Comment by wh-uws | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wh-uws | Hacker News Reader

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Some permutation of this comment is made litterally everytime any coding interview resource is posted.

I'm sorry man no cares that you and everyone who upvoted this comment are Super God programmers with 30 offers everytime they say they are looking who can afford to tell every company where they can stuff their interview.

Us mere mortals are willing to do whatever it takes to get our dream gigs.

These guides are largely targeted are getting into the some of the best, thus pickiest and most selective, companies in the world.

And if getting on means being a dsalgo monkey in front of a whiteboard for a few hours so be it.

Let us share interview tips in peace please.

This "hurr durr technical interviews suck" but I have no real alternative and have never built a company nor seen any really flourish at the top without this is monotonous.

Put your money where your mouth is and start and only support companies that skip these kinds of interviews.

Like these fine people

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

But the snarky comments are beyond annoying.

I think the parent is implying they’re not a Super God programmer, and some of these interviewers are expecting them to be, when in fact their company has no need of such a programmer.

My own opinion is let’s ignore companies that make us jump through hoops, as it only encourages them to become increasingly ridiculous.

> My own opinion is let’s ignore companies that make us jump through hoops, as it only encourages them to become increasingly ridiculous.

Unfortunately not everyone is in a position to do that.. "beggars can't be choosers"

I find it interesting that in the span of 3 comments it’s gone from “this company is only looking for the best of the best” to “beggars can’t be choosers”.

I’m of the opinion that if you are a company having trouble hiring people (everyone other than google/amazon) you should not copy their interview process.

There are great developers out there that do not do well in these interview environments, who are not worse than those who do well in them.

If you are going for a high power attorney partner job at a big firm they do not ask you to recite obscure case law. Id you are a master carpenter they do not ask you to build a cabinet using a hand lathe.

IMO provable previous work experience if a candidate has it should trump conceptual knowledge spewing, and interviews that ignore experience and give the same theoretical knowledge quiz as they do a new grad are shooting themselves in the foot. And I think everyone knows it, but most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do.

Tut most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do.

Yup, that seems to be it.

As if there's some "secret sauce" to interviewing that all the other shops know except their own.

Yes and this logic is essentially "if it works for a publicly traded company that has 25,000 full time engineers then surely it's the right approach for our start up of 25 people total."

Whether it actually works for those companies (beyond a placebo-like effect) is open to question.

But the bigger point is that - even assuming for the sake of argument that these questions actually do "work", on some leel - they've become such a huge fad that people are just adopting them solely on the basis of authority, without intrinsically understanding why these questions work, or more importantly, how to interpret candidates' responses to them

In other words, they're just following a script. I wouldn't say quite it's on "blind faith", per se (because the companies do have some reputation). But it's not much better than blind faith. Such that this precious quote of yours, from just a few days ago, seems quite apt here:

This practice of blindly adopting ideas just because they work for Google needs to stop.

The truth is you just don’t know, and you have to go off of hunches - the google panel rejects on hunches all the time, regardless of the systems they put in place to minimize it.

Yup - the hunch factor isn't a "bug"; it's absolutely intrinsic to the process. Not only is fundamentally irreducible - you wouldn't want to completely remove it from the process, even if you could.

So I guess the problem with objective-seeming (and often just simply gratuitously hard) "filter" questions like those suggested here is that their real purpose seems to be give the process an appearance of objectivity - "We had a guy in here, his code samples looked great, and he talked a great game and all -- but would ya believe, he totally froze on that Lego robot puzzle question! What a poser!" -- when of course it's never going to be anything of the sort.

> I find it interesting that in the span of 3 comments it’s gone from “this company is only looking for the best of the best” to “beggars can’t be choosers”.

Why is that weird? The "beggars" I was referring to are people looking for jobs, not employers, so those actually seem like things that would go hand in hand, since if all companies only want the best of the best there will be many people without a job. Thankfully it seems like companies all have a different idea of what the "best" is so I am still employed

>"Us mere mortals are willing to do whatever it takes to get our dream gigs."

How do you know it is you "dream gig" until you have actually worked there? Have you never been excited to accept an offer from a company only to get there and realize its just the same old bag of petty politics, egos, kool-aid drinking and grunt work?

Google, Facebook and the rest of the big SV companies that "only hire the best" are no different than any other big corporation. Also not everyone that works at these big SV companies gets to work on the really interesting and sexy projects.

There seems to be this myth that if you can just pass the Google or FB white board interview you will have it made and your "dream job" awaits. The propagation of this myth has given life to a whole cottage industry of prep courses and books on how to pass them.

I also think you have misunderstood the OPs position, I don't think they were saying that they were a programming god who can't dictate where they work, quite the opposite.

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