would you ask questions which you know are impossible? That's setting up the candidate to fail.
- twinkletwinkle_ 6y ago
  It's not "impossible", just not natively obvious. The solution I remember using is 0 * * * * foo() 0 * * * * sleep 30; foo() It's not the prettiest but is a reasonable imitation of a 30 second cron.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    You got it! the main idea is for it to be a "solve the problem" thing with certain framework. I've got guys that just google it, others that do a script and sleep within the script, and the guy that suggested the while. All of them are "right" answers for me... I don't really care about how they do it, but the process perform while doing it. Fact is, during the life of a DevOps, they will need to solve things that they don't know how to, so they'll need to be able to at least Google-fu themselves out of the problem.

guhcampos 6y ago

I had already accepted a position in a local bank when they called me again because one of my future colleagues wanted to ask me some further questions. I got there and met with a guy who had 3 or 4 "AWS Certified" pins attached to his shirt. He wanted to know how I had learned AWS since I did not have any courses or certifications on my resume. I dropped the position immediately after.

nomagicbullet 6y ago
The disregard for proper process would already a red flag, but the prospect of working with that coworker would make me nope out of that job before I left the building.

tilolebo 6y ago

One of my unmentioned red flags is a company with significant funding, no monetization plan and caring only about growth. That's 100% personal taste, as I'd rather work for a "calm company".

mberning 6y ago

I do take exception with “no clear direction on where the company is headed”. You have to consider who is interviewing you and the size of the company you are interviewing at. I don’t expect a low level hiring manager inside of a fortune 500 company to give some amazing elevator pitch. If they could they would likely be a C level exec. Everybody knows where companies like P&G or Coca-Cola are headed. The candidate might reasonably assume they intend to keep developing and selling new shampoo and drinks.

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mcguire 6y ago

"Not enough clarity about your role" :-) Back when I interviewed at Google, this was their signature. If they made you an offer, it could be to work on any team, anywhere. Their choice. "Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers" And this is why I never got a research job. Telcordia Research, 2004. The only group actually hiring was really doing product development. Everybody else left in the big, empty building were the people who hadn't already escaped.

BJBBB 6y ago

A view from another side. I am not a recruiting specialist, but have been retained by clients to "screen the candidates for someone like me". Greed and avarice typically win, so I tend to accept these follow-up gigs. The types of engineering that I do are not the most technically difficult. But it is a very small piece of the engineering pie, so there are not many out there with my combination of skill-set and education and experience. That is, I may not be representative of what the client probably needs in the long-term, as I was hired by the client to solve a particular and unique problem. So I typically screen for someone under 45 (I am over 60) that has done and is interested in certain types of math, programming, test, and hardware design. This is how interviews need to be structured - and just devolving algorithms and citing random information and doing circuit node calculations from schematics will be less likely to identify the engineer that you need. As for the problems cited by the writer - they are relevant, but are structural and should be self evident to anyone out of school for more than one or two years.

m0zg 6y ago

Take this with a grain of salt, however. You will see some of these "red flags" in a Google or Facebook interview (I've done both), and yet they're some of the world's best places to work, and you can have a _great_ time there.

stephc_int13 6y ago

I don't like this company. Their business model is parasitic.

site-packages1 6y ago

This is a really good list, and I don’t think I can add much to the discussion already here. But the article introduces the author as “passionate about architecting and building scalable software systems.“ Is _anyone_ passionate about this, or is this just marketing speak. It’s like introducing someone as “passionate about customer service,” give me a break.

jdgiese 6y ago
Maybe it depends on what you mean by “passionate,” but I would say I’m passionate about customer service and about architecting and building scalable software systems. I cofounded a professional services firm, and it makes me happy to provide our clients a lot of value, and I do really enjoy thinking about scalable systems.

repler 6y ago

Yes

nunez 6y ago

This is a solid list of red flags. Thank you!

nunez 6y ago

I’ll add one more red flag: your team is comprised mostly of contractors [1]. This is a common occurrence in big-co corporate engineering. Often times, this indicates that tech comes third fiddle to sales and accounting and that you will not only work with every enterprise-y tool you can think of, but you’ll work crap hours with little time for learning. [1] This doesn’t apply for those new to tech or, well, contractors!

jl2718 6y ago

At first I was surprised that he didn’t mention companies that interview many candidates endlessly and never actually intend to hire. But then I realized, he was the other side of that.

Seb-C 6y ago

With experience I have learned to stop relying on how the interview feels, but look more at the facts instead. Some companies who did feel strict during the interviews actually were really good companies. The opposite is true, I interviewed a company that seemed open minded and fun. The interview in appearance was quite enjoyable, but with huge red flags. The CTO was always talking (super fast) and just wouldn't let me speak. I could ask only one question (during 1h) and was rudely interrupted in the end because he had no more time. The CTO also said something like "If you join this company you will work with very competent engineers, smarter than you". To which I humorously answered while defending my pride, but probably ended up looking like someone full of himself. Clearly this is not someone I would enjoy working with on a daily basis.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I applied for jobs last year, after having been on the reviewing side of technical interviews for a good while (at my second job). I found a few things. One, wrt the companies I worked for, I didn't feel like they were vetting my technical skills enough; at best it was an hour of chatting and going through some of the code I wrote, but in my head there's just so much more to it. I felt like they were easily impressed. I also felt like I was cheating because I had reviewed so many interviews, so I knew what to look out for. Second, I initially went in there just to orient myself, to prove myself in technical interviews, but for both recruiters and employers, it felt like going into the process already meant I really wanted to work there. I never felt like I learned enough about the job to make that decision yet (although there is usually a one month grace period where you can quit or get fired without cause). Third, wages varied wildly. One job that was interesting was right across the street from me, flew through the interviews easily etc, but their offer was at best 2/3rds of what I earned at the time, it would have put me back years. I wonder if their wages were just not that great in general, or if they were betting on me preferring a one minute commute over a decent wage. I couldn't afford to live here on what they were offering so I declined. They did get back to me a few months later, I wonder if they changed their wage structure. I might reconsider if they can go over my current income. I did find a new job in the end, one where I didn't actually do a technical interview, but where I felt like they actually needed me (instead of just an ass on a seat), like I had a Mission to accomplish. Still working on that, slowly. What also helped is that while I work 4 hours / week less now (I was looking for that), I still earn the same as I did at my previous job - less taxes for a lease car, and income tax laws changed.

rkangel 6y ago

I want to make the point that I always make on this topic - as software engineers we are very lucky to be in a sellers market. We get to pick and choose companies and have the luxury of rejecting 10 companies based on small negative signals (however valid). It is important when thinking about social issues that the VAST majority of the population have very much the opposite experience - they might have to apply to 20 jobs to get one interview and if they get an offer they have to take it or they won't be able to make rent. The knock on effects on that on their work life are enormous.

paulyy_y 6y ago

Is it just me or did he Photoshop those glasses into his pic?

hagoseyu 6y ago

I had technical phone interview with one big electronics company. At the end of the interview when I asked the interviewer his daily work and how it looks like, he was honest and told me something that he don't like it. Something the problem is ill-defined with the manager only cares about end result. He seems very depressed from how he talked about the company, and at the end asked me if I am still interested working for such kind of problems. Decided then not to move to next step.

tor291674 6y ago

> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers Describes my experience with Conoco-Phillips 7 years ago.