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I had a wildly different experience interviewing at netflix. I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my original schedule with the

• deeviant 12y ago
  The official story told often at big companies is that the interview process should be tilted towards false negatives over false positives. The truth of the matter is you could probably get statistically similar results from a voodoo witch doctor reading chicken entrails. Ok, maybe not, but I really get the feeling that most hiring systems are arbitrary and are less "tilted toward false negatives" and more just plain random. In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term.
  • CrankyFool 12y ago
    As someone responsible for observability, I've got a real problem with biasing hiring decisions toward false negatives; what you're basically saying is that you're biasing the system toward the failure mode that you have the least ability to actually measure. It's a great way to feel good about yourself and your interview process; it's also a great way to not find fault in your interview process as it becomes arbitrarily ... arbitrary.
  • CoolGuySteve 12y ago
    I think these processes are like that Price is Right game Plinko. You're the round little disk and the interviewers are the pegs. There are thousands of pegs on the board, and your resume predicts the starting position of your disk. But once you hit the pegs, it's essentially random. Some pegs bounce you towards the jackpot and other pegs bounce you towards 0. It all depends on if you have a similar background, if the person likes you, if you've heard of the question before or solved something similar, if your chosen language fits the problem domain, etc. At the end of the day, your ability to actually do things doesn't matter much in the interview process. I've worked at 2 huge well known companies and failed at several other interviews. Hundreds of millions of people use my code every day. After nearly a decade in tech, I've never gotten a bad performance review. But I still plinko'ed into the 0 spot many times. As I get older, I find it's easiest just to enter orgs from friend's recommendations, preferably at smaller companies. Playing the plinko game with your livelihood is an exhausting waste of time, and often represents the politicking that goes on at these huge companies when review time comes around.
    • jeffreyrogers 12y ago
      Thanks for posting this :)
  • aceperry 12y ago
    "In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term" I would agree with you about the monoculture aspect where they tend to hire new college grads from mostly the top colleges. I thought it's a little bit too inbred, but they also buy a lot of companies and get a much broader set of employees that way. Although, they might dump a lot of the acquired employees instead of keeping them on permanently once the acquisition goes through.
• RayVR 12y ago
  Just a side note that the chief talent officer I met with is no longer at the company.
  • peterdng 12y ago
    lol, the irony. guess she was part of that 51%!
    • lylejohnson 12y ago
      Probably not in her list of "favorite firing" stories.
      • RogerL 12y ago
        she fired herself early in the history of Netflix due to lack of money. CEO decided to keep her on part time.
• serve_yay 12y ago
  It sucks when you can tell that a personality mismatch is causing the interviewer think you don't know what you're talking about. Or they could just be an arrogant ass, who knows (that if/else thing certainly raises the possibility). About the offer you got, maybe they thought you were strong in areas that would be important to the DW team even though you didn't fit into their expectations for the position you interviewed for. I've interviewed people who were obviously talented engineers but not quite right for the position in question, and suggested them for other positions they were better-suited for. This has worked well in my experience, but who knows if that's what happened at Netflix.
• eikenberry 12y ago
  > One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question. That should have been a big clue right there that it wasn't going to go well. Based on their hiring criterion and culture, that they still do a technical interview like they were hiring junior developers is a bad sigh.
  • frostmatthew 12y ago
    Jeff Atwood has a good post[1] on why something as simple as FizzBuzz is valuable when hiring engineers at any level. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
    • BrainInAJar 12y ago
      That's assuming you respect Jeff Atwood's opinions at all.
    • mgkimsal 12y ago
      For anyone above a jr level developer position, I would assume they'd have code or other artifacts you could review. If you weren't satisfied with their approach or style, don't interview further, or ask for clarification. If you can not find anyone at all with example code/projects, perhaps then start employing fizzbuzz on folks, but... I can't imagine it's too hard to find developers with at least a minimal portfolio that demonstrates something at least as complex, if not moreso, than fizzbuzz.
      • jedberg 12y ago
        The problem with sample code is that I have no idea if you actually wrote it. Maybe you copied it from Google, maybe your friend "helped" you. I have no idea. When I'm first interviewing you, I have no idea how honest you are. The only way I know for sure that you wrote the code is if I watch you write it in front of me. I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they've ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes, and then at least I can believe that their code sample is theirs.
• bogomipz 12y ago
  I also met with this same woman who talked about both the stock price and firing people. She also said something to the effect of "just because you have a job now doesn't mean you will have one in six months" and made a comparison to players being traded in professional sports. I remember feeling very put off by her. I too did not understand what the point in this bit of bravado was. It sounds like it's her standard candidate speech though which is just weird. The other thing that put me out was the first person who interviewed wasn't wearing shoes and insisted on sitting indian style with his feet pointed out to wards me. I am no stranger to a casual work environment but that is just gross. Lastly on the way to a conference room on the second floor I walked a fair amount through the office and what was notable to me was that I didn't see anybody smiling or even anyone who looked like they might be enjoying what they are doing. Ultimately I didn't get an offer because the job turned out to be a different description than the one I had interviewed about on the phone. I think that says it all.
  • poor_too_ 12y ago
    Not only gross, but wildly disrespectful in many cultures.
    • caente 12y ago
      Anything can be wildly disrespectful in some culture
      • geofft 12y ago
        There are a finite set of cultures. "Can be" isn't a particularly productive claim.
      • bogomipz 12y ago
        Being that its Netflix whose office is in California, it is American work culture we are talking about so yes this is considered disrespectful.
        • ck425 12y ago
• omni 12y ago
  > I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone. No, it really isn't. You should have a set of hiring standards that you strive to make as objective and quantifiable as possible. The interviewer should also be doing everything he or she can do to minimize their own personal bias entering into the evaluation of you as a candidate. Hiring people you get along with, i.e. people like you, is usually a quick path towards a homogeneous team of straight, white males from privileged backgrounds.
  • jghn 12y ago
    I recently redesigned our department's hiring process for software folks and one of the things I did was change our standard 2 person interview panels to be a larger group at once. The primary reason is so that everyone is seeing the same thing, including these sorts of personality conflicts. If Bob thinks the candidate is horrible due to some weird hangup and they were interviewing solo, the team would have to believe Bob. But if everyone else saw the interaction, they'd know that Bob was just being a cantankerous coot.
    • nradov 12y ago
      Panel interviews are usually a bad idea since they intimidate many candidates.
    • optimusclimb 12y ago
      A more scalable solution to this is pair interviews. The first company I worked at for 4 years made use of this, in addition to meeting in person, at the end of the day, to make a decision. Benefits of the pair interview: Two different opinions on the candidate for the same "experience". If either interviewer had poor tendencies, they'll be curtailed a bit because they know someone else is there to witness them. If both interviewers are in agreement, that's a pretty strong data point. When it came time for "review" at the end of the day, we started with an around the room "thumbs up/down". No hiding behind an anonymous email to the recruiter/manager. If it was unanimously up...offer. Unanimously down? Obvious no hire. If it was mixed, we'd go around to all of the thumbs down, and ask, "Are you on the fence, or are you 100% vehemently opposed to this candidate?" If they said, "NO WAY JOSE", we'd ask them to give their reasoning. Then, we'd ask if anyone had a positive enough experience to argue in favor of the candidate. If not? No hire. If yes, we'd then go around the room and ask all of the interviewers to give a full description of the interview. You'll note that this part gives the full data, but takes the most time, but could be avoided (an optimization) if it was going to be ultimately fruitless. This was by far the best hiring decision making process I've been a part of. No process, is perfect, but I feel this was pretty fair. Oh - lastly, if a candidate was particularly hard to decide on, and we went around the room, and some people were for them, and some were against, and it ended up in deadlock - we ended the meeting and it was up to the ranking members of the team to decide (i.e. managers.) This meant that after one round of debate, we wouldn't keep wasting the company's dime trying to force consensus, and instead moved the decision to the people who the company had already decided it wanted to make decisions. So, if democracy worked...great, but this was a business, and we had get shit done, so lacking clear consensus, the burden was reduced. After typing this out, I really, really whole heartedly respect this process - compared to much of what I've seen in the Valley.
• vanessa98 12y ago
  Same experience with that chief talent officer. I think it was supposed to be a pure sell interview, but it ended up being super tacky and uncomfortable. She went on and on about how much money they had. She went on and on about firing 51% of the people every year - which is not only unsustainable, but not supported by any kind of evidence of routinely culled NF engineers looking for work in the Bay Area. She was so busy congratulating herself and being smug I don't even know why I was in the room. The rest of the interviewers were great.
  • dustingetz 12y ago
    "She went on and on about firing 51% of the people every year" Wait, what? Slow down a sec and elaborate more about this please
    • ProAm 12y ago
      Netflix has a history of trimming unneeded employees as soon as they are deemed unneeded.
    • cookiecaper 12y ago
      Netflix models employment like a professional sports engagement, where performance is regularly reviewed in context and persons who no longer contribute to the "team dynamic" are "traded", i.e., fired, to go find a "team" in which their contributions are a better fit. Everyone knows this because Netflix released a big presentation about it a while ago. They keep "top performers" only as long as they are top performance from Netflix's perspective, and then dismiss them with a "generous severance". It's definitely an interesting way to do employment.
      • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Sounds like contractors. Why not just admit it and fire everybody?
        • cookiecaper 12y ago
• rdoherty 12y ago
  Wow, I had nearly the exact same interview process. Super aggressive to nearly combative recruiter (felt like I was being argued with the whole time), fizzbuzz question, left in a conference room alone for an hour for lunch, a few more questions then done. I got an offer but turned them down because their recruiter was so crazy aggressive it made me feel that Netflix would be a very unhappy place to work. From what I've heard from ex-employees (one a recruiter) the hiring/salary/firing process there is not well organized. People often make more than managers or more senior employees and large layoffs every year for the 'bottom 10%' make for some weird social dynamics. As much as I respect and admire their technical processes there I'm not convinced it's really a good place to work.
  • dmuino 12y ago
    Can you share the name of the recruiter? Just curious if that person is still working at Netflix. I've been a happy Netflix employee for over 4 years and have never experienced a 'large layoff' event. All the layoffs I've witnessed were not a surprise for the people affected. Senior engineers usually make more money than their direct managers, but I fail to see how that's an issue. I'm guessing RayVR met with Patty who left Netflix 2 years ago. My interview with her was different but I guess it would depend on your background and what she was trying to determine. In my case it was mostly to see if I was going to be a good cultural fit since I was at the time working for Yahoo which had a completely different culture. To me that was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Actually the whole interview process was great, and it was one of the major reasons I chose Netflix over other companies.
    • CrankyFool 12y ago
      I'm dmuino's manager. The day after I took over the team, my director sat me down and said "I don't know if you've looked yet, but most of your engineers make more than you do. That's because they're incredibly valuable. Your number one job is to keep them happy." In the last two years of managing this team, I've consistently gotten paid less than the top engineers on my team. Totally OK with it.
• ChrisAntaki 12y ago
  After my interview with Netflix, I felt smarter. Didn't end up working there, but met new people & we shared strategies for achieving higher performance.
• dreamweapon 12y ago
  Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science. Precious. And of course, an entirely different take could be made from your response -- precisely because you do have a solid grounding in CS, you've probably chosen to spend your time with languages with (for want of a better term) more "powerful", and arguably more standard constructions than what Python affords for this kind of a logical switch -- namely, a ternary operator -- which if Python had it, would probably look a lot like this: x = y ? 100 : 0 and that you were consequently flummoxed by Python's quirky lack of this useful (and arguably much more readable) construct. So if you were interviewing for a senior-level, Python-specific position I can see why they'd expect you to know the if-then-else trick. But if it's a secondary language for you, then the feedback that interviewer gave you definitely seems more than a bit off-base. (DISCLAIMER: No, I don't think Python is a flawed language because it doesn't have a ternary op, or that it should have "stronger CS fundamentals" or any of that. It's just a side aspect or a different, larger point I was making).
  • mahyarm 12y ago
    That is pythons 'ternary operator', you can nest it: x = 11 if False else ( 12 if False else 13) print x => 13 Python's philosophy in general is to try to avoid magic symbols such as && or || and just use 'and' and 'or'
    • keypusher 12y ago
      You can actually just use the 'or' to shortcut this whole thing, because or returns the first true value. x = False or (True or False)
      • philsnow 12y ago
        Or you can write it all out on multiple lines if cond1: if cond2: x = 12 else: x = 11 else: x = 13 That way you can debug it more easily (because you can trace execution rather than printing out the values that cond1 and cond2 depend on and figuring out in your head which way the ternary will go). This also removes ambiguity in the case where you might want to assign to x some falsey thing like None or [] or zero: >>> y = None >>> x = False or ( y or False ) >>> x False The above code depends on the value of y for control flow. Clearer is to use syntax for control flow and not abuse falsey-ness or truthiness. >>> print [bool(f) for f in [None, 0, 0.0, [], ()]] [False, False, False, False, False] If you really do want to test the falsey behavior, IMHO it's much, much clearer to branch on bool(the_maybe_falsey_thing) rather than just the_maybe_falsey_thing.
• deleted 12y ago
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• skuhn 12y ago
  I'm not a programmer, and had never heard of the fizzbuzz question. After seeing so many people come out in favor of it in the comments, I looked it up. It is just so easy that I have to imagine people who "bomb" it are failing because they're expecting a difficult question and wind up overthinking it. I mean seriously, this is the question as I found it: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”. And here is an answer in bash that took me literally 30 seconds: for num in {1..100} ; do out="" (( $num % 3 == 0 )) && out="Fizz" (( $num % 5 == 0 )) && out="${out}Buzz" echo ${out:-$num} done If this somehow provides valuable insight into a candidate, it certainly shouldn't be occupying prime 'in person' interview time. Request it before you schedule the on-site interview. Even identifying as a non-programmer, I have been asked much harder programming questions in interviews.
  • jlebar 12y ago
    I've never asked fizzbuzz, but I have asked people to count the number of upper-case letters in a c-string. I feel like this is of similar difficulty, for people who claim to know C/C++. When I asked that question, I was looking for fluency. A candidate shouldn't have to think about it. They should write c >= 'A', instead of floundering because they don't remember the ASCII value of 'A'. If asked, they should be able to iterate over the string without taking strlen first. This is basic stuff, but you might be surprised how many people with years of software development experience on their resumes can't do it. Moreover, I found that a good performance on this easy question was highly predictive of good performance on harder questions. Not that this didn't stop me from asking hard questions. :)
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • Gurkenmaster 12y ago
      Unrelated: In Unicode that would be a pretty difficult problem. The uppercase version of 'ß' is actually two characters "SS". There are a lot of messed up casing rules in the unicode standard. http://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#11 http://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#11
• bambax 12y ago
  By far the best part of being a self-employed contractor is never to have to deal with HR, ever. Ever never. Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to: - make sure the company doesn't overpay for "resources" (a "talent buyer" if you will) - make sure said resources, once hired, stay in line and don't make waves of any kind, and terminate them as needed, as silently as possible. We tend to think of HR as an adult version of the nice and benevolent elementary school teacher who first helped us understand the world; the reality is they are more like cops. Bad cops usually.
  • organsnyder 12y ago
    I had a boss that was extremely good to work for, but she didn't have management experience (given the nature of the organization, this would be expected), so she leaned on outsourced HR for advice. Not only did their advice lead to me leaving much less amicably than had been (mutually, I thought) planned, but they also opened themselves up to liability that wouldn't have been there otherwise. The "bad cop" analogy is spot-on. I've used that exact analogy—my boss (unwittingly) played "good cop", while the HR consultants played "bad cop".
  • fat0wl 12y ago
    amen. there are downsides to the chaos of consulting that i don't particularly enjoy but the only time i ever spoke to HR was when they handed me my badge, and there is no such thing as a "performance review", reprimands, etc. (lots of annoying memos about corporate policies at this particular client tho). In fact, I talk to my real "boss" about once every few months, in between it is just scrums with PMs I pretty much just go to work, chill out, and hope I can find a better gig sometime in the near future (I'm on basically an ever-renewing contract but the vendors in our system are horrible about rate increase).
  • 59nadir 12y ago
    > Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to: This part is so important. Our HR department doesn't actually know anyone in the office. It becomes particularly interesting when they organize a company outing and have completely missed that there is a large percent of the workforce that does not speak the native language where I live, but they still have event hosts that will only present things in this language. They've done this 3 years in a row now.