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Comment by artimaeis | Hacker News Reader

Much more interesting is the guide that this blog post mentions at https://asana.com/eng/interview-guide.

I don't really see whats interesting about this either way. Lots of places you interview at tell you what the interview is going to be like and what you are expected to be familiar with. This is just 'write code and we'll be testing you on data structures and algorithms!'

There's some flowery language there about having a genuine desire to want to hire you unlike those 'other evil companies!'... sounds like the same shit pretty much every other company does to me.

I had also the same impression. I think one of the best approaches is let the best engineers at the company go through same interview process. If they can't get pass through the hiring bar of the company, then maybe that company should re-think their hiring process.

My current company has a very similar interview style, and I later learned that I was pretty close to not being hired because I didn't do quite as well as one interviewer wanted on a coding challenge: I ran out of time. But what I also learned is that the interviewer had never solved the problem in the language I used!

I had one of our most senior engineers, who has worked in this language's compiler, to try to solve the exercise. Instead of 40 minutes, it took him three hours!

If a candidate is going to interview in a language, for the love of god, have as a prereq that the interviewer is actually capable of doing the exercise in that language.

Yes! Would be interested in seeing how much coding they ask for when interviewing for devops or ops positions.

Some orgs require only scripting, some go so far as to want application engineers who also know everything about AWS for devops/ops roles.

Disclaimer: I already asked via their google form for this information to be added in their docs.

I haven't followed the recent updates to our interview process closely but we traditionally looked for general knowledge over specific knowledge. I'm not sure how much that has changed recently though.

Edited In Response To Parent Edit: Thanks for asking! We should definitely make it clearer if there are differences per role.

So very awesome of you. Thank you for the reply!

"looked for general knowledge over specific knowledge" - incidentally, I was rejected because I could not answer (to the interviewer's satisfaction) how to implement an in-memory LRU cache. I made some good recommendations but the interviewers were expecting a very specific answer which exactly matched http://www.programcreek.com/2013/03/leetcode-lru-cache-java/

> looked for general knowledge over specific knowledge

This is one commonly thrown BS regarding interviews. At the end of the day it is all about one-dimensional usual algorithmic questions.

Regarding LRU cache, I think this is one of less crazy interview questions. In one phone interview, I had to solve a DP problem, code it perfectly and pass all the test-cases on HackerRank in less than twenty minutes. I am not certain how many developers out there can pass such interviews without months of preparation in such situations. Tech interviews are basically programming contests. I am not against programming contests or algorithmic questions. But it seems the interview questions are getting crazier day by day.

Why is it more interesting? The purpose of the blog post is to explain the rationale for the guide itself and directly links to it. I find it just as interesting to read about why they're doing it.

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