Can’t just be me, can it? Currently 0 for 3 on interviews because I can’t seem to get past the technical interview/test. Usually because of some crazy complicated algorithm question that’s never been relevant to anything I’ve ever had to do on the job in all my years coding.
Also, while I’m ranting: screw the usual non-answer when given feedback.
Don’t worry about the algorithm questions… companies asking that are just google-wannabe companies that don’t deserve you. I have always told recruiters “if there’s a time-limited interview test, I’m out”, and I’m doing very well for myself now.
If you’re desperate, unfortunately, you have to pick up a book on algorithms… one of those 600 pages book, and start reading…
Let’s be honest, even if you finish that 600-page book, you might not “crack” the algorithm interview. The inteview requires you to grind the question, or simply a lot of practices.
I was so lucky in the interview for my current job: I’m working on a product with a big networking component, and I was asked to write an echo server with low level components. That was maybe the second time I had a test related to the job.
You’d be surprised by the number of applicants that can’t write a for-loop. There’s a middle ground between no test and complex tree search algorithms.
I only got quite simple tests tbf, but I don’t look for senior positions. Main thing is to just get the problem solved writing decent code (if it’s a home assignment) or to walk them through your reasonings
The only time I got a leetcode waste of time it was a Dijsktra/A* problem (which I failed)
I simply refuse to move forward if the interview process involves a whiteboard interview. I have no aspirations to work at FAANG so this has only happened to me a couple of times
Back when i was a kid, i thought electronics shop were scammers; you knw, solder a wire here, hold power buttons longer than usual, and the thing works again! (This is the reason i got into fixing things 😁)
But since then, i came to a revelation, than it takes years of experience to knw which wire to touch, and wat not to touch at all; what is worth saving, and what is a gonner… saving time…
Coz apparently, as a kid i had a lot of time to spare. These days… Not so much.
PS: i still think they were scammers, coz i believe in being informed… Thats why for every electronics fixed/not fixed (even if its is a punny solder of a wire), i am completely transparent with the user, for both our sakes
Imo “scammer” is the wrong word. “Hustler” is more accurate in my experience.
Under certain circumstances, those iFixit places are exactly what it says on the tin - but if rent’s coming up and they haven’t had many walk ins, you might end up with a new Flux Capacitor in your JavaScript Microlibrary, since the old one looks like it started sending unhandled exceptions to the teraflop reader - but don’t worry, they put in a new 6-charge teraflop reader that should future proof it for years.
There’s a story/joke about a company that has a large, important industrial machine that stopped working. They call in a specialist engineer, who walks up, hits it with a hammer, and it starts working again. He then hands the manager a bill for $2000. Incensed, the manager demands an itemized invoice because this was outrageous for something that took 2 minutes. The engineer kindly obliges: hammer $5, knowing where to use the hammer $1995.
Yep, use to work somewhere where we had a technician that would spend a whole lot of time just walking around, noting where we had blown light bulbs and stuff like that and he told me something similar “What I’m doing now is not what I’m paid for, that’s just me being nice to my employer, what I’m paid for is knowing how to solve the real issues when shit really hits the fan.”
your 2 decades of experience mean much more than memorizing algorithms, you know how to produce real value
That’s all fine and dandy but the HR recruiter that can’t tell apart git from grunt needs to cross boxes in the skills assessment section, and if you don’t ace coding challenges you are as good as dead to them.
If you automatically rule out companies that either do their own coding assessments or offload them to third parties, you’d rule out most of the potential job market.
There are millions of small companies and shops that need engineering help. Many will actually talk to you like a person because they haven’t been enshuttified to death.
Yeah, I changed my career direction (industry, tech stack…) but before that, my CV only was enough for me to get hired. They would just verify the information, and sometimes, there weren’t even a single tech interview.
Yep. LeetCode medium difficulty puzzles is the de facto / unofficial standard, and even if you’re a pretty good programmer, those are tough to do in a timed 45 minute thing with some stranger watching every character you type :-(
Sometimes those positions are meant for promoting internal candidates, who obviously sat in, conducting the same interviews in the past. So the difficulty is dialed up to “I am Death incarnate!” levels and they then have scoring data to support their selection of the internal candidate.
At a friend’s workplace, they’d opened up a 2-3yr exp position to convert a great intern, and had some great 10+yr exp people apply. My friend said that was a little awkward. Even if Mark Russinovich or Linus Torvalds applied for that job, they still had no chance at getting it. I joked that I might put a resume in his manager’s pile for the creator of the tech stack they were interviewing for, just to hear how that reaction was.
That’s probably not representing even… 5% of these gauntlets, but it might make you feel better. Sometimes, it’s the hiring manager fulfilling the letter but not the spirit of some process, but it means they are frustratingly hard on candidates in the process.
And perhaps, ultimately, you have dodged some bullets.
We ask algorithm questions and I feel bad about it. But a nontrivial portion of the job really is adapting these algorithms to novel scenarios. Not most of the job, but maybe the hardest part.
Never had issues in the past, I actually did the tests for few friends, just for fun. But most of the time they are overkill. Now that I have more experience I realize it takes few very basic questions to understand if one is technically fit for the job.
I don’t know if I would appreciate a complex test now if I was looking for a new position. It feels a bit disrespectful.
I currently struggle accepting all the psychological and hr tests for management positions… They are hr bs. I do them, but they are imho much worse than technical test, because completely useless and arbitrary. Those are really offensive and intrusive
In my experience, the job that HR excels at is creating and perpetuating the view that the company needs a HR dept. Generally, the most unneccesary people in an office are HR.
Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.
So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.
My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.
I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.
20% of the company!? My last company had useless HR like that. Only 3 of them for 35 of us, but they did nothing and that was 2 too many. The “Director”, with all of two people under her, was so wildly incompetent we all thought she had something on the owner.
They couldn’t even handle their core job of bringing us solid candidates. Had no one under me but was still treated a management (IT) and finally put my foot down. Made it crystal clear, with many examples, that the people HR was bringing in didn’t have the most basic office related PC skills, and that I could tell on day-1 who was and wasn’t going to make it. Changes were made, success was had.
So ask yourself, how the hell is the IT guy a better judge of candidates than a “professional” HR team?!
I should add, my current company’s HR is rock and roll. It’s really nice working with them and I’m still good friends with one that left last year.
The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.
At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.
HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.
The job I was talking about was IT at a payroll company. Running payroll can be surprisingly complex, so most small businesses farm it out to a employee leasing place, let them hassle with the regulations. Lot’s more to it than multiplying hours by pay rate.
But it sounds like they were farming it out? Sending hours and pay rates to an accountant?
We’re a software dev, and despite the low turnover, we’re constantly growing and hiring. Not easy to pull in solid devs because it’s such a competitive field. HR earns their money in my outfit. We’ve needed a new security person in DevOps for 2-months, haven’t heard a peep from the boss about candidates.
But yeah, I feel you on the useless HR people. When I say our director was so dumb and useless, I really meant we thought she had blackmail on the owner. We were not joking, it was the only explanation that made sense.
Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of “HR” was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn’t want to go there.
My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.
The problem is that most times HR person is all you’ll get at the first interview and you’ll only get someone marginally tech-versed on the second interview. Even then you risk having some bozo who regrets not being hired by Google so all the questions are hyperbolic in the extreme and not related at all to daily tasks.
I believe algorithm focused technical tests are useful. However, if the interviewing team hasn’t taken the time to understand both the problem and the answer, then they are completely pointless. So you’re exactly right here to challenge their bullshit.
Astronaut: You mean they’re all too stupid to do the jobs they currently have?
2nd Astronaut: And they always were.
Also - those kinds of interview questions are bullshit. A good tech interviewer can ask about past experience and learn plenty from questions in that context.
For a lot of these you need to study/practice on sites like HackerRank for a while first. Some companies go overboard and expect you to build some crazy recursive dynamic programming implementation in 15 mins without an IDE, others are more realistic and just want to see if you know things like algorithm complexity, can pick appropriate data structures, and write logical and clean code. And yes, very little of it applies to what most of us do day to day. Anyways, HackerRank is great for interview practice, you can Google for pretty much any solution to their questions.
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Don’t worry about the algorithm questions… companies asking that are just google-wannabe companies that don’t deserve you. I have always told recruiters “if there’s a time-limited interview test, I’m out”, and I’m doing very well for myself now.
If you’re desperate, unfortunately, you have to pick up a book on algorithms… one of those 600 pages book, and start reading…
Let’s be honest, even if you finish that 600-page book, you might not “crack” the algorithm interview. The inteview requires you to grind the question, or simply a lot of practices.
I was so lucky in the interview for my current job: I’m working on a product with a big networking component, and I was asked to write an echo server with low level components. That was maybe the second time I had a test related to the job.
If they ask a tech test question, it’s time to leave. When they act surprised, tell them you don’t believe in wasting your time with bullshit.
You’d be surprised by the number of applicants that can’t write a for-loop. There’s a middle ground between no test and complex tree search algorithms.
If I ever encounter that middle ground, I’ll let you know. Until now, it’s only ever been complex bullshit.
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Lmao, what the heck. I’ve heard about that, but I still cannot believe it’s true.
This is why googling is a skill, even if I don’t know then some 15 year old kid from Bangladesh has a YouTube tutorial on it
deleted by creator
Why? Tech tests are fine, absurd complex tests for shitty jobs are not
If you find some that are reasonable then I consider you lucky. I have not. They’ve only ever proven to be an absurd waste of time in my experience.
I only got quite simple tests tbf, but I don’t look for senior positions. Main thing is to just get the problem solved writing decent code (if it’s a home assignment) or to walk them through your reasonings
The only time I got a leetcode waste of time it was a Dijsktra/A* problem (which I failed)
I simply refuse to move forward if the interview process involves a whiteboard interview. I have no aspirations to work at FAANG so this has only happened to me a couple of times
The worst is when you’re not expecting it and get ambushed with a whiteboard…
don’t take tech interviews seriously, they suck for everyone but big corps
your 2 decades of experience mean much more than memorizing algorithms, you know how to produce real value
don’t forget that, and don’t let them forget it
Back when i was a kid, i thought electronics shop were scammers; you knw, solder a wire here, hold power buttons longer than usual, and the thing works again! (This is the reason i got into fixing things 😁)
But since then, i came to a revelation, than it takes years of experience to knw which wire to touch, and wat not to touch at all; what is worth saving, and what is a gonner… saving time…
Coz apparently, as a kid i had a lot of time to spare. These days… Not so much.
PS: i still think they were scammers, coz i believe in being informed… Thats why for every electronics fixed/not fixed (even if its is a punny solder of a wire), i am completely transparent with the user, for both our sakes
Imo “scammer” is the wrong word. “Hustler” is more accurate in my experience.
Under certain circumstances, those iFixit places are exactly what it says on the tin - but if rent’s coming up and they haven’t had many walk ins, you might end up with a new Flux Capacitor in your JavaScript Microlibrary, since the old one looks like it started sending unhandled exceptions to the teraflop reader - but don’t worry, they put in a new 6-charge teraflop reader that should future proof it for years.
Might be, might not be. A popped capacitor doesn’t require a lot of skill to spot.
Not all jobs are rocket surgery.
There’s a story/joke about a company that has a large, important industrial machine that stopped working. They call in a specialist engineer, who walks up, hits it with a hammer, and it starts working again. He then hands the manager a bill for $2000. Incensed, the manager demands an itemized invoice because this was outrageous for something that took 2 minutes. The engineer kindly obliges: hammer $5, knowing where to use the hammer $1995.
I remember reading that as well, wasn’t it on a ship?
Yep, use to work somewhere where we had a technician that would spend a whole lot of time just walking around, noting where we had blown light bulbs and stuff like that and he told me something similar “What I’m doing now is not what I’m paid for, that’s just me being nice to my employer, what I’m paid for is knowing how to solve the real issues when shit really hits the fan.”
Sysadmins can similarly have a hard time. After all, if they’re doing their job right, there are no problems.
😂
deleted by creator
Okay
That’s all fine and dandy but the HR recruiter that can’t tell apart git from grunt needs to cross boxes in the skills assessment section, and if you don’t ace coding challenges you are as good as dead to them.
Why are you applying to that soulless shitshack??
If you automatically rule out companies that either do their own coding assessments or offload them to third parties, you’d rule out most of the potential job market.
There are millions of small companies and shops that need engineering help. Many will actually talk to you like a person because they haven’t been enshuttified to death.
STOP WORKING FOR THESE GIANT HELLHOLES.
Yeah, I changed my career direction (industry, tech stack…) but before that, my CV only was enough for me to get hired. They would just verify the information, and sometimes, there weren’t even a single tech interview.
They’ve been pulling leetcode questions designed to take a lot of thought and effort. They then expect people to get them in 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, I never got a degree so even when I can ace those questions, I’m really just there to fill their interview quota for the most part.
Yep. LeetCode medium difficulty puzzles is the de facto / unofficial standard, and even if you’re a pretty good programmer, those are tough to do in a timed 45 minute thing with some stranger watching every character you type :-(
You have a 2^n marbles and a scale…
Sometimes those positions are meant for promoting internal candidates, who obviously sat in, conducting the same interviews in the past. So the difficulty is dialed up to “I am Death incarnate!” levels and they then have scoring data to support their selection of the internal candidate. At a friend’s workplace, they’d opened up a 2-3yr exp position to convert a great intern, and had some great 10+yr exp people apply. My friend said that was a little awkward. Even if Mark Russinovich or Linus Torvalds applied for that job, they still had no chance at getting it. I joked that I might put a resume in his manager’s pile for the creator of the tech stack they were interviewing for, just to hear how that reaction was.
That’s probably not representing even… 5% of these gauntlets, but it might make you feel better. Sometimes, it’s the hiring manager fulfilling the letter but not the spirit of some process, but it means they are frustratingly hard on candidates in the process.
And perhaps, ultimately, you have dodged some bullets.
We ask algorithm questions and I feel bad about it. But a nontrivial portion of the job really is adapting these algorithms to novel scenarios. Not most of the job, but maybe the hardest part.
Never had issues in the past, I actually did the tests for few friends, just for fun. But most of the time they are overkill. Now that I have more experience I realize it takes few very basic questions to understand if one is technically fit for the job.
I don’t know if I would appreciate a complex test now if I was looking for a new position. It feels a bit disrespectful.
I currently struggle accepting all the psychological and hr tests for management positions… They are hr bs. I do them, but they are imho much worse than technical test, because completely useless and arbitrary. Those are really offensive and intrusive
deleted by creator
In my experience, the job that HR excels at is creating and perpetuating the view that the company needs a HR dept. Generally, the most unneccesary people in an office are HR.
Holy. One place I worked at had way too many HR personnel. It was crazy. I happenned to have my workstation directly next to them. They quite literally did nothing all day. Nothing. At. All. It blew my mind.
So why did we have so many? Well at basically every company-wide meeting this dep was putting on the biggest theater performance of being overwhelmed by “governmental endless bureaucracy” or something. So they always tried to hire more of their own friends. Temporary roles always became permanent and we ended up with 20% of the company working HR. The owner of the company, bless his heart, really could not say no.
My experience with HR in most companies has been hit and miss, but this one example really opened my eyes. Of course if you hire people who are basically actors you run the risk of forming an HR dep that is very dramatic and manipulative.
I can’t really blame the workers for taking advantage of an easy job and making a great living out of browsing Facebook and gossiping all day. But it really suck that the actual good workers were over-worked because other areas of the business were under-staffed. Virtually nobody else had the political impact in the hiring process HR had. Obviously this business wasn’t run by genius.
20% of the company!? My last company had useless HR like that. Only 3 of them for 35 of us, but they did nothing and that was 2 too many. The “Director”, with all of two people under her, was so wildly incompetent we all thought she had something on the owner.
They couldn’t even handle their core job of bringing us solid candidates. Had no one under me but was still treated a management (IT) and finally put my foot down. Made it crystal clear, with many examples, that the people HR was bringing in didn’t have the most basic office related PC skills, and that I could tell on day-1 who was and wasn’t going to make it. Changes were made, success was had.
So ask yourself, how the hell is the IT guy a better judge of candidates than a “professional” HR team?!
I should add, my current company’s HR is rock and roll. It’s really nice working with them and I’m still good friends with one that left last year.
Yeah, 4 employees out of 20.
The fact this department even existed is a mystery to me. They didn’t even screen candidates or participate in interviews. It was basically 4 glorified secretaries. To be fair they also managed the payrolls, which consisted of sending the same excel file to he accountant each week. Realistically we would only have needed 1 person to keep track of whatever might pop up and to make sure the payroll system was up to date. The owners liked to screen and do the interviews themselves.
At some other place I worked we had 1 admin/accountant person working like 1 or 2 days a week for a business of about 40 employees. Again the owners were taking care of new hires.
HR as a department seems largely useless unless you’re hiring 365 days a year and have so many employees that you can’t keep up with all the requests. HR people are usually terrible at screening candidates anyway.
The job I was talking about was IT at a payroll company. Running payroll can be surprisingly complex, so most small businesses farm it out to a employee leasing place, let them hassle with the regulations. Lot’s more to it than multiplying hours by pay rate.
But it sounds like they were farming it out? Sending hours and pay rates to an accountant?
We’re a software dev, and despite the low turnover, we’re constantly growing and hiring. Not easy to pull in solid devs because it’s such a competitive field. HR earns their money in my outfit. We’ve needed a new security person in DevOps for 2-months, haven’t heard a peep from the boss about candidates.
But yeah, I feel you on the useless HR people. When I say our director was so dumb and useless, I really meant we thought she had blackmail on the owner. We were not joking, it was the only explanation that made sense.
Yeah, payroll was outsourced and they met with the firm once or twice a year. The firm took care of mostly everything legal, including insurances and tax benefits afaik. The head of “HR” was a lifelong friend of the owner so I guess he didn’t want to go there.
My experience in a big software company was different and probably just like yours. The people there were rockstars.
This. 100x this.
The problem is that most times HR person is all you’ll get at the first interview and you’ll only get someone marginally tech-versed on the second interview. Even then you risk having some bozo who regrets not being hired by Google so all the questions are hyperbolic in the extreme and not related at all to daily tasks.
I believe algorithm focused technical tests are useful. However, if the interviewing team hasn’t taken the time to understand both the problem and the answer, then they are completely pointless. So you’re exactly right here to challenge their bullshit.
Astronaut: You mean they’re all too stupid to do the jobs they currently have?
2nd Astronaut: And they always were.
Also - those kinds of interview questions are bullshit. A good tech interviewer can ask about past experience and learn plenty from questions in that context.
You guys are getting interviews?
For a lot of these you need to study/practice on sites like HackerRank for a while first. Some companies go overboard and expect you to build some crazy recursive dynamic programming implementation in 15 mins without an IDE, others are more realistic and just want to see if you know things like algorithm complexity, can pick appropriate data structures, and write logical and clean code. And yes, very little of it applies to what most of us do day to day. Anyways, HackerRank is great for interview practice, you can Google for pretty much any solution to their questions.
I hope I never have to look for a job again but with the way my business has gone lately, I may need to start thinking about it in a few years.
I’ve also been coding for 25 years, most of that professionally. I’m not sure I could pass a tech interview.
The reality of tech.