11 ms·

I am still feel pissed about an interview for a job I think I'd have fit in superbly. It would have been fun, and productive. If not for the hackerrank quiz the

I am still feel pissed about an interview for a job I think I'd have fit in superbly. It would have been fun, and productive. If not for the hackerrank quiz they threw in the front filled with irrelevant puzzles that needed solving under time pressure. I don't have time to spend or willingness to "train" on such puzzles for the purpose of getting a job. I am sure if I had a chance to talk to the team or the engineers, it would have been effective. This bitter experience only amplified my hate for such tests even more. The job I'm at currently, gave me a practical task(similar to the ones I would be doing on the job) and a few days to submit the results/notes of. It was so much more pleasant to walk into a tech interview with such work and have a nice chat about practical technical stuff instead of stupid puzzles.

nerdponx 5y ago
Not getting the job at a company that hands out irrelevant discriminatory interview tasks seems like a positive outcome to me!
Sholmesy 5y ago
> It would have been fun, and productive How do you know this? The signal of them dumping you with some leetcode should be an indication that it wasn't meant to be?
- halfdan 5y ago
  Not necessarily. It just means that they weren't good at recruiting, they could still have a great team to work with.
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    How do you recruit a great team if they’re bad at recruiting?
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      If they put together most of the team another way, then it would be fine. My prior company would have interns do leetcode and system design. Intermediates and up had some paired code writing and a far less formal system design discussion. Most of the team might have been hired through a network and you only get leetcoded as an external unknown.
    - ssully 5y ago
      Where I work our team gets to review applications (pre-filtered) for candidates we are interested in. Those candidates are then given a general technical exercise. We get to review the results and ask follow up questions, but we basically get zero input into what kinds of questions are asked. I could 100% see a scenario where the people who manage the recruitment process replace that general exercise with some third-party online solution like hacker rank or whatever.
  - samstave 5y ago
    This. I interviewed with a company that I really wanted to work with, was overqualified for the job, and would have thrived in it... The HR person was a complete dolt though, and didnt even understand how to interview me properly... Sucks - I still respect the company, but their recruiting method was piss-poor..
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    It does tell you that the people working there practiced leetcode and puzzles in their free time (assuming they went through the same filter)
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Hilariously not in many cases. One of my old jobs introduced leetcode, particularly trees for interviewing. Nobody currently there could solve those. But a new engineer was assigned to handle interviewing and it was all about a couple of leetcode problems he found on the internet.
- reacharavindh 5y ago
  Parent commenter. The job description was top notch. It was a clear description of what they needed this engineering role to do. Inspire of it being a bit of a niche, I had almost perfect set of experiences from my prior jobs that made it very interesting. Fun because it would have given me an opportunity to _improve_ upon my already bootstrapped skills. Productive because, I already have a head start than another engineer getting into the groove of things. This is HN, I can be tech specific :-) I have worked a lot on performance from HPC perspective. The job was at a High Frequency Trading platform that needed a sys.engineer who would work on extracting performance with things like pinning a CPU core to a process and several optimisations at the OS and kernel that would shave off a few milliseconds in an already fast application.
nefitty 5y ago
It's even worse when you crush every other part of the process, including take homes, and then get blown out due to one idiotic contrived puzzle.
mountainriver 5y ago
Yeah this is the super unfortunate state of engineering today. I literally cannot bring myself to study puzzles when I could spend my time pursuing some interesting open source work. Consequently, I have a lot of successful open source work, but most companies still don’t care and fail me for lack of fake puzzle quiz skills. It’s utterly baffling to me that companies don’t want creative employees that build successful products out in front of everyone. Where you have a clear view of all their interactions and code. I’ve tried to change this thinking at my current company and the consensus was it would be biased. Biased?! Code quizzes are highly biased! I’m producing useful functionality to the world! I believe this and transparency are the new remote work. Some companies will get it early and for others it will take a major upheaval to get them to a place of reasonableness.
- politician 5y ago
  How many people are in your company?
- javajosh 5y ago
  I actually enjoy those puzzles, but agree that they are irrelevant to the work. In fact, the very few times they are relevant is something of a special occasion! "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm!" Most of the job is, of course, figuring out why things went wrong, based on imperfect evidence, which requires a good mental model of the entire system plus the ability to make changes to test and eliminate hypotheses. Very few, if any, technical interviews capture the essence of this act.
  - daxfohl 5y ago
    Even more rare "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm in 30 minutes while babbling the whole time!"
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  For someone who can't even get an interview, but loves working on oss, this is highly discouraging... I already have to be so focused with what little time I have in my life, and sacrifice a lot, to just make the things I want to make, I just can't imagine finding all the time to do this meta work/training. Every day I grow more comfortable with the idea that my love of software dev and oss will forever be avocational. Perhaps though, financial instability aside, I'll be happier this way anyway
dqpb 5y ago
Keep in mind that even if the job would have been perfect for you, the company probably interviewed multiple people, and selected one that they thought would be more perfect for them. I recently did a round of hiring for my team, and we had several excellent candidates, but could only hire one, so we made a choice. It’s always sad (for me) because I tend to see the potential in almost everybody, and wish we could hire all the people.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  Where on the planet are you and can you send the dropouts my way? This feels like alternative reality - we have jobs available but no takers.
  - ikiris 5y ago
    pay more
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The job I'm at currently, gave me a practical task(similar to the ones I would be doing on the job) and a few days to submit the results/notes of. Take-homes get a lot of criticism on HN, but in my experience they're superior for all the reasons you mentioned. I don't actually see pushback against take-home problems in the real world, mostly just online. When given the choice, most people would prefer a practical take-home over a whiteboard style interview.
- decafninja 5y ago
  The two biggest problems with takehomes: 1. They do not scale horizontally. You do a takehome and get rejected, then your effort has become worthless when applying to other companies. Versus grinding leetcode - it scales across a huge breadth of many different companies. 2. Often times a takehome is not. instead of an leetcode interview. It's in addition to the leetcode interview. So you end up needing to practice leetcode anyways. Now you just have more work to do - work that doesn't horizontally scale.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek. I soured heavily on take homes during an active job search phase as I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people. I had a pile of companies, would accept any of them on the surface, and it was just a matter of grabbing one. Many interview at a much less aggressive pace than that and I would prefer a take home when I am out of leetcode practice.
  - emptybottle 5y ago
    > HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them source?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it. > Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek Take homes shouldn't be taking a full workweek. If anything, take-homes make it easier to stack a lot of interviews because you can do them at your leisure in your own time. > I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.
dmkirwan 5y ago
There is evidence that traditional software engineering interviews[1] assess a candidate's ability to perform under pressure better than their ability to do the job. I find it crazy that you need to spend weeks studying leetcode-style problems after doing the job all day in order to prepare for an interview. Coincidentally, I've started working on a product to help this[2]. The general idea is that tasks like pull-requests, bug fixes and realistic take home projects are a better way to test candidates. Everything is done using Github, the tasks are all realistic and candidates can use their own laptop and development environment. It's not fully ready yet, but if anybody wants to chat about it just use the info@ address for the site. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.h... [2] https://devscreen.io/ https://devscreen.io/
- mountainriver 5y ago
  This is cool!
- javajosh 5y ago
  If you can capture the candidates ability to setup a BTD (build-test-debug) loop, their ability to find and fix bugs, and that they know enough tooling to get it into production (and troubleshoot deployment), then you have successfully checked 80% of the job requirements for...almost every programming job out there.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I'm lost on the "tooling to get it to deployment" test idea. Deployment seems both company (and industry) specific and trivially easy to learn compared to programming skills.
    - javajosh 5y ago
      Great! Today you learned something new: sometimes software deployment is complicated! Get more experience, and you'll find less trivial deployments. "Trivial deployment" is the goal of many systems, and is rarely met.
lhorie 5y ago
Having been on both sides of interviewing, I find that the majority of complaints about the status quo seems to come from people that haven't been involved in the interviewer side that much and consequently simply put forward their personal preference (e.g. some people downthread saying they prefer take home, and then subsequently being countered that take homes aren't ideal for various types of candidates) No offense to anyone, but it strikes me a little bit as armchair expert hot takes saying "why not just X". Personally I think that rather than complaining about leetcode-style loops, it'd be more productive to think in terms of what the problem domain is: namely, many of these companies are typically large and want some level of standardization in the hiring process: you have to contend with things like some ethnicities being culturally prone to "hiring down" to inflate subordinate count, talk-the-talk-but-dont-walk-the-walk types, thinly disguised sexism/ageism/other biases that are excused under the "cultural fit" umbrella, mismatch in terms of desire to provide technical interviewing skills vs volume of candidates, etc. It's easy to attack any one methodology simply because if such a thing as a silver bullet existed, we'd all already be using it. All interview methodologies are flawed, and for better or worse, leetcode-style happens to predominate interview loops because it has a semblance of standardization (though ironically, IMHO a good interviewer ought to be looking between the lines more than seeking specific answers, and a lot of leetcode-style interviewers don't get that nuance) If anything, my two cents is that leetcode ain't going anywhere, so the next best thing we should be focusing on is making it more widespread that memorization culture isn't and shouldn't be the evaluation criteria (this goes both for the interviewer and interviewee sides)
- mountainriver 5y ago
  Been on the hiring side a lot actually! I prefer to have conversations with people and hire primarily off OSS, it works really great
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > some ethnicities being culturally prone to "hiring down" to inflate subordinate count Sorry, what? Which ethnicities are these?
  - 5y ago
romanhn 5y ago
I agree with your overall message, however there's a subtle implication that some malevolent entity is putting up this awful process. In many companies, it is the engineers themselves that are creating these roadblocks. Most of them with good intentions even. I do wish that internal dissent was higher, but it's more common for new hires to be dragged along by inertia, especially since being hired often feels validating and equated with a fair process.
skeeter2020 5y ago
I got one of these as the second step for a senior engineering manager position. I had the luxury of telling them there was an obvious disconnect in terms of what we felt was valuable and required to be a good leader, and cancelled the process. No response from them until 3 months later I got an email saying they were moving forward with a different candidate and asking me to rate their interview process! This is the redacted exchange: Hi [PeopleOps], I started the assessment and was very disappointed to the point where I didn't complete it. I've been an Engineering Manager for about three years and still have a lot to learn, but I've never encountered anything that looks like a set of brain teaser puzzles & psychometric analysis similar to this test. I have to interpret this a huge mismatch between how [Company Name] defines the best skills and aptitudes for the role and my own, so I'm going to withdraw from the process. I can't imagine a lot of candidates are prepared to jump through these sort of hoops but that's just my single perspective. MONTHS LATER Thanks for the time earlier this week. I wanted to give you a heads up as to where we are at in our Sr. Engineering Manager hiring. We had an Engineering manager join us earlier this week and as of right now, we're ok on the hiring front. I'd love it if you could provide us some feedback on the process as we're always looking to improve. Here's a link to a very brief survey that would really help us out. Thanks!
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  One of the things I've come to enjoy about becoming a more senior engineer is how the interview flow has changed over time. Now that I've interviewed lots of people myself, I understand the person on the other side of the desk a lot better and I feel it's a far more balanced relationship. The issues that candidate employers are concerned about are (should be) more along higher level constructs such as ensuring quality or how to decide on a new technology or platform. What's a really interesting bug you found -- where really interesting probably means it was a system level issue, not just some bad code. The interview becomes a detailed discussion between peers who are each trying to understand if they want to work with the other. If someone started out with leetcode crap I'd probably react exactly as you did.
- geekbird 5y ago
  I've only done one of those nasty psychometric tests once. I didn't get a call back . This wasn't a surprise since they screen out non-neurotypical people with tests that are biased against dyslexia, colorblindnesss, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, ADHD, autism, and sequelae of brain trauma like short term memory faults.
DrNuke 5y ago
It’s a numbers game really depending on the role and the hierarchy level, though? I mean, we should know in advance what to expect by going into that process, and the cohort we are willing to join. It’s just a preliminary fit, at any level. If employers want prospective employees to bark and you enter that race, you bark.
geekbird 5y ago
This. I've slung code in (now) 16 different languages from macros, to scripting to compiled over the last mumbleseveraldecadesmumble. But they throw btree sort hackerrank puzzles at me when I've been a working sysadmin for over 20 years, and never had algorithm courses for a BS degree? How about no. If I have to sort stuff, I use a built in function, and let the CS hardcore software engineers do the puzzle games. I'm a script hack and sysadmin/SRE, not a software puzzle guru. I look up the syntax I need for the language I'm writing today. I may end up programming a different language next week, month or year. It's not worth the trouble memorizing the triviata of every language I ever used. There are only so many ways to cast variables and write loops. Everything else is nomenclature and punctuation. Ask me to address a system problem, don't give me a BS puzzle.
- crearo 5y ago
  FWIW, every data structure / algo interview I've done allowed me to use built in functions for sorting (I work at FAANG). In general, I dislike the interview process too, but there just isn't a better way to do these, as is clear from this large thread. If you look at it from the company's perspective, you have to conduct interviews at scale, and it can't hand off the same system problem to everyone. You're being tested on your problem solving ability. It doesn't correlate directly to your job, but the general assumption is, if you can solve puzzles after studying for them, the chance that you can solve any random problem thrown at you is high.
somenewaccount1 5y ago
Or you dodged a bullet as they probably also fill their day with useless crap that adds zero business value,but checks all the boxes. You might have ended up equally annoyed at your co-workers and management.
crate_barre 5y ago
You can’t really fight the system. We have to realize that those that got into these positions used that opportunity to put these gates in place. The only way to change the system is to get into the system and then break the cycle and advocate for alternatives. But the enemy has the high ground at the moment.

nerdponx 5y ago

Not getting the job at a company that hands out irrelevant discriminatory interview tasks seems like a positive outcome to me!

Sholmesy 5y ago

> It would have been fun, and productive How do you know this? The signal of them dumping you with some leetcode should be an indication that it wasn't meant to be?

halfdan 5y ago
Not necessarily. It just means that they weren't good at recruiting, they could still have a great team to work with.
- xchaotic 5y ago
  How do you recruit a great team if they’re bad at recruiting?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    If they put together most of the team another way, then it would be fine. My prior company would have interns do leetcode and system design. Intermediates and up had some paired code writing and a far less formal system design discussion. Most of the team might have been hired through a network and you only get leetcoded as an external unknown.
  - ssully 5y ago
    Where I work our team gets to review applications (pre-filtered) for candidates we are interested in. Those candidates are then given a general technical exercise. We get to review the results and ask follow up questions, but we basically get zero input into what kinds of questions are asked. I could 100% see a scenario where the people who manage the recruitment process replace that general exercise with some third-party online solution like hacker rank or whatever.
- samstave 5y ago
  This. I interviewed with a company that I really wanted to work with, was overqualified for the job, and would have thrived in it... The HR person was a complete dolt though, and didnt even understand how to interview me properly... Sucks - I still respect the company, but their recruiting method was piss-poor..
- wongarsu 5y ago
  It does tell you that the people working there practiced leetcode and puzzles in their free time (assuming they went through the same filter)
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Hilariously not in many cases. One of my old jobs introduced leetcode, particularly trees for interviewing. Nobody currently there could solve those. But a new engineer was assigned to handle interviewing and it was all about a couple of leetcode problems he found on the internet.
reacharavindh 5y ago
Parent commenter. The job description was top notch. It was a clear description of what they needed this engineering role to do. Inspire of it being a bit of a niche, I had almost perfect set of experiences from my prior jobs that made it very interesting. Fun because it would have given me an opportunity to _improve_ upon my already bootstrapped skills. Productive because, I already have a head start than another engineer getting into the groove of things. This is HN, I can be tech specific :-) I have worked a lot on performance from HPC perspective. The job was at a High Frequency Trading platform that needed a sys.engineer who would work on extracting performance with things like pinning a CPU core to a process and several optimisations at the OS and kernel that would shave off a few milliseconds in an already fast application.

nefitty 5y ago

It's even worse when you crush every other part of the process, including take homes, and then get blown out due to one idiotic contrived puzzle.

mountainriver 5y ago

Yeah this is the super unfortunate state of engineering today. I literally cannot bring myself to study puzzles when I could spend my time pursuing some interesting open source work. Consequently, I have a lot of successful open source work, but most companies still don’t care and fail me for lack of fake puzzle quiz skills. It’s utterly baffling to me that companies don’t want creative employees that build successful products out in front of everyone. Where you have a clear view of all their interactions and code. I’ve tried to change this thinking at my current company and the consensus was it would be biased. Biased?! Code quizzes are highly biased! I’m producing useful functionality to the world! I believe this and transparency are the new remote work. Some companies will get it early and for others it will take a major upheaval to get them to a place of reasonableness.

politician 5y ago
How many people are in your company?
javajosh 5y ago
I actually enjoy those puzzles, but agree that they are irrelevant to the work. In fact, the very few times they are relevant is something of a special occasion! "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm!" Most of the job is, of course, figuring out why things went wrong, based on imperfect evidence, which requires a good mental model of the entire system plus the ability to make changes to test and eliminate hypotheses. Very few, if any, technical interviews capture the essence of this act.
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Even more rare "Hey look, I have to design a slightly novel algorithm in 30 minutes while babbling the whole time!"
beepbooptheory 5y ago
For someone who can't even get an interview, but loves working on oss, this is highly discouraging... I already have to be so focused with what little time I have in my life, and sacrifice a lot, to just make the things I want to make, I just can't imagine finding all the time to do this meta work/training. Every day I grow more comfortable with the idea that my love of software dev and oss will forever be avocational. Perhaps though, financial instability aside, I'll be happier this way anyway

dqpb 5y ago

Keep in mind that even if the job would have been perfect for you, the company probably interviewed multiple people, and selected one that they thought would be more perfect for them. I recently did a round of hiring for my team, and we had several excellent candidates, but could only hire one, so we made a choice. It’s always sad (for me) because I tend to see the potential in almost everybody, and wish we could hire all the people.

xchaotic 5y ago
Where on the planet are you and can you send the dropouts my way? This feels like alternative reality - we have jobs available but no takers.
- ikiris 5y ago
  pay more

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The job I'm at currently, gave me a practical task(similar to the ones I would be doing on the job) and a few days to submit the results/notes of. Take-homes get a lot of criticism on HN, but in my experience they're superior for all the reasons you mentioned. I don't actually see pushback against take-home problems in the real world, mostly just online. When given the choice, most people would prefer a practical take-home over a whiteboard style interview.

decafninja 5y ago
The two biggest problems with takehomes: 1. They do not scale horizontally. You do a takehome and get rejected, then your effort has become worthless when applying to other companies. Versus grinding leetcode - it scales across a huge breadth of many different companies. 2. Often times a takehome is not. instead of an leetcode interview. It's in addition to the leetcode interview. So you end up needing to practice leetcode anyways. Now you just have more work to do - work that doesn't horizontally scale.
MattGaiser 5y ago
HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek. I soured heavily on take homes during an active job search phase as I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people. I had a pile of companies, would accept any of them on the surface, and it was just a matter of grabbing one. Many interview at a much less aggressive pace than that and I would prefer a take home when I am out of leetcode practice.
- emptybottle 5y ago
  > HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them source?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > HN people seem to line up 20 interviews and spend a week doing them. Having mentored a lot of college grads and also interviewed a lot of candidates, it's actually extremely rare for people to line up a huge number of interviews in a single week. It can be done if you really, really treat it as a numbers game, but it's not how most people do it. > Take homes are untenable in that situation as half the interviews would still be a full workweek Take homes shouldn't be taking a full workweek. If anything, take-homes make it easier to stack a lot of interviews because you can do them at your leisure in your own time. > I was already interviewing 4 hours a day with 3-6 people I think this is the disconnect: You're taking time off of work for live interviews, but take-homes come out of "extra" time. If you're interviewing full time, a take-home is still more flexible than a live interview.

dmkirwan 5y ago

There is evidence that traditional software engineering interviews[1] assess a candidate's ability to perform under pressure better than their ability to do the job. I find it crazy that you need to spend weeks studying leetcode-style problems after doing the job all day in order to prepare for an interview. Coincidentally, I've started working on a product to help this[2]. The general idea is that tasks like pull-requests, bug fixes and realistic take home projects are a better way to test candidates. Everything is done using Github, the tasks are all realistic and candidates can use their own laptop and development environment. It's not fully ready yet, but if anybody wants to chat about it just use the info@ address for the site. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.h... [2] https://devscreen.io/ https://devscreen.io/

mountainriver 5y ago
This is cool!
javajosh 5y ago
If you can capture the candidates ability to setup a BTD (build-test-debug) loop, their ability to find and fix bugs, and that they know enough tooling to get it into production (and troubleshoot deployment), then you have successfully checked 80% of the job requirements for...almost every programming job out there.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  I'm lost on the "tooling to get it to deployment" test idea. Deployment seems both company (and industry) specific and trivially easy to learn compared to programming skills.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Great! Today you learned something new: sometimes software deployment is complicated! Get more experience, and you'll find less trivial deployments. "Trivial deployment" is the goal of many systems, and is rarely met.

lhorie 5y ago

Having been on both sides of interviewing, I find that the majority of complaints about the status quo seems to come from people that haven't been involved in the interviewer side that much and consequently simply put forward their personal preference (e.g. some people downthread saying they prefer take home, and then subsequently being countered that take homes aren't ideal for various types of candidates) No offense to anyone, but it strikes me a little bit as armchair expert hot takes saying "why not just X". Personally I think that rather than complaining about leetcode-style loops, it'd be more productive to think in terms of what the problem domain is: namely, many of these companies are typically large and want some level of standardization in the hiring process: you have to contend with things like some ethnicities being culturally prone to "hiring down" to inflate subordinate count, talk-the-talk-but-dont-walk-the-walk types, thinly disguised sexism/ageism/other biases that are excused under the "cultural fit" umbrella, mismatch in terms of desire to provide technical interviewing skills vs volume of candidates, etc. It's easy to attack any one methodology simply because if such a thing as a silver bullet existed, we'd all already be using it. All interview methodologies are flawed, and for better or worse, leetcode-style happens to predominate interview loops because it has a semblance of standardization (though ironically, IMHO a good interviewer ought to be looking between the lines more than seeking specific answers, and a lot of leetcode-style interviewers don't get that nuance) If anything, my two cents is that leetcode ain't going anywhere, so the next best thing we should be focusing on is making it more widespread that memorization culture isn't and shouldn't be the evaluation criteria (this goes both for the interviewer and interviewee sides)

mountainriver 5y ago
Been on the hiring side a lot actually! I prefer to have conversations with people and hire primarily off OSS, it works really great
marcellus23 5y ago
> some ethnicities being culturally prone to "hiring down" to inflate subordinate count Sorry, what? Which ethnicities are these?
- 5y ago

romanhn 5y ago

I agree with your overall message, however there's a subtle implication that some malevolent entity is putting up this awful process. In many companies, it is the engineers themselves that are creating these roadblocks. Most of them with good intentions even. I do wish that internal dissent was higher, but it's more common for new hires to be dragged along by inertia, especially since being hired often feels validating and equated with a fair process.

skeeter2020 5y ago

I got one of these as the second step for a senior engineering manager position. I had the luxury of telling them there was an obvious disconnect in terms of what we felt was valuable and required to be a good leader, and cancelled the process. No response from them until 3 months later I got an email saying they were moving forward with a different candidate and asking me to rate their interview process! This is the redacted exchange: Hi [PeopleOps], I started the assessment and was very disappointed to the point where I didn't complete it. I've been an Engineering Manager for about three years and still have a lot to learn, but I've never encountered anything that looks like a set of brain teaser puzzles & psychometric analysis similar to this test. I have to interpret this a huge mismatch between how [Company Name] defines the best skills and aptitudes for the role and my own, so I'm going to withdraw from the process. I can't imagine a lot of candidates are prepared to jump through these sort of hoops but that's just my single perspective. MONTHS LATER Thanks for the time earlier this week. I wanted to give you a heads up as to where we are at in our Sr. Engineering Manager hiring. We had an Engineering manager join us earlier this week and as of right now, we're ok on the hiring front. I'd love it if you could provide us some feedback on the process as we're always looking to improve. Here's a link to a very brief survey that would really help us out. Thanks!

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
One of the things I've come to enjoy about becoming a more senior engineer is how the interview flow has changed over time. Now that I've interviewed lots of people myself, I understand the person on the other side of the desk a lot better and I feel it's a far more balanced relationship. The issues that candidate employers are concerned about are (should be) more along higher level constructs such as ensuring quality or how to decide on a new technology or platform. What's a really interesting bug you found -- where really interesting probably means it was a system level issue, not just some bad code. The interview becomes a detailed discussion between peers who are each trying to understand if they want to work with the other. If someone started out with leetcode crap I'd probably react exactly as you did.
geekbird 5y ago
I've only done one of those nasty psychometric tests once. I didn't get a call back . This wasn't a surprise since they screen out non-neurotypical people with tests that are biased against dyslexia, colorblindnesss, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, ADHD, autism, and sequelae of brain trauma like short term memory faults.

DrNuke 5y ago

It’s a numbers game really depending on the role and the hierarchy level, though? I mean, we should know in advance what to expect by going into that process, and the cohort we are willing to join. It’s just a preliminary fit, at any level. If employers want prospective employees to bark and you enter that race, you bark.

geekbird 5y ago

This. I've slung code in (now) 16 different languages from macros, to scripting to compiled over the last mumbleseveraldecadesmumble. But they throw btree sort hackerrank puzzles at me when I've been a working sysadmin for over 20 years, and never had algorithm courses for a BS degree? How about no. If I have to sort stuff, I use a built in function, and let the CS hardcore software engineers do the puzzle games. I'm a script hack and sysadmin/SRE, not a software puzzle guru. I look up the syntax I need for the language I'm writing today. I may end up programming a different language next week, month or year. It's not worth the trouble memorizing the triviata of every language I ever used. There are only so many ways to cast variables and write loops. Everything else is nomenclature and punctuation. Ask me to address a system problem, don't give me a BS puzzle.

crearo 5y ago
FWIW, every data structure / algo interview I've done allowed me to use built in functions for sorting (I work at FAANG). In general, I dislike the interview process too, but there just isn't a better way to do these, as is clear from this large thread. If you look at it from the company's perspective, you have to conduct interviews at scale, and it can't hand off the same system problem to everyone. You're being tested on your problem solving ability. It doesn't correlate directly to your job, but the general assumption is, if you can solve puzzles after studying for them, the chance that you can solve any random problem thrown at you is high.

somenewaccount1 5y ago

Or you dodged a bullet as they probably also fill their day with useless crap that adds zero business value,but checks all the boxes. You might have ended up equally annoyed at your co-workers and management.

crate_barre 5y ago

You can’t really fight the system. We have to realize that those that got into these positions used that opportunity to put these gates in place. The only way to change the system is to get into the system and then break the cycle and advocate for alternatives. But the enemy has the high ground at the moment.