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> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if preparing a lot for interviews and getting my ego bruised a little means I get a good job so be it.

hartator 5y ago
Yes, it’s easy to forget we are in of the highest paying industry. But yeah interviews should skip some redtape and HR bs.
- asdff 5y ago
  Still, it's not like any other field of engineering has something equivalent to leetcode. You don't make someone with a civil engineering degree and a resume of bridge building go up to a whiteboard and work out an irrelevant physics problem like it's undergrad again. You don't have an M.D. talk you through a hypothetical surgery. Only in computer science is there this metagame that you have to dedicate unpaid time toward, yet is hardly ever relevant to the tasks outlined in the job description. I feel like it's been pushed onto recruiters by companies that specialize in creating this crap like most other Enterprise software sold to HR teams, and now there is this expectation that this is how you are supposed to do these interviews because it's been going on for years now. Snake oil salesmen and lemmings in HR brought this upon us, not technical leadership demanding competency.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    And other fields of engineering don’t pay nearly as well. I’d choose a much higher pay over a reasonable interview.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Civil Engineers and Doctors have professional boards that certify they meet a minimum level of competency.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    I've done an EE "leetcode" phone interview with a non-technical HR person asking scripted problems. Didn't get to a real interview, then they foolishly called me back a year later where I just told them not again. This is for a company in the hinterlands of Oregon where you're making a sacrifice to work for the only viable employer in the area.
    - Der_Einzige 5y ago
      Is this Intel? The people of Hillsboro would resent you referring to their Portland suburb as "the hinterlands of Oregon"
raverbashing 5y ago
Yes, if you know the job is good go for it, it's a minor hurdle Otherwise you might not just bother, because it's usually a reflection of what the company values and how it thinks
- friedman23 5y ago
  Funny enough, I was looking for jobs relatively recently and decided to apply to cruise but didn't bother because they wanted a cover letter.
selcuka 5y ago
I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.
- johnwheeler 5y ago
  Exactly. Nothing is more valuable than a coworker who can implement a half-ass hashtable with a linked list even though there are state-of-the-art implementations available in nearly every programming language. I’ve got a sickness, and the only prescription is more bloom filters, baby
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Depends on where you sit, I'd take a half assed hash table if it consumes 1/10th of memory and code space of a reference library implementation. Embedded space sadly suffers from a dearth of good implementations for different parameters than CPU cycles.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > people who studied a bit Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems if they were given two months full time one on one tuition and told they'd get $100,000 in cash at the end. That would probably hold true even if you restricted it to college graduates and definitely would for high school graduates. Most people are really, really bad at mathematical thinking. It's more than just a bit of study.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Lol, given this market, by the time they solved 40 they'd be ready to get a 50K hiring bonus and 300K a year job at the FAANG. You need to offer 500K or more to even motivate someone to solve 200 leetcodes.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    >Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems Most of the population are not programmers. For someone who already knows a PL or 2, the picture is very different: There are maybe 32-50 questions that get repeated in almost every "code puzzle"-style interview. Which ones these are is actively monitored and curated in several communities. A person intelligent enough to know a PL, can simply memorize these questions. "Learning for the test" is a standard, and successful, strategy to game predictable test environments. We see it in educational systems using standardized multiple choice tests, why would it be different in bad code interviews?
wildrhythms 5y ago
What a strangely adversarial comment. In my experience, I can gather more information about a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes talking 1 on 1 with them rather than hours of Leetcode busywork. Funneling candidates through an annoying, needlessly rigid, and blatantly time consuming process is not a good thing, and probably leads to perfectly qualified people being denied; a system that optimizes for 'signals' that should not exist in the first place.
- chillacy 5y ago
  To be fair the parent commenter's post doesn't claim that this process is even remotely efficient, only that it's reality and they find it easy to game. Also more meta-level commentary, I find the word "should" interesting, as in general I have found that comments on HN which contain this word reflect a level of frustration that X is X instead of Y, because "X should be Y". Someone else may come along and say "X should be Z", and all the meanwhile, X is X.
  - danaris 5y ago
    The problem comes when a majority of us agree that X is not fit for purpose as it is, but we still get people saying "X is X, why are we talking about Y and Z?"
- stadium 5y ago
  I don't see anything adversarial, it is just someone describing how they play the interview game. There's a whole leetcode culture on sites like teamblind.com. A lot of people are happy to play the game. Not my cup of tea either, but to each their own.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Even if you're correct about your ability to sniff out talent you don't scale, and you can't be implemented by someone with eight hours of training, or replaced by automated testing, or a pencil and paper test. Legible processes that are known to work to within some tolerance are great for large organisations. If you can tell if someone's good within fifteen minutes of talking to them you should be able to get rich by setting up a software consulting company or startup with other people's false negative rejects. That's equivalent to being able to take mine tailings and spit out gold.
andreskytt 5y ago
In my experience, a broken HR indicates a broken organization. Yes, you can hunker down and focus on your field and move on in a while but I can’t, usually. As to shitty interviews. I was approached by Google for a non-programmer role a few years back. Failed the coding part as I’ve not been a professional programmer for a 20 years, despite being able to write all the code that I need for my research. Was told they’d be in touch for a development program as I’d apparently aced the rest of the interview. Never heard anything. Was approached again after a while and I agreed under the condition that there was no coding interview - I knew I had failed that and was going to fail again. Was assured there’d be no coding interview. Only to have one scheduled immediately. So an organization that manages what’s probably the largest information system on the planet cannot for the love of their life implement a simple sales lead process? Why? Because they fundamentally do not care about you.

hartator 5y ago

Yes, it’s easy to forget we are in of the highest paying industry. But yeah interviews should skip some redtape and HR bs.

asdff 5y ago
Still, it's not like any other field of engineering has something equivalent to leetcode. You don't make someone with a civil engineering degree and a resume of bridge building go up to a whiteboard and work out an irrelevant physics problem like it's undergrad again. You don't have an M.D. talk you through a hypothetical surgery. Only in computer science is there this metagame that you have to dedicate unpaid time toward, yet is hardly ever relevant to the tasks outlined in the job description. I feel like it's been pushed onto recruiters by companies that specialize in creating this crap like most other Enterprise software sold to HR teams, and now there is this expectation that this is how you are supposed to do these interviews because it's been going on for years now. Snake oil salesmen and lemmings in HR brought this upon us, not technical leadership demanding competency.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  And other fields of engineering don’t pay nearly as well. I’d choose a much higher pay over a reasonable interview.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Civil Engineers and Doctors have professional boards that certify they meet a minimum level of competency.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  I've done an EE "leetcode" phone interview with a non-technical HR person asking scripted problems. Didn't get to a real interview, then they foolishly called me back a year later where I just told them not again. This is for a company in the hinterlands of Oregon where you're making a sacrifice to work for the only viable employer in the area.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Is this Intel? The people of Hillsboro would resent you referring to their Portland suburb as "the hinterlands of Oregon"

raverbashing 5y ago

Yes, if you know the job is good go for it, it's a minor hurdle Otherwise you might not just bother, because it's usually a reflection of what the company values and how it thinks

friedman23 5y ago
Funny enough, I was looking for jobs relatively recently and decided to apply to cruise but didn't bother because they wanted a cover letter.

selcuka 5y ago

I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.

johnwheeler 5y ago
Exactly. Nothing is more valuable than a coworker who can implement a half-ass hashtable with a linked list even though there are state-of-the-art implementations available in nearly every programming language. I’ve got a sickness, and the only prescription is more bloom filters, baby
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Depends on where you sit, I'd take a half assed hash table if it consumes 1/10th of memory and code space of a reference library implementation. Embedded space sadly suffers from a dearth of good implementations for different parameters than CPU cycles.
barry-cotter 5y ago
> people who studied a bit Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems if they were given two months full time one on one tuition and told they'd get $100,000 in cash at the end. That would probably hold true even if you restricted it to college graduates and definitely would for high school graduates. Most people are really, really bad at mathematical thinking. It's more than just a bit of study.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Lol, given this market, by the time they solved 40 they'd be ready to get a 50K hiring bonus and 300K a year job at the FAANG. You need to offer 500K or more to even motivate someone to solve 200 leetcodes.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  >Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems Most of the population are not programmers. For someone who already knows a PL or 2, the picture is very different: There are maybe 32-50 questions that get repeated in almost every "code puzzle"-style interview. Which ones these are is actively monitored and curated in several communities. A person intelligent enough to know a PL, can simply memorize these questions. "Learning for the test" is a standard, and successful, strategy to game predictable test environments. We see it in educational systems using standardized multiple choice tests, why would it be different in bad code interviews?

wildrhythms 5y ago

What a strangely adversarial comment. In my experience, I can gather more information about a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes talking 1 on 1 with them rather than hours of Leetcode busywork. Funneling candidates through an annoying, needlessly rigid, and blatantly time consuming process is not a good thing, and probably leads to perfectly qualified people being denied; a system that optimizes for 'signals' that should not exist in the first place.

chillacy 5y ago
To be fair the parent commenter's post doesn't claim that this process is even remotely efficient, only that it's reality and they find it easy to game. Also more meta-level commentary, I find the word "should" interesting, as in general I have found that comments on HN which contain this word reflect a level of frustration that X is X instead of Y, because "X should be Y". Someone else may come along and say "X should be Z", and all the meanwhile, X is X.
- danaris 5y ago
  The problem comes when a majority of us agree that X is not fit for purpose as it is, but we still get people saying "X is X, why are we talking about Y and Z?"
stadium 5y ago
I don't see anything adversarial, it is just someone describing how they play the interview game. There's a whole leetcode culture on sites like teamblind.com. A lot of people are happy to play the game. Not my cup of tea either, but to each their own.
barry-cotter 5y ago
Even if you're correct about your ability to sniff out talent you don't scale, and you can't be implemented by someone with eight hours of training, or replaced by automated testing, or a pencil and paper test. Legible processes that are known to work to within some tolerance are great for large organisations. If you can tell if someone's good within fifteen minutes of talking to them you should be able to get rich by setting up a software consulting company or startup with other people's false negative rejects. That's equivalent to being able to take mine tailings and spit out gold.

andreskytt 5y ago

In my experience, a broken HR indicates a broken organization. Yes, you can hunker down and focus on your field and move on in a while but I can’t, usually. As to shitty interviews. I was approached by Google for a non-programmer role a few years back. Failed the coding part as I’ve not been a professional programmer for a 20 years, despite being able to write all the code that I need for my research. Was told they’d be in touch for a development program as I’d apparently aced the rest of the interview. Never heard anything. Was approached again after a while and I agreed under the condition that there was no coding interview - I knew I had failed that and was going to fail again. Was assured there’d be no coding interview. Only to have one scheduled immediately. So an organization that manages what’s probably the largest information system on the planet cannot for the love of their life implement a simple sales lead process? Why? Because they fundamentally do not care about you.