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Comment by shankr | Hacker News Reader

Truthfully, you don't have enough time. There are so many candidates who basically eat and breathe Data Structure and Algorithm for at least few months so that they can get into big five that your last one week preparation might not match up to them, especially without any prior experience like a course. I don't want to demoralize you, but how about you tell them that you aren't prepared right now, and would like to interview after 4-5 months. I think these companies are always looking for good talent, and don't mind interviewing someone later if they find the profile interesting.

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This sounds like great advice, but it's very funny from a distance. "I think I'm a great candidate for the work you need done, but your interview process has nothing to do with that. As such, I'll need to reschedule so I can spend a few months gaming that process."

I'm excited to be interviewing programmers in the near future as our company grows. I have to think through a lot of things, but I'd like to focus on: Have you successfully deployed an application before? How have you overcome the technical challenges of programming on a team. How have you improved your abilities over time. Explain something you're proud of creating in the format you're most comfortable with. How do you power through losing passion about a project? How comfortable will you be learning new frameworks and paradigms? Prove to me that you're an able programmer in whatever format you'd prefer. Etc.

All questions available ahead of time. Try to keep things comfortable for the candidate. Enough depth and variance to figure out if they have the technical skills you need. You get to see how they like to work.

An honest question for HN: has anyone really been in a project whose primary reason for failure was the lack of engineering talent? I have worked in micro/small businesses and large enterprise environments, and this has never been the case. The projects I have seen fail usually do so due to poor management, poor performers are typically fired unless they can pull one over management to make themselves seem more competent than they really are (not that difficult with bad management)

My experience matches yours.

I have. It's a long and interesting story, full of intrigue, backstabbing, hacking, and corporate espionage. But in summary:

Owners started tech business using trust-fund money. They were extremely non-technical, scared of computers to be honest. They hired people that were like them (also non-technical), and didn't have the ability to properly vet candidates. Tech staff was hired basically off of Craig's List with very little interviewing. Tech was built and company got large enough to get a couple contracts (heavily influenced by owners' existing personal connections).

As you'd expect, tech stack started creaking under the load. At first tech staff thought they had everything under control (strong Dunning-Kruger effect, bolstered by early successes). Eventually tech staff realized how badly things were going and started lying to management to cover for their own incompetence.

Decent tech management was hired (I think by accident) and the tech staff saw the writing on the wall. The entire tech staff just didn't show up to work one day. Left without any notice or warning (the more intriguing stuff tangents off here). New, more capable tech staff was hired (including me). At this point the system was hemorrhaging data and users. We triaged, stemmed the bleeding, and built out a decent infrastructure with a decent tech stack.

Unfortunately for them that was too late. The contracts had fairly stiff penalties for non-compliance, and the company was in non-compliance for a looooooong time. The owners had made some false statements about the assets of the company, and settlements offered were based on those statement, far too high for the company to pay. Other companies were pissed about that and took it to court. Owners ended up getting taken to the cleaners and lost pretty much everything, including a bunch of assets that they had owned before but transferred to the company (including real estate) in some fairly shady tax dodge scheme.

Ultimately the world is a better place now that this company doesn't exist. It operated in an extremely sketchy manner, and I left when I found out the gist of what was going on. I learned the earlier and later parts of the story from personal connections.

Does that count? I mean, ultimately I think if you have poor engineering talent then it's management's fault. But you can make that argument for any corporate issue: it's management's fault for not recognizing the problem and addressing it soon enough.

In the short term, no. Companies hire in order to support the growth they are projecting. Over the course of a year though a stressed team will achieve less, introduce more bugs, and make poor long term architectural decisions.

I don't think this is exactly the issue the interviews are trying to prevent... As mentioned by a commentator below, once somebody is hired it would be extremely hard to get them out, especially for big corps. "Project failure" is an extreme case but the loss can still be huge. Therefore the employer just wants to be rather safe than sorry with a set of standardized tests it seems.

Also, to be able to thoroughly study for and prepare for something on one's own, this on itself probably illustrates a lot about this person's qualities already. Of course it would be theoretically nice to spend all this time and energy on something that is unique to every person, but that is not totally realistic and would be hard to evaluate. One can still do that with their side projects though.

It's kind of sad, this state that interviewing has become where people spend months to prepare to pass a rather arbitrarily selected coding question that is supposed to tell the company whether they are good enough to go onto an even more intense, rather arbitrary in-person interview. And now you have companies popping up to offer you practice in said problems. It's worse than the SATs. Facebook even now has started having online webinars with an actual Facebook engineer that tells you how to prepare. Whatever happened to just fizzbuzz?

I think in a sense such standardization is always the price you have to pay for the popularization/mass adoption of anything. People have to find some sort of "established standards", some common grounds, as a compromise, as it becomes practically impossible/very hard to adopt a unique, custom-made solution to each applicant while still giving all of them the same fair chance and ensuring the quality of the results. The risks simply become great.

It's similar to what happened to higher education: 400 years ago higher-ed diplomas were extremely rare and it were mostly people who really held on to something to study, something to look into, that did those stuffs, and the institution could adapt to their needs individually. However, now that a huge percentage of the population get higher-ed diplomas, there has to be a standardized procedure to stuffs like university admission, issuance of doctoral degrees, etc.

What would you do if you were on the employer's side? Eventually people have to find a compromise and this is the solution that they came up with. Guess if I were on their side it would be hard for me to come up with something better and "safer". Also, it does suck to have to sit for exams which aren't necessarily directly related to the actual skills, but on the other hand I would say that that what I learned via SAT did indeed help my future studies, both in the university and by myself. I guess coding interviews can be perceived as something similar. There's no use complaining about the situation. One just has to face up to it and ace it, especially given how everybody else just has to go through the same. It's not something entirely ludicrous/Kafkasque after all.

I second that. I had no problem rescheduling interviews by several months with Big Five-style companies (including Big Five) in the past.

OT question: what do you do in the meantime? Usually, those months prepping for interviews are: - if a graduating student, while you are graduating? - grabbing a "worse" job waiting for the interview?

Ideally you are in college or in a job already. I guess if you’re in between then it makes sense to get another job. After all there is really no guarantee you will land the job at big 5 even after all the prep.

"It makes sense to get another job". The problem there though is that almost every company now, at least in the Bay Area, seems to be doing these coding screens as that is now the standard set by the big 5. I guess you could consider it live practice.

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