Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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