5 ms·
> But all three of us are very reluctant to start interviewing because we all know how much interviewing really really SUCKS. Basically we are forced to write
by lfowles 11y ago
> But all three of us are very reluctant to start interviewing because we all know how much interviewing really really SUCKS. Basically we are forced to write whiteboard code for 4-5 hours on topics that we may or may not know.
"reluctant to start interviewing" based off of stereotypes? Am I not understanding this?
- jeremymcanally 11y agoYeah, I'm not entirely sure where they've interviewed or read about interviewing. I guess Google and Microsoft might run interviews like that, but I've never had that experience. And I've interviewed in a lot of places (both in Silicon Valley and out of it!). It seems like maybe they've spent too much time on HN and Reddit reading about interviewing without doing it. ;)
- plorkyeran 11y agoI've never interviewed with Google, but when I interviewed at Microsoft I had a single interviewer (of five) ask me to write code on a whiteboard, and it was a total of ten lines or so.
- Blackthorn 11y agoI've proctored a number of interviews for $BIG_COMPANY and they wanted whiteboard coding (yuck), so I made sure that my questions involved the whiteboard but zero coding. Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce, I take people through an area that most software engineers use but are highly unfamiliar with: the linking and loading process. It works because it's such a black box with most people. I have them figure out how they would write a linker and loader. The people who score well with me never really thought about it before, but with a bit of guidance come up with a pretty reasonable facsimile of what such a system looks like for real. Then I interviewed at a bunch of places. Most of them were fairly small and they universally used whiteboard coding, except when I interviewed for a specific team at $OTHER_BIG_COMPANY and didn't touch a whiteboard at all. I expect that if I wasn't interviewing for a specific team, I'd have had to use the whiteboard. So yeah, sadly IME whiteboard coding is alive and well.
- danellis 11y ago> Without revealing my own secret interviewing sauce Why is it a secret?
- zzalpha 11y agoTo be fair, an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage, at least in companies where they understand their engineers are key to their success and not simply cogs in a machine.
- danellis 11y ago> an interview process that's novel and successful is certainly a competitive advantage That's true, but... it's pretty sad that it's true. There's so much to be learned from good interviewing practices.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- algoal 11y agoAs I mentioned above, collectively, the three of us have interviewed dozens of times over the last 3 years, so this is from personal experience. I've personally interviewed many dozens of times over the last 20 years I've been in Silicon Valley. The expectations from interviews have definitely changed, especially after Google (I interviewed their twice and never made it past the hiring committee). At one well-known company, I went through 15 whiteboard interviews (3 different days x 5 interviews per day) and finally got the job. I'm not sure why I stuck with it, but I did. If the nature of interviews have changed over the last year, I'll be thrilled, but I doubt it based on the reports I've heard from other friends of mine that have interviewed over the last few months.