53 ms·

Wasting time in tech interviews

• Hatrix 4y ago
  There are also job descriptions that do not state whether it is a remote job or where on the planet you are expected to work. City, state, country? Anything? You go to their website and also no address or clue of where the company is.
• quantified 4y ago
  TL;DR > There is no test for debugging SSL certificate chains in production at 3am
  • xg15 4y ago
    "The next part of your assessment will take place during your follow up phone interview at a randomly chosen time slot between 10pm and 5:30am this night. Please remember to hold yourself ready. Thank you for your time and have a pleasant rest of the day."
  • bpicolo 4y ago
    Heh, how about debugging another company's cert chains so you can inform their technical team to connect to them successfully...
• rootsudo 4y ago
  I also learned lately if they wish to record the interview, it most likely is for their benefit to prove their "interviewing" other candidates. I had an experience earlier this year with a famous/popular "equity firm" that when I refused and asked if they were recording beforehand, went on a tidbit about how they needed too/it's normal.
• kache_ 4y ago
  Just don't bother with amateur companies. Sometimes it means doing the FANG leetcode grind. Lesser of two evils IMO
• deleted 4y ago
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• CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
  Some kind of minimal helpful feedback upon request after an unsuccessful on-site is the big one for me. The hiring manager can share one sentence of filtered feedback with the recruiter, the recruiter can share that one sentence with the candidate over the phone. Five minutes per candidate all in. If you say "but legal liability" you have no courage.
  • spike021 4y ago
    I don't see why companies can't have some kind of waiver the candidate signs in order to get feedback. We already sign NDA's before most interviews to not provide the interview questions and stuff to people. Feels like something we should be able to trade for.
    • oarabbus_ 4y ago
      Best case scenario, they get some good word of mouth... which doesn't matter as FAANGs have more applicants than roles anyway. Worst case scenario they have an angry rejected candidate attempting to dispute the feedback. I doubt any large tech company would consider doing this.
      • troutwine 4y ago
        I've always had an interest in giving people feedback and have pushed for it at a few employers. What I've been told -- and I have no way to check this, considering I am not a lawyer -- is that giving post-interview feedback is legally fraught, contingent on the localities involved and would impose a review burden on the feedback which would, necessarily, be delayed by some weeks, carefully scrubbed and written. Dunno how accurate that is, but I've been told it at more than one shop.
        • CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
          In your next employer, if your recruiter is game, just do what I suggest upthread, don't bother asking permission.
• madrox 4y ago
  In my experience, interviewing for engineering teams is an afterthought that comes from how little interviewers are included in designing the interview process they have to use. When I approach each opening like a software project with a kickoff, buy-in from everyone working on the project, assignment of tasks, etc, you get more investment from the interviewers. You also get higher quality candidates making it past the recruiting stage, because the recruiters better understand what to look for. Without that, I think most engineers view interviewing as something that takes them away from their "real" job.
  • projectazorian 4y ago
    > Without that, I think most engineers view interviewing as something that takes them away from their "real" job. This. I don't want to view interviewing as a thankless chore because I think it's important, but hard to view it any other way when your interaction with any given new hire will be minimal at best - especially since the extra work of interviewing usually just ends up as a footnote come review time. If you want people to take interviewing seriously, give them some skin in the game.
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    I agree - for me the idea of shared pipelines is what kills a lot of the motivation - I don't who what the person will be working with, what on, I might have a passing familiarity with another interviewer (but most likely not) - it's difficult to treat people as anything else than a calendar appointment.
• tester756 4y ago
  >I’m exaggerating the amount of skill that I have. Everyone is. I use the right buzzwords on my CV. I inflate the scale of my achievements and the depth of my skillset. I even add tasks and responsibilities to historical jobs that fit your requirements. You’re never going to check, are you? I don't, I'm honest in my CV and during interviews I'm selling myself 'as-is' e.g despite using git for longer peroid of time, but mostly via GUI, then I'm not going to call myself proficient/experienced git user cuz I'd fail some above basics question
  • corrral 4y ago
    I don't exaggerate or list things I don't have significant experience with, but a relative who's in recruiting keeps telling me I'm doing it wrong. But I think they mostly do recruiting for big companies with bad automatic filters or people who don't understand the job doing the first weed-out pass on the résumé pile, so maybe that's why.
    • wikfwikf 4y ago
      The recruiter's interest and yours are not aligned. Recruiters would like everyone to list every skill on their resume. They have nothing to lose from you being interviewed for a position you're not suited for. And they get paid if you get hired into something that isn't right. Both these outcomes are less good, for you, than being interviewed less and only hired into jobs which are right for you.
      • leaflets2 4y ago
        Recruiters get paid per interview? Or directly when someone got hired? I thought it was more common that they'd get paid per person hired and still at the job 3 months later? But I'm a bit clueless
        • wikfwikf 4y ago
          no, they get paid when you are hired. but the more people they send to interview, the more likely they are to get a hire, whether a good one or an indifferent one.
• brakmic 4y ago
  Gatekeeping ceremony is strong with the IT.
• Apocryphon 4y ago
  The author is in DevOps, which seems like it should have its own interviews process distinct from general SWE. Seems like putting such folks through the Leetcode gauntlet would be a mismatch in expectations.
  • lcrmorin 4y ago
    Yup similar experience here. Field and experience should be taken into account when offering leetcode interview. Maybe langage should be added too. In python for exemple there are lot of standard library that implement and optimise the leet code stuff.
• rocgf 4y ago
  While I do understand where this view is coming from, I think it's also a major waste of time to complain about it. Let me put it this way - you are not entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. It's really that simple. It's a free market, and companies can select the way they recruit their people. You feel like it's a waste of time to learn Leetcode questions? Then don't do it. Case closed. I say this as someone who failed multiple algorithm questions because I did not invest enough time to be good at them.
  • Clubber 4y ago
    >you are not entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. It's really that simple. He's not talking about FAANG jobs. He's talking about Joe Blow companies that pays "market rates," and "great benefits!" to code really boring stuff with no highlights on the resume. He said these companies are too lazy to research any references and are just copy/pasta leetcode tests to their interviewees; tests the hiring people probably can't even validate as correct without an answer key.
  • ziddoap 4y ago
    >I think it's also a major waste of time to complain about it. Why's that? People are obviously taking time out of their day to read the complaint, and a non-zero amount of those people may be in a position to enact some small changes. >Let me put it this way - you are not entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. Not once reading this entire thing did I feel like the author felt entitled to a high-earning FAANG job. They actually make it pretty explicitly clear that they are talking about non-FAANG companies employing FAANG-style (or, what those non-FAANG companies think is FAANG-style) interviews. And it's still pretty clear, to me at least, that the author doesn't feel entitled to those jobs either. >You feel like it's a waste of time to learn Leetcode questions? Then don't do it. Case closed. That's... That's what they did. And they wrote about it.
  • paulcole 4y ago
    Kind of an extension of this is that Facebook isn't looking for qualified developers. They're looking for qualified developers who will bend over backward to make a pile of money. And many non-Facebook employers are looking for qualified developers who will bend over backward to make a much smaller pile of money. They might be making a bad decision, but it's their bad decision to make.
• lordnacho 4y ago
  What I don't get is when they ghost you, but with positive feedback! I was talking to a guy not long ago, everything was a fit, I'd done exactly what they wanted in my previous job, had team management experience, and so on. The HM/founder says I sound great and we should talk again. So he goes on holiday. Then his HR lady goes on holiday. They get back, apologize for the delay, and want to proceed. Nothing happens. No response... He's probably right about homework too. I can't tell if they are actually testing for you already having a solution on the shelf that you can slightly modify for them. Regardless, if someone did a homework assignment for me, I would make sure they got feedback. If it wasn't good enough I would think really hard about what I said about the conditions (don't spend too much time, it's ok if it isn't perfect) before dumping them. At best it is just a kind of fizzbuzz: if they can stand up a k8s thing in a few hours, they are likely not making this up or even copy pasting it. End of the day software has some odd ideas about what evidence is. Just about every other profession is just a CV, some chat, a light grilling, then a response. If the person is making it up they'll get found out and dumped out soon enough. Software somehow manages to do both: several interviewers have told me they dumped out a guy after a brief stint, then tried the whole Leetcode/homework/tech chat thing.
  • geekbird 4y ago
    Here's the thing that irks me about things like "standing up k8s in a couple hours": It's something that only gets done a few times for an entire project - once or twice in dev and test, then again in prod. Not even a few times a year - a few times per project/code stack. The actual work will be "tweak this to have six side cars instead of five", or "set it to spin up a few more nodes", or maybe even "upgrade k8s from version X to version Y without downtime, test your solution on dev first". There has to be some way to test that. Instead they give you "Bring up a vpc, resources with terraform or cloud formation, spin up k8s, program a webapp that tells me my IP in a container, set up a build system to package it, configure Route 53, then make it all run." - all in three hours. I don't write scripts or even yaml from scratch that fast. I don't know anyone who does. Most people copy/paste old projects or stuff off of StackOverflow and then mangle it to try to do these silly things.
    • 4y ago
• mywittyname 4y ago
  > You’re never going to check, are you? I'm definitely going to ask probing questions about the tech. And the more familiar I am with it (and the more relevant it is to the job), the more detailed and discerning I will be. It works too. The outcome is usually either, the interviewee is rattled and straight up admits that they don't know as much as their resume claims; or, we get to have a pretty in depth conversation about what the interviewee has actually done The former is fine with me. I think most developers understand it's better to come clean early. When interviewing with me, that's the right call, because if I think you don't know you're stuff, you'll fail, but if you admit that you aren't so familiar with $technology, then I'll shift my questions to something else. The latter is ideal though, since it segues well into the actual job requirements, and the interviewee gets real insight into what they are walking into. The person who wrote this article is a-typical. I've interviewed people with github accounts, but most of the time they are full of college course work or cloned open source repos, so they aren't really worth investigating too deeply. But someone with an active open source project on github and a popular blog seems like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with anyone like that.
  • alephxyz 4y ago
    This is why I wish cover letters were more popular. Having a candidate tell you they don't have much experience using X to do Y but that they'd love to learn to / have been working on it on their spare time is better than having them lie on their resume (or miss out on candidates that are too honest for their own good).
    • actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Contra this, cover letters aren't popular (at least for SWE hiring) in my experience, because nobody reads them.
      • nly 4y ago
        Honestly you're lucky if anyone reads your CV. Standard practice for the technical interviews, i.e. where someone on a team somewhere is taking time away from real work to interview you, is for them to maybe spend 90 seconds, just 5 minutes before the start of the interview, to give it a skim
• zpthree 4y ago
  hot take: OP is confusing memorizing "how to debug SSL certificates" with problem solving skills
  • draw_down 4y ago
• isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  To be honest I looked at github - there's barely any activity, projects have little if any descriptions, the professional experience has been 12 years of mix of project management and customer support, some 2 years of freelance and contract devops work. Medium posts are mostly crypto related. Now compare that with LinkedIn about section, and there's an entirely different picture. It could be that the reason you are getting the interviews is the Linkedin profile (especially as often companies encourage interviewing people with atypical background), but maybe you fall short of the image you are projecting? The form of the interviews might not help highlight your skills, of course, but it's probably not the only factor.
  • cosmiccatnap 4y ago
    The point was that the GitHub should not be used which he said up front -_-
• srvmshr 4y ago
  I think an ever bigger evil is companies who do not calibrate their Leetcode type tests to their hiring needs. I was given a take-home test few years ago by a well-to do medical software company based out of Verona, WI. Their programming test had a question from past ICPC. Typically Olympiad questions takes well-to-do teamwork & few hours of brainstorming - not a 30min timed test you give with a proctor watching your monitor
  • drstewart 4y ago
    Epic doesn't expect that you will finish every question on the exam. That's actually the point of giving harder questions: the ability to calibrate against the entire candidate pool. If the test is so easy everyone aces it, how is that calibration going to go?
    • srvmshr 4y ago
      In a 50 min test with 10 min MCQs and two timed questions, where one question is a ICPC derivative question & the other one is refactor a pseudocode similar to MUMPS language, what CS talent is it exactly testing? I don't mind writing MUMPS if I was hired, but the test is not my ability of understanding MUMPS-styled syntax or predicting the win percentage in some chess layouts without using MCTS.
  • lapcat 4y ago
    > a well-to do medical software company based out of Verona, WI You might as well just say Epic Systems LOL
• kitanata 4y ago
  I recently went through an interview process where to advance to the technical interview I would have to learn Go. I know a ton of languages. Haven’t done much with Go. Could I learn it? Sure, I could. But… I am not going to learn a new language where I am comfortable enough to do an interview just so that I have a chance to work for your pre-A round company. I am especially not going to do it when I have 2 job offers sitting on the table that I am currently considering. If you’re a startup founder recruiting other devs, don’t ask them to learn a whole new language on spec so they can interview with you. I’m sorry. You’re just not as hot as you think you are.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• oarabbus_ 4y ago
  >given me a take-home coding assignment of at least 30hrs of work It's absolutely astounding to me that people must entertain these at a sufficient rate that companies still try to pull this free labor nonsense. One company I interviewed with provided a take-home assignment and said to bill them for the hours; I found that to be a fair offer, although due to other circumstances limiting my available time, I declined to continue the interview at that point. If the take-home assignment is expected to take a few hours, maybe it's worth considering. Any longer, and they can look elsewhere for free labor. That time is much better spent sending out more applications, networking, leetcoding for FANG interviews, working on personal projects, or simply taking a walk outside.
  • systematical 4y ago
    I'd by happy with even $20 an hour, shit even $10 for doing their stupid take home assignment would make me less angry. At least they are buying me a couple of beers.
  • actually_a_dog 4y ago
    I agree with you in principle, but I don't think characterizing most of these types of assignments as "free labor" is quite accurate. What I suspect is going on is that companies simply aren't taking the time to calibrate the effort required to complete their take home projects. I've had many "two hour" projects end up being more like 6-8 hours to properly complete (I tended to just stop at 3-4 hours and opt out of the rest of the process on this type of thing). Calling it "free labor" implies to me that the company is going to get some kind of actual value out of it in the end, other than as a candidate assessment. Most of these types of things I've seen simply haven't been the type of project that would be useful in that sense. OTOH, the big mistake I see a lot of companies doing is doing a 2+ hour take home assignment, then not making the tech portion of the actual interview process just a discussion of the take home project. If I'm going to commit that amount of my own personal time to your interview process, I want to know that it's going to get me out of at least as much "whiteboard hazing" in the end. In my experience, this frequently has not been the case.
• tristor 4y ago
  >I’m exaggerating the amount of skill that I have. Everyone is. I use the right buzzwords on my CV. I inflate the scale of my achievements and the depth of my skillset. I even add tasks and responsibilities to historical jobs that fit your requirements. You’re never going to check, are you? I don't think everyone does this. I certainly have never done this. I've never had an issue getting interviews using an honest accounting of my work experience, and I know as an interviewer I use the candidate's resume as the basis for forming my questions to ask them. I would expect others to do the same. Filling your resume with things you didn't actually do just makes the interview harder.
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• qaid 4y ago
  I too once scoffed at grinding leetcode. I’d rather work on side projects or blog instead. But after 5 years of failing to get a job offer, I finally caved. Putting in the effort to deeply understand DS/algos and grind away leetcode led me to getting offers I liked and IMO has made me a better engineer. I now have a “gold star” on my resume and am confident I can still answer most leetcode questions. I consider that time spent as a great time investment, since landing my next job will be much easier. Money wasn’t my original goal when I got into CS, but it eventually became my driving force. I regret taking so long to notice this, and letting my feelings get in my way (of how it “should be”) / resisting leetcode for so long.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > Money wasn’t my original goal when I got into CS, but it eventually became my driving force. Same, once I realized that the reasons I originally loved programming were never going to present in a my career. Though currently I'm more tempted to eat the loss, shed the golden handcuffs and go do something else.
    • nly 4y ago
      Achieve financial independence first. You never know what life will throw at you
• sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
  > If you want better candidates filling roles, you must stop being lazy and relying on Leetcode or lazy CV parsing. Check the candidate’s portfolio. Pose realistic questions. Lets be honest. What you want is easier questions. Vague questions that can be discussed and argued one way or the other.
• LeffeBrune 4y ago
  It is not a waste of hiring team time if we avoid hiring a candidate that doesn't meet our standards. We try very hard to find good candidates, but it doesn't mean we will stop interviewing if the candidate pool runs dry. We'll just have to spend more time looking for quality applicants.
• captainredbeard 4y ago
• hondo77 4y ago
  Back in the nineties, I worked for a big company where lots of people wanted to work. We had what I called "resume reading parties". A half-dozen of us, managers and ICs, would sit around a pile of resumes in the middle and start reading. When we finished each one we would check either "Y" or "N" and pass the resume to our left...except two noes and the resume was put in the reject pile. Sometimes they fed us. From there would be phone screening then on-site interviews. HR didn't like being cut out of the loop but we knew we were better at screening than they were. A benefit of this process is that your resume-writing skills improve a lot. Read a hundred or so resumes and you'll learn what catches your eye and what gets ignored. Alas, nobody else does this. I used to mention this process at places I worked but people thought I was nuts. It worked, though. We rarely had a hire that didn't work out.
  • darcwader 4y ago
    can you post some examples of these. would love to hear what makes a resume stand out and is actually leading to a good hire.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • warcher 4y ago
    The HR recruiter involvement in the hiring process is madness to me. I get that managing somebody through the pipeline is work, and probably a dev isn’t the right person for that job. But having HR out there rejecting resumes is insanity.
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  • paxys 4y ago
    > Alas, nobody else does this. I'm confused by this statement. Every company I have worked at for the last 15 years has had hiring managers and usually some senior engineers on the team screen resumes. How else do you even decide who to move to the phone or in-person interview stage?
• coding123 4y ago
  I feel like 95% of people are friends or family anyway. 5% are hired off the street.
• darth_avocado 4y ago
  I have more than a decade of experience in SWE and a resume that boasts big tech names. If you hired me based on my GitHub, I would not have a job. Truth be told, I haven’t used public git since undergrad (for assignments). I don’t do extra curricular projects. Mostly because I don’t have the time to. I’ve never had it, except maybe the first year of my professional experience. All the free time I have if any, goes towards other projects that I do at work. And honestly, I am okay with that. Building a portfolio takes a lot of time, and it becomes irrelevant real fast. It is also, a waste of time.
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  The thing I hate the most is that 80% of the time you will be kicked out of the interview process before you even talk to the person you will be working with. Your GitHub doesn't matter Your resume to a degree doesn't matter If you can answer the questions and solve the problems that matters ...but what matters most is if you have a good attitude and can do the job you are being hired for and it's pretty rare someone hires you based on gasp the job they expect you to do. Show me someone who can write merge sort from scratch and I'll show you an unemployed programmer.
• edfletcher_t137 4y ago
  > Despite a long and storied career in software development, I have few abstract problem-solving skills. I proceed through problems in increments, getting slightly better each time. The beneficial thing for you that my experience brings is that I can do it really fast. Fast enough to deliver a working piece of software in a timeframe that won’t bankrupt you. > Never in my entire career have I whiteboarded a solution that even remotely survived contact with software frameworks, APIs and hardware constraints. A hundred different gotchas and restrictions lay in wait. The only way through them to a resilient solution is one step at a time. So, I can’t show you anything meaningful with Leetcode challenges unless I practice them as a discrete skill. This, 1000x. This whole piece nails it, but this really jumped out. I succeed and excel because I actually get things done, rather than "mostly done". No interview methodology ever can hope to screen for this. Or any of the other things mentioned above. The process is getting worse, not better, and this piece rightly points out why.
  • omegalulw 4y ago
    You are assuming that the same person can't do both.
    • onion2k 4y ago
      If the skill you're hiring for is to iteratively solve a real world problem, then it doesn't matter if someone can do both. You need to find someone who can iteratively solve real world problems. People might have both, but some people only have one, and not the one you're hiring for. If they can ace Leetcode problems, or unicycle, or speak Klingon, that's lovely but irrelevant, and absolutely pointless to test for in an interview as a proxy for solving real world problems.
    • weq 4y ago
      then you can work at a FAANG company and get payed handsomely to lock up all that talent selling people things they dont need through ads!!!! Some people see NASA and think of all the smart people who worked there and what they did. me, i see talent wasted on war and i imagine all the great things that these people could of done if they applied their talents to something meaningful.
• promhize 4y ago
  Interviewing in tech is a mess especially with the self-aggrandizing questions. Besides the questions, you get interviewed by recruiters. The recruiter, very likely a person that has never done anything technical, been in a technical team, delivered products/features under tight timelines... Companies do not want their engineers and product people spending time interviewing prospects, so they throw recruiters at the problem and end up frustrating and wasting the time of other engineers. Like, it's your problem, not ours. If a recruiter reaches out and I'm interested, I ask to talk to someone technical.
  • doytch 4y ago
    > If a recruiter reaches out and I'm interested, I ask to talk to someone technical. How do you phrase this? What are some successes and failures you've encountered with this approach?
  • dvtrn 4y ago
    I recently had a first round interview with a hiring manager, not a recruiter. It served as the screening call and hiring manager call. I was a bit surprised, as I’ve long said how much I want to talk to the HM as early as absolutely possible. Of course then I learned said HM had only been at the org for two months and the entire Infra team was ostensibly just the hiring manager on the other side of the zoom call and I was suddenly a great deal less enthused and interested in the role.
    • kolanos 4y ago
      > Of course then I learned said HM had only been at the org for two months and the entire Infra team was ostensibly just the hiring manager on the other side of the zoom call and I was suddenly a great deal less enthused and interested in the role. Why?
      • dvtrn 4y ago
        Rant incoming, you asked for it ;) Having been in organizations where the Devops/Infra org was brand new, it's not something I'm remotely eager to be a part of again. Some people have the tolerance to be the 'founding' Devops/SRE talent, who help the company go through that "transformation" from the ground up, implement the IR process, create the standards, win the hearts and change the minds, and thrive when the Devops tradecraft and practice is very new to the parent organization. I'm not one of those people. Some people would balk and say "shouldn't this be done by a CTO?" and my honest answer would be "I don't know anymore", because I really don't. I keep hearing Devops needs buy in from the top. And I used to think so too. Then I found myself eight years into this field and seeing the rhetoric was CONSISTENTLY failing to match the reality of whatever the hell we're "supposed" to be doing in Devops, because it can mean whatever the org needs it to mean. And I'm just cynical enough to think, nowadays, that companies know this. They know they can just slap the Devops job title or SRE job title on any assortment of tasks that do not improve developer experiences, minimize toil, improve quality or provide visibility to applications, services and infrastructure and get droves of candidates. So many Devops/SRE job descriptions lately point out the painful truth that so many companies are cargo culting their way through operations; they don't know what they actually need, they don't know who they need to be hiring, and as a result you end up with companies hiring "Devops enginees" to do any kind of technology work that isn't writing app features or building a product thing. I've gotten around this by having a litany of very specific questions I ask in interviews (which have been commented on "wow you ask some VERY tough questions". Yes. I know. That's intentional), and a pencil cup full of little yellow, orange and red flags that I look for when deciding if I want to continue interviewing at an organization or not. "Our devops team is brand new, I'm the manager, and I just started a month ago" is one such red flag. Doesn't mean it's a bad organization or they have bad people, just that it's a bad organization for me.
• Yhippa 4y ago
  It seems like companies do this because the stakes are so high to them. That is, if you hire this person and they fail, they will somehow do serious damage to the company. If you do this at a large enough scale, then you are putting the company in serious danger. How do you de-risk this? My take would be to focus on getting "good enough" candidates in and then if they don't work out, be able to fire them easily. It's tough to normalize that. It's legal in states that have at-will employment but it seems that there are still taboos to doing that.
  • beebmam 4y ago
    The problem with firing people isn't with how hard it is. It's with the effect firing has on morale and culture of those that remain. As a dev, the moment someone on my team is fired for performance is the moment I'm looking for a job elsewhere.
    • mbg721 4y ago
      It's like the minimum wage; nobody actually does it.
  • throw_away 4y ago
    Every US state is at-will. The only state that significantly varies from this is Montana, wherein employment is at-will for only the first six months of employment, which would cover your case here. https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/employment-at-will-laws-by-state/ https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/employment-a... I think the taboos are less around the law and more around trying to avoid a reputation that the company will can you a couple months after you've perhaps uprooted your life and moved to a whole new city. I wonder if the taboo will lessen in remote work contexts, where the employee is not so expected to uproot their lives for a job.
  • synicalx 4y ago
    Things like this are why I'm glad I live in a country with sensible employment laws. Firing people willy-nilly SHOULD be taboo, if you find yourself firing people all the time then you're the problem not the people you're firing. Make an effort to support and develop people rather than looking for mythical unicorn candidates.
• zwilliamson 4y ago
  Ive been trying to negotiate interview processes (I have 15+ years experience, staff/principal level). Been relatively successful getting adjustments at smaller startups (approximately 10-20 engineers). It seems anything larger I run into push back. Perhaps maybe the size of the company may be a key indicator? Maybe as a company scales you can’t be dependent on hiring managers knowing how to hire good people so you rely on filter mechanisms that are cheap and lazy.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > It seems anything larger I run into push back Only semi related, but I built a lot of things in my life from hacking, that could be computer systems, social systems or something else. But these day I find myself up against powerful entrenched bureaucracy. I'm convinced that some of these can't be beat (at least not by a single insignificant person).
• b-team 4y ago
  If you are as skilled as you say you are, getting through a few challenging questions in a technical interview should be a breeze. Also, don’t discount the feedback that your interviewers don’t like your personality. If you have heard that more than once, that may be the crux of your problem.
  • lcrmorin 4y ago
    It is what is weird to me. Those leetcode problems seems weirdly designed, some even seems counterproductive. I've juste been offered an interview about easy-medium level leetcode questions. I went to the site and ... the easy questions seems to be fundamental questions that no one deal with in real life. Medium are some common practical problems that were implemented and optimised in standard libraries a long time ago. Hard problems are actually fun to deal with and probably more revealing about myself. What am I supposed to do ? ask for difficult problems only ?
• systematical 4y ago
  I gotta agree here. I don't do leetcode challenges. There was one point in my life where I began studying them to pass these filters, but I rather be doing anything else than leetcode...so I stopped. I've never been unemployed so its easy for me to decline jobs when they present me with these challenges. If I were ever out of a job and struggling to get a job I am pretty sure that would change my tune. Until then I reject those companies. Now thats not to say I won't do coding assignments, but I weigh those pretty heavily. If the employer seems pretty amazing I'll do them, if they seem meh then I decline. On the flip side, I've had interviews where they asked me no technical questions and no coding challenges. That is an enormous red flag to me.
• posharma 4y ago
  Interviewing gets discussed a lot here. Very little actually gets improved. If you want a (1) high paying job (2) and want to work on products that scale to millions, there's just no way you can escape leetcode style interviews. I've 2 decades of experience and have resisted it for sometime, but eventually gave in. These companies have way too many candidates to filter, so unless you're one of those inventors of popular frameworks like Tensorflow/Pytorch, you've to go through the grind. And with the popularity of blogs/tutorials/coaching classes the bar is only increasing. 2 medium problems in 30 mins is not a joke unless you've solved the same problems before or solved hundreds to quickly decipher the patterns. All this really breaks the back of staff/sr. staff level folks who rather choose to stay where they are even if that means lesser pay.
  • as-j 4y ago
    I don't want agree but I do. I think there might be an alternate to leet code studying. I did Advent of Code (AoC) in 2019 to learn a new language. I then did some interviewing, and remember a few things on leet code problems "oh, this just like this AoC problem" and applying the same skill set. So maybe doing AoC and solving funny Elf and Sleigh problems could be more fun? Maybe not as efficient though. ;)
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • the_only_law 4y ago
      AOC is way more engaging than any leetcode problems I've ever done, but I wonder if that's because I could choose whatever language I want or a feel allows me to best express the solution.
      • posharma 4y ago
        Not sure what you're talking about; Leetcode also allows you to choose any language.
        • 4y ago
• kralos 4y ago
  As an employer, we are always trying to improve our technical interview. At this point in time we've found the best approach is to look at the ticket board and think "If I had a new developer, what could they work on?". Then come up with a single real world question and ask the candidate this during the interview. The question should allow for a junior or senior to give an answer where the depth of the answer would likely vary much like the feedback on a hypothetical peer review would. We try to avoid anything requiring too much business domain knowledge. You should be able to explain the scenario to someone off the street (non-developer). We then have a face to face (or screen share) discussion about the problem, any questions or scoping and the approach that could be taken like any real developer would if they were given this as a ticket. As an example: --- We have an existing job management system to track and update the progress of warranty repairs (e.g. whitegoods). Sometimes parts need to be ordered to complete a repair. If we wanted the job system to book and track parts orders into third-party warehouse management systems; how would you address the following? - Credential management - Data types and their life cycles - Sources of truth e.g. - Customers who have purchased whitegoods are the source of truth for new jobs - Our staff operate the job system and our clients (manufacturers) are the source of truth for parts - Tradespeople operate the job system and are the source of truth for new parts orders - Warehouse staff operate the WMS and are the source of truth for stock levels - Required/Optional API calls and their triggers - Fault tolerance and monitoring - Compensate for variations/shortfalls in existing WMS APIs (in some countries we use a 3PL) WMS: Warehouse Management Software 3PL: An external company who operates a warehouse and dispatches items on your behalf. These companies may do so for multiple tenants and have established staff, processes and WMS.
  • slt2021 4y ago
    I would outsource the development of this simplest CRUD system offshore for like $30/hr, using managed platform like Microsoft PowerApps Portal. This would be perfect and cheapest for enterprise, but answer like this wont get me software gig :) auth via ADFS/SAML/Kerberos, everything else is managed and provided by office365 ;)
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• eikenberry 4y ago
  > You won’t read my code because reading code takes 10x more time and effort than writing it. When I first read this I assumed sarcasm and moved on, but later it seemed odd as the tone of the article isn't very sarcastic overall. If this wasn't sarcastic then I disagree 1000%. Code should be much easier to read than write. The only code I've come across that I'd put as harder to read than write is a few cases of just terribly written code. They were the exceptions, not the standard.
  • eikenberry 4y ago
    Downvotes and no comments. Lets try again. If you are a junior developer you very well could write code that is harder to read than write. Being junior that is to be expected as you need to learn these skills. If you are past junior and your code is harder to read than write you need to rethink your profession as you are bad at what you do.
• lukaslalinsky 4y ago
  I'm in the software business for over 20 years. Currently working as an architect, but still do a lot of coding daily. I believe I have a pretty good grasp on computer science concepts. Know several programming languages very well. Keep myself up to date with the latest trends. I couldn't pass a technical interview. At some point in life I gave up. I realized the only way I can get a good job is via somebody in the company knowing me, ideally them reaching out to me to work for them. For the jobs, where I passed the technical interviews, I quit fairly quickly, as they were horrible jobs. So when doing interviews myself, I just chat with them about the project we have and things they mentioned on their CV. You can easily detect if they are honest in their CV and their level of competence without actually asking too many technical questions, just by having them talk about the stuff on their CV.
  • lumost 4y ago
    I'll give my 2 cents on why larger firms strongly emphasize these white boarding skills. In an organization of ~500+ highly paid and (hopefully) competent engineers - there is a very high premium on outward signs of technical competence. If a fresh college grad isn't quite sure that their "senior" is really "senior" - or worse a neighboring manager becomes displeased, then there is a problem. Similarly in very large code bases with heavy testing and performance requirements, iteration times can become slow... resulting in a stronger need for planning, design, debate etc. The white board technical interview effectively tests that you can communicate competently on an arbitrary coding/design topic. An inability to do this can be a death sentence in a large, interconnected engineering organization.
    • lukaslalinsky 4y ago
      Yep, that's the thing. I'm bad at on-the-spot communication. My mental process is too complicated and during the pauses when it's happening, I show all aspects of an incompetent person. If I have the time to think/prepare for a particular topic, you get a very difference experience. But yeah, for large companies, having a quick brain and being able to talk about anything pretty much immediately is a very useful skill.
    • 4y ago
• btheshoe 4y ago
  I really hate the discourse around tech interviews. Every blog post is exactly the same: that leetcode isn't an indicator of real skill, that the whole landscape is terrible, and everything is completely awful and no one knows how to hire anyone. We need good data based approaches to tech interviews to move the discourse forward; I really like triplebyte's talks and blog posts on how to hire, and what they mainly point out is that a good interview process provides a decent signal on how successful an employee will be.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  End of the day hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no one. So I’m willing to forgive companies for how much scrutiny they have. Sure some it’s kinda performative, but I’ve been on teams where HR was just letting anyone in and it screwed a lot up.
• Fr3dd1 4y ago
  Context: I am myself a tech lead / team manager and at the moment I try to recruit a more senior developer. My way to assess candidates differ from the style the blog describes, but of course I do some kind of technical screening. From my point of view, this blog, obviously, just describes the view of the candidate. And maybe this person is quite good at his job. But you have to consider, that you get a lot of candidates who can't get things done. I screen candidates who want to do a PhD in computer science but write code like we are 20 years or more in the past. I get candidates with a degree in computer science who do a little programming task that won't compile at all. What I want to say is, don't underestimate the sheer number of people who apply (or get brought in by recruiting companies) who, to be honest, cant develop software that's a little more complex.
  • sai_c 4y ago
    I'm honestly curios, so please bear with me. All the HN threads about recruiting mention this. I get the argument, and yes, there seems to be no better way than to test the candidate (no matter if it is a take home test, online, or onsite). As I see it, most of these tests are about algorithms and data structures, not real, practical problems the company has/had. What I do not get is the following. Most companies (especially FAANG) demand a CS degree and then give you those coding tests about algorithms and data structures your degree actually proves you know about. If the candidate got the degree thirty years ago, then (maybe) fine. But even candidates fresh out of university? And even if you do not recall them in an instant, your degree should prove you can successfully research and understand them. Is a CS degree actually anything worth then, if I still have to prove this knowledge every time I apply for a job? And if it's not about theoretical things, why demand a degree and test for theoretical knowledge instead of practical problem solving skills?
    • Fr3dd1 4y ago
      I live and work in germany so the environment might be way different then in the us or other countries. What I do is a small programming task that candidates can do in there own time frame at home. For the task you have to implement one interface consisting of 2 methods. Its nothing special in terms of computer science. What do I look for in the solutions I get? - Is the code readable? - Does it compile - Are there any unit tests - The implementation needs to work with the filesystem, how is that solved and how is it tested (if it is tested)? - Is there some kind of error handling? I check these points and in the next interview with the candidate I discuss the solution with him or her.
• deleted 4y ago
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• cik 4y ago
  I've said this before, but I'll share it here. This is my current interview process for any front end dev, regardless of level, including the thinking that goes into it. The whole thing is designed to take 2 hours or less. Note: We provide either a physical laptop if onsite, or an AWS box pre-set up for this. 1. Here's a project with a back end API server, it's a repository already cloned to disk, and includes a README.md with very detailed (local) deployment instructions, that one can copy+paste. Thinking: Validates the individual's ability to read, and synthesise 2. Run the API server - this in turn provides a swagger API, that allows users to see the available APIs in their browser, and instructions to do so. The machine has various chrome plugins, Postman, curl, etc pre-installed. Thinking: Validates curiosity, and basic understanding of the modern(ish) web. 3. The candidate is to create a new project (framework of their choosing). They have the time of their choosing to implement an impossible to complete task (which we share). They have to create <something> that can trigger various APIs to insert, update, and remove data from a database. We provide the sample data in text files such that copy+paste is possible. Thinking: Validates if and how they reach out for assistance. Helps us understand where the candidate likes to spend the time of their choosing while working on a solution. Encourages a conversation about difficulties, frustrations, what could have gone better, and feedback. This entire process is designed to ensure that we actively interview the candidate with something "real". It allows us to understand the real level of a candidate based on their efforts (i.e write tests, don't write tests). This is not perfect - but it's the best we could get. I'd love feedback.
  • deanCommie 4y ago
    To put on a devil's advocate hat: This is a great interview for someone whose job will be to create basic CRUD web/mobile apps. And there's nothing wrong with that! 90 (99?) of the software the world needs are basic CRUD web/mobile apps. Hell, for probably 60% of that, a basic no-frills CRUD app would be an improvement! But HackerNews measures it's baseline of the tech industry against "BigTech". That's more than FAANG, that's now also the 500+ unicorns imitating FAANG. All these unicorns don't get to where they are by building CRUD Apps - They're Changing The World. (facetious) And changing the world (serious now) requires not hiring engineers who can build CRUD apps with a database, but engineers who could build the database, the next Swagger, etc.
• xapata 4y ago
  > I’m not going to use Google before your very eyes, either. Obviously. I have the hardest time convincing interview candidates that I in fact want to watch them use Google to solve a problem. It turns out that many people are ineffective at finding and reading documentation.
• labrador 4y ago
  High tech interviews are as much a personality test as a test of intellect. What do people do when they buy a car? They kick the tires, bounce it on it's shocks to see how it responds, get in and hit the gas hard, take it fast around a few corners. If the interview was about what you're supposed to know it wouldn't be too stressful, would it? No, they want to hit you with some curveballs from multiple people and see if you fly off the handle or handle it with grace and humor. Humor especially. If you can make people smile or laugh you have a much better chance. That's been my experience. I've failed every interview where I got angry, even if I didn't express it. They could tell.
• mvind 4y ago
  Leetcode is great. If you can't solve a couple of easy LC questions, I would question your problem-solving skills.
  • kolanos 4y ago
    If the difficulty of the LC questions were calibrated for the role, I'd agree. But the times I've run into LC it was rarely the "easy" questions. Instead I've seen LC questions thrown at me that would take someone already familiar with the solution a couple hours to implement, but I'm going into it cold and am given 30 minutes with someone watching me. Or worse, I've seen LC questions that were once the basis for someone's CS PHD. It might have taken Dijkstra 20 minutes to come up with the algorithm he is most famous, but you're not interviewing Edsger Dijkstra here.
• RupertWiser 4y ago
  One important reason for coding questions I haven’t read in the comments is the need to avoid the interviewer’s personal bias. I’ve seen a lot of people say they can feel someone is a bad interviewer but how do you quantify that? Large corps need to protect themselves. They also need to make candidates feel like they were tested using the same criteria as other candidates.
• raverbashing 4y ago
  > A company recently wanted me to choose an application, terraform an infra for it (including CI/CD pipelines) and have the whole thing launchable from zero in a single line. They estimated this piece of work at four hours. Four hours if I copied and pasted the lot from Github, perhaps. Oh boy. Yeah, that's the issue I see with most of those "take home" exercises (and then of course they take the candidates that spent 20h on it instead of 4h)
• bambax 4y ago
  Contrary to the OP I think Leetcode questions are useful to test the abilities of candidates, including their understanding of Big O complexity. What I don't understand is why there isn't a standardized (proctored) test that companies could rely on, instead of re-testing each candidate themselves. Couldn't FAANGs put resources together to establish an independent testing institute? Wouldn't that save everybody a lot of time and money?
  • arghnoname 4y ago
    A degree in the field from a reasonable school requires passing many proctored tests and submitting many completed projects. Companies don't seem to find this sufficient. Why is that? Would a board test fix this? I would back this idea if it would work, but I think it's crazy that I have a BS and PhD in CS, years and years of having my work vetted, professional experience, etc, and yet if I wanted to find a new job...time to leetcode.
    • hagy 4y ago
      Universities have mixed incentives at best in terms of certifying graduates. A degree program that routinely failed a high portion of students of the program would soon find few students entering the program. Because universities see students as a customer first, there is a strong incentive to give the customer's the product that they're paying for. University degree program do care about rankings, which entails some concern about the quality of graduates awarded a degree. But they mainly address that by filtering students at admission time. Some program still have weed out courses to nudge students into alternative programs early on. But once the student is committed to the program, there is a strong incentive to award a degree regardless of their demonstrated capabilities.
• paraiuspau 4y ago
  Avoiding the p1ssing contest is very important, as well as ensuring we don't have egotistical a-holes interviewing. In a role we're currently interviewing for, we intentionally ask deep-dive style questions. We first explain our approach by telling the candidate we don't necessarily care about the answer; we seek to assess aptitude, rather than ability, and so we ask the candidate to be as vocal as possible to display their reasoning. So far, it has helped us narrow-down the pool to two promising candidates. Of course, we also mention in the interview that, "we'd make liberal use of google, and we understand that most other people would too" - but some of our better interviews have turned into pleasant, fruitful technical discussions, and not just a back-and-forth "pub quiz". Just my $0.02.
• tarr11 4y ago
  > You won’t read my code because reading code takes 10x more time and effort than writing it. > Particularly in DevOps, my specialism. There is no test for debugging SSL certificate chains in production at 3am. > We can’t replicate having no answers as to why production is down at 6pm on Christmas Eve or how we will stay at our desk until it’s fixed. So, I’m getting the sense that this person enjoys devops. I wonder if they are trapped between engineering and ops - good at both, but not great at either. if this person wants to work at a larger tech company, maybe this person should apply to be an SRE? They have very valuable skills and the pay for SRE often exceeds the pay for engineers. I’d not expect an SRE interview to be as focused on whiteboarding, but have a much deeper understanding of a systems toolchain, eg how to use Linux tools to diagnose a network issue.
• throwaway0asd 4y ago
  I have found most software developers cannot write software…at all. Most interviewers seem to find people that can actually write software grossly incompatible. Knowing this I try to cut through all the bullshit and immaturity by focusing on leadership and measures. Software is exceedingly immature and biased, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I interviewed at a FAANG this year and it was one of the worst: leet code nonsense and false assumptions about performance that don’t survive reality. They might pay well, but the interview made it feel like a dead end hourly job flipping burgers.
• em1sar 4y ago
  Nice blogpost but you're just in the wrong industry. It's really your own fault if you don't get offers thrown at you daily with the skillse you have. Stop messing around with solidity and this rotten industry and start writing real software.
• brunooliv 4y ago
  I can't relate to these articles anymore, honestly... I get it, interviewing sucks, Leetcode sucks and FAANG-level interviews are tailored for a very specific skillset. And while Leetcode problems are a horrible proxy, there are a few caveats to be aware of: - In terms of acquired skill level, I guess we all agree it's harder to gain context on a new codebase and debug production issues at 6am. However, we do this repeatedly, every time we switch jobs. Contexts are different, business, issues and tech stacks are different. Yet, we always succeed. Leetcode should be the same: just a crap you have to shove down for a few months before interviewing and then forget about. It's not pleasant, but, if you can debug prod issues with ease, a few relaxed months doing some closed-form problems that repeat themselves over and over should be _doable_. - Not all companies require technical interviews based on Leetcode. In the end, the weight of: effort put in vs. company reputation vs. salary will end up dictating what you will be able to (or want to) apply for and work hard for. I personally am on your boat: hate leetcode, suck at it 100%, but, I've accepted that there are many, many great companies which have fair and representative interview processes and still allow you to do meaningful work. You know, the companies you've never heard about on the internet in your local area or city? Yep, those ones. I believe that this kind of "self-pity" or claiming that the entire industry sucks, is broken, needs Leetcode is a bit too much. Sure, some very high stakes companies do it, but, again, those will attract the engineers who have the willingness, perseverance and skill to power through those problems (plus system design too!!) and get the job. It's a skill. The more conscious effort you put into it, the better you will become. The real issue is then losing sight of the forest for the trees: the real work begins once you are hired. I don't know if this process truly finds _better_ candidates in average... But, imo, it doesn't need to: there will be extremely smart people who will simply stay away out of these types of processes and that's totally fine, as it keeps the talent pools balanced and creates super cool and interesting work environments and projects centered around "the other 99%" of companies.
  • posharma 4y ago
    It's not healthy when an industry makes it extremely hard (grind for months) for staff+ candidates to switch companies and expects them to prove themselves every single time. Not sure if other professions have similar strategies. Again, I've accepted it but this needs to be said. Also, you mention "a few relaxed months doing some closed-form problems". Sorry, they're not relaxed at all. You've to find time to do them after work when you're tired + need to ensure you can remember the patterns.
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Personally, I just remember getting bored talking with AWS and Google reps, then just sort of wandered back to focus on something more interesting. Understanding corporate cultures is similar to ecology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl... There should come a point in your career when you realize “Process” people have a different set of priorities, and being secure enough to not make decisions in simulated peril is wise. ;-)
• dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
  The best "coding test" I saw recently was a company that just asked "send us some technical writing (white paper, blog, whatever) you did about working a problem, if you don't have anything you can legally send us, just write a short essay about something cool." The funny part was that they linked to it and called it a coding test.
• icod1 4y ago
  I had a github profile once, but a conflict with the Go team lead to my account being blacklisted (flagged). So I deleted 150+ repos from it and the account. I host my own gogs and recently gitea instances now and there is little public code there. The public code is not representative and I won't give you access to my private code. I also won't do pre-noon interviews. If you start pressuring me I'll revoke the application. You can be lucky I even applied to your company, despite all the bs buzzword requirements you have posted you have no clue about what they mean. I am very angry at current hype driven job ads. And yes I wager they're more of an ad for the company than actual job ads. From some ads where I sent my application to I have never even heard back, which means they probably sold my info. Even reading all those job ads is tiresome. Most don't even write if they're ok with 100% remote. Most don't even write if it's ok to not work 100% full time. Most don't write how much they're willing to pay. Most job ads are just a waste of time spicked with bs trendy buzzwords. I'm so pissed at the whole state of everything.
• hnbear 4y ago
  I recently got kicked from a hiring process after a good third round call with the CTO because at some point I’d refused to do a leetcode. I hadn’t, but I had pushed back and asked why round one was a hackerank round, when it was a senior management SRE-team position. Not normally a role with a lot of leetcode. I’d only asked why it was necessary, not refused it. In that actual interview the interviewer (their principle engineer) said he’d looked at my resume as prep, wondered why HR even scheduled a leetcode and skipped the code review and asked questions instead. He passed me. 2 rounds later the recruiter decided he didn’t lie I’d pushed back early on. Personally I hate leetcode style challenges and seldom use them. Designing our recent hiring process for our org I included a take-home, but made sure it: - time limited to 2-4 hours - had the team practice and verify it’s doable - clear objectives - clear marking criteria - any language they want It came down to a somewhat typical platform eng/sre/DevOps type task of working with APIs, so chose our company’s public API, so it’s somewhat relevant and interesting, and asking the candidate to write something to read and process our API data. The really key goal being to weed out people who: - just can’t write any code at all - don’t approach problems in a code-first repeatable way. I learn a lot through running it, and improved the take-home in many ways based on feedback. The rubric offered the option to do it in a session as a leet-code style round, no one ever asked for that out of hundreds of candidates.
  • saargrin 4y ago
    the best take homes i ever had were of this sort - public api, clear measurable goals, any language/framework you want then even if you dont get the job at least you feel you've learned something or proven to yourself you can handle a challenge
• rendall 4y ago
  Reading the comments on these kinds of HN posts stresses me out. Not for me, but for you. I wish I could just give you all a big hug and a pep talk. The demand for software engineers is expanding faster than new engineers are minted. There are lots of excellent, well-paying jobs going unfilled out there and with persistence one of them is yours. If you fail a tech interview, it's ok. It happens, and all too often it's a blessing in disguise. Well-designed tech interviews bring your strengths to the surface and you will do well. Otherwise it's just a crap shoot and sometimes you win anyway. Chin up. You will make it.
• leaflets2 4y ago
  > I’m exaggerating the amount of skill that I have ... I inflate the scale of my achievements and the depth of my skillset. I even add tasks and responsibilities to historical jobs that fit your requirements. ... > If you want better candidates filling roles, ... Check the candidate’s portfolio. Why wouldn't a candidate's portfolio be fake too? Someone else's work, plagiarized with minor edits / refactorings to make it look unique, for example Why would it be off limits to cheat on GitHub but ok in one's CV
• Ava433 4y ago
• punkbit 4y ago
  He is absolutely right! I've wasted a lot of time of my live that I'll never get back. I could have spent with family, friends, which some have passed away. It got extremely hard for me between issues with IR35, Brexit and the pandemic. 4 stage interviews in multiple places with long take home tests; some which I didn't even sleep to deliver as quickly as possible. Some interviewers had nothing much on their public profiles, either GitHub or personal sites. An absolute lack of respect. Https://GitHub.com/heldrida
• SolubleSnake 4y ago
  This topic (whiteboarding in tech) is so common and SO boring! I work in an engineering org with ‘real’ engineers (mech eng, electrical, chemical eng etc) and I’m on a multidisciplinary team. No one tested my code on a whiteboard on the way in. They trusted the fact I have a CS degree from an elite U.K. university and numerous other software qualifications. Whiteboarding is just a bizarre fetish for people who want to felate Silicon Valley wankers. Screw this sh1t