7 ms·

FAANG guy here, interviews are hard in that they have absolutely nothing to do with your day-to-day job. If I were to go through the interviews again right now

FAANG guy here, interviews are hard in that they have absolutely nothing to do with your day-to-day job. If I were to go through the interviews again right now I'd make a massive fool of myself. I'd say it's basically common knowledge that prior to making any hops, you've got to take at least a month or two to grind leetcode problems so that you're back in that head space where you can solve pointless problems with high efficiency. Interviews are also hard (as I frequently comment around here) because, once you've seen how the sausage gets made, you realize it's basically still a crap shoot which comes down to the loop you get. If you get an unlucky roll and end up with the personality type which views interviews as a chance to show how much more clever they are than everyone, then you've already failed. Their ego is tied to their "high bar" and impossible question set, and you're just fodder for them to show off that "high personal bar" during the de-brief.

svaha1728 6y ago
Yup... it’s like asking your doctor to draw the Krebs cycle from memory.
- nwienert 6y ago
  Ha! My hobby is pharmacology and I’m always having to refresh myself on various steps of Krebs. We need a Ninja Nerd[0] for CS I guess, I’ve found it incredible. [0] https://youtu.be/rr7IRYLqleg https://youtu.be/rr7IRYLqleg
- sanderjd 6y ago
  Right, but you can't become a doctor without spending many thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining credentials. But you can become a highly compensated software engineer by spending a miserable day answering pointless questions on a whiteboard. I would personally prefer the credentialing approach because at this point it would be easy for me to get the credentials. But the low barrier to entry also has advantages.
- dTal 6y ago
  For that matter, I'm not sure that the way medical education is done is something to aspire to. Years and years of exhausting sleepless tedious grind, at the expense of any instruction on deductive thinking or bedside manner; if at the end of it all they can't even draw the Krebs cycle from memory, then what the hell is the point?
mynameisash 6y ago
My beef with the leetcode interviews is that, IMO, they're in no way reflective of what you're actually going to do, and yet the interviewer often acts like it's a perfect barometer. One misstep or quibble and you're out. I remember when a former colleague wanted my input on his interview question which was basically, "Write the algorithm for product recommendations." (eg, like Netflix's movie recommender.) Despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with that question only to come back and admit, "Yeah, that wasn't at all good." Imagine what the poor guy or gal on the other side of the table had to go through. I don't know what the right answer is to interviewing, but my take is that I would prefer to work with someone who I can get along with, have real human conversations, and become good collaborators -- even if they're not ace coders. That measurement seems glaringly missing from too many interviews.
- jrnichols 6y ago
  Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to interview people and asking them questions like that, not as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart people to solve some of their software problems? or trying to glean proprietary information out of others?
  - chrononaut 6y ago
    > Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to interview people and asking them questions like that, not as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart people to solve some of their software problems? It's a struggle between fitting the interview to real-world situations vs making it seem like the candidate is doing work for the company. I feel like a good situation might be actual problems previously encountered with the technology being assessed during the interview that would've required you to have collaborated with someone who is also experienced in that technology to help you solve them. Maybe the best way to do this is when the situation is proposed to the candidate, make it clear that the answer is already known and put it in an envelope (physical or digital), which will be referred to when it's solved or the candidate hits a dead-end.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
xenocratus 6y ago
When I'll be preparing for the next interview rounds in my career, I'll make note of some problems that are both short/easy to explain, and have really interesting optimisations that are almost impossible to come up with on the spot (unless you've done a lot of similar stuff or that exact problem before). Then, when the interview is (nearly) over and it's my time to ask the interviewers something, I'll drop one of those in their lap to see how they react, and if they can come up with something that's not laughably stupid/inefficient. My point being that, if they're not capable of solving problems like that under intense time pressure, they're not up to the task of interviewing someone else on them. If they do give a good response, kudos to them, I'll be impressed. Though I think my expectation is that they'll get annoyed and stop the "interview".
- randomswede 6y ago
  If you did this to me during an interview, I would try as best as I could to give you an answer in the 5 or so minutes left of the interview. Then, in my feedback, I would strongly recommend not hiring you as a bad personality fit. I also don't really ask "trick" questions (I try to select questions based on what the CV indicates would be a strong area for the specific candidate), the closest I get to that is probably when it comes to service monitoring (where the exact final answer is less interesting than the process of getting there).
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    > I also don't really ask "trick" questions My reply was only intended for "trick" questions that have absolutely no relevance for the day to day job of 99% of Software Engineers. And that's exactly because those trick questions tend to be more about the "exact final answer" than about the process, so my point was about figuring out if the interviewer actually has a grasp of those sort of problems in general or if they memorised a good solution and are milking that for all it's worth. And I do know that almost any interviewer would reject me based on that, but I think it's worth letting them feel the burn they try to inflict themselves.
brightball 6y ago
As a younger developer I was part of a 3 person team that was interviewing people at a telecom. I mostly kept quiet and observed since it was the first time I'd done this but we had one member of the team who was bent on trying to show how smart he was. My absolute favorite interview of the group, a guy who ended up getting hired elsewhere, was the most calm and professional developer I'd ever been around. Sitting in the room, I felt like he was interviewing us rather than the other way around. It was just in the way that he carried himself, answered questions. And then the guy on our team started asking questions. The gentleman we were interviewing, rather than answer, kept calmly asking more questions of him instead. - Can you describe the situation where this would be used? No - Have you ever run into an issue like this before that could be an example? No - How do I know that by solving this problem we would be addressing the business or customer problem? We don't - Then shouldn't I be solving questions related to the work? ... I loved that guy. Wish we could have hired him because I really wanted to work with him.
- icedchai 6y ago
  So he was a no hire? "Poor cultural fit", I'm guessing? I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe we should save ourselves some time.
  - brightball 6y ago
    Oh no, he was our top choice by the end of it but already had something else by the time we got the offer out.
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    > I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe we should save ourselves some time. I've done this a few times, each time from a startup that reached out to me asking me if I'd come in to talk to them, and then would throw me into their coding challenges immediately. Like whoa hold on there, I don't even know what you do, why are you asking me to do a coding challenge before we've even figured out if there is a fit for me technically and I figure out what it is you're trying to solve.
defen 6y ago
> interviews are hard in that they have absolutely nothing to do with your day-to-day job I often wonder why this is legal, especially given the legal concept of disparate impact. It's basically just a disguised test of some combo of IQ + free time + willingness to grind dubiously useful information
- hannofcart 6y ago
  TBH, pointless questions in interviews is not exclusive to programmer interviews. Pretty much any white collar job interview is an intellectual joust at best, and a mild hazing ritual at worst. We actually have it good: you at least know what the broad contours of what we'll be subjected to.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  I think it's only a matter of time until the extreme disparity between the candidates that pass this filter (mostly white and asian men below age 35) vs the applicant pool is used in a legal challenge about whether these tests are really looking for bona fide occupational requirements. Because any software person will tell you these tests are extremely detached from the requirements of the job. It seems like it would be an open and shut case if not for the army of lawyers employed by the likes of Google.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I find this interesting, because I feel every time I visit a Silicon Valley tech company’s office, I’m surprised by how diverse the employees working there are. Yes I know certain groups are still more represented than others. But it’s still more diverse in contrast to the companies I’ve worked at (non-tech old school companies in finance, etc), where the tech employees tend to fall into a much narrower stereotype.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I think such a challenge would fail in any reasonable legal system. HN seems to be talking itself into a belief that these interviews have no relationship to actual programming work, but that's not the case and plenty of experienced engineers would step up to defend algorithmic questions if it ever moved beyond bellyaching in blog posts. Of course the USA is ever more extreme and crazy when it comes to identity politics, so ago knows if the justice system is still reasonable in this regard. But I'd really enjoy watching people argue in front of a judge that working with tree structures is extremely irrelevant to programming.
khalilravanna 6y ago
Good call on the dice roll. Spent months prepping for the FB interview and got an engineer who seemed to be having a bad day or was just bored. I knew both problems but they derailed me on whether you can uniquely identify objects in JS with no additional id assigned. I told them you can’t as there’s no pointers or memory addresses in JS. They didn’t believe me and literally spent multiple minutes googling things to prove me wrong. And then rejected me after I still finished the second problem in the 7 minutes remaining. Nevermind they were looking at their phone multiple times during the interview lol Demoralizing as all hell. Thankfully I had multiple mocks with FB engineers who told me I did great so I know it really was just bad luck that the real phone screen was a dud.
- laichzeit0 6y ago
  Sometimes interviews are just part of “following the process” when someone who knows someone is going to get the job anyway, but still they have to follow the process so everything looks normal. These things are not so cut and dry and objective as you would like to believe. I wouldn’t sweat it.
- sanderjd 6y ago
  People who interview like that should be fired. The damage to the company in missing a good hire and blighting the company's reputation is cause.
  - g_p 6y ago
    It amazes me more people don't see this. Virgin in the UK looked into the data and found a bad candidate experience was significantly impacting their bottom line, just in actual candidates cancelling their service within 30 days of a bad candidate experience. They didn't even need to look at word of mouth impact to see a material hit on their customer retention, in a sector where churn is costly. They went on a crusade to improve, and now find candidates for jobs are net promoters, and their customer acquisition cost via candidates is lower than normal advertising(!) I think some of the big tech companies simply don't care about their reputation at either micro or macro level, and nobody wants to call out that kind of toxic behaviour as they're all "part of the club".
decafninja 6y ago
Regarding getting a "bad" interviewer - what makes this worse is you're rolling the dice multiple times. I've had several interviews where everything seemed to go well, but one (out of say, 4/5) interviewer just seemed to be hostile from the moment they walk into the room.

svaha1728 6y ago

Yup... it’s like asking your doctor to draw the Krebs cycle from memory.

nwienert 6y ago
Ha! My hobby is pharmacology and I’m always having to refresh myself on various steps of Krebs. We need a Ninja Nerd[0] for CS I guess, I’ve found it incredible. [0] https://youtu.be/rr7IRYLqleg https://youtu.be/rr7IRYLqleg
sanderjd 6y ago
Right, but you can't become a doctor without spending many thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining credentials. But you can become a highly compensated software engineer by spending a miserable day answering pointless questions on a whiteboard. I would personally prefer the credentialing approach because at this point it would be easy for me to get the credentials. But the low barrier to entry also has advantages.
dTal 6y ago
For that matter, I'm not sure that the way medical education is done is something to aspire to. Years and years of exhausting sleepless tedious grind, at the expense of any instruction on deductive thinking or bedside manner; if at the end of it all they can't even draw the Krebs cycle from memory, then what the hell is the point?

mynameisash 6y ago

My beef with the leetcode interviews is that, IMO, they're in no way reflective of what you're actually going to do, and yet the interviewer often acts like it's a perfect barometer. One misstep or quibble and you're out. I remember when a former colleague wanted my input on his interview question which was basically, "Write the algorithm for product recommendations." (eg, like Netflix's movie recommender.) Despite repeated warnings, he went ahead with that question only to come back and admit, "Yeah, that wasn't at all good." Imagine what the poor guy or gal on the other side of the table had to go through. I don't know what the right answer is to interviewing, but my take is that I would prefer to work with someone who I can get along with, have real human conversations, and become good collaborators -- even if they're not ace coders. That measurement seems glaringly missing from too many interviews.

jrnichols 6y ago
Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to interview people and asking them questions like that, not as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart people to solve some of their software problems? or trying to glean proprietary information out of others?
- chrononaut 6y ago
  > Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to interview people and asking them questions like that, not as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart people to solve some of their software problems? It's a struggle between fitting the interview to real-world situations vs making it seem like the candidate is doing work for the company. I feel like a good situation might be actual problems previously encountered with the technology being assessed during the interview that would've required you to have collaborated with someone who is also experienced in that technology to help you solve them. Maybe the best way to do this is when the situation is proposed to the candidate, make it clear that the answer is already known and put it in an envelope (physical or digital), which will be referred to when it's solved or the candidate hits a dead-end.
colinmhayes 6y ago

xenocratus 6y ago

When I'll be preparing for the next interview rounds in my career, I'll make note of some problems that are both short/easy to explain, and have really interesting optimisations that are almost impossible to come up with on the spot (unless you've done a lot of similar stuff or that exact problem before). Then, when the interview is (nearly) over and it's my time to ask the interviewers something, I'll drop one of those in their lap to see how they react, and if they can come up with something that's not laughably stupid/inefficient. My point being that, if they're not capable of solving problems like that under intense time pressure, they're not up to the task of interviewing someone else on them. If they do give a good response, kudos to them, I'll be impressed. Though I think my expectation is that they'll get annoyed and stop the "interview".

randomswede 6y ago
If you did this to me during an interview, I would try as best as I could to give you an answer in the 5 or so minutes left of the interview. Then, in my feedback, I would strongly recommend not hiring you as a bad personality fit. I also don't really ask "trick" questions (I try to select questions based on what the CV indicates would be a strong area for the specific candidate), the closest I get to that is probably when it comes to service monitoring (where the exact final answer is less interesting than the process of getting there).
- xenocratus 6y ago
  > I also don't really ask "trick" questions My reply was only intended for "trick" questions that have absolutely no relevance for the day to day job of 99% of Software Engineers. And that's exactly because those trick questions tend to be more about the "exact final answer" than about the process, so my point was about figuring out if the interviewer actually has a grasp of those sort of problems in general or if they memorised a good solution and are milking that for all it's worth. And I do know that almost any interviewer would reject me based on that, but I think it's worth letting them feel the burn they try to inflict themselves.

brightball 6y ago

As a younger developer I was part of a 3 person team that was interviewing people at a telecom. I mostly kept quiet and observed since it was the first time I'd done this but we had one member of the team who was bent on trying to show how smart he was. My absolute favorite interview of the group, a guy who ended up getting hired elsewhere, was the most calm and professional developer I'd ever been around. Sitting in the room, I felt like he was interviewing us rather than the other way around. It was just in the way that he carried himself, answered questions. And then the guy on our team started asking questions. The gentleman we were interviewing, rather than answer, kept calmly asking more questions of him instead. - Can you describe the situation where this would be used? No - Have you ever run into an issue like this before that could be an example? No - How do I know that by solving this problem we would be addressing the business or customer problem? We don't - Then shouldn't I be solving questions related to the work? ... I loved that guy. Wish we could have hired him because I really wanted to work with him.

icedchai 6y ago
So he was a no hire? "Poor cultural fit", I'm guessing? I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe we should save ourselves some time.
- brightball 6y ago
  Oh no, he was our top choice by the end of it but already had something else by the time we got the offer out.
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  > I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe we should save ourselves some time. I've done this a few times, each time from a startup that reached out to me asking me if I'd come in to talk to them, and then would throw me into their coding challenges immediately. Like whoa hold on there, I don't even know what you do, why are you asking me to do a coding challenge before we've even figured out if there is a fit for me technically and I figure out what it is you're trying to solve.

defen 6y ago

> interviews are hard in that they have absolutely nothing to do with your day-to-day job I often wonder why this is legal, especially given the legal concept of disparate impact. It's basically just a disguised test of some combo of IQ + free time + willingness to grind dubiously useful information

hannofcart 6y ago
TBH, pointless questions in interviews is not exclusive to programmer interviews. Pretty much any white collar job interview is an intellectual joust at best, and a mild hazing ritual at worst. We actually have it good: you at least know what the broad contours of what we'll be subjected to.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
I think it's only a matter of time until the extreme disparity between the candidates that pass this filter (mostly white and asian men below age 35) vs the applicant pool is used in a legal challenge about whether these tests are really looking for bona fide occupational requirements. Because any software person will tell you these tests are extremely detached from the requirements of the job. It seems like it would be an open and shut case if not for the army of lawyers employed by the likes of Google.
- decafninja 6y ago
  I find this interesting, because I feel every time I visit a Silicon Valley tech company’s office, I’m surprised by how diverse the employees working there are. Yes I know certain groups are still more represented than others. But it’s still more diverse in contrast to the companies I’ve worked at (non-tech old school companies in finance, etc), where the tech employees tend to fall into a much narrower stereotype.
- thu2111 6y ago
  I think such a challenge would fail in any reasonable legal system. HN seems to be talking itself into a belief that these interviews have no relationship to actual programming work, but that's not the case and plenty of experienced engineers would step up to defend algorithmic questions if it ever moved beyond bellyaching in blog posts. Of course the USA is ever more extreme and crazy when it comes to identity politics, so ago knows if the justice system is still reasonable in this regard. But I'd really enjoy watching people argue in front of a judge that working with tree structures is extremely irrelevant to programming.

khalilravanna 6y ago

Good call on the dice roll. Spent months prepping for the FB interview and got an engineer who seemed to be having a bad day or was just bored. I knew both problems but they derailed me on whether you can uniquely identify objects in JS with no additional id assigned. I told them you can’t as there’s no pointers or memory addresses in JS. They didn’t believe me and literally spent multiple minutes googling things to prove me wrong. And then rejected me after I still finished the second problem in the 7 minutes remaining. Nevermind they were looking at their phone multiple times during the interview lol Demoralizing as all hell. Thankfully I had multiple mocks with FB engineers who told me I did great so I know it really was just bad luck that the real phone screen was a dud.

laichzeit0 6y ago
Sometimes interviews are just part of “following the process” when someone who knows someone is going to get the job anyway, but still they have to follow the process so everything looks normal. These things are not so cut and dry and objective as you would like to believe. I wouldn’t sweat it.
sanderjd 6y ago
People who interview like that should be fired. The damage to the company in missing a good hire and blighting the company's reputation is cause.
- g_p 6y ago
  It amazes me more people don't see this. Virgin in the UK looked into the data and found a bad candidate experience was significantly impacting their bottom line, just in actual candidates cancelling their service within 30 days of a bad candidate experience. They didn't even need to look at word of mouth impact to see a material hit on their customer retention, in a sector where churn is costly. They went on a crusade to improve, and now find candidates for jobs are net promoters, and their customer acquisition cost via candidates is lower than normal advertising(!) I think some of the big tech companies simply don't care about their reputation at either micro or macro level, and nobody wants to call out that kind of toxic behaviour as they're all "part of the club".

decafninja 6y ago

Regarding getting a "bad" interviewer - what makes this worse is you're rolling the dice multiple times. I've had several interviews where everything seemed to go well, but one (out of say, 4/5) interviewer just seemed to be hostile from the moment they walk into the room.