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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 prob

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".
  - khalilravanna 6y ago
    This is actually a big thing we invest in at my current company: candidate experience and consequently a high Glassdoor rating. After focusing on it for years the company has one of the top ratings on Glassdoor (top 100 or 200 I forget). It’s a big differentiator when you’re not a big company and not a recognized brand. I think for FAANG companies they can get away with it because despite a poor experience, the actual job and pay/perks they offer are extremely desirable. Sad because, like you say, it’s not hard to see and make an impact on improving.
    - Copernicron 6y ago
      In my experience Glassdoor doesn’t mean shit. The single most dysfunctional, toxic work environment I’ve ever been in had - and still has - a high (>4) rating on Glassdoor. I won’t get into details but I was miserable and left after two months. They said all the right things during the interview but the reality was vastly different. The non-disparagement clause I had to sign on my way out was the icing on the cake. No wonder they have such a high rating if you’re not allowed to be honest about your experience. At an employer prior to that, I saw first hand how companies were able to get negative but true reviews taken down almost as soon as they were posted. There was high turnover at that place and a lot of people were truthful in their reviews of the company. The Glassdoor rating was far higher than they deserved until they went under. Im short, I’m sure you think you’ve got a great work environment, but I’ve been burned by bullshit Glassdoor reviews and I doubt I’m the only one.
      - khalilravanna 6y ago
        That’s fair. It’s a metric so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s game-able like others. I guess as a candidate you have to use it as one data point. It’s tough because even interviewing as a candidate and asking lots of culture questions you only get, what, like 20 mns of questions answered? Before you commit to 40 hours a week? Sorry to hear you got burned. Toxic work environments are such a drain on life.
soonnow 6y ago
Well on the opposite side of the table are the people who start arguing with me during the interview (and twice even after the interview). I generally try to help everyone as much as I can during interviews, because honestly this is taking time away from my other work and I'd nothing better than to hire you, but sometimes it's just to much.
cwdegidio 6y ago
Ugh, that's terrible. I had a similar situation when I started interviewing after my startup failed. It was with a major energy company for an Angular developer role. The interviews were going really well until the final interview when they asked me to do some live coding. This led to a 15 minute discussion about 5 minutes into the session about whether JS had while loops. The developer testing me was absolutely convinced that JS had no while or do/while loops and refused to move on from that point. Their loss.
mcjkrw 6y ago
That's a bugger :/ Regarding uniquely identifying objects, if we can compare objects by reference, doesn't it count as unique identifying? E.g. let a = { }; let a2 = a; let b = { }; a === a2, but b !== a2 .
- khalilravanna 6y ago
  In this case it was a problem about creating a deep copy of nodes in a graph. My “easy” approach involved using a map with the key being a reference to the original A and the value being the copy A* OR adding matching ids to A and A* and use a map to go from A to A*. They said no mutations to the original objects (ids are out the window) and then that led to the quibbling over addresses because you can’t use an object reference as a key in a map in JS (it’ll just stringify it in the map). (I’m half hoping that after typing this out someone will reply with some data structure I’m unaware of that would allow you to uniquely map the reference of an object to an arbitrary value.)

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".
- khalilravanna 6y ago
  This is actually a big thing we invest in at my current company: candidate experience and consequently a high Glassdoor rating. After focusing on it for years the company has one of the top ratings on Glassdoor (top 100 or 200 I forget). It’s a big differentiator when you’re not a big company and not a recognized brand. I think for FAANG companies they can get away with it because despite a poor experience, the actual job and pay/perks they offer are extremely desirable. Sad because, like you say, it’s not hard to see and make an impact on improving.
  - Copernicron 6y ago
    In my experience Glassdoor doesn’t mean shit. The single most dysfunctional, toxic work environment I’ve ever been in had - and still has - a high (>4) rating on Glassdoor. I won’t get into details but I was miserable and left after two months. They said all the right things during the interview but the reality was vastly different. The non-disparagement clause I had to sign on my way out was the icing on the cake. No wonder they have such a high rating if you’re not allowed to be honest about your experience. At an employer prior to that, I saw first hand how companies were able to get negative but true reviews taken down almost as soon as they were posted. There was high turnover at that place and a lot of people were truthful in their reviews of the company. The Glassdoor rating was far higher than they deserved until they went under. Im short, I’m sure you think you’ve got a great work environment, but I’ve been burned by bullshit Glassdoor reviews and I doubt I’m the only one.
    - khalilravanna 6y ago
      That’s fair. It’s a metric so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s game-able like others. I guess as a candidate you have to use it as one data point. It’s tough because even interviewing as a candidate and asking lots of culture questions you only get, what, like 20 mns of questions answered? Before you commit to 40 hours a week? Sorry to hear you got burned. Toxic work environments are such a drain on life.

soonnow 6y ago

Well on the opposite side of the table are the people who start arguing with me during the interview (and twice even after the interview). I generally try to help everyone as much as I can during interviews, because honestly this is taking time away from my other work and I'd nothing better than to hire you, but sometimes it's just to much.

cwdegidio 6y ago

Ugh, that's terrible. I had a similar situation when I started interviewing after my startup failed. It was with a major energy company for an Angular developer role. The interviews were going really well until the final interview when they asked me to do some live coding. This led to a 15 minute discussion about 5 minutes into the session about whether JS had while loops. The developer testing me was absolutely convinced that JS had no while or do/while loops and refused to move on from that point. Their loss.

mcjkrw 6y ago

That's a bugger :/ Regarding uniquely identifying objects, if we can compare objects by reference, doesn't it count as unique identifying? E.g. let a = { }; let a2 = a; let b = { }; a === a2, but b !== a2 .

khalilravanna 6y ago
In this case it was a problem about creating a deep copy of nodes in a graph. My “easy” approach involved using a map with the key being a reference to the original A and the value being the copy A* OR adding matching ids to A and A* and use a map to go from A to A*. They said no mutations to the original objects (ids are out the window) and then that led to the quibbling over addresses because you can’t use an object reference as a key in a map in JS (it’ll just stringify it in the map). (I’m half hoping that after typing this out someone will reply with some data structure I’m unaware of that would allow you to uniquely map the reference of an object to an arbitrary value.)