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someone called me to give me a rejection the other day and i was really mad about it (privately, obviously it isn't this hr drone's fault probably) if its a no just text me no and gently caress off! i don't want to hear you expound about how bad i am, i've already got more of that than i need from my own internal monologue
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Jun 10, 2022 19:44
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Corla Plankun posted:someone called me to give me a rejection the other day and i was really mad about it (privately, obviously it isn't this hr drone's fault probably) the worst is when they loving schedule a call to tell you they've rejected you. i recently had a recruiter ask for my availability to schedule another interview after the "final" interview round. they then went silent after my reply, then almost a week later they e-mail saying they'd like to schedule a call to update me on things. my naive optimistic mind was convinced they'd decided to skip the post-final interview and were going to make a verbal offer. of course reality was that they wanted to let me know they were moving in another direction.
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Jun 10, 2022 20:15
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interviewing is not predicated on good faith. it is a market of lemons on both sides. just have more of them on deck so you arent disappointed
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Jun 10, 2022 20:16
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also even for the best i think whiteboarding code has a bit of a failure rate (at least if you're applying for a job you're not vastly overqualified for), always a chance one starts off wrong and it doesn't become as clear as you hope. next time it'll work out
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Jun 10, 2022 20:35
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nudgenudgetilt posted:the worst is when they loving schedule a call to tell you they've rejected you. i recently had a recruiter ask for my availability to schedule another interview after the "final" interview round. they then went silent after my reply, then almost a week later they e-mail saying they'd like to schedule a call to update me on things. yeah! mine was scheduled four days in advance so i was expecting good news all weekend and then instead it was that
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Jun 10, 2022 20:56
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Corla Plankun posted:yeah! mine was scheduled four days in advance so i was expecting good news all weekend and then instead it was that that's an incredible amount of emotional damage. condolences
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Jun 10, 2022 21:22
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thank you. today i had a really great systems design interview thanks to practice and the advice in this thread so i am doing great now!
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Jun 10, 2022 21:29
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4lokos basilisk posted:oh the feedback mentioned that the solutions could have been more optimal performance-wise, so i take this to mean that i focused too much on talking and not enough time on crunching out the fastest fizzbuzz they want you to have a performant solution _and_ talk through it. if you can only do one or the other, that's non-ideal. if you talked through a performant algorithm and didn't implement, sounds like they were being goofy. but if you just never figured out/brought up something better than quadratic or whatever, well, that's the algo lottery for you nudgenudgetilt posted:my naive optimistic mind was convinced they'd decided to skip the post-final interview and were going to make a verbal offer. of course reality was that they wanted to let me know they were moving in another direction. fuckin a, been there and it sucks and _why do they do this just send me a 'no thanks' email!!!!_ Corla Plankun posted:yeah! mine was scheduled four days in advance so i was expecting good news all weekend and then instead it was that that sucks, sorry corla Achmed Jones fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jun 10, 2022 |
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Jun 10, 2022 23:40
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Achmed Jones posted:they want you to have a performant solution _and_ talk through it. if you can only do one or the other, that's non-ideal. if you talked through a performant algorithm and didn't implement, sounds like they were being goofy. but if you just never figured out/brought up something better than quadratic or whatever, well, that's the algo lottery for you i believe the poster is complaining because they specifically said "you don't need to find the most efficient solution" and then went ahead and rejected them for not finding a sufficiently efficient solution. while there's space between "most efficient" and "sufficiently efficient," it's far more likely that they just fuckin lied, because that's an extremely common lie
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Jun 11, 2022 00:16
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people just ... say poo poo in the prelude to an interview. it has the same relation to the truth as poo poo that peeps say in the first 5 minutes of an internet app first date, or the first 5 minutes of a used car sale close
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Jun 11, 2022 00:18
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"don't worry about finding the optimal solution" is a lie that the interviewers are primarily telling themselves, because they don't want to admit that they're just running people through an algorithms course final exam, because that would be incredibly stupid, right?
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Jun 11, 2022 00:22
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Corla Plankun posted:yeah! mine was scheduled four days in advance so i was expecting good news all weekend and then instead it was that This is some loving nonsense gees.
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Jun 11, 2022 00:32
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it's a way better interview experience if the candidate actually writes some code successfully. if i tell someone that I'm not looking for the most optional solution up front, that's because I think they're heading down a path where they might do a lot of thinking about the optimal solution but never actually get around to writing code before the interview is over. in order to actually get a hiring recommendation though, you need to get the basic solution done with at least 15 minutes left in the interview, so that I can ask you "how could we make it faster" and then you can talk about how you'd use a faster but more complicated algorithm, demonstrate your awareness that such things exist and that they could be applicable to this problem space. maybe you can even code it up if we have enough time. given that the interview premise here was to "get an idea of how i solve problems and iterate", i'm guessing that this interview was similar, and the "iterate" part of making the initial solution more optimal didn't happen. maybe this is the interviewer's fault, if they didn't manage the time properly themselves and wasted a bunch of it on silly questions without letting you get to the meat of the problem. it's hard to say secondhand.
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Jun 11, 2022 00:38
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I guess there’s also optimal and optimal solutions. they’re probably looking for you to use a tree or like an iterator algorithm or really anything better than o(n^2) I remember there was some hackerrank question I was looking at once where the “optimal” algorithm was like a discrete cosine transform or some poo poo. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jun 11, 2022 |
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Jun 11, 2022 02:27
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agreed with both jabor and hobbesmaster
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Jun 11, 2022 02:56
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i was told to post in this thread for interview/tech related stuff for jobs in the bay area.. been at my current company 6 years or so and they've kinda burned me on promotion so i feel like i'm well underpaid for other places. my plan is to interview at all the big companies even if i'm not planning to join them. experience is ~15 years with the last 10 or so in the bay area, initially doing startups. i have a compsci degree and understand the the general running times of all the basic sorting and searching algorithms. i'm pretty flexible about what i'm looking for. i've done "front-end" and some back-end all generally in javascript for the past ~10 years but i'm interested in anything as long as its not c++. what is the scene like now vs 6 years ago for interviewing? generally i would get one phone call from the recruiter, then one call from an engineer asking me a tech question. assuming i past that question, there would be an onsite for a day anywhere from 3-6 people interview.. if they like you then they'd ask you to talk to a much higher-up person. i'm guessing that format is basically the same? coding question wise... is it just memorizing l33tcode questions now? i've started looking through them and i've noticed that there's more questions i never saw ~6 years ago. for example, the alien dictionary question. can anyone knowledgeable discuss the differences interviewing now vs 6 years ago? graph related stuff is kinda a weakness so it looks like i'll have to review those. does anyone here pay for l33tcode or something similar?
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Jun 11, 2022 06:34
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Strong Sauce posted:what is the scene like now vs 6 years ago for interviewing? generally i would get one phone call from the recruiter, then one call from an engineer asking me a tech question. assuming i past that question, there would be an onsite for a day anywhere from 3-6 people interview.. if they like you then they'd ask you to talk to a much higher-up person. i'm guessing that format is basically the same? substitute in zoom calls for both phone call and in-person interviews, and it's about the same Strong Sauce posted:coding question wise... is it just memorizing l33tcode questions now? i've started looking through them and i've noticed that there's more questions i never saw ~6 years ago. for example, the alien dictionary question. can anyone knowledgeable discuss the differences interviewing now vs 6 years ago? graph related stuff is kinda a weakness so it looks like i'll have to review those. does anyone here pay for l33tcode or something similar? faang is still l33tcode poo poo, but the real world seems to have moved on to take-home projects that sit before the 3-6 person interview, and are discussed in said interview
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Jun 11, 2022 06:40
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I can't speak for every company, but nowadays our "on-site" is just a panel of 5 videoconference interviews, which could be all on one day or could be split up depending on the candidate's availability. The "phone screen" is also a videoconference interview, though that one is more about "would we be wasting the time of five other engineers to give this person an on-site" than it is about actually hiring or not. Unfortunately you're a little bit late to the dance - a lot of trash companies (i.e. ones without a strong business model) have frozen hiring (or even rescinded offers) since the money faucet looks to be drying up. While the good places are still hiring, there are more candidates competing for those positions than there were a couple months ago. Probably not a huge deal if you can stay at your current place while waiting for interviews to happen, but I wouldn't want to be in a situation where I needed a job urgently right now. I don't think memorizing specific questions and answers has ever been the way to go - unless you've got an inside line on exactly what the questions are going to be, it seems like memorizing enough possible questions would be more work than just learning the material properly - but knowing how to read that style of problem and quickly understand the actual technical question being asked is really helpful for being able to show yourself at your best. Practicing those problems also helps you identify specific areas of weakness that you should probably shore up - if someone gives you a problem that needs you to depth-first-search a graph, and you literally cannot write a depth-first search correctly in the course of the interview, it's going to be really really hard for them to advocate for hiring you.
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Jun 11, 2022 07:07
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Achmed Jones posted:they want you to have a performant solution _and_ talk through it. if you can only do one or the other, that's non-ideal. if you talked through a performant algorithm and didn't implement, sounds like they were being goofy. but if you just never figured out/brought up something better than quadratic or whatever, well, that's the algo lottery for you my expectation based on the interviewers words was that first i should read the assignment, then code up a naive or sub-optimal solution that works, while talking about whatever goes on in my head. i did that part, getting a verbal "ok this solution works, thats good" from the interviewer we then talked about the complexity and improvements and in some cases the interviewer wanted me to code that stuff up as we go. sure, in all cases the final solution was far from anything i would personally run in production Jabor posted:in order to actually get a hiring recommendation though, you need to get the basic solution done with at least 15 minutes left in the interview, so that I can ask you "how could we make it faster" and then you can talk about how you'd use a faster but more complicated algorithm, demonstrate your awareness that such things exist and that they could be applicable to this problem space. maybe you can even code it up if we have enough time. this is how it went, and i had 3 different coding interviews that followed this pattern in the interview process i guess since it was a senior software person position, it meant that their expectation was that i do code it up to "optimal" during the interview. all in all since this is the 2nd time i go through a interview process like this, the unspoken expectation seems to be "read the cracking the code interview book" and grind leetcode or hackerrank or whatever. which is fine i guess if the expectation is to hire people who can game the interview process and crank out efficient solutions to toy problems that they will never encounter in real life doing the actual work of course i am salty too because i should just man up and do that stuff too, and end up with a life-changing tco boost. its difficult to judge here in paris, because at the moment i am around 80k eurobucks + some stock options and it seems that this is already more than senior devs can get as an offer (and no im not relocating anytime soon due to reasons beyond my control). full remote to a figgieland job seems like a good idea, but the stonk situation / hiring freeze combined with seemingly every big corp having mandatory partial rto is closing that window of opportunities and finally i have been thinking a lot recently that the position i would really leave my current job for is probably not findable unless i get insanely lucky. i want to find a place where i can work on different things that require me to regularly learn new concepts and approaches AND the team itself is well motivated and nice to work with. i have said it before, i don't mind shoveling poo poo all day if my coworkers are nice to work with. the problem is that i feel in most big places the work is siloed a lot, and in a mature product there are not many new concepts or technologies to adopt - ideally its every dev or team in their own silo/component and the work is endless agile meetings and arguing about 2 or 4 character indent for the new repo. this is a straw man on my part, but having written this i realize that i would like to have a way to search for jobs not by language/tech stack but nature of work and the working style of the team. and the sad part is that there is probably some perfect small company somewhere looking for a generalist type of person but i will never find it because it is hidden among all the other burplelyslurp.io-type fart app startups.
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Jun 11, 2022 08:13
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4lokos basilisk posted:of course i am salty too because i should just man up and do that stuff too, and end up with a life-changing tco boost. this is one of the things that i think is worth it to just suck up and spend a few weeks grinding out until you're like, a master-level leetcoder. but yes it's really stupid lol
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Jun 11, 2022 19:17
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Leetcoder questions are dumb (I'm still practicing though). Worst of all are the ones that rely on some specific trick which makes them dramatically easier, like rotating a matrix 90° being the same as transpose + row reverse. Fairly certain most places wouldn't try using one of them for an interview though.
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Jun 12, 2022 13:06
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last coding interview I was in was to build a client-server recyclerview app from scratch and it infuriated tf out of me that, under time constraints, the interviewer would say he wanted code and then say that he wanted me to talk, and then say that he wanted code again. if I coded the UI he wanted me to talk about the state layer instead, and if I started focusing on the state layer he interrupted and said to talk about the network, and then he told me that i needed to code that. i was not allowed to explain or code anything to a conclusion, even at a high level. i don't believe that there was any goal to evaluate me on simultaneous coding and talking (which, again, there wasn't time for), he just wanted me to solve the problem the exact same way he imagines that he would Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jun 12, 2022 |
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Jun 12, 2022 19:18
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I agree with sentiments above, that a coding interview carries implicit pressure to produce code. A communication gap, under that pressure, should be forgiven if you produce code that has features of a solution (which is not to say that it will be, because interviewers have free will). I've interviewed candidates who run the clock out talking about the problem requirements and maybe write a function signature, but don't suggest a solution. I didn't recommend them.
Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jun 12, 2022 |
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Jun 12, 2022 20:04
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distortion park posted:Leetcoder questions are dumb (I'm still practicing though). Worst of all are the ones that rely on some specific trick which makes them dramatically easier, like rotating a matrix 90° being the same as transpose + row reverse. Fairly certain most places wouldn't try using one of them for an interview though. while the average user of leetcode is interested in interview problems, the people that spend the most time on those sites are into competitive programming. as a result competitive programming math stuff is going to be a bit over represented in solutions and submitted problems. I wouldn’t worry too much about those well, unless you’re say, getting a job in image processing or 3d engine backend work or something, then you should know the matrix tricks.
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Jun 12, 2022 22:15
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but as an interviewing tool leetcode is gonna be worthless because we all know no one is going to look at what was put into leetcode, just the single digit result and then make decisions on that
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Jun 13, 2022 06:47
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champagne posting posted:but as an interviewing tool leetcode is gonna be worthless because we all know no one is going to look at what was put into leetcode, just the single digit result and then make decisions on that i think the point of leetcode for interviewing is that you should practice your skill of solving small brain teaser problems in a crappy web ide, so that you would be good at this in the interview if some company is just checking my leetcode profile for the score then lol
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Jun 13, 2022 17:25
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yeah i know a lot of young people going through the intern/new hire interviewing circuit and i have not heard of a company checking your leetcode score lol. you'd be lucky if they even looked at something like a github. they're just interested in whether or not you know how to solve silly little programming problems, so everybody spends time doing a million leetcode problems instead of learning about designing complete software
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Jun 13, 2022 17:30
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i always carefully look at gh and i am literally the only weirdo i know who does this
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Jun 13, 2022 17:34
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i keep the link on my resume just in case, but the only time it's ever come up in an interview was when i applied to a very small, local software company for an intern position. bigger tech just seems like a numbers game to me tbh, nobody i know has felt seen for their particular talents or interests in an interview
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Jun 13, 2022 17:39
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I always look at a candidate's github, but have yet to bring it up during an interview have comments on projects of a couple of our new hires when they started though
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Jun 13, 2022 17:54
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bob dobbs is dead posted:i always carefully look at gh and i am literally the only weirdo i know who does this I'm with you, I do this too much to the chagrin of the ICs ITT Which reminds me, don't lie or be evasive. I had one entry level dude whose resume was like "PRs accepted by [well known OSS Software A] and [OSS Software B]". So I checked his PRs. He changed python 2 print statements in some orphaned code from print "Hello world" to print("hello world"). On the one hand, respect the hustle. On the other hand, uhh bro when I ask you about describing the nature of your contribution to [OSS Software B] dont get weird and evasive as gently caress. CarForumPoster fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jun 13, 2022 |
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Jun 13, 2022 22:12
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always lie never get caught
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Jun 13, 2022 22:35
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CarForumPoster posted:I'm with you, I do this too much to the chagrin of the ICs ITT ah, the average Hacktoberfest participant
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Jun 14, 2022 04:51
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i got called out on this once early in my career. i'd managed to land a trivial quirks patch in the kernel, then mentioned i was a kernel contributor in an interview. interviewer took way more interest than i expected and pulled up my patch during the interview.
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Jun 14, 2022 05:43
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i suspect those who say "fake it until you make it" have never really been hired by bureaucratic accident into a job way over their heads. this (1) is humiliating (2) carries the risk of getting fired (3) sets you back in finding other work because 80% of recruiters will only ask about your most recent job
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Jun 14, 2022 16:14
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or they successfully faked it until they made it 🤷♀️ imo it's good advice for a lot of things but probably not for jobs. but for stuff like, uh, confidence and extroversion being able to talk to people? hell yeah it works
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Jun 14, 2022 18:45
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great advice for sales / marketing jobs, poo poo advice for you-can-be-wrong-about-it jobs, can literally kill peeps if its a could-kill-peeps licensed job more than one kinda job in the world
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Jun 14, 2022 19:22
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oh, yeah, i meant for computer touchers which are pretty solidly last two categories there
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Jun 14, 2022 20:07
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just call it a learning curve instead of fake it till you make it. im not saying you should lie your way into a can kill someone job, but most of computer fondling and adjacent professionals is fart apps, business process efficiencies, and making someone with too much money richer. ignore the imposter syndrome. get paid.
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Jun 14, 2022 20:36
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ultravoices posted:ignore the imposter syndrome. get paid. i agree with this attitude, almost none of this is important just fucken get paid and escape capitalism
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