5 ms·

That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, a

That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it must have been hard to spam out CVs. The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? That would have been a relatively recent publication in 1980. Kadane's algo didn't arrive until 1984 IIRC. Was K&R published yet?

KineticLensman 4y ago
> What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? The last time I was hired for a purely software-related position was 1993. They were looking for an IC (they didn't call it that, then) who would quickly transition to tech lead / system architect. The technical part of the interview involved role-playing myself presenting an initial proposal to a potential customer who had provided a brief written requirement. One of the interviewers role played the customer. IIRC the interview schedule was something like 30 mins to read the requirement and think, 15 mins to ask initial questions, an hour (perhaps longer?) to develop the proposal, an hour (?) to present it and face customer questions. In essence I was being asked to spot ambiguities in the requirement and develop an initial estimate. I passed. I would have failed had I applied for the same job straight out of uni.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deeblering4 4y ago
Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few conversations, followed by checking references. CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with other companies cargo culting that into their interview practices.
- ddulaney 4y ago
  They were definitely influential, but it's way more complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. Here's an article that digs into this specific history: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
- baus 4y ago
  Tech interviews were definitely around prior to Google. I went through multiple tech interviews in the 90s
- mikestew 4y ago
  Microsoft was known for “why are manhole covers round” and CS trivia before Google was even a company.
  - jcadam 4y ago
    Yep, I blame Microsoft. Now these sorts of interviews are done even by companies writing pedestrian web apps that don't require hard-core CS knowledge. Yet they test every applicant on it anyway.
    - dspillett 4y ago
      > Yet they test every applicant on it anyway. If you have enough applicants, why not filter out so you have the best of them? (well, maybe not quite the best, there is some value in having someone less likely to get bored and move on PDQ).
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        One reason, besides the obvious lack of respect, is that the more you test for things you don't need, the higher the odds that you select somebody with false positive results on the things you need.
      - nsxwolf 4y ago
robterrell 4y ago
My copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s! My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills components, aside from demos of software I'd written and general discussions of implementation details. One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was probably 1990-ish? They made a LAN email product that ran on top of Novell NetWare. There were a couple of hours of general interviews, including a lunch on-site. The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.
- mrunkel 4y ago
  > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. I had something similar happen in 92. The interview consisted of leaving me alone looking at one screen of Apple BASIC that came from their actual production code. The screen was nearly full of characters. I was supposed to tell them what that bit of code did. I spent about 5 minutes looking at it, and though I think I could give the correct answer, I also realized I didn't want to work with this code base. I then thanked the interviewer and left. The headhunter that sent me on this interview was quite irate that I had "embarrassed" them. C'est la vie.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Got a job working on an old Ada system during the Great Recession (I was unemployed and desperate enough to take any job). Mom was kind enough to give me all of her old Ada books - apparently her employer (defense contractor) had sent her to training when the language was first introduced. > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. That's cold. The worst I've had was otherwise normal code with a few deliberate bugs introduced: "Tell me what's wrong with this code."
- idontpost 4y ago
  > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job. It's nice to know that stupid interview questions are not a modern innovation.
coldcode 4y ago
My first interview for my first job in 1981 consisted of the manager asking me general programming questions ending in a description of an errant program which I had to explain how I would figure out what was wrong, and what it was likely to be. No whiteboards, no coding, nothing. That was the only interview, and I was hired on the spot, despite having 0 work programming experience and 0 college education in programming (was chemistry major, programmed for fun on an Apple ][). Highly unlikely to happen so easy today. I retired recently after nearly 40 years as a working programmer.

KineticLensman 4y ago

> What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? The last time I was hired for a purely software-related position was 1993. They were looking for an IC (they didn't call it that, then) who would quickly transition to tech lead / system architect. The technical part of the interview involved role-playing myself presenting an initial proposal to a potential customer who had provided a brief written requirement. One of the interviewers role played the customer. IIRC the interview schedule was something like 30 mins to read the requirement and think, 15 mins to ask initial questions, an hour (perhaps longer?) to develop the proposal, an hour (?) to present it and face customer questions. In essence I was being asked to spot ambiguities in the requirement and develop an initial estimate. I passed. I would have failed had I applied for the same job straight out of uni.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deeblering4 4y ago

Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few conversations, followed by checking references. CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with other companies cargo culting that into their interview practices.

ddulaney 4y ago
They were definitely influential, but it's way more complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. Here's an article that digs into this specific history: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
baus 4y ago
Tech interviews were definitely around prior to Google. I went through multiple tech interviews in the 90s
mikestew 4y ago
Microsoft was known for “why are manhole covers round” and CS trivia before Google was even a company.
- jcadam 4y ago
  Yep, I blame Microsoft. Now these sorts of interviews are done even by companies writing pedestrian web apps that don't require hard-core CS knowledge. Yet they test every applicant on it anyway.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    > Yet they test every applicant on it anyway. If you have enough applicants, why not filter out so you have the best of them? (well, maybe not quite the best, there is some value in having someone less likely to get bored and move on PDQ).
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      One reason, besides the obvious lack of respect, is that the more you test for things you don't need, the higher the odds that you select somebody with false positive results on the things you need.
    - nsxwolf 4y ago

robterrell 4y ago

My copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s! My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills components, aside from demos of software I'd written and general discussions of implementation details. One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was probably 1990-ish? They made a LAN email product that ran on top of Novell NetWare. There were a couple of hours of general interviews, including a lunch on-site. The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.

mrunkel 4y ago
> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. I had something similar happen in 92. The interview consisted of leaving me alone looking at one screen of Apple BASIC that came from their actual production code. The screen was nearly full of characters. I was supposed to tell them what that bit of code did. I spent about 5 minutes looking at it, and though I think I could give the correct answer, I also realized I didn't want to work with this code base. I then thanked the interviewer and left. The headhunter that sent me on this interview was quite irate that I had "embarrassed" them. C'est la vie.
jcadam 4y ago
Got a job working on an old Ada system during the Great Recession (I was unemployed and desperate enough to take any job). Mom was kind enough to give me all of her old Ada books - apparently her employer (defense contractor) had sent her to training when the language was first introduced. > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. That's cold. The worst I've had was otherwise normal code with a few deliberate bugs introduced: "Tell me what's wrong with this code."
idontpost 4y ago
> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job. It's nice to know that stupid interview questions are not a modern innovation.

coldcode 4y ago

My first interview for my first job in 1981 consisted of the manager asking me general programming questions ending in a description of an errant program which I had to explain how I would figure out what was wrong, and what it was likely to be. No whiteboards, no coding, nothing. That was the only interview, and I was hired on the spot, despite having 0 work programming experience and 0 college education in programming (was chemistry major, programmed for fun on an Apple ][). Highly unlikely to happen so easy today. I retired recently after nearly 40 years as a working programmer.