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One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself hav
by thr0wawayf00 5y ago
One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well.
Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo and he floundered the entire time). One of my coworkers took some pot shots at the candidate, being deeply critical and rude, cutting the candidate off mid-sentence, etc. I was honestly embarrassed to be on the call and I thought it reflected poorly on my company. I’d never seen my coworker act like this before and it changed the way I felt about him.
I wonder how much of the leetcode interviewing culture is rooted in this desire to dominate candidates, since ICs rarely have opportunities to wield such power over others.
- civilized 5y agoThose ICs are either sociopathic or they're channeling the sociopathy of their managers.
- ryandrake 5y agoThey could just need training and feedback. A lot of places just throw any rando engineer into an interview with no coaching on how to behave, how to set guide rails for the candidate, how to empathize and pace the interview, what the evaluation criteria and rubric is. And then after the interview, the person has no idea if he conducted the interview properly. Totally open loop. Just yeet him at candidates untrained and then wonder why he can’t interview effectively.
- ericbarrett 5y agoI still recall an interview I did at a recently public company in New York, for a DevOps position. 4/5 of the interviews went sailingly, with heavy emphasis on networking, scripting, and AWS knowledge. Then the lead engineer sailed in, five minutes late. He gave me an algorithm question straight from the Google playbook (I don't remember the question, sadly), then after I asked for a few minutes to ponder, proceeded to smirk and interrupt me every 30 seconds to ask if I needed help. In between he was chatting on his phone with the audible keybord ticks enabled.
- aigo 5y ago> chatting on his phone with the audible keybord ticks enabled. That alone is a disgrace.
- ghaff 5y agoPlease go off in a corner and ponder why such casual ageism is as unwelcome as casual racism or sexism and maybe just stay there until you come up with an answer. Substitute woman for boomer in that sentence and listen to what it sounds like.
- aigo 5y agoI could substitute it for child, another group of people who are broadly less likely to know where the setting is, and it wouldn't be offensive that way either.
- chiph 5y agoAs someone who was born before the moon landing and saw one of the last IMPs get installed on the ARPANET, yeah that was offensive. You should apologize. Knowing to silence your phone in meetings is a matter of having manners, not age.
- aigo 5y agoJust as no-one would begrudge a dominated race from poking fun at the dominant race, I don't see why you are so on your high horse about the dominant age group getting the same. 'Punching up' is fair game where I come from. I'm afraid I just don't get your outrage at an innocent comment poking fun at the most dominant section of society. But, as you're the second person to have taken offence, I'm going to delete it anyway.
- spoonjim 5y agoWell he could also be pissed off that he’s interviewing someone who claims to be an expert in something he can’t even install.
- Supermancho 5y agoI can easily write tests for Cypress without knowing anything about react because Cypress doesn't require react. Strange filter. https://www.cypress.io/ https://www.cypress.io/
- Gigachad 5y agoI have been doing React development for 4 years now and I have never set it up from scratch and only have a rough idea how it’s done. I still apply for react jobs and do fine. Installing something from scratch is one of the least important tests because it’s something that companies typically do once every few years, they can afford to flounder for a few days on that.
- cosmotic 5y agoExactly. Greenfield projects are exceedingly rare.
- WalterBright 5y agoI reinstall Linux from scratch about once every 5 years, long enough that I totally forget how to do it. So I keep a file with all the commands to do it.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoThat may be true, but there's no justification for taking it out on the candidate.
- Aeolun 5y agoI mean, you set up cypress exactly once, and after that you write only tests. It seems reasonable to me to not be great at setting it up.
- friedman23 5y agoLol power tripping over cypress.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ljhsiung 5y agoI recall voicing an opinion that we should record interviews we give candidates and re-review it during the hiring committee, much like we do code reviews. Have the interviewer justify certain beliefs about the candidate with hard timestamps rather than platitudes ("not confident", "wanted to see how they react under pressure", etc. etc.). My comment always gets pushback. Privacy, respect for interviewer ("If I work here, then I myself can judge fine!"), not enough time, etc. Hiring processes are about as contentious as CI methodologies, it seems
- phnofive 5y agoThis is an excellent idea that will surely be nixed by legal - why gather evidence against yourself?
- oneepic 5y agoIf I was the candidate, and you informed me the interview would be recorded with video, I would politely thank you for your time and end the call.
- heavenlyblue 5y agoWhy? It could easily be optional by the way. I would be ok with the recording as long as they don’t make my sign the form allowing it to be used as part of some public campaign.
- oneepic 5y agoI'm not comfortable with the idea of being recorded, especially when I'm already under the pressure of an interview. I don't know how they'll use my video, if it will be used in training, leaked, etc. I might never see that company again, but they could use my video forever without me knowing.
- runnerup 5y agoI was offered an interview which would be recording myself to get graded by AI software: https://startupleague.online/blog/vempathy-tech-scalable-user-research-powered-ai/ https://startupleague.online/blog/vempathy-tech-scalable-use... If I thought my interview was being recorded, I'd assume it was being used for this internally. If given the option to have it recorded, I'd assume that I'd get "minus points" for declining. This is very unfortunate, because I love your idea. I'd just need stronger legal protections to ensure that I wasn't perpetuating part of a dystopia.
- kingcharles 5y ago.
- ikawe 5y agowrong thread I think. edit: If you delete your reply to this, I'll delete this. and we can unfuck this whole thing. ;)
- kingcharles 5y agoLOL. Yep! And I tried to delete it but I can't because there is a reply ;)
- allenu 5y agoI have noticed that sense of "domination" come out in interviews as well. I remember long ago having one interview where the interviewer was asking me to code something which I knew would be impossible to complete in the time allotted. It just seemed so ridiculous to me that I was supposed to write this complete solution in about 30 minutes. I remember how superior he was acting at the start of the interview too, and then after I wrote up the code (unable to complete in the time given, but apparently good enough to make him happy), his tone changed completely of one where he was very friendly as though somehow I passed his "test". I was now worthy of speaking to as an equal, whereas half an hour or more earlier I was some nobody to him. Another interview I had years later, the interviewer clearly didn't think I was worth his time because he literally got up and started playing with a yo-yo as he threw challenging question after challenging question at me and pressing me harder and harder for solutions ("Imagine you were given task X and nothing more. How would you solve this? What would you do next? If that didn't work, now what would you try?") I remember it was incredibly disrespectful and left a bad taste in my mouth about the team. Thankfully I didn't get the job.
- Aeolun 5y agoWhat the hell does a yo-yo do in an interview? I think that by itself would make me walk out.
- mrfusion 5y agoIncompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us. Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.
- afarrell 5y agoFor example: The idea that there are many programmers who cannot even write fizzbuzz sounds like a very strong claim. It seems far more likely that there are many programmers who have socially-induced anxiety.
- 5y ago
- WalterBright 5y ago> he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo and he floundered the entire time If I was floundering because the interviewer found a hole in my knowledge (and there are many holes in Albert Hall) I'd proactively state that and say where the holes weren't and ask for a question about that. For example, I've implemented a complete C compiler, front to back, so at one point I knew everything about C. But in implementing a new C compiler (ImportC) a few months back, I had to go over the Standard again, as I'd forgotten bits and pieces. There's no reason at all why the interviewee cannot drive the direction of the interview, rather than being driven. For example, when I interviewed for a software job after leaving my mechanical job at Boeing, I was concerned that I wouldn't be taken seriously as a programmer. So I brought along listings of the code I'd written and pulled it out during the interview and proceeded to explain it to the interviewer, on my own initiative. A long time after that, I was talking to the interviewer, and he said that that was what got me the offer.
- Jensson 5y ago> There's no reason at all why the interviewee cannot drive the direction of the interview, rather than being driven. You know how they made a program pass the Turing test? They didn't make it smart, they hardcoded a conversation where the program drove the conversation to where it wanted it to be. That way the person interacting with the program was passive, so they never noticed that they were just interacting with a stupid program in the 5 minutes they had with it. The same happens in interviews, if you take a person who don't understand tech, but have watched a lot of conference talks and read some papers and he can re-tell those, and he even remembers answers to common questions from the question parts there, but he doesn't understand much at all of what was said he just remembers conversations, then that guy will look like a world class expert if he gets to drive the interview. But once he starts working he didn't know anything at all, he just learned to talk about these things not do them. Some would say "just dive deeper into his knowledge!", but you can't always do that, if you aren't an expert yourself in his subject area you wont be able to drive down deep enough to find his flaws, and since he is driving the conversation most likely you wont be an expert on what he is talking about.
- 5y ago
- solididiot 5y agoThis is very insightful. I'd also add that having such people let loose to do interviews without training and checks and balances also is a huge red flag about the org.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrfusion 5y agoYou’re describing hazing. it’s a part of human nature that we should work to overcome.
- mrfusion 5y agoEven an expert probably has only a few installs under his belt. The day to day work could be maintaining and configuring, etc. I consider myself an expert on lots of things I’d still need references and a bit of study to install properly.
- saxonww 5y agoI hadn't done many interviews before starting at my current job, where they seem to make a point of getting a lot more people involved in the interview process. I guess this is an idealistic view, but it should be pretty clear if you're a hiring manager whether the people you're getting involved in the interview process are likely to be jerks to a candidate. What you describe is embarrassing, and does reflect poorly on your company. Review sites like Glassdoor do or did have interview reviews as part of their company review, and people do go look at those when deciding whether to apply at a company. I hope you shared your feedback with your coworker, and also the hiring manager. That coworker is probably not ready to do interviews and needs some training (or maturing) first. In the future, you might interrupt the coworker and then try to help the candidate along; maybe they won't pass the interview, but you don't have to let them leave feeling like a failure, and along the way you might get some information about where they could fit in your organization. And the entire interview won't have felt like such a waste.
- joelbluminator 5y ago> In the future, you might interrupt the coworker Not many people are gonna risk confrontation with a colleague over some candidate they don't know. Especially not during the interview, maybe afterwards when things are calm. I'm agreeing with you here but let's stay realistic; some companies have assholes working for them, sometimes these assholes get to positions of power. Usually the company knows damn well employee X has a bit of an attitude problem but...guess he adds enough value (or acts well enough) to keep being employed.