Comment by jeremymcanally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremymcanally | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, same experience. I interviewed a long time ago (something like 5-6 years ago), and the interviewer sounded bored and grumpy the whole time. I told them before I interviewed that I didn't know of any of their core languages well enough to interview in them (Python being the only one I could possibly perform well enough with), but they said doing it in Ruby was fine since I was going for a testing position where they used Selenium and Ruby (no clue if that was true since the guy who interviewed me said it wasn't). The interviewer was just severely adversarial the whole time, constantly pointing out "you can't do that" syntactically or "that won't work" even though I'd step through and show them links or irb runs that proved otherwise.

And what's the deal with doing code interviews in Google Docs? I don't know if that's how it's done now, but it was extremely high-pressure. Given that he could see every keystroke and was pretty un-cooperative, it made for a super unpleasant interview with the constant feeling that I couldn't think or explore the problem given.

Needless to say, I didn't progress.

Yes, Google Docs was still the whiteboard for screening less than a year ago.

Thankfully, the person I dealt with was generally pleasant and made for one of the better interview experiences I've had.

Still used less than a few months ago. My interviewer was at least pleasant and helpful though. Would be nice if they would just make a plugin for major IDEs/Editors and let people use what they want.

Google docs here too the last time. Very pleasant, kind and helpful interviewer.

Yes, google docs is still used. Several of the people I did phone screens with commiserated that it's a poor way to code online, but they seemed to have 0 choice in the matter.

Yahoo used collabedit.com, which was much more pleasant (but still realtime).

It's a step up from when I interviewed, also about 5-6 years ago. I had to solve some coding puzzles ("uniquify a list in python while maintaining order") over the phone. Not so easy to dictate python code to someone with a strange accent over a crappy phone line. 2/3's of the interview spent on me or him saying "what?" He also was very grumpy. But it was a fun experience.

Yeah, I had the same problem with G docs. I think an inherent capability of a decent candidate is thinking of all possible avenues at once. When you add in the meta-cognitive overload of an interview to that you're testing other things. It's like adding confounding variables to a neural net. :)

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