Hacker News Reader

Comment by sg47 | Hacker News Reader

Most tech interviews especially for engineers are a one-sided power dynamic that does nothing except make the candidate nervous and eventually rejects them arbitrarily. The ones that do get a job seem to think that that's the only way to interview people and this cycle continues. What happens is this becomes a boys club that excludes anyone else.

View on HN

This is more apparent for people with anxiety too. My mind shuts down during whiteboarding, yet people generally seem to think I'm smart outside any of those scenarios.

I've already been employed for several years at different places, doing a whole range of things, and it's weird that I have to practice some arbitrary exercises in order to demonstrate to a company that I can work. This has led to me landing at companies that don't require the bizarre jumping-through-hoops that filters for the desperate and "committed".

And so far, I've not only yet to see interview-style programming on the job, I've seen utterly atrocious practices.

Absolutely. There's no reason to do this. No one has written code on a whiteboard at work. To do this just for interviews is very silly. You've to also second guess what the interviewer expects from you. Not every interviewer is calibrated the same way.

If I could it my way, I'd start with a 30-minute briefing session on the coding test that's to follow. 1-1.5 hour coding project - implement an API or something. 45 minutes where you review some code (maybe intentional bad code). 1 hour writing a design document. 1 hour presenting the design doc to a couple of team members. Couple of behavioral sessions with team members/manager.

But why even have any of it? In what other private sector field is there any sort of requirement to continuously re-prove your qualifications beyond your education and prior work experience? The answer is none.

There are fieldS with more complicated knowledge than tech/CS that don’t put their candidates through this type of interview process. Not doctors, nor lawyers, nor scientists and engineers (electrical/mechanical/civil).

The technical interview process is absurd on its very premise, and should be outlawed.

The problem is, no other field allows you to copy/paste code from Stack Overflow, call yourself a "Senior" Engineer after 2 years of experience, etc. There are lots of really crappy programmers out there. The process is to weed them out. Unfortunately it's also biased against the good engineers. In my opinion, this weeding out can be done during the phone interview or initial coding test.

I think the concern over candidate fraud is over exaggerated. Other fields don’t have any special way to identify fraudulent candidates - anyone can misrepresent experience in any field, and the only way to reliably identify it is in their actual work product. I see no reason why tech should be any different. Especially when nearly all tech jobs are under at-will employment. The cost of replacing a position is the same as in any other field.

I work for a FAANG company. The interviews were quite stressful, and my goal for every question was to push through and at the very least make some progress instead of giving up.

I don't make use of any of the algorithmic skills I was interviewed on, but I do have to push through stressful situations regularly and make progress in a timely fashion. I do think that if I weren't able to do that during an interview situation, I wouldn't have been able to do that on the job.

Maybe I wouldn't have any stress in my current position if I were 10x smarter or 10x more experienced/knowledgable, but that would also indicate that I were underleveled.

I'm certain there are many smart and skilled individuals that wouldn't be able to consistently make it past a tech interview loop unless they put in lots of "unnecessary" extra work.

> I do have to push through stressful situations regularly and make progress in a timely fashion.

You mean like everyone else in (almost) every single job ever? Do you think developers at inferior companies just sit around blissfully typing away with half of their brains shut off?

Those interview processes say practically nothing about candidate’s fit/performance for the job. This has been shown to be true many times. The awkward hoops put in place just result in the interviewer having ample convenient opportunities to turn down a candidate for any reason. Like maybe in the back of their mind, deep deep down inside, they actually don’t want to hire that black person who just wasted weeks or months of their life grinding useless leetcode questions.

There's stress everywhere, agreed. In my experience, holding all else equal the amount of stress you have is correlated with the cost of screwing something up or of not delivering on time. Holding all else equal, that is also correlated with compensation, and if stress is too high relative to compensation that either means you're getting a bad deal or you're in over your head.

> Like maybe in the back of their mind, deep deep down inside, they actually don’t want to hire that black person who just wasted weeks or months of their life grinding useless leetcode questions.

That's a reason to push for standardized interviews with objective questions, so you decrease the effect of interviewer bias and focus on candidate performance.

There's definitely something to be said here though about increasing the knowledge of how to get into top tech companies for disadvantaged groups, because I don't think it's common knowledge.

Based on what you wrote, I believe you need better managers, not better developers.

This is a giant red flag :

I do have to push through stressful situations regularly and make progress in a timely fashion

Also based on the same argument, its kind of obvious your hiring process at all levels isn't working.

Can you expand on why you believe these sorts of interviews don't offer good signal? Having gone through a couple of these interview cycles, I felt the behavioral questions adequately demonstrated how I'd perform in similar situations.

Behavioral questions are fine. Some like top grading are not. I had someone ask me about my choices right from my senior year in high school and my choice of college, etc. Well, I was extremely depressed in high school and didn't do well in my entrance exams, got into an average college but was actively programming by myself and turned my life around in my junior year in college. I wouldn't have fit into the interviewer's expected stereotype of someone who has been excellent since high school.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com