7 ms·

He appears to be good at algorithms, has a feel for the actual space and time requirements, is able to think under pressure, and has a sense of humour. I'd hir

He appears to be good at algorithms, has a feel for the actual space and time requirements, is able to think under pressure, and has a sense of humour. I'd hire him in a heartbeat.

ErrantX 17y ago
he fell into every trap laid out for him... (all of them classic interview traps). That would at the very least worry me... But it depends on the job :)
- yason 17y ago
  What were these traps? I'd like to know.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    - chasing an irrelevant point (the interviewer specifically wanted to move on. NEVER stop that, that is the one single that can cost you a job). - assuming importance (his tone suggests he thinks he knew more than the interviewer. I imagine that might have come across in the interview) - assuming ingorance (if it seems amazing the interviewer is clueless on something then it probably isnt true. Adjust appropriately.) - chasing the wrong issue (if an interviewer needs to draw an answer out - even in a fluid way like that - it will be a black mark on your notes) - assuming irrelevance (his opening remarks suggest he though the question was not relevant to the interview he was having, which suggests he possibly did not treat it with the same gravity. Everything is relevant - the more off the wall the question the more important your answer is). There are more but those were the key points I picked up: not being there and only having his side of that short portion I cant say 100% he fell into every one. But it definitely looks that way :) This is based on similar traps I set up for our interviewee's.
    - byrneseyeview 17y ago
      chasing an irrelevant point Anecdotally, when a one-hour interview turns into a three-hour discussion of a side point, it is a really good sign. If the interviewer isn't into it, give up -- but people who can bounce ideas off of each other tend to come up with more ideas.
    - zyrkonsan 17y ago
      Anecdotally, when a one-hour interview turns into a three-hour discussion of a side point, it is a really good sign that the interviewer has the ability to bounce of new ideas and discuss them while the interviewee has not.
    - ezeki3l 17y ago
      I disagree. This seems to suggest that no matter how stupid the interviewer is, you just need to make him feel better and you'll get hired. Which defeats the purpose of the interview. I'd walk out on that interview as the interviewee.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      You're right that he did "wrong" things from the perspective of trying to please the interviewer. Personally I would have walked out if I got a negative vibe from the interviewer during this. Questions like this are deliberately obnoxious bullcrap pulled by recruiters and interviewers who don't understand what they're actually after in a candidate. Everything that you want from a good software engineer (requirement refinement, minimal-effort-maximum-payout planning, awareness of a large variety of domains relevant to your company's business) was expressed by this person's response. You want these things in a candidate because they are the hardest things to find in a good candidate. But the interviewer didn't actually want real-world skills and a real problem solution, they wanted some arbitrary, bullcrap pseudocode up on the whiteboard. This kind of bullcrap pseudocode doesn't actually tell you if the person can or can't code, so it's utterly pointless. I've walked out of interviews and refused job offers for less egregious examples of this kind of nonsense. It doesn't bode well for the company when they're so scatterbrained and insecure that they can't handle someone who actually takes your question seriously.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        not at all: but flagging a point to death when I already made clear what you said registered with me is an instant turn off. His blog post seems to suggest he barely spent much thought on the solution to the actual problem (which we cant deny is important). The data-set is not real world, that is obvious to everyone, but the solution IS.
        KirinDave 17y ago
        The problem is not real world. The data is not real world. The solution is not real world. The entire dialogue is a fantasy. So why even engage in it? Were you expecting something real-world from it? It was an interview. You're being unreasonable to put someone under an already high-stress situation and then saying, "Now we're going to conduct an extremely difficult experiment where you try to come up with the solution to a difficult problem in one fell swoop without any of the usual access to reference and the opinions of your peers." It is bullshit, plain an simple. A bizarre artifact of a world where people have extreme difficulty evaluating software engineering skills. It bears no resemblance to how people in the real world write code or engineer solutions. If you wanted real world examples why not put a pre-requisite to the interview to bring in working code that does what something relevant, and then discuss it in the interview? That's a far more realistic scenario with far more useful data than this little play-acting show that you're describing. When I operate as the interviewer, I look for responses like the one the blogger gave at the beginning, where they start to really analyze the problem domain. People like this save millions of dollars in software engineering costs because they can look at the scope of a request and start to refine it (or outright reject it if it is unreasonable and they can cogently explain why it is so). To say these qualities are a "turn off" blows my mind. This kind of attitude is nearly as bad as the attitudes expressed in the reviled modern-google-interview, and competent software engineers who are not desperate for a job would do well to refuse to tolerate it. After all, an interview is as much for the interviewee as it is for the interviewer. Most of the time, getting to an interview like this means that the company in question thinks you might be a good hire, and they're hiring to fill a void in their ranks. The interviewee is far from powerless.
    - rapind 17y ago
      The idea of "traps" is ridiculous and shows us how little some companies understand about the interviewing process. As an interviewer meeting potential candidates YOU are representing your company. If you're acting false and laying little traps etc. and your candidate detects this, you could lose a very smart and productive person simply because acting falsely is a natural turnoff. On the other side, if the candidate is answering questions in some sort of rehearsed way it'll be a turnoff for the interviewer. Good interviews are no different than meeting people. As a candidate, be yourself, don't worry about silly traps. Your goal is to show them who you are and find out who they are to see if there's a fit. If you've already decided you want the job before meeting with their representatives then you're potentially making a bad decision and wasting your own and other people's time. If you're egotistical and feel a need to point out that a question is useless, then by all means do so! That way they know what they're getting and can make an informed decision about whether or not they can deal with that. You may want to work on the ego a bit in general, but not specifically for an interview... that would be fake. Don't try to con your way into a job because there's a very god chance you'll be unhappy if you get it. Don't be fake and cagey with candidates because ultimately you could scare away some really excellent employees. Intuition is important as an interviewer so you can detect when someone's being fake with you without being a weirdo yourself. Ask questions you actually want answers to instead of trap / fake questions. The whole fake / fake thing just perpetuates itself and makes it next to impossible to find good fits. It should just be common sense without all this complicated trap nonsense.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        Well.. perhaps "trap" is the wrong word. Or rather "designed trap" is the wrong concept. But when answering a question there are, surely, natural traps an interviewee inevitably has to avoid. And not doing so is a potential black mark the interviewer has to watch out for. That said your argument is fair - and I'd probably agree. But I di think laying intellectual traps can be appropriate. It really depends on your candidate and the interview: if you go into an interview (either as the interviewer or the interviewee) with any form of fixed agenda then, yes, things are going ot be fake and plastic (90% of the interviews I went to were like that). You adapt to the situation: if you candidate is showing intellect and sharpness you test that and start a sort of push-pull intellectual "battle of wills". If he detects that and doesnt like it he is not the candidate for me - I would hope he detects it, calls us on it and avoids the "traps". THAT is a good candidate, for me at least :)
    - reggieband 17y ago
      I agree with you and don't understand people who argue differently. The interviewer didn't ask: "Can I find a list of the top 10,000 words usages?" Which is the question the interviewee insisted on answering. If I am a lead and I need a list of the top 10,000 words and I go to my co-worker and end up in a protracted argument about what that means philosophically I am going to be upset. I want him to say: "Here is how I'd do what I think you want. Oh, and by the way, I'm not sure an exact list of the top 10,000 words is possible .... here is how we can get as close as possible". Sure, the list is a moving target. That fact is simply a bullet point in the risk assesement. Note it, move on and solve the actual problem that is presented.
    - emini 17y ago
      "- chasing an irrelevant point (the interviewer specifically wanted to move on. NEVER stop that, that is the one single that can cost you a job)." Below you state 'everything is relevant' "- assuming importance (his tone suggests he thinks he knew more than the interviewer. I imagine that might have come across in the interview)" How can you assume the interviewer knows more? "- assuming ingorance (if it seems amazing the interviewer is clueless on something then it probably isnt true. Adjust appropriately.)" How can you assume that is true? I would not want to work for ignorant douche bags like you. No wonder why this country is fucked up.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        Good arguments (apart from the insults: conversely I wouldnt employ you because you dont appear to see any subtlety in all of this). Look, I wasnt trying to say the interviewer is superior to the interviewee. Definitely not. But I am saying dont treat them like "ignorant douchebags" and dont assume you know more than them. Potentially you do - but assuming that is the case is a fallacy because you probably end up coming across wrong..
    - wiglebot 17y ago
      This is all good advice if you know the social qualities you are looking for determine whether the person can do the job or not. This issue is actually a statistical nightmare because companies think they know exactly who to hire and they try to prove it by showing off the people they have hired. But they need to compare their current employees to people they turned away. Any study on this has shown companies have no idea who to hire after the basic the basic personally and technical filters.
- badger7 17y ago
  I would appear to have missed those traps too. From my reading, he appears to have avoided many traps of assumption, traps that the interviewer blundered into without even noticing. IE, there is no average corpus, language is dynamic, hash functions aren't all equal, etc. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
  - jameskpolk 17y ago
    >From my reading, he appears to have avoided many traps of assumption, traps that the interviewer blundered into without even noticing. In my experience, if the interviewer seems to be trapped by assumptions, they aren't. ;)
    - badger7 17y ago
      Ditto, funnily enough, but the defensiveness portrayed differentiates my experience from that of the OA.

He appears to be good at algorithms, has a feel for the actual space and time requirements, is able to think under pressure, and has a sense of humour. I'd hire him in a heartbeat.

ErrantX 17y ago

he fell into every trap laid out for him... (all of them classic interview traps). That would at the very least worry me... But it depends on the job :)

yason 17y ago
What were these traps? I'd like to know.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  - chasing an irrelevant point (the interviewer specifically wanted to move on. NEVER stop that, that is the one single that can cost you a job). - assuming importance (his tone suggests he thinks he knew more than the interviewer. I imagine that might have come across in the interview) - assuming ingorance (if it seems amazing the interviewer is clueless on something then it probably isnt true. Adjust appropriately.) - chasing the wrong issue (if an interviewer needs to draw an answer out - even in a fluid way like that - it will be a black mark on your notes) - assuming irrelevance (his opening remarks suggest he though the question was not relevant to the interview he was having, which suggests he possibly did not treat it with the same gravity. Everything is relevant - the more off the wall the question the more important your answer is). There are more but those were the key points I picked up: not being there and only having his side of that short portion I cant say 100% he fell into every one. But it definitely looks that way :) This is based on similar traps I set up for our interviewee's.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    chasing an irrelevant point Anecdotally, when a one-hour interview turns into a three-hour discussion of a side point, it is a really good sign. If the interviewer isn't into it, give up -- but people who can bounce ideas off of each other tend to come up with more ideas.
  - zyrkonsan 17y ago
    Anecdotally, when a one-hour interview turns into a three-hour discussion of a side point, it is a really good sign that the interviewer has the ability to bounce of new ideas and discuss them while the interviewee has not.
  - ezeki3l 17y ago
    I disagree. This seems to suggest that no matter how stupid the interviewer is, you just need to make him feel better and you'll get hired. Which defeats the purpose of the interview. I'd walk out on that interview as the interviewee.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    You're right that he did "wrong" things from the perspective of trying to please the interviewer. Personally I would have walked out if I got a negative vibe from the interviewer during this. Questions like this are deliberately obnoxious bullcrap pulled by recruiters and interviewers who don't understand what they're actually after in a candidate. Everything that you want from a good software engineer (requirement refinement, minimal-effort-maximum-payout planning, awareness of a large variety of domains relevant to your company's business) was expressed by this person's response. You want these things in a candidate because they are the hardest things to find in a good candidate. But the interviewer didn't actually want real-world skills and a real problem solution, they wanted some arbitrary, bullcrap pseudocode up on the whiteboard. This kind of bullcrap pseudocode doesn't actually tell you if the person can or can't code, so it's utterly pointless. I've walked out of interviews and refused job offers for less egregious examples of this kind of nonsense. It doesn't bode well for the company when they're so scatterbrained and insecure that they can't handle someone who actually takes your question seriously.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      not at all: but flagging a point to death when I already made clear what you said registered with me is an instant turn off. His blog post seems to suggest he barely spent much thought on the solution to the actual problem (which we cant deny is important). The data-set is not real world, that is obvious to everyone, but the solution IS.
      - KirinDave 17y ago
        The problem is not real world. The data is not real world. The solution is not real world. The entire dialogue is a fantasy. So why even engage in it? Were you expecting something real-world from it? It was an interview. You're being unreasonable to put someone under an already high-stress situation and then saying, "Now we're going to conduct an extremely difficult experiment where you try to come up with the solution to a difficult problem in one fell swoop without any of the usual access to reference and the opinions of your peers." It is bullshit, plain an simple. A bizarre artifact of a world where people have extreme difficulty evaluating software engineering skills. It bears no resemblance to how people in the real world write code or engineer solutions. If you wanted real world examples why not put a pre-requisite to the interview to bring in working code that does what something relevant, and then discuss it in the interview? That's a far more realistic scenario with far more useful data than this little play-acting show that you're describing. When I operate as the interviewer, I look for responses like the one the blogger gave at the beginning, where they start to really analyze the problem domain. People like this save millions of dollars in software engineering costs because they can look at the scope of a request and start to refine it (or outright reject it if it is unreasonable and they can cogently explain why it is so). To say these qualities are a "turn off" blows my mind. This kind of attitude is nearly as bad as the attitudes expressed in the reviled modern-google-interview, and competent software engineers who are not desperate for a job would do well to refuse to tolerate it. After all, an interview is as much for the interviewee as it is for the interviewer. Most of the time, getting to an interview like this means that the company in question thinks you might be a good hire, and they're hiring to fill a void in their ranks. The interviewee is far from powerless.
  - rapind 17y ago
    The idea of "traps" is ridiculous and shows us how little some companies understand about the interviewing process. As an interviewer meeting potential candidates YOU are representing your company. If you're acting false and laying little traps etc. and your candidate detects this, you could lose a very smart and productive person simply because acting falsely is a natural turnoff. On the other side, if the candidate is answering questions in some sort of rehearsed way it'll be a turnoff for the interviewer. Good interviews are no different than meeting people. As a candidate, be yourself, don't worry about silly traps. Your goal is to show them who you are and find out who they are to see if there's a fit. If you've already decided you want the job before meeting with their representatives then you're potentially making a bad decision and wasting your own and other people's time. If you're egotistical and feel a need to point out that a question is useless, then by all means do so! That way they know what they're getting and can make an informed decision about whether or not they can deal with that. You may want to work on the ego a bit in general, but not specifically for an interview... that would be fake. Don't try to con your way into a job because there's a very god chance you'll be unhappy if you get it. Don't be fake and cagey with candidates because ultimately you could scare away some really excellent employees. Intuition is important as an interviewer so you can detect when someone's being fake with you without being a weirdo yourself. Ask questions you actually want answers to instead of trap / fake questions. The whole fake / fake thing just perpetuates itself and makes it next to impossible to find good fits. It should just be common sense without all this complicated trap nonsense.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      Well.. perhaps "trap" is the wrong word. Or rather "designed trap" is the wrong concept. But when answering a question there are, surely, natural traps an interviewee inevitably has to avoid. And not doing so is a potential black mark the interviewer has to watch out for. That said your argument is fair - and I'd probably agree. But I di think laying intellectual traps can be appropriate. It really depends on your candidate and the interview: if you go into an interview (either as the interviewer or the interviewee) with any form of fixed agenda then, yes, things are going ot be fake and plastic (90% of the interviews I went to were like that). You adapt to the situation: if you candidate is showing intellect and sharpness you test that and start a sort of push-pull intellectual "battle of wills". If he detects that and doesnt like it he is not the candidate for me - I would hope he detects it, calls us on it and avoids the "traps". THAT is a good candidate, for me at least :)
  - reggieband 17y ago
    I agree with you and don't understand people who argue differently. The interviewer didn't ask: "Can I find a list of the top 10,000 words usages?" Which is the question the interviewee insisted on answering. If I am a lead and I need a list of the top 10,000 words and I go to my co-worker and end up in a protracted argument about what that means philosophically I am going to be upset. I want him to say: "Here is how I'd do what I think you want. Oh, and by the way, I'm not sure an exact list of the top 10,000 words is possible .... here is how we can get as close as possible". Sure, the list is a moving target. That fact is simply a bullet point in the risk assesement. Note it, move on and solve the actual problem that is presented.
  - emini 17y ago
    "- chasing an irrelevant point (the interviewer specifically wanted to move on. NEVER stop that, that is the one single that can cost you a job)." Below you state 'everything is relevant' "- assuming importance (his tone suggests he thinks he knew more than the interviewer. I imagine that might have come across in the interview)" How can you assume the interviewer knows more? "- assuming ingorance (if it seems amazing the interviewer is clueless on something then it probably isnt true. Adjust appropriately.)" How can you assume that is true? I would not want to work for ignorant douche bags like you. No wonder why this country is fucked up.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      Good arguments (apart from the insults: conversely I wouldnt employ you because you dont appear to see any subtlety in all of this). Look, I wasnt trying to say the interviewer is superior to the interviewee. Definitely not. But I am saying dont treat them like "ignorant douchebags" and dont assume you know more than them. Potentially you do - but assuming that is the case is a fallacy because you probably end up coming across wrong..
  - wiglebot 17y ago
    This is all good advice if you know the social qualities you are looking for determine whether the person can do the job or not. This issue is actually a statistical nightmare because companies think they know exactly who to hire and they try to prove it by showing off the people they have hired. But they need to compare their current employees to people they turned away. Any study on this has shown companies have no idea who to hire after the basic the basic personally and technical filters.
badger7 17y ago
I would appear to have missed those traps too. From my reading, he appears to have avoided many traps of assumption, traps that the interviewer blundered into without even noticing. IE, there is no average corpus, language is dynamic, hash functions aren't all equal, etc. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
- jameskpolk 17y ago
  >From my reading, he appears to have avoided many traps of assumption, traps that the interviewer blundered into without even noticing. In my experience, if the interviewer seems to be trapped by assumptions, they aren't. ;)
  - badger7 17y ago
    Ditto, funnily enough, but the defensiveness portrayed differentiates my experience from that of the OA.