Hacker News Reader

Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

That's what's I thought too. At one of the companies I interviewed at, we had a programming task that could take max 4 hours. The interview was at the company itself.

Less convenient for people who have a different job at the same time though.

View on HN

They are not selecting for individuals with an ability to do the job, punch out at the right time, and then live their lives.

Corporations love obsessive-compulsive workers who feel thankful to have the job, are willing to sacrifice personal time towards their business goals and would never dream to unionize or otherwise engage in collective bargaining. They want solitary and competitive workaholics, that's the whole point of 'homeworks'.

You are selecting for people who make it impossible to realistically plan deadlines.

A.k.a individuals who accept whatever deadline is imposed onto them and work round the clock to meet it instead of telling management they failed to properly assign time and resources to the project.

I won't spend half a day in your building without being paid. At home, I can split the task. Beside, 4 hours task is a bad joke. I interview at a lot of different companies. I have no time for this.

My policy, before finding a place I like and plan to stick around at, is no programming tasks. There's plenty of companies desperate to hire than you can be picky if you know your stuff. I also will walk out if they start up with those 'clever' programming questions that have nothing to do with the job.

Can you illustrate that in practice?

You took out the time to go to some office. You just spent an hour talking about your hobbies and attitudes and the company's working culture etc. Then, a programmer asks you to balance a red/black tree. You do.. what? You angrily throw the marker on the ground, cry insult, and run out the building? No, right? So then what?

I see this repeated a lot on HN and I'm not sure I'd have the guts to walk out of an interview. To be honest, I doubt many people do.

> You took out the time to go to some office.

How about a phone call or a quick email to ask what is their hiring process, what is the work and how it is usually fulfill?

In the current market you are not a seller, you are the buyer. Why should I consider working for you?

In the current market there’s abundance of junior or mid-level developers from body shops applying to senior level positions. If you cannot stand from this crowd and shine by balancing the tree right, why someone would care hiring you? I can tell you plenty of stories about people who had impressive background and great soft skills, but in the end barely can do their job.

On a first date you don't do boring everyday stuff becouse you don't want to spend time on that.

My experience is that hireing descicion is so noisy that there are no reason to invest too much since the rate of sucess is barely increased anyway.

The more picky the employer seems the less reason to apply. It might be a internal candidate allready chosen or they are just hoarding resumés to keep recruiters occipied.

The decision is allready made from the from the first minutes ... but you can ruin it of course.

> If you cannot stand from this crowd and shine by balancing the tree right

I don't think memorization of an algorithm is what should make a senior level candidate stand out. Senior people need to be able to lead, mentor, self manage (this is a huge one IMO), and understand the bigger picture. "How do we avoid having to balance this tree at all?"

This is brilliant!

The role of the senior Engineer isn't to tell you how to balance the tree. You, or anyone you instruct to, can simply ask google that or use a library.

Their role is to ask why we need to balance the tree. You very definitely can't ask google that, and that's why you need to hire a senior Engineer.

It’s one of the ways, for sure. But it is really interesting to me how a person without deep knowledge of fundamentals can lead or mentor anyone while being on a non-management position? They are supposed to gain authority from their professionalism, but without theoretical knowledge they won’t be able to justify their decisions, and then what? What exactly they can teach anyone?

As a senior/lead developer with years of broad experience you don't need to remember details of every algorithm in existence. But you should keep information scrap in your head to guide you or your apprentice to relevant source of information.

"Hi <dev name>! I think we may need to optimize memory consumption of this distinct element counting code a bit; I remember there is some HyperLogLog algorithm which should help here... let's check how it goes... (reading Wikipedia page)[0]"

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog

Do you take this approach for jobs to which you actively applied in the first place, or only jobs for which they reached out to you first?

I'm with your comment's parent: I don't think I'd have the guts to walk out of an interview either, especially for a job I applied to first.

The last time I applied to a company, I ask them all of this. Something in those lines "Hello, I use your product FooBarTools everyday and it help me a lot. I really like it. It is nice piece of software. bla bla bla. I see that you have some opening positions in your careers page. bla bla bla. I would love to be a part of the improvement of FooBarTools. bla bla. What is your hiring process? What do you expect a senior/midlevel/junior should be able to do? bla bla. Thank you for your time. Have a nice day."

For company who reach me, it is mandatory.

Ya I get emails like this coming in from my contact form too. Honestly though it's very hard to distinguish real ones from spam so I never respond.

I'm not sure this is the best approach...

> I don't think I'd have the guts to walk out of an interview either, especially for a job I applied to first.

Have you no common courtesy? I terminate the process as soon as I find out I'm not a good fit for the company or vice versa, no matter who initiated first. Continuing with an interview when I'm sure I'm going to decline is just wasting everybody's time.

Maybe, but from a self serving standpoint acquiring multiple offers drastically helps your negotiating position.

Good point. That never even occurred to me.

Not really in this case. If you go to the job you like saying that the shitjob offered you 2x the salary... and they call your bluff? Now what? Take the shit job you are not going to take? For that you could have bluffed with an empty hand anyway.

I was condoning lying about offers or salaries on offer, just that having more offers signals a perspective employer that you're a desirable candidate.

I've heard of companies asking for proof of other offers so saying so and so offered me 2x is a very risky play if untrue.

> I've heard of companies asking for proof of other offers so saying so and so offered me 2x is a very risky play if untrue.

My point is that it is also risky if it is true, but the other offer is not a job you would take.

Then you keep interviewing. I don't understand why you seem to think negotiating over salary is somehow "risky." It happens all the time.

I just use recruiters to do all the leg work and tell them my requirements. Always had made sure to still bring it up during the phone screening. Only once had they brought me in and started with the quiz nonsense.

> Can you illustrate that in practice?

I have walked out of interviews as well. Sometimes the interviewer and I discover together that the recruiter we worked with didn't know their job, at all!

More often, though, it sort of was clear from the start of the interview that the company would not be a good fit for me. I would tell them so, and my reasons why I thought so, and leave after thanking them for their time.

If they ask me to do some simple programming task, I ask them if they have looked at my Github repository and what they think they will learn during the simple task they could not from my repository. If they do would have a good answer for that, for example they want to get to know my thought processes while coding, I am happy to oblige. But if they clearly have not looked at my Github repositories, nor have any inclination to customize the interview process, I tell that I do not believe in the validity of the process.

I have also walked away twice during the one-month trial period. Once the company was unable to find a project for me, even though they kept on promising there would be one for me soon. The other time I discovered I was unable to combine working full-time with finishing writing my PhD thesis.

Anyway, I also found that in half of the cases I walked out, the other party did understand and accepted why.

Of course, it is easy to walk away when you know you will find a job soon anyway and even if you would not you will get some support from the government anyway.

You have it all backwards. Companies shouldn't be making custom interview processes just for you. That hurts the accuracy of the process.

A cute thing to do whenever someone sandbags you with trivia is to suggest going over to the developer desks and asking everyone in turn if they know the answer. If you find someone that does, you answered the question. If you don't, then you suggest doing a web search, and you have also shamed your interviewer.

If they don't wave you off at the suggestion, you also get to meet everyone and see their work environment.

I did. I walked into the hiring manager's office and he barely looked up while asking me to decode the complex declaration on the white board that wrapped twice. My departing words were along the lines of: if you and your team write code like that, this is not a match. So I left.

I remember an interview at Coinbase I should have walked out of. The first question was "what is the angle between the hour and minute hands of an analog clock at 3:15?" It went downhill from there.

I have a large-ish personal project to show and if 700+ commits of my code don't tell them enough, nothing will.

From my experience, you're in the minority.

In having a large private codebase to show prospect clients or employers? Or in having it accepted as an alternative to standardized tests?

Having it to show. I'd happily accept that in place of a coding challenge, but sadly incredibly few candidates have anything they can show.

I think you're totally right to walk out on puzzle questions. But if you avoid companies that make sure you can program, aren't you worried about the skills of your colleagues?

There's other ways to evaluate if someone can program. A "4 hour" take home test for example isn't a good one as they could easily cheat or spend more time on it. In person tests are often setup to test your memorization which let's be real, how many of us don't google stuff on the daily?

What I feel is more important is a persons thought process on how they approach a problem and come to a solution.

I can offer different perspective here: what about a task which also has some value for you? I rarely give tasks to candidates and only in cases where otherwise good candidate is not familiar with our technology stack. The task in that case is to build a proof of concept on that stack and requires fast learning and general understanding of software architecture. I always give detailed feedback on completed solutions. Even if the candidate was not selected, they still can take something from it and won’t consider it wasted time.

I would never spend 4 hours on a task after hours for a company I'm interviewing for, that is my time and I value my work life balance. It is my humble opinion that a serious interview should take max 1 hour.

If you don’t see any value in learning and trying something new, I can understand it. At the same time there are plenty of people who see it differently and accept such challenge, willing to commit much more time to this kind of task. Maybe it’s not the kind of the job you would be interested in, but then why your opinion on it would matter?

One hour interview cannot be more than just screening, when split 50-50 to give candidates enough time to ask their questions. It leaves ridiculously small amount of time to the really interesting technical topics. And this discussion is important: CVs are not trustworthy, plenty of people lie or exaggerate the facts — only a live talk can verify the necessary knowledge, experience and skills. It may not be enough, true, but hiring someone after barely speaking to him is unnecessary risk. And hiring someone without necessary practical knowledge and without proving the ability to learn quickly is the same.

It's not a marriage, it's a job, and if you can't screen someone in a hour interview then you're doing it wrong. Have two rounds of interviews, whatever, if a company wants me to learn some skill they need then they can offer training as one of the benefits of the job.

It’s entirely possible that you spend more of your life with the person you’ve just hired than your spouse.

Working for this Ivan guy it's entirely possible. Jokes aside though, I've worked for great companies and each had an hour interview and things were fine, people that didn't fit the culture just left and I can't imagine dedicating 4 hours to one interview because frankly speaking I have better things to do and a company that values a work life balance will respect that and keep their interviews short.

if you can't screen someone in a hour interview then you're doing it wrong

Are you sure you meant to say what you wrote? I'm not aware of any place that has figured out how to properly screen candidates in one hour. If you know how to do it, please share, it would help all of us.

Perhaps you should be more selective about wich companies you advance beyond the intro chat with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com