Not so great experience interviewing at Twitter

You dodged a bullet. Companies that hire people like this are never fun to work at. Usually bigger companies suffer from this issue.

My Google interviews were similar. A guy had me write an algorithm for scoring bowling, then after everything asked me to "turn it into an API" without specifying anything beyond that.

I asked a few questions about the use cases and he refused to expand.

At that point I had no choice but to just start adding weird methods and turning the one-shot algorithm into an iterative scoring class (where you could calculate score as you added frames) and the guy started to nitpick literally everything I did.

"Why did you indent here?" Because a new block of code is there. "Why did you put the brace on the same line?" Because I like to follow 1tb style personally, but I can change it if you'd like. "Yes please do."

Then was rejected, without any feedback other than "perhaps consider brushing up on your coding abilities, or take a code camp and try again in 6 months". I've been writing code for 20 years, 11 professionally. It is, quite literally, almost all I ever do.

Ultimately realized how terrible of a company Google was, anyway, so I dodged a bullet in the end. But you just kind of have to learn to roll with these punches.

Thank you so much for your sincere feedback. I appreciate it. Thank you

wow i never want to work at Google if that's what working there is like.

Oof, that sounds like such a terrible interview experience, I'm sorry to hear it. I'm glad to say my Google interview wasn't like that at all. In my experience working at Google, code reviewers are more likely to communicate their expectations clearly, and less likely to request arbitrary style changes, than at my previous startup job.

After interviewing at multiple FAANGs, I would advise against generalising company culture based on single interview incidents. Sure, it is not nice but well...it happens. They are interviewing hundreds of people, employing thousands of engineers, and these engineers are also training themselves in the context of interview skills. Assuming the Google interviewer was honest in his feedback (i.e. noted down wrong indentation as a minus), I would bet this is caught somewhere in the hiring review process, eventually pointed out and corrected on Google side. The downside is, sadly, that you get rejected, but ultimately these companies can afford rejecting good candidates.

> They are interviewing hundreds of people...

And yet they're still terrible at interviewing.

Why?

I guess because there is no "lessons learnt" or "how to interview" thinking-- just grab someone from the canteen "Hey bud, you doing the interviewing today".

(and if you think I'm exaggerating-- thats how Steve Yegge described it when he was interviewing at Google, though it migth have changed since then)

Some speculation: They have very little feedback about how interviews went from the rejected candidate's perspective. They withhold feedback about the candidate so even if they did ask for feedback, it would be uninformed. Those that do get hired are the ones that went successfully through the broken interview process so they propagate it to their candidates as if it's the correct thing to do.

Spot on. My hunch is you're correct.

My radical proposal is to record interviews, for later playback and study.

Ages ago, I ran for office. Very similar hazing ritual.

The recorded endorsement interviews were generally terrific. Only one of the unrecorded interviews was constructive; I wish it had been recorded.

The majority of unrecorded interviews were shit shows. Which then seeded more drama. I quickly learned to make my own recordings. Kinda like having dash cams.

This is exactly my take, too. Once someone is rejected, the communication ends there for fear of litigation.

And the spiral continues.

Time crunch, pressure to deliver while interviewing a large number of candidates, lack of feedback provided from the candidate, lack of formal guidance or training in what to look for, quality control over the hiring assembly line, sometimes people have a bad day, and so much more.

The biggest reason is lack of internal quality control. You can't record the interview for later review. Experienced interviewers do not observe or "crash" interviews so feedback can be given to the interviewer.

Even my experience at google was terrible.

'Not the most efficient solution' was the feedback, even though all that was happening was that their method required 1 loop and mine had split those operations into 2 loops, with exactly the same time and space complexity.

Oh, and I had immediately taken their hint to modify my code anyway and the solution was working in both cases.

It's a random process. I think the comments here are misleading.

FAANG and peers set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire. The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire. People run the gauntlet. You can do the stats, but it:

- Misses a majority of good hires

- Rejects a supermajority of bad hires

Unless you are 1-2 std. div. above a typical Googler, you should expect multiple interviews before you're hired. If you're qualified, and it's 1 std div, it takes about 3-4 tries. If it's 2 std. div, it takes 20(!) tries. If you're underqualified, that goes up very rapidly, and if you're overqualified, it goes down a bit.

Few people are overqualified on all axes (soft skills, coding, system design, etc.), so virtually everyone runs into rejections like this. The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.

> The sooner you learn to deal with rejection, the better off you are.

Definitely a good advice. Thank you. I appreciate it.

What do you mean when you say “1 to 2 std div above….”?

It sound probably be "std dev", shorthand for "standard deviation".

Yup. The stupid brain version of a typo.

* Setting the bar at 2 std dev means you need to interview 20 candidates at your hiring cut-off to find one you believe is qualified. The other 19 qualified candidates get rejected by chance.

* Setting the bar at 1 std dev means you need to interview 3-4 candidates to find one who you believe is qualified. The other 2-3 are rejected by chance.

Of course, most candidates aren't right at cut-off, so it's not quite 1:20, but it is pretty random. A good model for hiring, from the candidate side, is that you interview. If you pass, you role a die, just like in an RPG.

Unless you're coming in through a side door or a backdoor, rejections are just part of life. People take it personally, and fault the interviewer for a bad process, but interviewing is fundamentally a very noise measurement. It's the only way we've found to get good employees at scale:

* You set an unreasonably high bar.

* You interview a lot of people.

* Occasionally, qualified candidates pass by chance, but the majority are rejected.

* If you set the bar high enough, unqualified candidates will rarely pass by chance, by virtue of how Gaussian curves look

I'm still confused. Standard deviation of what? What is being measured here?

Certainly not clarity of written communication.

Some measure of employee quality, as evidenced in the interview. To make this simple, let's take an exam instead of an interview:

* Let's say I was hiring someone to do calculus.

* I want applicants who typically score at least a 90% on a calculus AP. The exam has a std. dev. of 3 points.

* I get an applicant, and I give them an AP exam.

* They score a 91. What do I do?

That means they are 1/3 of a std. dev. above my cut-off. They might typically score 88 and got a little bit lucky, or even 85 and got very lucky. Or they might typically score a 94, and got unlucky.

If I hire that person, although they're probably qualified (assuming a uniform distribution of applicants), I'll get a lot of bad hires.

To avoid that, I set the cut-off at 93% or 96%. This means I intentionally reject most people who meet my cut-off. On the other hand, if I hire someone, I can be pretty confident they're qualified.

The cut-off needs to be high in part since the distribution of applicants isn't uniform. Most applicants are unqualified morons. Qualified people will apply to a few places, and are quickly hired. Unqualified people will apply over, and over, and over, everywhere they can.

>Unqualified people will apply >over, and over, and over, >everywhere they can

Given this is true, won’t it be the case that you’d hire more people who were unqualified but repeatedly got better at interviews as opposed to the qualified one(someone who always gets 91 or 92 in your example)

You’ll actually end up hiring folks who are not good at what they do but people who got better at interviews.

As a point of fact, that's kinda what happens at big firms. No one has yet figured out a better model. There isn't a magic oracle to point you to perfect employees.

That's not really how it happens, though. You get people who are really good at whiteboard coding and little invert-a-tree type exercises, with no other skills. Most don't do this through interviewing over and over, but by practicing online. You end up with big companies full of people with nothing better to do with their time.

A lot of the people who interview over and over really have no idea what they're doing wrong. Employers don't give feedback, aside from "Thank you. We'll let you know. [ghost]," or at best "Thank you. We filled the role." A half-dozen interviews helps, but from then, it's rapidly diminishing returns.

I like startups, where you can do all sorts of side and back hiring channels, but none of those scale above maybe 100 people, and usually not past a dozen.

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A "standard div", I like it!

I think there is another angle of this that a "good hire" that is missed because of ridiculous interview practices could potentially be an exceptionally great hire over time. If anything, FAANG companies are probably an ideal environment for people to deepen skills.

I think, based on comments here and elsewhere, FAANG companies always have job postings up and are always interviewing simply to vacuum talent up from competition and to project the image of an ever expanding company that is hard to get into. I wouldn't like to be forced into interviewing candidates for essentially generic job postings where the majority of outcomes for candidates is negative. How depressing.

"The cost of a bad hire is much higher than the cost of a missed good hire."

I see this all the time, but never anyone backing it up with studies.

I'm not calling you out specifically - but rather, I wonder, does anyone here have any comprehensive study on this topic that they can link?

(I'm asking, because this industry is littered with dubious claims that sooner or later become accepted as facts)

It's one of those things, if you've ever managed a larger team, that's incredibly, incredibly obvious.

A single bad hire can suck up the vast majority of your management time, drain team morale, drain it further when you inevitably fire them, open you up to liability, and generally make your life miserable.

Bad hires do slip in, and each time they do, BOY does it suck.

You need a study for this just about as much as you need a study for "Don't touch the kitchen burner."

> ...set the bar about 1-2 std. div. above their typical hire.

How's that metric determined? For the candidate, current staff, and interviewer themself?

I don't think this sounds 'bad'

For some random and arbitrary reason you and this existing employee didn't get on and are likely not to work well together.

This fact is obvious to them, to you and even HR - everyone is in agreement on this.

I wouldn't look as the rejection as just personal criticism of you - I'd see it as rejection of a team consisting of you and them. Unfortunately as they're the current employee and you're the applicant, you get the shitty end of this 'team rejection stick'.

I'd take the suggestion to "apply to other teams" as strong positive feedback and do just as they suggest. I'm sure Twitter has a long and illutrious applicant list, so if they didn't think you were a fit for the company they could have just told you (or not) and phoned the next person.

Thank you so much for the sincere feedback. I truly appreciate it.

Sorry to hear about that experience. People can be truly shitty sometimes.

I got told I "didn't have enough C# proficiency, and this role is unsuitable for C# learners" on a take-home assignment recently. I found that feedback point interesting but vague, so I pushed my luck and quizzed the recruiter further. Apparently the problem was using C# 9 features (pattern matching, record types). I'm not really a cynical person, but I find it amusing I'm apparently incompetent in a language because... I can use the new features? (You could say I over-complicated it, but I really didn't.)

In my experience time spent at the beginning of the interview establishing rapport with the interviewers is well spent. Make smalltalk before the interview properly starts. Ask how the interviewers plan on asking questions. Always stay friendly, agreeable and positive. It's far harder to be an asshole to someone you've already been nice to. If they continue to act up, then feel free to end the interview yourself because you don't want to work there.

In the last 10 years this is how I got my last 3 jobs: single stage 30-45 minute technical conversation with a lead engineer. I had other multi-stage interviews that went nowhere. Those were not FAANG companies obviously, but FAANG are overrated anyway. I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.

Bottom line is - if a company actually wants to hire, they don't waste time. I've met engineers from other companies at meetups who told me they have rejected every single candidate because they didn't want to hire, management was pushing them to. Others said they have deliberately chosen "Elite Language X" to weed out "bad developers" and so on.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, FAANG is very overrated but I am currently working at FAANG and I applied at Twitter because of their permanent working from home policy.

"I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond."

I'm a tadpole in a puddle.

Yikes. I’m not terribly surprised by that, but I am pretty jaded about both hiring and big tech companies at this point so that’s probably why.

I recently wrapped up a job search, and it occurred to me just now that in each of my job searches since finishing undergrad I’ve ended up at the company with the least painful hiring process. That’s not something I’ve intentionally tried to optimize for, but apparently I weight it pretty heavily.

What’s really interesting is that this time around I ended up in a US federal position that I cold-applied for, over private sector positions for which I was being actively recruited. You’d think startups would be able to do better than the most bureaucratic organization in the history of our species, but no, they insisted on 5+ rounds of interviews and 8-hour “take home” exercises.

For what it’s worth, my previous employer was a startup, I applied on a Friday afternoon and had a written offer in hand on the Monday morning 6 business days later.

I completely agree. The interview process at big tech is a long, emotional and mental roller coaster now. Anyways, Thanks for the feedback.

The thing that really impressed me about my first permanent job after college (at what we now call the Defense Information Systems Agency) was the approach that the interviewer took.

He started off by saying that he knew I had interviewed at a lot of other companies on campus, and that I’d probably heard a lot of positive things said about those companies. He said that I could assume that all those same things were also true of working for the government.

What he then proceeded to spend his time doing was telling me about all the disadvantages of working for the federal government.

I really, really appreciated that authentic and unvarnished (well, probably lightly varnished) approach. And for some reason, they decided to hire me anyway.

Thanks, Mr. Brewer!

Interviewing is very much a crapshoot.

A dev I knew used whether somebody knew string intern() as his main indicator that someone was proficient with Java. This one trivia fact determined whether or not you were considered proficient.

Just googled it. I am now proficient with Java despite not having touched it in 6 years.

You would be. He would consider you a senior Java developer.

The flipside is also unfortunately true. When I first interviewed, I drank the hn koolaid and began with the talking, figuring that the resume screen and a quick chat world filter out the fakers.

5 candidates who could talk but could barely write a line of code later, three technical screen was then the first layer.

I'm not talking difficult leetcode style problems either, my initial questions were barely a step a above fizzbuzz.

Does anyone object to FizzBuzz questions? The problem is the Leetcode.

I got invited to a Leetcode interview yesterday. In the interview instructions doc, they have this:

"Review data structures and algorithms from university, stuff you haven’t touched in a while."

So they admit that it is not used regularly, at least not everything by everyone, but go learn it for the interview anyway.

Ironically, yes.

Okay, so it was for a DevOps Engineer role and not an SDE role, but we did have one guy who refused. He didn’t feel that he was a good enough programmer to do that on a whiteboard in front of a panel of interviewers, and so he refused. He even refused to talk about the core functions you’d need to make fizzbuzz work. He felt that he could work it out over time outside of the pressure of a hiring situation, but he didn’t feel he could do it on the spot.

To be honest, I felt that his recognition of that lack of skill and talent and his refusal to be pushed down that road, that was one of his strongest features for me. He was willing to stand up in front of the whole group and say “I Don’t Know”. I pushed hard for him to be hired, and the guy who had asked the fizzbuzz question didn’t feel as strongly that we shouldn’t hire this person.

To this day, I think he was the best hire the company ever made. I don’t know if he ever learned how to do a fizzbuzz program, but he was definitely one of the best DevOps Engineers we had.

If you have any style of interview, some candidates will be against it and they will shit on you for that.

When you use algo questions, people complain that it's not practical.

When you do use practical questions, people complain that they can't study one thing for all jobs like with algo.

When you do a take-home, people complain that it takes their personal time with no commitment from company's side.

When you take more than 1h for an interview, people complain that it takes too much time, some will demand payment.

When you do remote interviews, people complain that the dynamics is not the same and they'd prefer to whiteboard stuff, or that they'd rather not turn their camera on for whatever reason.

When you do on-site interviews, people complain about commuting and coding with people watching.

If you do fizzbuzz, people will be offended because they think you think they are idiots (this includes people who can't do fizzbuzz)

If you interview people with many years of experience in the industry, some will complain that they have to do anything during interviews since their credentials speak for themselves. Some of them will try to pressure you into changing the interview process just for them. These people are typically the worst candidates you get in terms of skills and personality.

When you don't give feedback, people complain about it.

When you give feedback, people will disagree with it, sometimes violently (I was stalked by one particular weirdo).

If you ask soft questions, some people will complain the questions have nothing to do with the job.

If you don't ask soft questions, some people will think that the interview is very impersonal.

I agree people will complain about anything, however, some of those you enumerated are valid complaints.

Complaining about the take-home, fizbuzz is a little unreasonable. Complaining about needing a perfect Leetcode medium answer in 30 min is not an unreasonable complaint.

Before I switched to software engineering, as a licensed CPA, my first job was as an External Auditor for the top 1 firm in my country (biggest in terms of market share and human resource share). It became apparent to me that, even though I and my colleagues, who were hired in roughly the same time frame as me, have the same job description, our experiences within the firm vastly differed.

I know this because I had 4 roommates who were working at the same firm, with the same job title, but under different Partners.

P.S. I guess this is one of the non-legal related reasons why companies don't give feedback, they'd like to avoid being featured in hackernews, I presume.

EDIT: I always forget driving my point home after crafting a lengthy comment.

My point is, I can almost guarantee that someone out there has the exact opposite of your experience w.r.t. the hiring process of twitter.

> someone out there has the exact opposite of your experience Agreed completely. Thanks for the feedback.

Be happy at least you got to the interview stage. As you grow older, you won't even get to recruiter screen. Speaking from experience :-)

OP if you can pass that interview go work at a shit hot start up where you can contribute on a level these guys will never get to in Twitter.

Thank you so much for the feedback. Agreed. That's a good idea :)

Sometimes during interview rounds you can detect that someone has already rejected you. Obviously you can only try to guess why but my gut feeling is that this is often political (I.e. it wouldn't be good for them if you were hired).

It's very difficult to counter because you don't know the people interviewing you or the team's politics. You're discovering it as the interviews go based on cues, including the way they interact among themselves.

> you can detect that someone has already rejected you

I completely agree. I had that feeling. He made up his mind already.

Yeah I noticed this. One interviewer had a very interesting tactic. He had a topic ready that is totally outside of the role you are applying for. He would not bring up the topic immediately, but soon as he decided ‘no’, he sets you up for failure by asking all these questions about the topic.

Then they send out a rejection letter saying you don’t know enough about the topic. What can you do? Reply back ‘But you know that topic has nothing to do with the position’. It was the first time I saw a interview version of a ‘kill switch’.

As an interviewee, you also develop radar for this where you also can just check out 10 minutes into the interview and not care too much (so much is decided on initial perception, looks, vibes, speech - within minutes).

You're dwelling on this. If you have a PhD, have extensive experience with Java, are mid/senior level you should already have forgotten about this interview.

Hearing that you're "not proficient" sucks big time and this is probably what hits hard. Do you _feel_ you're not proficient? Did HR meant something else? Snap out of it and just continue. Have you been in very cozy environment you're whole life? It's like your mom telling you you're the most handsome boy and then you walk up to a girl that's say your an ugly weirdo. Maybe you are, maybe you're not. You just check out the next girl. Or boy.

Like, this whole analysis of the situation, really makes me wonder, how old/experienced everybody is (including you). Like in general, life, you know. You can code an A* heuristic in 5 minutes, but you still don't know communicate/interrupt each other during an interview?

Thank you so much for the feedback. I appreciate it. Thank you.

perhaps “apply to other teams” was a wink and a nod, you did fine but one guy doesn’t want to work with you, who can say why.

Yes, it was very strange when HR said that to me and she kept insisting I did great. Anyways, Thanks for feedback.

Ask HR if they have a reccomendation for openings on other teams.

Eh, in my experience HR likes to sugar coat things. The number of times I've been told BS from managers and HR is uncountable. Stuff like "we're only taking external hires with extensive experience to start the team and we encourage you to apply again in a couple months", or that I have a lot of potential but they don't give me any action items about how achieve my potential, etc. Dangling the carrot only works if you never let them eat it.

Yeah, if I get rejected, I always assume that the response from HR or the recruiter or whatever is just whatever story they need to tell themselves to feel good about the outcome. It is highly unlikely to be related to any actual reasons in question.

But, I try not to burn any bridges over it. If I got the interview because of a personal connection, I will do whatever I can to maintain that personal connection, regardless of the fact that I got rejected. They might know of something that comes up in a week, or a month, or six months, or they might move on themselves to a different company, or whatever.

And who knows — maybe they did actually tell you the truth, and you just didn’t get enough context in the answer to fully understand why.

But that also doesn’t stop you from continuing to try elsewhere, and take what you can learn from that experience and apply it to your next interview.

I think interview feedback does more harm than good to be honest. It puts the idea that your entire life can be judged in 2-3 hours.

Like, who the fuck gets to say you did bad behaviorally, or you don’t fit the culture, over a 3 hour meeting? That’s extremely unfair.

The technical feedback is up for both parties to decide and no one side is right. It was either a fair question, followed with a fair answer.

> Google meet

If a company was sincere about wanting interviewees to feel comfortable and to perform their best, they would ask the interviewee (ahead of time of course) to choose what videoconference software they'd prefer.

It's a joke being forced to download MS Teams or Skype or whatever just for a single interview, and then not have the ability to do a "test run" in advance to make sure your mic/camera/bluetooth are all working correctly and to become familiar with the UI.

Oh, I always download whatever the software is in question, and then do practice runs with it to make sure I know how it operates.

You can’t always do that with whatever whiteboarding or shared IDE solution they might want you to use, but at least with the chat/shared screen solution, you should definitely be able to do that. Find friends or family to help you, or whatever it takes to practice that.

The in-person equivalent would be knowing exactly how to get to the building where you’re going to interview, know where parking is, etc…. You do a dry run and see what it’s like. Maybe also take a moment to look at people going into the building to see how they’re dressed.

Make sure to fully review any material that HR or the recruiter gives you before the meeting. Review it again just before the meeting. If they have any suggestions on interview techniques or the kinds of things you can do to help explain your experience, make sure you can do that in spades.

Beyond that, I would encourage you to be authentic. Be your best version of yourself, sure — but still be true to your core nature. If they don’t like you, then you’ve probably dodged a bullet.

For all my references, I ask them to be radically transparent and honest with their discussion of me. I wouldn’t ask them to be my reference if I didn’t trust what they were going to say in the first place, so I would prefer that they don’t whitewash anything they would say about me. If my references scare off a potential employer, then again — they’ve helped me dodge a bullet.

Weird interviews are a thing, and you are better off.

Still, even though this is logical it still can feel like a failure: it isn't.

Onwards and upwards :)

Thank you :) I truly appreciate your feedback. Thanks.

I was the lead engineer at a top university for a large multi-year DARPA project on Android privacy, working with literal experts in the field. I applied for some roles at Twitter for Android privacy engineering after the project was over, and they rejected me without even speaking to me.

Forget Twitter lol

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.

Sorry why would they not hire a guy like that? They hire like crazy and when a very good dev comes around they do stuff like that? Companies should fire guys like these senior devs asking asshole questions. This is some sort of ego bullshit I do not understand.

>> I tell this interviewer that I do not hear the sound and I do not get a notification that someone raised their hand

Why are you not getting a notification or hear a sound? Laptop issues??

3 month interview process? F that.

LoL, if you would end up a programmer why did you have to waste your time doing PhD?