Currently looking myself. It's rough out there. And companies will never give you any useful feedback, so you're just left with self-doubt.
Table stakes (and it sucks to say this, but it's true) is you've mastered the leetcode/cracking the coding interview style questions. I'm a self taught SW engineer so I had to spend about a year cranking on these type of questions before I was proficient. I spend a month or two reviewing before I start any interview cycle.
Do you have any idea where your weaknesses might be?
I've found that the problem-solving whiteboarding that is common in the industry reflects my university comp sci education (binary tree, big O notation, etc).
On the other hand, I also have zero interest in working for a FAANG so that might have something to do with it.
Is it right that a lot of companies want you to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard to get a 400-600k TC job? I dunno. But that is the state of things, to me it seems pretty easy to just study for a couple months and then remove that hurdle from the process.
Yeah, unfortunately some candidates get very abusive if you tell them why you've chosen not to move forward (ex. one sent me numerous nasty emails for months after they were rejected). I still like to give feedback to everyone, because I'd rather live in a more honest and direct culture, but it's very understandable why most employers don't.
I don't discount your situation above or pretend to know all the aspects, however objectively looking at it, blocking the persons email address would solve some of those issues. I assume most places do this. Noting that even if you didn't give them feedback, ghosted, or rejected them, they could have also sent numerous nasty emails anyway.
I would like to see at some point some of the same professionalism, such as you show with your feedback to candidate's, from all companies that "evidently" have huge wishlists and want to hire professionals.
* I haven't found any sites or papers that have tracked giving / not giving feedback to candidate's and the prospective results outside of anecdotal situations.
* I did notice that some places such as Dragos do list feed back as part of the process. <https://www.dragos.com/blog/what-to-expect-when-interviewing...>
But seriously, I honestly dont know. When I ask for feedback, even during the interview, I get, at best, a "I think you're doing fine" answer.
* there is a pool of interviewers for each set of subjects
* hiring manager picks the subjects, and thus people are signed up for that pool get an interview slot.
* interviewers talk to the candidate one on one (sometimes two on one if there is someone in training or it's a pair panel). They avoid talking to each other until everyone finished with their interviews, so as not to bias each interview. No "This candidate is great" -- never discuss the candidate until everyone is done.
* interviewers fill out a form with feedback. The form contains info about what was asked and how the candidate did.
* hiring manager gets all the forms and makes a decision based on what is on the form. No side channel "Hey, I said 'hire', but really it should be a 'no hire'". If the hiring manager has a question, there is a recorded feedback mechanism in the form where details can be solicited.
* HR keeps all the feedback forms
Asking if you were better or worse than the previous candidate is a no-no. They are not going to tell you, and you shouldn't ask. Because of that, you can't gauge whether you are the best candidate or not, which means you don't know if you got the job.
You can ask if you did well, and they will give you a bland "You did fine", because they don't know if you will be hired or not. Also, most interviewers understand that it is a pain, so when they say "I appreciate you coming in", they usually mean it. Everyone's been on the other side, and we really do appreciate you coming in, and most of the time you really did do fine, and that's all we can say. It's rare to get a really bad interview. In those cases where the interview is awful, I try to say find something positive and then say "well, try not to worry too much". The goal is to be honest, non-committal, and supportive at the same time - because maybe the person might come back and interview later, or maybe they will tell their colleagues, and the last thing you want to do is to give them a bad experience or make them think you are giving them a hard time just because they couldn't answer some questions.
Only the hiring manager knows, at the end of the process, what all the feedback is. Even if you think they did great, if several other people on the panel don't, it's probably a no-hire. The person who met you at the door, offered you coffee, and is shepherding people in and out of the room doesn't know, either. They will try to make you comfortable, make sure everything goes smoothly, and tell you that you did fine.
Only in extreme cases will you get meaningful feedback during the interview. One time I asked one of our standard questions, and the candidate refused to answer. He started arguing with me, saying it wasn't a good question. It was pretty shocking. We don't just ask any question, the questions are reviewed by other people. If I give you a program and ask you to calculate the running time, don't refuse to do that because you don't like the program. It doesn't matter if you don't like it, just answer the question. After you answer the question, you can mention why this type of program is often unnecessary. So that was one situation where I gave feedback, along the lines of "It's not a good interview if you don't answer the question". Please don't have a chip on your shoulder. I know interviews can be irritating and nerve wracking, but let's just get through it with professionalism and a minimum of drama. Odds are good that you did fine, and if even you didn't, there's no point in worrying too much about it.
I don't want to wax on about why we need DS&A tests in SW interviews, I think it gets taken to a silly degree and is in no way the only marker for what makes a good engineer. I just think that, as an interviewer, if I ask a question that I'm required to ask as part of the interview loop, and I get some comments about how these questions are silly or the candidate just falls on their face and can't do it... it shows more than a lack of time spent with cracking the coding interview. It shows lack of preparation and you can extrapolate that to the rest of the candidates work. If that person thinks the prep is silly, the prep we all know we need to do for a high paying job, and they just don't do it... it doesn't say anything positive.
Luckily at the company I work at now, you have plenty of chances to prove you just didn't refresh DS&A knowledge and you can still be hired, but why have your docket show up to the panel with an extra thumbs down when passing the bar is so easy... I don't know.
But that isn’t true. A surgeon isn’t asked to do a quick review of random medical facts before they take an interview.
I refuse to submit to this ridiculous process, and therefore I’m always failing out in the leetcode part. I’d rather spend my time doing something useful or relaxing.
The leetcode questions are just Data Structures and Algorithms questions. If you can talk through a couple different data structures, accurately describe the time complexity of your solution, and implement a half working solution you’ll pass. If you haven’t studied DS&A then I don’t think you have worked to perfect your craft, and I don’t want you on my team. This isn’t a trivia test, it’s a small bar that is trivial to get over.
This all required from companies that face no penalty if you start on day one and don't have proper tooling, make up applications and tooling as needed, no standard software workflows, side step security policies, etc. Seems a bit rich asking candidate's to be of such high caliber when the company isn't also held to same standard outside of high compensation.
At least in the US exercise the 90 day period maybe plan 3 months of severance and move on. It probably amounts to the same effort anyway, not that I know of any company that is tracking this or making the data publicly available to study.
| I just fail to see the point in lamenting the process or purposefully
| removing yourself from it on some principle. DS&A studying and time
| complexity analysis..
I agree with you that knowing or thinking about DS&A as part of honing your developmental skills or working with a new language is useful, however I think the scope of it as a sharpened skill provides overall diminishing returns as most people only brush up on it for interviews. This is what I would surmise the previous poster was alluding to in that its not a generally called upon skill in day-to-day software development use, so what purpose is there in asking about it unless a performance issue/enhancement was part of the general discussion.
It is also possible that companies that ask these types of questions are providing indicators of how they operate. To some making a ton of money isn't what they are after so eliminating these types of companies is beneficial to them. Otherwise if 10x the money is your goal, then as you said its just a small hurdle.
One interesting thing that happened to me was I kept at the interviews and found a few that flowed more like the conversations I would prefer to have at an interview. This helped with dissipating the self-doubt as I was constantly re-iterating on the positions I was applying to, the companies, job description wording, etc. and seriously questioned "Is this the state if hiring?"
I'm in the cybersecurity realm coming from a sysadmin, networking, background with a recent masters. Companies want people with years of experience as if most businesses outside aerospace and the government in the last 10 years made security a high priority. My observation is that insurance companies realized the risk related to policy payouts and "now" security is a requirement of future riders/contracts.
That being said, I'm committed to giving every applicant direct feedback. Feel free to apply to Grit. [0] https://getgrit.notion.site/Grit-Job-Board-31942eda7b0e49478...
I recently got feedback that I "didn't have enough experience working with other teams".
What I was actually asked in the interview was to tell a story about a time I'd worked with another team. Apparently that story wasn't good enough... somehow.
It’s almost invariably “I didn’t like the way you named this variable” kind. I can’t ever let it go when I get a result that is so clearly biased/bullshit.
Companies are not hiring as much they were when the world economy was booming. And for those of us outside the US, in Africa, to be precise, there's now less remote on HN whoishiring. The remote jobs posted there now are mainly for those domiciled in the US. I would have to look towards other platforms come next month. I've always used HN to connect to top companies but for a while things haven't been that good.