Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

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> the interview process is hard

Nah. I've interviewed at a lot of places where I sort of enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate my soft skills. I can't say I'm looking forward to my FB & Google interviews(quite the opposite). My Amazon interview experience absolutely sucked(not a single question relating to the job, stupid algorithm gotcha questions).

Most companies, IME, are much easier. For instance, there is a large media company which pays competitively to FANG companies and the only thing I need to do to prep for the interview is memorize the algorithmic cost and backing algorithms of the common C++ STL container classes. For my current job(arguably not the greatest gig), I had to demonstrate my knowledge of Python, C++, kernel programming and networking. I know those things, and enjoyed demonstrating that. I enjoyed talking about my past work. My biggest worry was choosing the button up shirt I was going to wear. That's how interviews should work.

Many interviews are hard, but there's a distinct difference between good hard and bad hard.

My current gig interviews were all deep storage strategy conversations and hard in the sense of needing to show a lot of knowledge articulately. I left there feeling really good if exhausted.

My Google interviews were hard in the sense of embarrassing regurgitation and thinking nonsense on one's feet. Hard was being made to feel inferior.

Hard was being made to feel inferior.

I had an interview experience, where the interviewer was looking for a particular answer. I give him 3 answers to his design issue. Then the interviewer says he was looking for the 2nd answer I gave him, as if I didn't just say it.

It's one thing to reach and fail. It's another thing to be in a context where the truth of what you know doesn't even matter.

The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience.

I think the next time I see it, I'm just going to question whether this is how they behave in their job too, even if it means ending the interview right there.

The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience.

How is this distinguishable from the interviewer hearing something from the candidate where an understandable reaction is to stay silent and look dubious? I've had candidates try to tell me something like: a null pointer member of a struct in C++ takes up no data. The first part of what you described was my natural reaction, not a hazing strategy. (I then went on to ask if they were sure about that.)

I had a Google interview where the interviewer started by saying we will start with a warm up question and then we would go into a real question.

The warm up question was difficult and I was completely embarrassed that I didn't some it right away. As I walked out I knew for certain that was not a warm up question and was pissed that he had consciously shaken my confidence right off the bat.

The warm up question was difficult and I was completely embarrassed that I didn't some it right away. As I walked out I knew for certain that was not a warm up question and was pissed that he had consciously shaken my confidence right off the bat.

How do you know it wasn't just a badly written question? Interviewing is hard in the same way that teaching and writing is. It's hard to put yourself into another person's shoes. Never ascribe malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.

You are right. It is possible. I did have to write a bit of code to get the work done correctly and he seemed satisfied with the progress, but I may have done it inefficiently and he was encouraging.

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