Working at Netflix
brendangregg.com
brendangregg.com
I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my original schedule with them...) for one of my interviews and she spent half the time telling me why the stock price was so low "We were high on a $300 share price and thought we were gods." Then, the other half telling me her favorite firing stories. I don't know what the purpose of all of this was but it gave me the impression that HR/head of HR needed to demonstrate how important they are in the company.
One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question. I successfully answered it. He then asked me to rewrite it with some restrictions. I did this. Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science.
I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone. However, because of this feedback, and the fact that the people at netflix generally liked me, they wanted me to work on some sort of data warehouse management team. I'm not sure why they would offer me a job so wildly different from what I was contacted to apply for, or why the syntax from one language would be considered representative of my knowledge of CS.
Overall, I think the experience of one person at a company is nothing more than an anecdote that can be entertaining, perhaps moderately informative, but it's not a complete picture. There are many stories out there about people interviewing with or working for Netflix. If you are seriously interested in the company, read a lot of those stories, discount all of them as biased, and then see for yourself by talking to them.
The truth of the matter is you could probably get statistically similar results from a voodoo witch doctor reading chicken entrails.
Ok, maybe not, but I really get the feeling that most hiring systems are arbitrary and are less "tilted toward false negatives" and more just plain random. In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term.
It's a great way to feel good about yourself and your interview process; it's also a great way to not find fault in your interview process as it becomes arbitrarily ... arbitrary.
There are thousands of pegs on the board, and your resume predicts the starting position of your disk.
But once you hit the pegs, it's essentially random. Some pegs bounce you towards the jackpot and other pegs bounce you towards 0.
It all depends on if you have a similar background, if the person likes you, if you've heard of the question before or solved something similar, if your chosen language fits the problem domain, etc.
At the end of the day, your ability to actually do things doesn't matter much in the interview process. I've worked at 2 huge well known companies and failed at several other interviews. Hundreds of millions of people use my code every day. After nearly a decade in tech, I've never gotten a bad performance review. But I still plinko'ed into the 0 spot many times.
As I get older, I find it's easiest just to enter orgs from friend's recommendations, preferably at smaller companies. Playing the plinko game with your livelihood is an exhausting waste of time, and often represents the politicking that goes on at these huge companies when review time comes around.
I would agree with you about the monoculture aspect where they tend to hire new college grads from mostly the top colleges. I thought it's a little bit too inbred, but they also buy a lot of companies and get a much broader set of employees that way. Although, they might dump a lot of the acquired employees instead of keeping them on permanently once the acquisition goes through.
About the offer you got, maybe they thought you were strong in areas that would be important to the DW team even though you didn't fit into their expectations for the position you interviewed for. I've interviewed people who were obviously talented engineers but not quite right for the position in question, and suggested them for other positions they were better-suited for. This has worked well in my experience, but who knows if that's what happened at Netflix.
That should have been a big clue right there that it wasn't going to go well. Based on their hiring criterion and culture, that they still do a technical interview like they were hiring junior developers is a bad sigh.
[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
If you can not find anyone at all with example code/projects, perhaps then start employing fizzbuzz on folks, but... I can't imagine it's too hard to find developers with at least a minimal portfolio that demonstrates something at least as complex, if not moreso, than fizzbuzz.
I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they've ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes, and then at least I can believe that their code sample is theirs.
He had a nice code sample (pre-github era).
Some of these stories about super experienced ("10+ years") developers not being able to answer the most basic of basic syntax or "algorithm" questions seem far-fetched to me.
I'm not sure how this is possible either, but the world works in mysterious ways.
Really I don't think those sort of on-the-spot tests/trivia questions are representative by themselves. They may be a useful part of a larger investigation.
Two things to stop code sample plagiarism: choose a unique code challenge and, if you're really worried about it, give the client a laptop and tell them to bang something simple out right there and come back in 30-60 minutes to check.
Honestly, though, I've rarely depended on either code samples or code trivia to determine if someone is a good hire. If you sit and talk about dev with a person, you can tell if they're on their game or not 90% of the time. The sample/on-the-spot tests can help weed out that extra 10%.
When I see "expert" on a CV I have learned to become cynical.
I asked him about his expertise and he spoke in platitudes about it - at a sort of BBC News kind of level. I'm certainly not an expert but I know sufficient to be able to ask useful questions about it.
He couldn't tell me anything at all about biometrics. I continued to probe.
Turns out that by "biometrics expert" he quite unashamedly meant he had, at the request of a manager, bought a USB fingerprint reader from PC World and installed it so that his manager didn't have to use a password any more.
One has to play this game on marketing documents to be considered. For some reason "pretty good, definitely still learning" doesn't click with many HR people. You can't really blame candidates for trying to get hired by presenting themselves in an authoritative context.
I don't consider anyone an actual expert in something unless they have hard, indisputable credentials, like a long history of commits to the core project (for expertise in specific software/languages/frameworks), etc.
But something about "expert" really grates on me. I think it's that it is a self-anointed title in nearly all cases. There are legitimately experts in lots of different areas - if you happened to invent IDS, for example, you go right ahead and call yourself an expert. If you happen to have run a bunch of Snort rules across a prod environment for a year or two, you might be "experienced", go on, stretch it to "highly experienced" for all I care, but if you stretch it to "expert" then paint me cynical.
In the end they said "Okay, you pass." When I asked why, the answer was "While we don't agree with all the choices, it's basically well-written and does something interesting. We just wanted to know if you were the one who wrote it."
- did they likely write the code, for obvious reasons - are they aware of the various tradeoffs and choices they made, i.e. we might not agree but can they make a reasonable argument for them - this demonstrates breadth of knowledge - how are their communication skills?
I would be delighted if an interviewer asked me such questions about my code.
Fizz buzz you can't skate around. Either you know how to implement something, or you don't.
I'd actually have to think for a minute on how to do fizz buzz right now, simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.
Err, what? Fizzbuzz is NOT a riddle. It's intentionally meant to be a stupid simple test, and everyone has written stupid simple code at some point. Even as a "senior engineer" you'll have to write dumb business logic code, even if it's only occasional.
If you really struggle with fizzbuzz it would almost assuredly be a sign that you would really struggle to write quality software in a timely manner. It's also a sign that you really aren't familiar with even the basic control flow of your chosen language, which is similarly worrying.
The only part of fizzbuzz that's "removed from the actual engineering workflow" is MAYBE the modulus operation, which I'm willing to bet most interviewers probably won't give a shit if you goof on the syntax a little and write "%" when you should've written "%%".
And even then, a perfectly acceptable fizzbuzz can be written without using mod if you're not familiar with that basic arithmetic operation.
This type of attitude is highly suspicious.
If you're not the kind of person who thinks fizz buzz is trivial, then there are actual red flags.
The idea of "fizzbuzz" is to show basic understanding of language control structures and flow. Better, more universal tests that actually use language constructs that are encountered in daily operation could definitely be devised to demonstrate the same fundamental concepts.
I tried homework, it didn't really work that well for me, people would google and copy paste stuff and invest way too much time, in the end they couldn't explain what they did and it was just a waste of time for both parties. The other problem is that I usually let people work with whatever language/frameworks their familiar with. I ended up beeing not familiar with some C# stuff they used and couldn't really judge their code. Fizzbuzz is simple enough that you can see if it looks right in pretty much any language And it's done in 5 minutes even if that means accepting a few false positives.
Oh and, we had I few people where I noticed that they were really nervous and I thought maybe that's why they failed Fizzbuzz, so I invited them in for half a day and gave them a toy project to implement. Usually something really simple like, fetch this RSS Feed, parse it, save it somewhere, make sure that if you fetch it multiple times it doesn't save duplicate entries, and spit out the titles and URL's to stdout or a webpage or anything. A relatively real world exercise I think, nobody was constantly watching them, it was just a "get it done" job, they had internet, their own IDE, their language of choice and everything (a few people complained that they can't implement FizzBuzz without an IDE). And all of them failed. Hard. So I ended up not doing that anymore and treat a failed FizzBuzz as a K.O. criteria.
90% of the code I've written, and all the clever stuff, is copyright of and property of corporations. There's no way I'd jeopardise my current job by showing someone else that code
I would love to exist in a world where everyone could fizz buzz flawlessly.
And you know what? More than 1/2 the people that claim to be doing a job writing code right now can not do it. If you can't write a simple loop in your preferred language, I have to wonder how you are doing coding right now and being successful.
That said, for FizzBuzz proper, one should have dozens of solutions memorized for these situations, but for similarly easy questions the candidate might not have come across that might end up being a big deal.
I've definitely felt that pressure as an interviewee. It's pretty disheartening to write a simple and obviously correct implementation only to have the interviewer express their disappointment that you didn't use a particular optimization.
The most fun technical questions I've had start with making a functional algorithm and then massaging it to meet whatever time/space complexity requirements are asked for. Sometimes it results in a complete rewrite and that's ok, the real world works like that too.
I almost always preface whiteboard coding sessions with "I'm going to write some dumb, slow code and then we can make it faster if you want. Sound OK?" I've never had anyone disagree with this, but if they tell you they want you to go straight to the clever solution, hey, now you know what they're looking for.
50% of working programmers can't write a for loop? Does that square with your experience outside of interviewing?
I don't quite buy the whole fizz-buzz story, though I don't have an adequate explanation for what could cause these kinds of failure rates. Something seems very off.
Not 50% of working programmers, but of the programmer applicant pool. The applicants who can find jobs quickly aren't in the pool very long, and so it's dominated by the fakers and those who otherwise shouldn't be there. ... Which should make the reported phenomenon a little more believable.
I'll stop asking fizzbuzz when people stop failing it.
And so I did. And oh boy, there were a LOT of previous Fortune 500 Senior devs that could not write anything that even resembles a correct fizzbuzz solution in any language they like without time restriction (I had to kick a few people out after I left them alone for 30 minutes and they told me they need more time).
All their CV's looked fine though. If I interview you, I'll ask you to write code, on any level. Usually I asked interviewees for ~3 code samples on paper starting with fizzbuzz moving up in difficulty to still beeing a relatively easy ~5 minute task.
I've had one interviewee that started to laugh when I asked him for a fizzbuzz sample and he said, "well that's like asking a baker to bake a bun". he proceded to write a fizzbuzz solution down and is apparently one of the top developers at that company now.
I don't care how senior you are. If you're offended by quickly writing down a fizzbuzz solution you're not senior enough to realize how much some people suck at programming.
Obviously the actual only interview only started after they wrote fizzbuzz, fizzbuzz helped me stop wasting my time and I convinced HR to stop sending me CVs of people that played bullshit bingo in their CVs.
Sure you could blame HR on this for not filtering good enough but HR aren't developers. Although I'm not saying HR couldn't have given me better CVs...
The volume of "good" CVs that landed on my desk was consistently high, but when we spoke to the candidates on their first telephone interview it became immediately apparent that they were not nearly as skilled at security as they were at writing CVs.
In the end, we inserted a 10 minute quick-fire Q&A at the beginning of the telephone interview which was as basic as "Define: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability" and other such trivial security knowledge. It was terrifying the number of people applying for mid/senior level jobs, or contracts with high day-rates who couldn't get past this. What was most galling was when people were obviously googling the anwswers whilst we spoke - we countered this with simple "which is better, and why" type questions so that there was too many variables to google and you also needed to defend your answer.
There were only a very small number of candidates who, when confronted with the Q&A responded in a "are you serious?" kind of way and just rattled off the basic knowledge in a couple of minutes. With these we could get down to the detail of the real interview pretty quickly.
I did that when we were ~7 people, then the company grew, we got a HR department and I kinda lost interest in the company and was just doing my job. Efficient shouting-trough-the-room to get shit done was replaced by by slow corporate processes, office politics started to happen, somebody decided that our SMB shared folders must have a number in front so they are shown in the order admin though they needed to be shown... So when they decided to optimize folder structures for mouse-heavy non-technical users, taking my ability to quickly nagivate trough the directory structure, I decided it was time to leave :)
Edit: One funny thing I forgot, they built a file-name generator in excel we had to use :)
However, that's all it's good for, which means it should be a single pass/fail question. Asking the candidate increasingly specific iterations of fizzbuzz would be a waste of time.
Um, neither of those are true in any companies I worked at in the US except for a job in high school as a cash register attendee.
Did you suggest that you would feel more comfortable if they sat differently?
This doesn't make any difference for me personally but I understand why some people would prefer that the person not sit like that. However, if you did not express an objection with regards to how that made you feel, I don't think "insisted" is a fair choice of words there.
"He insisted on chewing with his mouth open, I mean, ew. Gross."
The offender is generally expected to read non-verbal, and often non-expressed, communication of the offended's opinion.
Please don't ever make this assumption. I referred an acquaintance from school to my workplace (he was a great project partner, and I was the first of us to get hired after graduation, so why not?), and apparently when he passed through everyone was just... doing work. That was a telltale sign that everyone was grumpy to him.
I had to explain that we basically don't work at all on Friday afternoons because we're too busy drinking, we play pingpong religiously, frequent out of office events on the weekends, and in general it's just an enjoyable crowd. Random conversations happen all the time.
But nope, that one time he came through the office, everyone looked unhappy. Because they were working, I guess.
But it's okay to tell them what to do?
That sounds ... very strange. Weekends aren't generally speaking "office hours", and more importantly also not "working hours". Having an "out of office event" in my world is when you're doing work, i.e. it's during normal working hours, but you're not at work.
Having frequent work-related "events" on weekends sounds like a total bummer.
This also sounds like a major bummer -- aside from the fact that does smacks (way too heavily) of bro culture, it's incredibly off-putting to anyone who doesn't drink (or who does, but thinks drinking in the office -- or drinking heavily in the afternoon on any kind of a regular basis -- is basically pretty stupid).
No, it really isn't. You should have a set of hiring standards that you strive to make as objective and quantifiable as possible. The interviewer should also be doing everything he or she can do to minimize their own personal bias entering into the evaluation of you as a candidate.
Hiring people you get along with, i.e. people like you, is usually a quick path towards a homogeneous team of straight, white males from privileged backgrounds.
The primary reason is so that everyone is seeing the same thing, including these sorts of personality conflicts. If Bob thinks the candidate is horrible due to some weird hangup and they were interviewing solo, the team would have to believe Bob. But if everyone else saw the interaction, they'd know that Bob was just being a cantankerous coot.
The first company I worked at for 4 years made use of this, in addition to meeting in person, at the end of the day, to make a decision.
Benefits of the pair interview: Two different opinions on the candidate for the same "experience". If either interviewer had poor tendencies, they'll be curtailed a bit because they know someone else is there to witness them.
If both interviewers are in agreement, that's a pretty strong data point.
When it came time for "review" at the end of the day, we started with an around the room "thumbs up/down". No hiding behind an anonymous email to the recruiter/manager. If it was unanimously up...offer. Unanimously down? Obvious no hire. If it was mixed, we'd go around to all of the thumbs down, and ask, "Are you on the fence, or are you 100% vehemently opposed to this candidate?" If they said, "NO WAY JOSE", we'd ask them to give their reasoning. Then, we'd ask if anyone had a positive enough experience to argue in favor of the candidate. If not? No hire. If yes, we'd then go around the room and ask all of the interviewers to give a full description of the interview. You'll note that this part gives the full data, but takes the most time, but could be avoided (an optimization) if it was going to be ultimately fruitless.
This was by far the best hiring decision making process I've been a part of. No process, is perfect, but I feel this was pretty fair.
Oh - lastly, if a candidate was particularly hard to decide on, and we went around the room, and some people were for them, and some were against, and it ended up in deadlock - we ended the meeting and it was up to the ranking members of the team to decide (i.e. managers.) This meant that after one round of debate, we wouldn't keep wasting the company's dime trying to force consensus, and instead moved the decision to the people who the company had already decided it wanted to make decisions. So, if democracy worked...great, but this was a business, and we had get shit done, so lacking clear consensus, the burden was reduced.
After typing this out, I really, really whole heartedly respect this process - compared to much of what I've seen in the Valley.
Interviews are clearly stressful situations for a majority of candidates, even if their technical chops are without question. This ends up manifesting in ways that can come off as personality defects / lack of fit. I can think of a few times where the person I went in with came out with a specific point in spacetime that was wrinkled for them - a comment they thought was off, something about their behavior - and more than half of the time I've noticed comments the candidate made, or compensating factors, that reasonably explained these wrinkles. A lot of the time, I'm trying to balance the things I care about asking with paying attention to my co-interviewer so I can provide objectiveness down the line.
So far, it's worked out well. No lemons yet.
I happen to work on a three person team right now and I like my two colleagues. It does not conform at all to your forecast for (straight, white, privileged, men). Sorry. I think this is based on the assumption that people like others that are like themselves, which in fact is not very true. I prefer to be around people that are very different from me.
Unfortunately, it is uncontroversial that most people show preferences for people similar to themselves when choosing friends, romantic partners, and employees. Nobody, that I've heard, is saying that this applies to every single person, so there's no reason to say that it can't be true because you don't follow it.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110922093313.ht... for a random paper
Wait, what? Slow down a sec and elaborate more about this please
Everyone knows this because Netflix released a big presentation about it a while ago. They keep "top performers" only as long as they are top performance from Netflix's perspective, and then dismiss them with a "generous severance".
It's definitely an interesting way to do employment.
What's basically clear is that the candidates complaining here a) didn't do their basic f-ing homework, and b) are seriously misrepresenting Netflix views on letting people go.
Not I agree with that part of Netflix culture (and it would pretty much be illegal in most Western countries), but there is a clear logic behind it, and I seriously doubt they skipped that part in the interview.
You can assume the posters here are being malicious, or that they're honestly telling what they understood from the interview. If the latter, then I'd argue it's Netflix fault for failing to leave the right impression.
Potential employees don't need to know her name to make an informed decision about whether or not apply to Netflix.
http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/unreasonable...
I just thought it was incredibly interesting how a person can be so polarizing. This person acts like she walks on water!
I got an offer but turned them down because their recruiter was so crazy aggressive it made me feel that Netflix would be a very unhappy place to work.
From what I've heard from ex-employees (one a recruiter) the hiring/salary/firing process there is not well organized. People often make more than managers or more senior employees and large layoffs every year for the 'bottom 10%' make for some weird social dynamics.
As much as I respect and admire their technical processes there I'm not convinced it's really a good place to work.
I've been a happy Netflix employee for over 4 years and have never experienced a 'large layoff' event. All the layoffs I've witnessed were not a surprise for the people affected.
Senior engineers usually make more money than their direct managers, but I fail to see how that's an issue.
I'm guessing RayVR met with Patty who left Netflix 2 years ago. My interview with her was different but I guess it would depend on your background and what she was trying to determine. In my case it was mostly to see if I was going to be a good cultural fit since I was at the time working for Yahoo which had a completely different culture. To me that was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Actually the whole interview process was great, and it was one of the major reasons I chose Netflix over other companies.
The day after I took over the team, my director sat me down and said "I don't know if you've looked yet, but most of your engineers make more than you do. That's because they're incredibly valuable. Your number one job is to keep them happy."
In the last two years of managing this team, I've consistently gotten paid less than the top engineers on my team.
Totally OK with it.
Precious.
And of course, an entirely different take could be made from your response -- precisely because you do have a solid grounding in CS, you've probably chosen to spend your time with languages with (for want of a better term) more "powerful", and arguably more standard constructions than what Python affords for this kind of a logical switch -- namely, a ternary operator -- which if Python had it, would probably look a lot like this:
x = y ? 100 : 0
So if you were interviewing for a senior-level, Python-specific position I can see why they'd expect you to know the if-then-else trick. But if it's a secondary language for you, then the feedback that interviewer gave you definitely seems more than a bit off-base.
(DISCLAIMER: No, I don't think Python is a flawed language because it doesn't have a ternary op, or that it should have "stronger CS fundamentals" or any of that. It's just a side aspect or a different, larger point I was making).
x = 11 if False else ( 12 if False else 13)
print x
=> 13
x = False or (True or False) if cond1:
if cond2:
x = 12
else:
x = 11
else:
x = 13
This also removes ambiguity in the case where you might want to assign to x some falsey thing like None or [] or zero:
>>> y = None
>>> x = False or ( y or False )
>>> x
False
>>> print [bool(f) for f in [None, 0, 0.0, [], ()]]
[False, False, False, False, False]
Maybe if you never program in python. Otherwise it makes absolutely no sense to do so because its obvious that every value is evaluated for its boolean value.
default_result if condition else alternate_result
I'd like to bring up that while it's a matter of opinion the older ugly ?: syntax is much less readable even when you memorize it. I never use ?: syntax ternary expressions in languages that have them because I always have to look it up. That's why a number of languages prefer python-like versions or forms which emphasize to an even larger degree the fact that its just an if-else as an expression to an even larger degree(so I'd question that it's standard, I'm not 100% it's older either as I think the LISP version is closer to the python version).
CoffeeScript
s = if condition then "yup" else "nope"
abs := x > 0 ifTrue: [ x ] ifFalse: [ x negated ]
Scala a = if (n == 12) "twelve" else "not twelve"
Rust
let y = if x == 5 { 10 } else { 15 }; // y: i32
fac x = if x==0 then
1
else x * fac (x - 1)
boolean and true_branch or false_branch
This is parallel to the standard C one. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it, but I guess that makes sense because it's not very explicit about what it's doing, which goes agains the spirit of python. Probably not very common for python programmers to use.
I mean seriously, this is the question as I found it:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
And here is an answer in bash that took me literally 30 seconds:
for num in {1..100} ; do
out=""
(( $num % 3 == 0 )) && out="Fizz"
(( $num % 5 == 0 )) && out="${out}Buzz"
echo ${out:-$num}
done
When I asked that question, I was looking for fluency. A candidate shouldn't have to think about it. They should write c >= 'A', instead of floundering because they don't remember the ASCII value of 'A'. If asked, they should be able to iterate over the string without taking strlen first.
This is basic stuff, but you might be surprised how many people with years of software development experience on their resumes can't do it. Moreover, I found that a good performance on this easy question was highly predictive of good performance on harder questions. Not that this didn't stop me from asking hard questions. :)
Where it does get complicated is determining whether a codepoint or a digraph of multiple codepoints is a letter, and that's culture-dependent; e.g. IJ in Dutch.
My main problem is that, as a candidate, I would interpret being asked this question to mean that the interviewers have already undervalued me (or worse, have no idea how to value me).
One weak question in hours of interviews isn't bad, but now I'm mentally preparing for more weak questions. Making a candidate disengage is a sure way to get a bad interview, or a good interview that results in a "no thanks" to your offer.
No, your main problem is just how many of your contemporaries with indistinguishable backgrounds and experience totally bombs this question.
Being offended by a simple fizz-buzz style question[1] is roughly as constructive as being offended by "Is this a good time to talk?" even when a good time to talk has been carefully scheduled.
1: I don't think many people use fizz-buzz exactly, it's too well known, but there are tons of other really quite simple questions that exercise two or three basic programming concepts, maybe throw in some basic problem solving for good measure.
But that's the problem that FizzBuzz highlights. A bunch of people just can't do it. This isn't about the (now retracted) Sheep and Goats stuff. Plenty of the people who fail fizzbuzz are computer science graduates or senior programmers.
I don't know of any research about why people who think they can program can't do FizzBuzz. I'd love to see it though.
During an interview, I'm interviewing the interviewers as well as being interviewed. Part of that process (for me) is to see if they have correctly identified my skill level (in my opinion), so that hopefully they have the right kind of position in mind for me.
The name of a position is often meaningless, unless you know the inner workings of that organization. "Senior" is meaningless window dressing. It's how the role fits within the team that determines if it's right for me and if I will be able to have the kind of impact I want.
Now, I am sure that you, skuhn are able to do those simple things, but the guy interviewing you doesn't know it. If he asks you a simple question that you can nail in 5 minutes, and answer "sorry dude, your question is so easy I find it offending", the interviewer will think you're an arrogant douche - that's how I would feel at least. Instead, just solve the problem he's asking you and move on.
If after that he keeps asking stupid questions, well, it's a different story and you probably wouldn't fit well in that company.
I think this question is suitable for phone screening. You should already know if someone can do the work equivalent of tying their shoes before bringing them on-site. If I was asked a question at this level during an on-site interview, I would be a little disappointed. If the entire interview continued in that vein, I wouldn't accept the position.
There is also the common problem where candidates google for answers or at least seem to google for answers during phone screens.
The problem with asking truly challenging coding questions during an interview is that they are often too challenging to finish in the time allotted. Frequently challenging coding questions require an ahah moment or domain knowledge. For example if an interviewer asks a candidate to invent an advanced algorithm on the spot what is being measured? If the candidate gets the answer right they might be really smart, they more likely have been previously exposed to the idea, or they got lucky. If they got the answer wrong the interviewer must judge them on their ability to communicate their thought process during their attempt - but from that the interviewer didn't learn if they can code.
You shouldn't be disappointed that interviewers don't know straight away that you aren't a charlatan. You should instead be disappointed by the fact that there is such a high number of successful charlatans in our industry.
Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to:
- make sure the company doesn't overpay for "resources" (a "talent buyer" if you will)
- make sure said resources, once hired, stay in line and don't make waves of any kind, and terminate them as needed, as silently as possible.
We tend to think of HR as an adult version of the nice and benevolent elementary school teacher who first helped us understand the world; the reality is they are more like cops. Bad cops usually.
The "bad cop" analogy is spot-on. I've used that exact analogy—my boss (unwittingly) played "good cop", while the HR consultants played "bad cop".
I pretty much just go to work, chill out, and hope I can find a better gig sometime in the near future (I'm on basically an ever-renewing contract but the vendors in our system are horrible about rate increase).
This part is so important. Our HR department doesn't actually know anyone in the office. It becomes particularly interesting when they organize a company outing and have completely missed that there is a large percent of the workforce that does not speak the native language where I live, but they still have event hosts that will only present things in this language. They've done this 3 years in a row now.
I've seen quite a few articles on HN recently where what we call "candidate experience" during the hiring process was a theme. Whether this writer chose to list "Recruiting" as the first topic because of chronology (recruiting was first experience with company) or to emphasize the importance is unknown, but candidates today seem to assume that a broken hiring process is indicative of flaws in culture and how the company values employees.
Companies that simply play the numbers game and don't consider improving candidate experience are running the risk of reducing their brand as an employer, regardless of how the public regards their products or services.
First impressions count.
It's hard to know what a company is really like without knowing some insiders. Searching on the Internet may find opinions pointing every which way. And then, you meet their recruitment team, and get your first -- and maybe last -- firsthand exposure to the internal workings of the company.
Hiring the right staff is obviously very important. So any issues with the hiring process that cannot be fixed is deeply worrying. Does the company not value hiring? Why can't it be fixed? Who will my co-workers be? What else is broken? etc.
I regret that I didn't walk out during the misaligned interviews, to save everyone's time. I did eventually tell recruiters not to contact me anymore, but that seemed to make them more interested, and I was handed to a different team. (In the end, I picked Netflix anyway, and am very happy I did.)
Netflix recruiting was awesome, and I think other companies can do the same. Don't put up with recruiting problems -- help fix it. It may be your company's first and last impression.
HR typically wants to control as much of the process as possible, which often means an HR screening first. This tends to turn off engineers considerably, as it's deemed a waste of time, so the first step in the process is perceived negatively and that negative first impression is hard to overcome. The clients I've represented that have the smoothest process are those that use HR to facilitate and provide answers to questions, but to try and limit involvement beyond that.
I would never interview at major tech' companies because from what I've read of their interview process, it is all about knowing random Computer Science trivia and studying a book of trick questions.
I like more traditional corporations/business who give you questions actually applicable to the job and your experience. Silicon Valley interviews are pretty insufferable, due to their pseudo-intellectual elitism.
Companies should take their interview, and then give it to what they consider their most successful employees. If the employees wouldn't be "hired" then the interview process is completely broken.
We recently tried to identify such a question, with a scope such that the candidate should take about an hour and a half to complete - where complete also implies documentation, tests, etc. We couldn't find an appropriate question which would be something that would be highly indicative of the specific work they'd be doing that a) Didn't require a ton of domain knowledge (we don't expect people to have that domain knowledge coming in) or b) Would be too specific to particular technologies such as which ORM type library one is using, which type of DB, what libraries, etc.
Typically when I've seen examples of these questions where they are fully relevant they're in a space that's tightly defined - you're using say RoR, MySql, etc and candidates are expected to be proficient in those. That's not us.
I don't know anyone who does trick questions (most people I know find them anathema, and even Google -- famous for them -- acknowledges they're useless). I definitely do know some people ask the 'cycle in a linked list' question (or others like it); honestly, I don't see a problem with that set of questions.
When I interviewed at Google (four years ago now I think) there were no trick questions. Hard questions? Yes. But none that had "gotcha" answers that you'd either have to know already or be some kind of genius to come up with on the spot in an interview.
I asked someone that today, and it didn't go very well. I gave him the hint to start with writing code to print out all of the children of a node, then when that stack overflowed, he was able to make progress.
Do you think there are senior generalists engineers who would be great who could struggle with that question? Its hard for me to put myself in those shoes but I believe it could be possible.
The goal of that question from my perspective is to watch them solve a problem that requires recursion. I've always found that people who do well on that stuff tend to get stuck less designing software in general.
I do worry that it cuts out people who would actually be good.
I'm very interested to hear thoughts on this from others.
It seems to me to still be very poorly understood in general that the purpose of a question in an interview is not to see if the candidate gets the right answer, but to see how they function. (In those interested enough to read the discussion this deeply it's probably somewhat better understood.)
I always stipulate that they can use whatever brute force approach they want, and that i'm not judging on the algorithm. (Though we'll then discuss the big O complexity of what they've done and i'll ask them to brainstorm some avenues for optimization).
The main drawback of this particular problem is that it's biased toward people with more formal CS experience who have probably seen more tree and graph stuff, when i'm not really trying to measure for that experience directly.
I'd be interested in a problem that doesn't have that aspect but still takes up a fair bit of brain space when thinking through. What I mean by that is that when you're trying to build and debug something recursive, you have to hold in your mind some representation of what the stack will be at various points, and not everyone has a great aptitude for that.
It's never happened to me yet with this type of problem, but i'd be really impressed if I did run into someone who has the optimal algorithm for this memorized and can code it on demand in an interview. I'd certainly want to check that they haven't spent all of their time just memorizing algorithms and they can still do other things of course.
If this did happen i'd want to validate that they really understand the solution and aren't just spamming it out by rote, but if they've really got a few algorithms in the bank like this i'll just consider this box checked and move onto other considerations.
all I really want to know is if the candidate has the "horsepower" to deal with these sorts of problems, many people don't. someone who can code optimal solutions to these things on demand obviously does.
That said, obviously this is much easier for someone who's dealt with trees and graphs and such a lot before, so it's not ideal. I'd certainly be interested in a better way.
Iterate through the list adding its nodes to a set. If a node is already present when we go to add it, then stop, since we've found a cycle. Otherwise if we reach the end there is no cycle. With a hash set which has O(1) insert and membership check, the algorithm takes O(n) time and space since.
Note that I mean we're adding the nodes themselves to the set, not the element stored by / pointed to by the nodes. This may mean storing a pointer to the node in the set, or some other kind of object identifier.
I think this solution is fair to expect from anyone, including the caveat about node identity. Plus a candidate who already knows tortoise and hare should be able to come up with this when asked to solve the problem another way ("what's the simplest, most naive solution you can think of?"). I am not sure that I would expect anyone to come up with solutions beyond this one and the O(n^2) solution during an interview. I think those solutions correspond to knowledge that everyone should have in their working set. "Have I seen this thing before" is a pretty simple application of data structures. The O(n^2) solution trades off storage to track whether a node has been seen with determining it on demand in duplicate each time by traversing the list from the beginning repeatedly.
(If solutions are fair game that involve modifying the list, such as reversing it, or assuming that list nodes can be marked as seen, then make sure the boundary of what's allowed is clearly communicated. Make sure that the candidate does not neglect to consider a category of solutions by mistaking it as out of bounds. Candidates who are asked to design an algorithm to process a data structure cannot usually modify that structure to make the problem easier, so if this is something that you want to encourage, then you might tip the candidate in that direction by asking them to write the definition of their list node, and encouraging them to implement the node however they want as long as it meets your definition of being a linked list. Conversely if this is out of bounds, it might be best to provide the definition of a list node.)
Anyway, it seems like a fair simple interview question along the lines of a medium difficulty FizzBuzz, if the answers above give full credit. I don't think effective software engineers would be tripped up by this. One area of concern might be people looking for overly fancy solutions without trying "er... can I just track what nodes I've seen in a set?", but finding simple solutions is part of being a good engineer. I think there are better questions than this one: (1) it's too easy to memorize all the answers (2) it's already well known by this point (3) I have not heard of a good way to build on the question to make it challenging and interesting for high performing candidates. This might be an OK intro question before moving onto a harder one. I've never asked this in an interview - just going by instinct.
I agree with you that there are probably better questions. As you say, I'm looking for a medium difficulty fizzbuzz. I also agree with you that this is not going to be challenging and interesting for high performing candidates.
Incidentally, if someone has managed to memorize the solution to this and other algorithm problems I would consider that a pass. just the ability to do that is enough. there's enough code involved that they have to understand the problem pretty well to memorize it, and its the ability to understand that i'm interested in. (Barring some extreme outlier with super memory but bad other skills, but I'll have to detect that with other questions).
"The goal of that question from my perspective is to watch them solve a problem that requires recursion"
I wouldn't use recursion for my solution. It takes up stack space for no reason. If I'm going to be allowed to use more space, I'd just loop through the list, add them to a set, and check if I've already seen it. No recursion, but extra space. Is it more space than another stack frame? Depends on the type of set I'm using. But at least I know I won't blow up the stack (maybe the heap :-)
Since you are asking for opinions from others, I'm going to assume you wouldn't be upset with me solving it this way. So am I less of an engineer because I didn't immediately go for recursion?
With that said, everyone has a baseline - answers they expect to see. But everyone has to keep an open mind.
My company is trying to come up with a corpus of questions and answers to those questions at the junior, normal, and senior level. I've voiced my opinion that it is a slippery slope. If you get someone who isn't a skilled interviewer, and the interviewee doesn't use one of the prescribed 3 answers, what happens to that candidate? Granted it is one data point in the loop, and not the only data point. But as I stated, it becomes easier to be "lazy" during the interview.
No, not at all. a stack is a stack, whether it's the call stack or one you maintain in code.
Its not the recursion that's important to me, it's holding a problem of moderate complexity in your head in order to be able to come up with a solution. Problems that lend themselves to recursion seem to present a bar that some engineers struggle with, and others find easier, in my anecdotal experience.
I know I said recursion is important all over the place, clearly my thinking is sloppy on this and needs to improve.
I have this idea that there is a class of problem, that lends itself to recursion, that separates the wheat from the chaff in some ways. maybe that's nonsense.
What I really want to test for is the ability to juggle abstractions while working through code problems. there's probably a better way to do it.
Thinking about this corpus of questions and answers, I guess the common idea of fixing broken code might have a bit more merit because it removes the risk of an interview focusing too much on judging the approach and turning it into a trivia contest (have you seen this before and do you remember how to do it).
I'm going to assume your answer is "on the job performance". If not, this is going to be a difficult conversation, and I'd ask why you are trying to measure for something you aren't going to be paying for.
The best predictor of on the job performance is ... on the job performance. Everyone but the most junior person has experience. Look at that.
All of these exam type questions usually rely on knowing a trick, or being recently well versed. I TA'd a graduate course in Algorithms. That's rather relevant, I would think, since you aren't offered that if you don't have ability. Yet you know the last time I've done, say, dynamic programming? It's been awhile. I know about it, I know when to decide whether to pull it out, but ask me to do it, in a high pressure interview (all interviews are high pressure), and well, I'll probably fail. I'm working on other things like Bayesian inference. Bet you'd fail doing that stuff, even though it is just simple multiplications and such, when you get down to the implementation. Unless, of course, you are working on that sort of stuff right now.
I find the situation in SV somewhat ridiculous. To go out and interview means a lot of prep. Google recommends spending a month reviewing algorithms before applying. You know, I have an actual job, and I have open source side projects, and I have a family, and hobbies, and an old dog I want to spend all my time with. It is trivial to find out my skills by looking at what I have done and asking me questions about it. Have me give you a 1-2 hour tech talk, for example (I like public speaking, most don't so that is not a universal solution). Have me write some code with you, if you must. I work at a very high level, but I am not necessarily 'clever' at seeing the right trick in 10 seconds under pressure in an interview.
Also, how important is that sort of thing, really? For some jobs it is, undoubtedly. If you want me to write a load balancer for your cloud infrastructure, there are some algorithms I need to understand. Even then, not knowing something now is not evidence I can't do the job. I can learn - it's how I've done everything up to now. I can learn your thing too. More importantly (to my mind) - am I a hard worker? Can I mentor others? Can I lead a team? Can I put a schedule together, and recognize when that is appropriate and not appropriate? Can I make a budget? Can I talk to clients? Do I meet my deadlines? Do I solve problems - not implement the cards in this sprint - but see friction of some sort at work and engineer a solution? Do my peers like working with me? Do I get shit done? Is my code maintainable, readable, modular, commented? Can I write? Can I teach? Can I work with the CEO?
I've been to so many interviews where they don't even try to learn any of that latter stuff, where they show no interest in what I have done, where they don't try to figure out if I can do the actual job they are doing, but are deeply interested in if I can program a smart pointer, from scratch, to some arbitrary set of requirements. It is all just deeply puzzling to me.
All I'm really going for is to ask someone to write some code live, on their laptop with their tools, so I can watch how they debug, how they think through things, etc. I want the problem to be hard enough that the person has to model execution in their head and that it's challenging to do so.
I have found that there are people who can code decently well but get badly stuck when the complexity hits a certain level. I'm trying to not hire them in senior positions.
For example, I had a recent project where we were analyzing user data and producing a bunch of edges representing potential connections detected between users, as a way of sniffing out fraud rings.
One feature associated with this was a banning UI, allowing loss prevention types to navigate through the graph, select groups of users according to certain criteria, and generally look for patterns that are evidence of fraud rings manually, to supplement the automatically generated analysis.
There are a lot of front end people who will go into brainlock on this kind of thing. I need to make sure I have some people around who don't.
When making senior hires, I want people who can write code for this sort of thing without making a huge mess or just getting stuck for weeks.
Presenting a real sample from a problem like this needs way too much context though.
I'm going to keep thinking about how to precisely define the type of task that i'm really talking about here. My fuzzy definition about ability to model execution of X complexity in one's head is obviously weak and probably flat out wrong.
So when it comes to "junior, normal, senior" they dont have to be different questions, in my opinion. Opened ended questions give flexibility for the candidates inclination and complexity in answering. Depending on how the candidates doing add increasing complexity, discuss improvements, or try again with a simpler setup. Something like Word Count can go many different ways; If they like C talk about char and buffers and syscalls. If they like javascript, well then you can make fun of their tail call recursion.
Netflix does like to hire senior staff, who often have previous public accomplishments they can refer to, and discuss in interviews.
I got some blunt answers (reinforcing what was in the culture deck), which felt different than the happy-talk you can get with other companies, but I appreciated the honesty. I didn't get anything tactless.
I almost didn't work for a company because my experience during an internship was that HR, payroll, and other departments that were not part of my day-to-day job were painful and bureaucratic. I was talked into the job anyway, and it was without a doubt the right decision for me. I learned an enormous amount, worked with some terrific people, and helped ship a very successful product. You could argue that the ancillary stuff reflected company issues that ultimately led to the company's demise. But I would certainly not have passed up the 3 years I spent there even if I'd known that in 3 years I'd end up looking for a new job. And that's not least because so everyone I worked with did the same thing, and now I'm still working with many of those same people on much of the same technologies.
What was important about the candidate experience? It was clear that the team was interested in working with me and developing me as an engineer, and that they were very bright and working on important problems. That trumped basically everything for me.
For employers evaluating a candidate, "if it's not yes it's no" - I would suggest job seekers to have the same attitude. (Unless your current job already sucks.)
For me, the interview is absolutely 2 ways. I spend just as much time answering questions and talking about our team as I do asking questions. There are times where I walk away wishing I had done a better job, but you always HAVE to care about candidate experience.
My point to the folks at my company is that we need to be improving our brand in the eyes of software professionals, not making it worse. To do this we need to present an image that's not just bog standard, mid-sized bureaucracy style hiring.
And I that perhaps a bit more subtly than it appears. This frantic search for warm bodies can make you feel pretty desirable and important, and I think it is easy for that to skew your thinking a bit and to over-interpret small things that happen during interviews. But, that is the reality of human behavior, and you cannot ignore it.
I recently went through a job hunt and two stand out in my mind: Red Hat and Rackspace.
Neither one of them insulted me or anything, per se. Rather, I saw that they were looking for engineering people on a couple different job boards and instructed you to apply through their 3rd party system. I had done a lot of work lately in virtualization and distributed computing and these guys are good open source citizens there, so I figured I'd apply. Two months have gone by now and still no word -- my status on their website remains "resume received".
Makes me wonder how they ever manage to hire anyone at all. It's really soured me both to them and companies that use that shitty application system in general. At this point I figure anyone who uses it (including Amazon and Oracle) aren't even worth wasting my time messing around with.
My personal favorite experience was being called (on my desk phone) by a recruiter in response to an application that I submitted, for a different job at the same company. I had applied 4-5 months previously, and had been working there for at least 3 months. One hand seriously has no idea what the other hand is up to.
I sympathize with you, this can feel pretty bad as an applicant (especially if you've done a lot of work on your resume / cover letter just for that job). Once I realized how things work on the back end, I stopped caring or even thinking about jobs until an actual human reached out to me.
(Or the US does thing entirely differently - I only work in the UK business unit, so you never know)
I'm sure no one actually got/read my CV. It irritates me to no end that I can't talk to an actual hiring manager, can't provide a cover letter, etc.
Google started as a Xanadu everyone wanted to job for, but more and more tales about bureaucracy and people jocking for power keeps coming into light.
Apple has for long time seemed to be a very demanding employer where you sign away your life to the company the day you start working.
Microsoft was the original power employer but for a long time seems to have been paralyzed by department infighting and middle management.
Valve long claimed to have a unique and awesome culture but other accords has described it as being dysfunctional an ineffective.
I'm not sure whether Facebook is good or bad or has corrupted at this point.
Anyways, the point seem to be that the bigger the company the more business people and management who will corrupt the company. The more employees the more rules and bureaucracy is needed to enforce them.
It certainly is possible to avoid this but it seems the bigger the company the faster the entropy slide into oblivion and the more energy it takes to counteract it... and not many do. The "Bozo explosion" as Jobs described also was very apt.
Can anyone comment on Netflix's backend architecture?
Hopefully "high performance culture" isn't a synonym for "sweatshop".
How diverse is the population of engineers at Netflix compared to other public tech companies at a similar stage?
A high-performing culture that emphasizes mentorship is better IMO.
I don't think it's hard to imagine a great developer performing poorly because either the role or company is a poor fit.
It just makes it seem as though getting fired implies you are a bad engineer, and not getting fired means you are somehow better than those who got fired.
[0] http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-value...
I have a few friends who I worked with at a large company, the kind with a large bureaucratic, broken management system that shuffles around incompetence without ever purging it. They went on to work at Netflix and they tell me how much they love it. They no longer have to deal with terminally incompetent divisions. They're top performers; there's no fear. If Netflix were stupid enough to fire them they'd instantly be buried in new opportunity. Of course, Netflix isn't that stupid.
Consider the economic incentives: A strong will-fire policy is a great negative incentive to prevent incompetent hires in the first place. It's not so scary if you're competent and capable -- and that's precisely the kind of people a company will want to hire..
I can say that for some people, it is absolutely scary, even if you are competent and capable. For example: - You suffer from imposter syndrome. Not that uncommon. - The companies you work for have fired people regularly (read: startups). You notice these people are not always incompetent, but more often bad at politics or unlucky. - You have others to support where the risk of being fired just isn't worth it.
Or, put it another way. Incoming netflix hires already have this expectation, so you'd expect the incompetent to self-select, as you've suggested. Yet netflix is reportably still firing often, which suggests one of the following is happening: 1) people who are so incompetent that they don't know they are incompetent are getting through netflix's hiring process 2) something else is happening and incoming netflix hires should absolutely be worried about being fired.
Acknowledging that you will need to fire some portion of those you hire is an adult approach to the issue. Likewise from an employee's perspective. It's not a big deal to plan for things possibly not working out.
At first glance this seems good, because I've certainly worked places where dead weight was permitted and there seemed to be no getting rid of them.
The problem is: how do you know which people are good? I believe you can come to pretty accurate conclusions with the right people in place at each level of your hierarchy. However, one wrong person can completely skew your perception of who is doing good work.
I've also never seen a metrics-based review system that was actually designed for measuring humans. It must work really well on the robots that Google tests it on, but people don't map to 1-5 point scales or bell curves as well as you might think.
And I don't think that Netflix shuffles, mentors or warns people -- I think they just bounce you out of the company. It's been put to me as "they pay top of market, so they shouldn't have to deal with any personnel issues."
I mean think of it, have they literally never made a mistake here? Well, what if you're that mistake? Tough shit, here's 50 grand (made up number), go be unemployed now.
The last story I mention is especially concerning since, at least in NY, if a company has a single project they need completed, they hire consultants. Consultants are paid very well (much more than even Netflix will pay) as compensation for the risk of being a consultant (i.e., no health insurance, no implicit or explicit agreement that the work will continue for more than a single project).
However, there were a few points that are a little disconnected from reality, or perhaps they are not being entirely honest about the employee / employer relationship.
When I'm working for somebody I give them everything, my heart and soul. My passion. My success is the companies success.
But I think it's honest to be clear that I am giving up _time_ with my family or _time_ working on my own projects to bring home a salary. There is a big difference between my heart and soul for 20 hours a week, or 40 hours a week, or 60 hours a week. Hours do matter. Hours are my side of the bargain, and in return for hours I get paid cash.
I think its a form of dishonesty to gloss over this and wave your hands around and say hours don't matter, just come in when you want and do your best and if you perform well you won't be fired. When I hear this I think the employer doesn't expect you to have anything else in your life other than your job, and that what they really want is _all_ your hours in exchange for your salary.
I don't think that's necessarily bad, just say so and be upfront about it.
Having no holiday policy also artificially creates a grey area, or a point of conflict between an employee or employer. If I were a cynical old bastard I would suggest that the no holiday policy is actually so that holidays don't accrue from year to year. In my experience young engineers don't really take holidays and if you don't force them out of the office they end up with months and months of leave saved up.
This. If I had one advice for every company out there, its to try and do this. Being adult doesn't have to do with your age. People who are responsible, curios and always willing to learn and work out differences... these are the kind of people that you really want.
Admittedly that's hard to do. Perhaps that's why many people like to hire within their network.
The whole firing average performers thing is, in my opinion, really a means of making sure that only those applicants who feel strongly that they have something to bring to the table should apply. This is not where you go for job security, it is where you go to work on something that excites you. That being said, it is extremely rare to see someone let go who did not have some sort of fair warning or multiple indications that their work was somehow below par. I believe the multiple claims on glass door are remnant of the culture when this company was under serious duress in 2012/2013.
Of course, as with any organization, mileage may vary. One of the negative aspects of this culture is that as you get some very smart, very confident, very opinionated minds into a room - you are of course going to get into some head butting. Sometimes the overarching business strategy may change before a team can adapt to that change, and then persons may become defensible about their territory. While Netflix as an organism does a great job of eliminating this threat, it does take some time to formally fix the mojo within a deprecated organization / way of doing things.
People basically work 9 to 5. Yes, some people will put in a couple hours at home or on the weekend, but the nice thing is that no one expects you to be there, so you can definitely get all your "group work" done from 9 to 5.
Weren't you the guy who basically ran all Reddit tech stack, alone, day and night, for years in a row though? :-)
> Now I hang out and enjoy technology, advise startups and some other stuff (including working at Netflix as the Site Reliability Lead)
Which gives me the impression you work part time (or at least reduced hours) at Netflix. If that's the case, it may not be a good work/life comparison to other experiences you've had.
I would love to know more about their hiring process though. You mentioned that you didn't have to answer questions unrelated to your job (something I personally experienced during a job interview on a bad scale recently). Do they make you solve puzzles and other pointless indicators that some companies use to determine if a developer is any good or not? More specifically maybe a front-end focused role, not a back-end one.
Would love to know more about the process (as much as you can without getting into trouble).
As it turned out, the interviewer had plans to test me on a few front-end related things, but then proceeded to ask me questions about Java, databases, server administration and complex Javascript puzzles. Keep in mind this was a position for a front-end developer, their job listing didn't mention Java, databases or server administration. Looking at their current site, they are abusing jQuery pretty badly, aren't minifying their CSS/JS or tonnes of other things, so it felt weird I was being asked super complicated and mostly irrelevant questions when their site seemed so poorly developed.
I think it is important you not only get quizzed on things relating to your job, but also other things not directly relating to your job (but still important and within reason). I showed up for a particular job as a front-end developer and was asked questions that you would ask a DBA, Java developer and front-end developer. It was not the role being advertised.
This is a mistake that I discovered seems to happen at quite a fair bit. The hiring process is definitely broken at a lot of companies.
A farther flung interview suggests an interest in hiring a person rather than a set of skills.
I have been in that situation a few times in my career, when I worked at a digital agency especially. My job varied from Javascript, CSS and HTML, to developing HTML newsletters, building Wordpress websites, setting up servers/databases and tonnes of other things. At the time it was an invaluable learning experience, but also meant I worked long hours because my list of responsibilities was longer, friendships suffered because I worked a lot of weekends/late nights. As a result of that job, I didn't feel like it made me an expert in one particular thing. I was good at many things, but not truly great at front or back-end development. I felt like I had to learn outside of work hours to get good enough to specialise in my chosen field (my day-to-day job was obviously also a factor).
If I went for a job advertised as one thing, but then discovered that they expect you to be good at a lot of other things it would make me think twice (at least now I do). When I first started out, I was willing to do anything because I was young, naive and excited I had a job doing what I wanted to do in life.
My initial thoughts would be, "Please, not again. I don't want the responsibility of wearing multiple hats. I've worked hard to get to the point where I want to specialise in a chosen field", followed by, "This company is trying to get a combination stir-fry developer so they can cheap out and not have to hire a separate database administrator or back-end developer."
If you want a developer who knows a lot of things and is expected to work with a tonne of different languages, deploy a server and make coffee: there is nothing wrong with that, just be upfront and honest about it, so people like myself don't waste your time and have their time wasted. Don't lure candidates in with a misleading job description only for them to discover the job is actually more than you initially led on.
It's not the kind of company where bad mistakes are frequently made, and no one is held accountable.
These are aspects of "culture" that are really easy to boast of but hard to actually prove that you have. Some more data on how Netflix avoids inter-personal conflict between those with power would be really interesting.
Things went downhill fast after that point - the recruiter was very casual in her approach towards anything related to skills or compensation but very aggressive about how they value performance, what an honor it was to work at Netflix how lucky I am to be in the interview "pipeline"...
I had never met a bunch of folks so enamored by their own culture. I probably said something like "I have worked at quite a few places that have very good supportive cultures as well" towards the end.
The process ended after that call...thankfully.
[posting from a throwaway to avoid the fairly easy googling identification]
Political warfare isn't always obvious to a newcomer with several months on the job.
I met with 3 developers, a hiring specialist and a development manager on the first day and they asked very domain-relevant questions within my area of expertise. No silly programmer brain teasers. I had plenty of time to ask questions of my own.
On day two I met with non-developers. Business, designers/UX, etc. I was able to get a very good idea of the people I would be working with and the types of problems I would be solving.
I ended up deciding to take another offer, but it was a very positive experience overall. I didn't encounter any jerks like some others have.
But to be honest, we're pretty heavily invested in the Linux ecosystem at this point.
But FreeBSD has been improving on EC2, such as PVHVM support. If the benefit was big enough, it might outweigh the cost. I'd like to do a little FreeBSD EC2 perf testing this year (as I would for any tech that might pay off)...
I'm curious about the time frame though. The author of the post noted that he started several months back, to anyone who is sharing their story here can you please also note the approximate time frame for when your story takes place?
I'm curious to see if the company has corrected the problems that some people have hit while maneuvering through the recruiting process.
There have been technologies that I haven't liked, and I've had the freedom to work on them, change them, improve them, and have. I can list many of those, but it's not too different to what I've been putting in my blog during the past 10 months.
They love to bleat on about their Chaos Monkey this and Chaos Monkey that. But come on, they wrote a read-only cloud-hosted and distributed video streaming service that leans on standard cloud services and best practices for 90% of the hard parts. Chaos Monkey just smacks of writing a integration test for a third party component you don't own.
Frankly I wouldn't want a job at Netflix simply because the problem domain is not interesting enough. Read-only highly-resilient distributed systems are not particularly hard to create and test. It's only becomes an interesting problem when you need to do a comparable amount of write-ops at the same time as those read-ops.
Online distribution of content is pushing inexorably towards battles over hit exclusives. Some would consider that anti-consumer, and an unsavory tactic, though admittedly it doesn't fall cleanly in the sales, legal, or marketing arena. It's a little of all three.
I'm also worried about what's happening behind the scenes to push the service away from DVDs.
I used to have a video store around the corner that had a massive library of indie and foreign films. I have eclectic tastes in film, or at least don't just want the latest hits, so I rented there frequently. It's been driven out of business by online streaming. That was supposed to be ok, because, Chris Anderson, said, Netflix would stock even deeper content.
Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't have the time or inclination to fight the licensing battles required for streaming rights on anything approaching a deep DVD library. As negotiations over blockbusters and fights with Amazon over exclusives dominate the time of their lawyers, it's going to be even rarer to find gems from the long tail on the site.
Already we end up with Academy Award winners and nominees that are conspicuously absent. The 80 of 86 films on Spike Lee's "essential films" list that are unavailable. Giant holes in the catalog for major directors, like Hitchcock. Netflix has The Lady Vanishes and nothing else. That's one of over fifty films, many of which are classics, some of the best films of all time. (That one is fine but probably not his best or most noteworthy.)
To make it worse, Reed Hastings seems to hate physical discs, even though licensing for them is automatic, so he keeps trying to spin off or kill that service. So over the last year, the number of scratched discs I've received in the mail has increased, and most of the DVDs I request are on "very long wait," often dropping out of the collection entirely.
So now, even with their DVD service, pivotal noir films, like The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, or The Blue Lamp, which won the BAFTA for best British film in 1949, Netflix just doesn't know these exist. Yoji Yamada's "The Hidden Blade," one of the best samurai dramas of all time, just not there. There's basically nothing available by legendary Taiwanese wu xia director King Hu.
Sure, the Internet is the future, and shipping bits is phenomenally cheaper than shipping plastic. But there are different legal regimes here, and sometimes law trumps technology. The first sale doctrine allows DVD rentals without costly rights negotiations. So consumers get access to more content. Content owners argued for a few decades that rental stores were driving them out of business, it didn't happen.
Netflix isn't an archive, but it did knock a few of them out of business. It has a huge number of titles, but when you go through the list of really important films, it's 90% holes.
I understand they're chasing a dream to foster streaming of content. Along the way they've killed something that I don't think we can easily get back.
> Bad News syndrome
What is that precisely? (in context of tech companies)
Netflix must have brought their P.R. Consultant on full time for the last 3 months to write this post.
This is basically an HR approved Netflix puff piece.
- If I don't know them, they have little incentive to tell me the truth.
- If it's not private, then selection bias: glowing affirmations (or pseudo-critique: "Yeah we have our problems, but...") will obviously be the voices we hear. Not only are those maybe rewarded, but cold enough critiques are swiftly punished. For obvious reasons.
- If they're not sharply critical types, they miss what should be obvious, because they drink the koolaid or are just plain fine with whatever silliness.
(Why the emphasis on critique? Because one's job is solving problems, and real companies have such egregious problems. I'll accept fairly wrong critique in preference to correct bragging, because critique's usually missing and at least something not-too-wrong is a string to pull on during research.)
If the Mikes can be ousted from RIM, you can bet your rear that Hastings can be ousted from Netflix. And once "maximizing shareholder value" becomes the goal, "culture" becomes an afterthought.
Can't say I've ever heard of an organization where that's true. Typically, adequate performance means no promo, and being first in line for dismissal if the order comes down to cut staff.
Firing someone who is trying and doing sort of OK-ish but not actually well sounds hard. I would expect all but the hardest of hearts to be reluctant to dismiss a lowish performer, preferring to hope that experience and mentoring will yield a turnaround. People have empathy, after all. (Well, except for the sociopaths...)
In fact, to actually get managers to get rid of the merely adequate, you'd probably have to institute something like an up-or-out system, so managers could blame the system rather than themselves or the workers when the merely adequate got shoved out the door.