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I did an interview with Reddit - whom I hope sees this comment - and they not only provided zero information about the context of the tech interview in advance,

I did an interview with Reddit - whom I hope sees this comment - and they not only provided zero information about the context of the tech interview in advance, or whether it would be one, but also the interview itself was like playing a random version of tech Jeopardy, but without the category columns, and very few of the questions had anything to do with the job I would be doing. I have over 20 years of programming experience, am a founder, and have worked for multiple venture backed startups. That includes hiring countless developers, so I get both sides of the situation. And my partner is also a tech recruiter for a top tier HFT / market maker, so I know what a demanding but respectful hiring process looks like. Reddit’s hiring process converted me from a fan of the site into someone that thought the entire organization was second tier - which obviously it is in terms of monetization - but also in how they treat people compared to the FAANGs. And a year later the role is still open.

greenhatman 5y ago
Maybe they don't really want to fill it.
Zelphyr 5y ago
I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" If I ran into a problem and went to them for help, would they just stare at me, waiting for me to figure it out on my own? They didn't extend an offer to me and, based on my performance in that interview, I can't say I blame them. I'm not sure I would have accepted if they had, however. That experience really left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a low impression of that company. We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews.
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  "Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" Unfortunately, yes. Young engineers are terrible at communication and working with others. Partly due to workplace incentives and partly because you must realize that entire generations have grown up with computers and not people.
  - Zelphyr 5y ago
    I don't think this deserves the downvotes it is getting simply because there is some truth to the comment. A good friend of mine worked with a young developer recently who was excited about what he was able to generate with a single npm command. When my friend, who has been writing software longer than this guy has been alive, calmly pointed out that the npm command had just generated 400 files and thousands of lines of code that didn't actually solve their problem, this guy got mad and went to complain to their manager.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      I'd be mildly ticked-off, too. The senior guy was being an ass.
      - mkr-hn 5y ago
        I can easily imagine how it went down. "Wow! I can do so much with so little!" "Everything you just generated is wasteful and meaningless." The right way is to encourage that enthusiasm and guide them toward doing more useful work with the same power they just discovered.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      We only have your telling of your friend's telling of the story. This is rhetorically similar to saving a 50% quality jpeg as a 20% quality jpeg.
  - teclordphrack2 5y ago
    In all honesty it's not just younger developers. I have worked in plenty of companies where the idea of "communication" needed to be stressed and would of fixed many problems and saved a lot of money.
- raincom 5y ago
  In a cut-throat environment, where 10% of people are PIP'ed, it is expected: your senior colleagues are not going to help you, will lead you down a wrong path, etc. That way, the tribal knowledge will be with them, and they can outshine any new employee. In your interview case, they should have given you hints, even if they want to not hire you later.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    That’s not how 10% attrition works at any notable company.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - polotics 5y ago
      Pray tell, can you clarify what's incorrect in the above description?
    - teclordphrack2 5y ago
      I know some MIT labs work that way. Backstabbing people b/c there are only so many upper positions instead of titling and paying people their skill level you would have to wait for someone to retire.
- sparker72678 5y ago
  I had an extremely similar experience recently and it really shook me up for a few days. Same amount of time in the industry as you. Looking back there's no way I would have fit in there, but damn did that interview screw me up for a while.
- vmception 5y ago
  Nothing about tech interviews is a signal for what happens inside the company, aside from you having the dual role of giving tech interviews while you forgot to factor that into your sprint planning You’re making the same mistake at vetting them that they’re making at vetting you
  - edoceo 5y ago
    The interview is signal from the actual company - it's definitely got some information about what's inside.
    - vmception 5y ago
      You are simply determining that you are okay with false negatives Which is exactly why they do irrelevant interview brainteasers as well This problem is a two way street in the tech sector, in case anyone wanted to fix it. The candidates alone are making the same mistake and bringing it to the company
      - edoceo 5y ago
        Is a "false negative" a positive?
        vmception 5y ago
        Its a quadrant. Positive, Negative, False Positive, False Negative
        randomswede 5y ago
        It is a determination that something should be rejected, when it really should have been accepted. Similarly, a false positive is something that was accepted, when it should have been rejected. If you have a sufficiently high candidate pool. you can (for a while, at least) live with an interview process with a relatively high false negative rate (that is, x% of the time you don't hire people you should have). If it is typically quick to go from "in through the door" to "is a productive member of the team", it may be that you can live with a high false positive rate (that is, y% of the time you hire people you shouldn't have).
- vidanay 5y ago
  Honestly, these are the reasons I don't look for a new position.I make "good" money, but by no means great. I have the benefit of 20 years tenure and apparent stability in my current role. Trading that for more stress in hiring and gambling more stress in daily work doesn't balance the potential salary increase.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I've never understood the heavy emphasis on in-interview coding or brain teasers. To the extent that I've participated in the hiring process (both as an IC and a manager), 80% of the interview is assessing culture/personality/ethic fit; that is, the basic "do I want to work with this person" question. The technical competence check is all retrospective, hearing them talk about prior projects and what the design and implementation process was like, how decisions were made, what the challenges were and how they were handled, any regrets/learnings. And most of that is just digging in far enough to confirm that the person was actually a first-class participant in it with a deep understanding, and not a bystander. Any whiteboard stuff would be "show us how the system worked" as a last-ditch check on basic communication skills.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    You know, I was nodding my head in agreement as I read this when something occurred to me. This all requires that the interviewer be willing to interact deeply with the candidate. Our profession has a (well deserved, I think) reputation for having a high percentage of people who really don't like interacting with others on a peer level. Is it likely that a large part of the problem is that we have people doing interviews who really shouldn't be? I mean, if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them, then you're going to be a really shitty interviewer. And that's exactly the personality type I see being described over and over in these anecdotes.
    - kodisha 5y ago
      Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head" I can tell you, with quite substantial sample size from me directly and from people I deeply trust that every time we encountered an interview like this, we later found out that the company culture was really bad. Those are not the kind of people you want to work with.
      - mikepurvis 5y ago
        For clarity, is the "like this" in your comment referring to brain teaser technical one-upmanship interviews, or the less structured style that is focused on getting to know the person and having them describe in their own words the projects in their past?
- serf 5y ago
  i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script. Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost. I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related. It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards. That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.
  - mateo411 5y ago
    > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.
- lowercased 5y ago
  > trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. that describes 2/3rds of the 'codility' tests I've been given in a few scenarios (toptal used it to weed me out). The couple of jobs I've been in where I was explicitly barred from ever asking any clarifying questions, or talking to business/SME folks about the problem at hand... I left those pretty quickly. I guess it serves to weed out people who have some hard-wired dependency on talking to people to clarify requirements.
- herbturbo 5y ago
  Never understood this way of interviewing. I get shit now and then for helping people too much in coding exercises, but if someone has reached the point where they are obviously not going to progress why not nudge them along and see how they respond? I've found that the ability to receive and act on guidance with a certain degree of humility is a much better signal of someone's potential than how many algorithms they've memorised.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Interviewing is hard. It takes a lot of practice to know what level of assistance to provide at what time. A coworker once showed me a technique of keeping a google doc with the problems, as well as a step-by-step of the solution and the times at which they should be at that step. It always seemed to work out well for the candidates, as even a poor candidate would finish the problem at like 55 minutes into a 60 min interview. Even with that, getting a person to see what they should be doing next, without telling them explicitly, is definitely a skill you develop with practice. I think you're right in erring on the side of too much assistance. You get to see much more of how the candidate works if you can skip over the part where they are getting stuck on something.
    - herbturbo 5y ago
      Yes some people just need a nudge in the right direction to carry the task through to completion. And some need to be pushed along the entire way. In either case they don't leave the interview feeling humiliated having floundered in the face of smug silence.
    - marbletimes 5y ago
      It is one of those common tropes, "interviewing is hard", that seems to justify the inevitability of poor attitude, wasting time of interviewees (remember the interviewers are paid for those hours) and a painful process for basically anyone. I often interview for my company/group and yes, it is challenging in one hour to find out "life, death, and miracles" of some guy who is being interviewed, but it is especially challenging when the interviewer is in a bad mood, does not want to be there, or sees interviewing as a nuisance, and he is looking for a reason to make someone fail. I worked at a FAANG and I got offers from FAANGs-adjacent companies, so I am not one of those you-cannot-win-at-this-game-so-you-complain people. I saw: someone stopping the interview for unexplained reasons after the first 45 minutes, an interviewer at a blue company looking at my private parts for a good part of 45 minutes, multiple people interviewing while doing something else in person or virtually, recruiters (those were the fronts, the hiring managers were responsible) dragging the process forever and then say no with zero explanation. Is it really "hard" doing better than that?
- xtracto 5y ago
  Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides a test where they evaluate a person for proficiency on different sets of English skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, general comprehension. At the end of the test they give you a score for each of those and then a general score. Now, the nice thing about the TOEFL score is its reputation: When you are going to study into a University (from Oxford to Liverpool, from Harvard to Queensland), if you are not a native English speaker, the university asks you to take a TOEFL (or equivalent) and get a score higher than X. As long as you provide that score, the university won't ask any questions. They don't doubt your English proficiency skills. I want to do something like that but for development: Sure, University thought you CS101, CS201, etc. But what companies are looking for are specific skills (similar to say, https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix/ https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix... or https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC... ). These very concrete skills that can be concretely measured. I want this becase I've been dealing with recruiting, interviewing and also being interviewed for most of my career. And in my experience setting up a "recruiting wheel" in a company or startup is very painful. Most developers don't know how to perform interviews. Or don't care (who has time for that?). As an Engineer manager, having to comb through 400 resumes a week is time consuming and unproductive. So I imagine a scenario where, there is this proverbial "Full Stack Developer" certification authority which is independent, very reputable and unbiased: They won't tell me if X or Y developer will make it into my team. They will tell me how does the person score in "Algorithms/Data Structures" or "Micro Services development" or "Frontend development" and then I will choose whether I want to hire them or not (according to my current requirements). That way, I only have to do a culture-fit interview and that's it. In the past I have dealt with "Sourcing Agencies" that try to do something like that: They do the 1st technical interview, and they say that there will be alignment to what I want. But that was not the case: They send me 2 candidates and get very surprised when I reject one and not the other. And I feel our objectives are not aligned, so everybody is frustrated. Moreover, I don't want to have to deal with hiring agencies. And paying 1 to 3 salary months is too fucking expensive. Now, as a candidate/developer: I would love to have a "TOEFL" like certificate that I can show, with my proficiency. That way, I can "look for a job" passively. I don't have to be making countless of code interviews showing one time after another what I know. I only do it ONCE for an authoritative company, and everybody else can check my qualifications there. Companies like Microsoft or TripleByte have tried to do something like that, but the problem is again that they do other things: Their interests clash. Why would I trust LinkedIn? That's why TOEFL monetization make sense: The candidate has to pay for it. I am aware there are some certifications: Oracle whatever, Microsoft whatever, AWS whatever. But those are either too specific/niche (WebLogic Server 12c administration exam) or they are only a "badge" (AWS Cloud Engineer) that doesn't tell you that much. There is opportunity here for disruption. And I know that the problems that I've faced are faced by countless of other CTOs/Technology Heads.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
  My honest opinion, at this stage in my career I don't have any patience at all for explaining technical concepts. Its almost never a one off, once you have to hold someones hand, you always do. And if you don't, they are creating technical debt.
- andrekandre 5y ago
  > We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. maybe i'm naive but, how about just ask the candidate to make a mini version of what they would actually do irl? if your an app dev: make me an app that does x, you have 60 min if your a rails dev: make me a site that does y, you have 2hrs if your a pdm: make me a spec and tickets for a system that does z maybe i'm missing something but it shouldn't be too hard should it?
  - Zelphyr 5y ago
    It's all the potential criteria around the request that makes just that one piece more complex than it seems. For example; "Make me a site that does x, you have 2 hours" Do I need to build the app in front of you? Problematic because how often does one build an entire web site in a couple of hours, while someone is standing over their shoulders scrutinizing every keystroke? Do I take it home and do it? If so, how do I prove to you that I did the work? Do you care what framework I use? Do you care if I use Open Source code? What design should I use? Where do I get the site assets from? If I'm building this site for you, are you paying me for that time? Then there's the non-technical parts missing from an interview like that: How does such an exercise tell you that I'm the kind of person you want to work with? How does such an interview provide me an opportunity to ask you question? It tells me nothing about you or your company which is every bit as important as you finding out about me.
- rambojazz 5y ago
  I could absolutely never ever make anything with people staring at me. I need to be alone with my PC.
- dennis_jeeves 5y ago
  >We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. Won't happen, because most don't want to figure out a better way. We just have to come to terms with it.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Had a colleague have a similar interview with Reddit for an infosec/appsec role. They said it was a shit show, no feedback, never heard back. Sourced through an external recruiter, so Reddit is burning some recruiter's time churning through candidates. Picked up by someone in finance at similar comp a few days later.
bschwindHN 5y ago
They're too busy writing self congratulatory blog posts on their hiring process to have time to improve it. https://alexgolec.dev/reddit-interview-problems-the-game-of-life/ https://alexgolec.dev/reddit-interview-problems-the-game-of-...
- herbturbo 5y ago
  It's a good signal for me when I'm presented with silly brain teasers like this in interviews, especially when the technology of the company isn't that great. I'm interviewing you too, so give me something that reflects the problems you solve as a team, otherwise my assumption is your office is full of white boards containing puzzles of the day and your tech is all 3rd party libs.
  - randomswede 5y ago
    I wouldn't actually class this as a brain-teaser. It is a non-trivial[1] problem that doesn't require an "aha!" moment to get right. It is amenable to multiple ways of reaching a correct solution. It has interesting follow-up questions. It also stands a minimal chance to actually discover (some) of the way a candidate thinks. It is also implementing the VM for a Turing-complete computational model. It may also be that anything work-related is actually too long to fit into a limited interview time. Now, a trivial, brain-teaser, question would be "you have an NxM matrix, and you can either go left or up. How many paths are there from the lower left, to the upper-right corner?" I consider it a brain-teaser because if you write code that contains any matrix manipulation or searching, you have basically failed. There is a closed-form expression for the number, so... [1] By "non-trivial", I basically mean that there are multiple correct solutions.
- xtracto 5y ago
  That's actually a nifty problem in itself, I don't see anything wrong. Of course I have learned that the actual "proposition" of whatever problem is not what is right/wrong in an interview. The way I would apply that problem interviewing someone is: We have 1 hour. Here is this problem (to which of course I know the solution to already). How would you solve it? Let's solve it together so that I can see your decisions, your code, do you use exceptions? do you use specific type of exception for different errors? do you split functionality in a lot of functions? do you know nifty language tricks (maybe a bit of code golfing or functional constructs if JavaScript or Ruby). The problem comes when the "interview problem" is passed from the creator to the "mid-level" Engineer who now has to do the interview. For them it becomes: "Ok, you gotta implement this in one hour", and they don't know the nuances or reasons for the problem. I've seen this first hand with an equivalent problem. I had all this nice interview process that I applied, and the first time I shadowed one developer so that he could do the interview, he was just looking at the poor interviewee fail due to nerves, with the aim to evaluate him only on the merits of how far a set of working code did he had.
thenanyu 5y ago
I interviewed for a director of engineering role there — met the CTO, very informal ahead of the actual interview loop. Recruiter said they would follow up. Crickets. I followed up. Silence. It was quite weird.
ctvo 5y ago
As someone passively looking, thank you for this. I'll remove Reddit from my list. That is unacceptable. I do 5 interviews a week on average for my company, and if we did that to candidates, heads would roll. As an interviewer your two objectives are: 1. Ensure the candidate has an excellent experience 2. Collect data points In that order. Sometimes we run into candidates who make the second item difficult. They fail to complete the specific technical problem. They can't speak about their experiences in detail. We need to drag data out of them screaming. It doesn't matter, your priority is to ensure they feel respected, and leave thinking they WANT to work there.
pkulak 5y ago
The last technical interview I did was for Facebook, and say what you will about them, it was a great experience. Before the interview they actually gave me a couple paragraphs about what I was going to be tested on. Needless to say, I nailed it. :D
EvilEy3 5y ago
> I have over 20 years of programming experience, am a founder, and have worked for multiple venture backed startups. Do you want a pat on the back or something?
- ctvo 5y ago
  Probably not? They most likely want you to know they've been in other interviews in the past, and this one was particularly egregious?
- burnished 5y ago
  The implication is that they aren't new and they've had ample opportunity to be humbled and grow. That their perspective is the result of experience. Thats all.
kryptn 5y ago
I also interviewed with Reddit, although it was a few years back at this point. I thought I nailed their code challenge and expected to continue through the process, but after that session that was pretty much the last I heard from them. It was pretty disappointing.
hangonhn 5y ago
One of my buddies gave me this useful insight once: the impression you give your candidates, even the ones you don't end up hiring, will likely be the last impression you'll get to make on that candidate and the tech world is very small. Negative experiences will impact how candidates perceive your company and word of that experience will spread. Always be respectful to the candidates. If nothing else, they took the time out of the day to meet with you and go through various obstacles, etc. It's too bad your experience was so negative. That's going to be a datapoint in my mental dataset of companies to consider when the time comes.
mbesto 5y ago
> Reddit’s hiring process converted me from a fan of the site into someone that thought the entire organization was second tier - which obviously it is in terms of monetization - but also in how they treat people compared to the FAANGs. And from a completely non-technical persons perspective Reddit is incredibly disorganized at the executive management and corporate level. The amount of turnover, controversy, business model revamps, etc. for a 16 year old company with the hype they have is unique and unprecedented. It's not surprising whatsoever that their hiring practices are similarly disjointed.
hogFeast 5y ago
I interviewed for a front-end dev position (it was my first ever interview in the industry, I vomited before I got there so it was a pretty crazy day). I come in. The front-end guy starts asking me questions to try and solve something he is working on. No-one else is there yet. He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments, I say I don't know, I have never had that issue before...I make an off-hand comment that I use React and most of my JS code doesn't have comments because I am just working on projects by myself, and I don't do a lot of library code...the manager comes in at this point, and proceeds to berate me about why commenting is essential. I say: I use comments where they are needed. Off he goes, again. Interview starts. Manager proceeds to go through a series of questions designed to expose my ignorance. None of which are related to the job. One classic was him explaining to me that database normalization made no difference to the size of the database because "the data is all the same on the disk" (which is, ofc, not accurate...I tried to explain, he just kept repeating that over and over...he actually said as I was leaving "make sure you understand databases for your next interview" with a massive shit-eating grin). For some reason, there was also a back-end guy there who, upon hearing that I built something in Java, proceeded to launch into a series of questions on internals of Java (for example, he asked me what the difference was between certain versions of Java and the size of the heap...perhaps unsurprisingly, he also got some of this stuff wrong but began laughing when I said I thought X was Y). The only two questions that I had about front-end dev were: the front-end guy trying to ask me to help solve an issue he was having (before the interview, when no-one was there), and a question about the value of this in arrow functions (which I got wrong, but is also an excruciating thing to try and explain, so I don't think the guy knew whether I got it wrong...it is a terrible question). That was it.
- Banana699 5y ago
  >He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments Huh ? language parsers remove comments because they're comments, that's literally by definition. Are you (or your past interviewer) using "comments" in a different sense ? (Also, not trying to be a pedant on you I swear, but technically JS is traditionally interpreted. Most mature runtimes have compilers but it's not part of the API. It's just a juvenile pet peeve of mine when language implementations are generically referred to as compilers.) >he actually said as I was leaving "make sure you understand databases for your next interview" with a massive shit-eating grin I sincerely hope from my heart of hearts that company or department is in it's well deserved position in the depths of the toilet now, or at any rate that specific person.
robotnikman 5y ago
Reminds me of how too long ago they ended up hiring someone with a very controversial background, and quickly backpedaled on the decision. Seems like they need to take a long look at their hiring practices
tootie 5y ago
My favorite interview surprise was when I was asked to craft a presentation on an interesting project and be prepared to discuss it. When I got on site, it turns out they wanted me to present it cold to the entire dev team of 50+ people.
poulsbohemian 5y ago
I have a not dissimilar background and what you describe is exactly what caused me to throw up my hands and leave the tech world. It's just not worth the BS.
- hirvi74 5y ago
  What do you do now? I'm looking to stay in tech (for now), but I'd really like to get out of web development at the very least. Though, I'm not entirely sure where to even begin my long journey.
  - poulsbohemian 5y ago
    My educational background was CS and business, I spent 23 years in a wide range of technical, managerial, and consulting roles, and now I sell real estate in two states (our market spans a state line). Would be happy to chat anytime about career ideas.
    - hirvi74 5y ago
      That's very kind of you, I think I will take you up on that offer. I've only been in the field for like 5 years as of next month. Do you have a preferred form of contact?
      - poulsbohemian 5y ago
        Sure - see my profile.

greenhatman 5y ago

Maybe they don't really want to fill it.

Zelphyr 5y ago

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" If I ran into a problem and went to them for help, would they just stare at me, waiting for me to figure it out on my own? They didn't extend an offer to me and, based on my performance in that interview, I can't say I blame them. I'm not sure I would have accepted if they had, however. That experience really left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a low impression of that company. We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews.

nine_zeros 5y ago
"Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" Unfortunately, yes. Young engineers are terrible at communication and working with others. Partly due to workplace incentives and partly because you must realize that entire generations have grown up with computers and not people.
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  I don't think this deserves the downvotes it is getting simply because there is some truth to the comment. A good friend of mine worked with a young developer recently who was excited about what he was able to generate with a single npm command. When my friend, who has been writing software longer than this guy has been alive, calmly pointed out that the npm command had just generated 400 files and thousands of lines of code that didn't actually solve their problem, this guy got mad and went to complain to their manager.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    I'd be mildly ticked-off, too. The senior guy was being an ass.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      I can easily imagine how it went down. "Wow! I can do so much with so little!" "Everything you just generated is wasteful and meaningless." The right way is to encourage that enthusiasm and guide them toward doing more useful work with the same power they just discovered.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    We only have your telling of your friend's telling of the story. This is rhetorically similar to saving a 50% quality jpeg as a 20% quality jpeg.
- teclordphrack2 5y ago
  In all honesty it's not just younger developers. I have worked in plenty of companies where the idea of "communication" needed to be stressed and would of fixed many problems and saved a lot of money.
raincom 5y ago
In a cut-throat environment, where 10% of people are PIP'ed, it is expected: your senior colleagues are not going to help you, will lead you down a wrong path, etc. That way, the tribal knowledge will be with them, and they can outshine any new employee. In your interview case, they should have given you hints, even if they want to not hire you later.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  That’s not how 10% attrition works at any notable company.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - polotics 5y ago
    Pray tell, can you clarify what's incorrect in the above description?
  - teclordphrack2 5y ago
    I know some MIT labs work that way. Backstabbing people b/c there are only so many upper positions instead of titling and paying people their skill level you would have to wait for someone to retire.
sparker72678 5y ago
I had an extremely similar experience recently and it really shook me up for a few days. Same amount of time in the industry as you. Looking back there's no way I would have fit in there, but damn did that interview screw me up for a while.
vmception 5y ago
Nothing about tech interviews is a signal for what happens inside the company, aside from you having the dual role of giving tech interviews while you forgot to factor that into your sprint planning You’re making the same mistake at vetting them that they’re making at vetting you
- edoceo 5y ago
  The interview is signal from the actual company - it's definitely got some information about what's inside.
  - vmception 5y ago
    You are simply determining that you are okay with false negatives Which is exactly why they do irrelevant interview brainteasers as well This problem is a two way street in the tech sector, in case anyone wanted to fix it. The candidates alone are making the same mistake and bringing it to the company
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Is a "false negative" a positive?
      - vmception 5y ago
        Its a quadrant. Positive, Negative, False Positive, False Negative
      - randomswede 5y ago
        It is a determination that something should be rejected, when it really should have been accepted. Similarly, a false positive is something that was accepted, when it should have been rejected. If you have a sufficiently high candidate pool. you can (for a while, at least) live with an interview process with a relatively high false negative rate (that is, x% of the time you don't hire people you should have). If it is typically quick to go from "in through the door" to "is a productive member of the team", it may be that you can live with a high false positive rate (that is, y% of the time you hire people you shouldn't have).
vidanay 5y ago
Honestly, these are the reasons I don't look for a new position.I make "good" money, but by no means great. I have the benefit of 20 years tenure and apparent stability in my current role. Trading that for more stress in hiring and gambling more stress in daily work doesn't balance the potential salary increase.
mikepurvis 5y ago
I've never understood the heavy emphasis on in-interview coding or brain teasers. To the extent that I've participated in the hiring process (both as an IC and a manager), 80% of the interview is assessing culture/personality/ethic fit; that is, the basic "do I want to work with this person" question. The technical competence check is all retrospective, hearing them talk about prior projects and what the design and implementation process was like, how decisions were made, what the challenges were and how they were handled, any regrets/learnings. And most of that is just digging in far enough to confirm that the person was actually a first-class participant in it with a deep understanding, and not a bystander. Any whiteboard stuff would be "show us how the system worked" as a last-ditch check on basic communication skills.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  You know, I was nodding my head in agreement as I read this when something occurred to me. This all requires that the interviewer be willing to interact deeply with the candidate. Our profession has a (well deserved, I think) reputation for having a high percentage of people who really don't like interacting with others on a peer level. Is it likely that a large part of the problem is that we have people doing interviews who really shouldn't be? I mean, if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them, then you're going to be a really shitty interviewer. And that's exactly the personality type I see being described over and over in these anecdotes.
  - kodisha 5y ago
    Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head" I can tell you, with quite substantial sample size from me directly and from people I deeply trust that every time we encountered an interview like this, we later found out that the company culture was really bad. Those are not the kind of people you want to work with.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      For clarity, is the "like this" in your comment referring to brain teaser technical one-upmanship interviews, or the less structured style that is focused on getting to know the person and having them describe in their own words the projects in their past?
serf 5y ago
i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script. Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost. I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related. It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards. That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.
- mateo411 5y ago
  > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.
lowercased 5y ago
> trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. that describes 2/3rds of the 'codility' tests I've been given in a few scenarios (toptal used it to weed me out). The couple of jobs I've been in where I was explicitly barred from ever asking any clarifying questions, or talking to business/SME folks about the problem at hand... I left those pretty quickly. I guess it serves to weed out people who have some hard-wired dependency on talking to people to clarify requirements.
herbturbo 5y ago
Never understood this way of interviewing. I get shit now and then for helping people too much in coding exercises, but if someone has reached the point where they are obviously not going to progress why not nudge them along and see how they respond? I've found that the ability to receive and act on guidance with a certain degree of humility is a much better signal of someone's potential than how many algorithms they've memorised.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Interviewing is hard. It takes a lot of practice to know what level of assistance to provide at what time. A coworker once showed me a technique of keeping a google doc with the problems, as well as a step-by-step of the solution and the times at which they should be at that step. It always seemed to work out well for the candidates, as even a poor candidate would finish the problem at like 55 minutes into a 60 min interview. Even with that, getting a person to see what they should be doing next, without telling them explicitly, is definitely a skill you develop with practice. I think you're right in erring on the side of too much assistance. You get to see much more of how the candidate works if you can skip over the part where they are getting stuck on something.
  - herbturbo 5y ago
    Yes some people just need a nudge in the right direction to carry the task through to completion. And some need to be pushed along the entire way. In either case they don't leave the interview feeling humiliated having floundered in the face of smug silence.
  - marbletimes 5y ago
    It is one of those common tropes, "interviewing is hard", that seems to justify the inevitability of poor attitude, wasting time of interviewees (remember the interviewers are paid for those hours) and a painful process for basically anyone. I often interview for my company/group and yes, it is challenging in one hour to find out "life, death, and miracles" of some guy who is being interviewed, but it is especially challenging when the interviewer is in a bad mood, does not want to be there, or sees interviewing as a nuisance, and he is looking for a reason to make someone fail. I worked at a FAANG and I got offers from FAANGs-adjacent companies, so I am not one of those you-cannot-win-at-this-game-so-you-complain people. I saw: someone stopping the interview for unexplained reasons after the first 45 minutes, an interviewer at a blue company looking at my private parts for a good part of 45 minutes, multiple people interviewing while doing something else in person or virtually, recruiters (those were the fronts, the hiring managers were responsible) dragging the process forever and then say no with zero explanation. Is it really "hard" doing better than that?
xtracto 5y ago
Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides a test where they evaluate a person for proficiency on different sets of English skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, general comprehension. At the end of the test they give you a score for each of those and then a general score. Now, the nice thing about the TOEFL score is its reputation: When you are going to study into a University (from Oxford to Liverpool, from Harvard to Queensland), if you are not a native English speaker, the university asks you to take a TOEFL (or equivalent) and get a score higher than X. As long as you provide that score, the university won't ask any questions. They don't doubt your English proficiency skills. I want to do something like that but for development: Sure, University thought you CS101, CS201, etc. But what companies are looking for are specific skills (similar to say, https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix/ https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix... or https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC... ). These very concrete skills that can be concretely measured. I want this becase I've been dealing with recruiting, interviewing and also being interviewed for most of my career. And in my experience setting up a "recruiting wheel" in a company or startup is very painful. Most developers don't know how to perform interviews. Or don't care (who has time for that?). As an Engineer manager, having to comb through 400 resumes a week is time consuming and unproductive. So I imagine a scenario where, there is this proverbial "Full Stack Developer" certification authority which is independent, very reputable and unbiased: They won't tell me if X or Y developer will make it into my team. They will tell me how does the person score in "Algorithms/Data Structures" or "Micro Services development" or "Frontend development" and then I will choose whether I want to hire them or not (according to my current requirements). That way, I only have to do a culture-fit interview and that's it. In the past I have dealt with "Sourcing Agencies" that try to do something like that: They do the 1st technical interview, and they say that there will be alignment to what I want. But that was not the case: They send me 2 candidates and get very surprised when I reject one and not the other. And I feel our objectives are not aligned, so everybody is frustrated. Moreover, I don't want to have to deal with hiring agencies. And paying 1 to 3 salary months is too fucking expensive. Now, as a candidate/developer: I would love to have a "TOEFL" like certificate that I can show, with my proficiency. That way, I can "look for a job" passively. I don't have to be making countless of code interviews showing one time after another what I know. I only do it ONCE for an authoritative company, and everybody else can check my qualifications there. Companies like Microsoft or TripleByte have tried to do something like that, but the problem is again that they do other things: Their interests clash. Why would I trust LinkedIn? That's why TOEFL monetization make sense: The candidate has to pay for it. I am aware there are some certifications: Oracle whatever, Microsoft whatever, AWS whatever. But those are either too specific/niche (WebLogic Server 12c administration exam) or they are only a "badge" (AWS Cloud Engineer) that doesn't tell you that much. There is opportunity here for disruption. And I know that the problems that I've faced are faced by countless of other CTOs/Technology Heads.
ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
My honest opinion, at this stage in my career I don't have any patience at all for explaining technical concepts. Its almost never a one off, once you have to hold someones hand, you always do. And if you don't, they are creating technical debt.
andrekandre 5y ago
> We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. maybe i'm naive but, how about just ask the candidate to make a mini version of what they would actually do irl? if your an app dev: make me an app that does x, you have 60 min if your a rails dev: make me a site that does y, you have 2hrs if your a pdm: make me a spec and tickets for a system that does z maybe i'm missing something but it shouldn't be too hard should it?
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  It's all the potential criteria around the request that makes just that one piece more complex than it seems. For example; "Make me a site that does x, you have 2 hours" Do I need to build the app in front of you? Problematic because how often does one build an entire web site in a couple of hours, while someone is standing over their shoulders scrutinizing every keystroke? Do I take it home and do it? If so, how do I prove to you that I did the work? Do you care what framework I use? Do you care if I use Open Source code? What design should I use? Where do I get the site assets from? If I'm building this site for you, are you paying me for that time? Then there's the non-technical parts missing from an interview like that: How does such an exercise tell you that I'm the kind of person you want to work with? How does such an interview provide me an opportunity to ask you question? It tells me nothing about you or your company which is every bit as important as you finding out about me.
rambojazz 5y ago
I could absolutely never ever make anything with people staring at me. I need to be alone with my PC.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. Won't happen, because most don't want to figure out a better way. We just have to come to terms with it.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Had a colleague have a similar interview with Reddit for an infosec/appsec role. They said it was a shit show, no feedback, never heard back. Sourced through an external recruiter, so Reddit is burning some recruiter's time churning through candidates. Picked up by someone in finance at similar comp a few days later.

bschwindHN 5y ago

They're too busy writing self congratulatory blog posts on their hiring process to have time to improve it. https://alexgolec.dev/reddit-interview-problems-the-game-of-life/ https://alexgolec.dev/reddit-interview-problems-the-game-of-...

herbturbo 5y ago
It's a good signal for me when I'm presented with silly brain teasers like this in interviews, especially when the technology of the company isn't that great. I'm interviewing you too, so give me something that reflects the problems you solve as a team, otherwise my assumption is your office is full of white boards containing puzzles of the day and your tech is all 3rd party libs.
- randomswede 5y ago
  I wouldn't actually class this as a brain-teaser. It is a non-trivial[1] problem that doesn't require an "aha!" moment to get right. It is amenable to multiple ways of reaching a correct solution. It has interesting follow-up questions. It also stands a minimal chance to actually discover (some) of the way a candidate thinks. It is also implementing the VM for a Turing-complete computational model. It may also be that anything work-related is actually too long to fit into a limited interview time. Now, a trivial, brain-teaser, question would be "you have an NxM matrix, and you can either go left or up. How many paths are there from the lower left, to the upper-right corner?" I consider it a brain-teaser because if you write code that contains any matrix manipulation or searching, you have basically failed. There is a closed-form expression for the number, so... [1] By "non-trivial", I basically mean that there are multiple correct solutions.
xtracto 5y ago
That's actually a nifty problem in itself, I don't see anything wrong. Of course I have learned that the actual "proposition" of whatever problem is not what is right/wrong in an interview. The way I would apply that problem interviewing someone is: We have 1 hour. Here is this problem (to which of course I know the solution to already). How would you solve it? Let's solve it together so that I can see your decisions, your code, do you use exceptions? do you use specific type of exception for different errors? do you split functionality in a lot of functions? do you know nifty language tricks (maybe a bit of code golfing or functional constructs if JavaScript or Ruby). The problem comes when the "interview problem" is passed from the creator to the "mid-level" Engineer who now has to do the interview. For them it becomes: "Ok, you gotta implement this in one hour", and they don't know the nuances or reasons for the problem. I've seen this first hand with an equivalent problem. I had all this nice interview process that I applied, and the first time I shadowed one developer so that he could do the interview, he was just looking at the poor interviewee fail due to nerves, with the aim to evaluate him only on the merits of how far a set of working code did he had.

thenanyu 5y ago

I interviewed for a director of engineering role there — met the CTO, very informal ahead of the actual interview loop. Recruiter said they would follow up. Crickets. I followed up. Silence. It was quite weird.

ctvo 5y ago

As someone passively looking, thank you for this. I'll remove Reddit from my list. That is unacceptable. I do 5 interviews a week on average for my company, and if we did that to candidates, heads would roll. As an interviewer your two objectives are: 1. Ensure the candidate has an excellent experience 2. Collect data points In that order. Sometimes we run into candidates who make the second item difficult. They fail to complete the specific technical problem. They can't speak about their experiences in detail. We need to drag data out of them screaming. It doesn't matter, your priority is to ensure they feel respected, and leave thinking they WANT to work there.

pkulak 5y ago

The last technical interview I did was for Facebook, and say what you will about them, it was a great experience. Before the interview they actually gave me a couple paragraphs about what I was going to be tested on. Needless to say, I nailed it. :D

EvilEy3 5y ago

> I have over 20 years of programming experience, am a founder, and have worked for multiple venture backed startups. Do you want a pat on the back or something?

ctvo 5y ago
Probably not? They most likely want you to know they've been in other interviews in the past, and this one was particularly egregious?
burnished 5y ago
The implication is that they aren't new and they've had ample opportunity to be humbled and grow. That their perspective is the result of experience. Thats all.

kryptn 5y ago

I also interviewed with Reddit, although it was a few years back at this point. I thought I nailed their code challenge and expected to continue through the process, but after that session that was pretty much the last I heard from them. It was pretty disappointing.

hangonhn 5y ago

One of my buddies gave me this useful insight once: the impression you give your candidates, even the ones you don't end up hiring, will likely be the last impression you'll get to make on that candidate and the tech world is very small. Negative experiences will impact how candidates perceive your company and word of that experience will spread. Always be respectful to the candidates. If nothing else, they took the time out of the day to meet with you and go through various obstacles, etc. It's too bad your experience was so negative. That's going to be a datapoint in my mental dataset of companies to consider when the time comes.

mbesto 5y ago

> Reddit’s hiring process converted me from a fan of the site into someone that thought the entire organization was second tier - which obviously it is in terms of monetization - but also in how they treat people compared to the FAANGs. And from a completely non-technical persons perspective Reddit is incredibly disorganized at the executive management and corporate level. The amount of turnover, controversy, business model revamps, etc. for a 16 year old company with the hype they have is unique and unprecedented. It's not surprising whatsoever that their hiring practices are similarly disjointed.

hogFeast 5y ago

I interviewed for a front-end dev position (it was my first ever interview in the industry, I vomited before I got there so it was a pretty crazy day). I come in. The front-end guy starts asking me questions to try and solve something he is working on. No-one else is there yet. He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments, I say I don't know, I have never had that issue before...I make an off-hand comment that I use React and most of my JS code doesn't have comments because I am just working on projects by myself, and I don't do a lot of library code...the manager comes in at this point, and proceeds to berate me about why commenting is essential. I say: I use comments where they are needed. Off he goes, again. Interview starts. Manager proceeds to go through a series of questions designed to expose my ignorance. None of which are related to the job. One classic was him explaining to me that database normalization made no difference to the size of the database because "the data is all the same on the disk" (which is, ofc, not accurate...I tried to explain, he just kept repeating that over and over...he actually said as I was leaving "make sure you understand databases for your next interview" with a massive shit-eating grin). For some reason, there was also a back-end guy there who, upon hearing that I built something in Java, proceeded to launch into a series of questions on internals of Java (for example, he asked me what the difference was between certain versions of Java and the size of the heap...perhaps unsurprisingly, he also got some of this stuff wrong but began laughing when I said I thought X was Y). The only two questions that I had about front-end dev were: the front-end guy trying to ask me to help solve an issue he was having (before the interview, when no-one was there), and a question about the value of this in arrow functions (which I got wrong, but is also an excruciating thing to try and explain, so I don't think the guy knew whether I got it wrong...it is a terrible question). That was it.

Banana699 5y ago
>He is asking me about why a JS compiler is removing his comments Huh ? language parsers remove comments because they're comments, that's literally by definition. Are you (or your past interviewer) using "comments" in a different sense ? (Also, not trying to be a pedant on you I swear, but technically JS is traditionally interpreted. Most mature runtimes have compilers but it's not part of the API. It's just a juvenile pet peeve of mine when language implementations are generically referred to as compilers.) >he actually said as I was leaving "make sure you understand databases for your next interview" with a massive shit-eating grin I sincerely hope from my heart of hearts that company or department is in it's well deserved position in the depths of the toilet now, or at any rate that specific person.

robotnikman 5y ago

Reminds me of how too long ago they ended up hiring someone with a very controversial background, and quickly backpedaled on the decision. Seems like they need to take a long look at their hiring practices

tootie 5y ago

My favorite interview surprise was when I was asked to craft a presentation on an interesting project and be prepared to discuss it. When I got on site, it turns out they wanted me to present it cold to the entire dev team of 50+ people.

poulsbohemian 5y ago

I have a not dissimilar background and what you describe is exactly what caused me to throw up my hands and leave the tech world. It's just not worth the BS.

hirvi74 5y ago
What do you do now? I'm looking to stay in tech (for now), but I'd really like to get out of web development at the very least. Though, I'm not entirely sure where to even begin my long journey.
- poulsbohemian 5y ago
  My educational background was CS and business, I spent 23 years in a wide range of technical, managerial, and consulting roles, and now I sell real estate in two states (our market spans a state line). Would be happy to chat anytime about career ideas.
  - hirvi74 5y ago
    That's very kind of you, I think I will take you up on that offer. I've only been in the field for like 5 years as of next month. Do you have a preferred form of contact?
    - poulsbohemian 5y ago
      Sure - see my profile.