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JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...
Havent had a drug test in like 15 years. Whatd you do wrong?

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Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I was drug tested for a consulting role as a liability thing. Other than that, I've never been tested.

BurntCornMuffin
Jan 9, 2009


JawnV6 posted:

Havent had a drug test in like 15 years. Whatd you do wrong?

Presumably, be employed outside of Seattle/The Valley. I've been trending 50/50 on whether or not I get a pre employment screen. I was even random-tested at my first job (they did monthly screenings in groups of 30), though that job is really an outlier for bizarre, draconian policies.

Horse Clocks
Dec 14, 2004


Today I hung up on an interview.

After submitting my CV with my github profile with numerous open source projects on there, then a half hour technical test/puzzle, they wanted to do more technical questions over the phone including a coding portion (that I was interrupted repeatedly during). And then there would be an on-site.

All for a 6 month contract.

Not sure if this makes me a prima-donna. But if your tech test isnt screening effectively, fix it. dont tack on a second.

Horse Clocks fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Jun 12, 2018

Volguus
Mar 3, 2009

Horse Clocks posted:

Not sure if this makes me a prima-donna. But if your tech test isnt screening effectively, fix it. dont tack on a second.

If you're not happy with an interview, regardless of reason, don't need to waste your or their time. May not need to go as far as "hung-up", but 'thanks, but no thanks" would be fine.

Pixelboy
Sep 13, 2005

Now, I know what you're thinking...

JawnV6 posted:

Havent had a drug test in like 15 years. Whatd you do wrong?

Last I heard, Intel still does this to all new hires because Reasons.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED
I have family that worked for Intel anjd they could not say enough bad things about the company and culture (also they did the classic "lay off a year before full pension kicked in" move). Maybe it was an exception to the rule but it sounded like a screaming nightmare.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
Ripped from a blog post regarding interviewing at a place I'm tech screening with tomorrow:

quote:

Back to basics.
Interview preparation takes weeks even months. Do it in batches and do it well. Enjoy the nostalgia. Enjoy the beauty of math.

Your regular tech work life patterns and practices are important but quite often they are not so helpful when doing interviews. Here are some ideas to help you prepare for the engineering interview at (company):

Read Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell.
Read Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck.
Watch as much Uncle Bob talking about SOLID principles as possible.
Ask a friend to test you at a whiteboard over lunch.
Choose a language and get comfortable with it (without an IDE).

Dear lord our industry is insufferable.

Naar
Aug 19, 2003

The Time of the Eye is now
Fun Shoe
There isn't a :rolleyes: big enough. I feel sorry for you guys in the States.

return0
Apr 11, 2007
Tell them that Uncle Bob is a garbage dildo.

withoutclass
Nov 6, 2007

Resist the siren call of rhinocerosness

College Slice
Studying to the test is working great for American education, why not apply it to interviews?

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I'll link the blog when I decline to go to round 3, I'm definitely going to take round 2 tomorrow though since I'm working from home and it'll be good practice or good for a laugh.

2nd Rate Poster
Mar 25, 2004

i started a joke
How loving pretentious can you get?

Enjoy the math of our first year algorithms question. Savor the relational theory of inner joins. Change the world with our line of business CRUD app.

This industry is a loving dumpster fire.

Che Delilas
Nov 23, 2009
FREE TIBET WEED

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Ripped from a blog post regarding interviewing at a place I'm tech screening with tomorrow:

quote:

*Jams nose into own rear end in a top hat and inhales deeply*

Dear lord our industry is insufferable.

Oh man please let me have the ultimate privilege of working at this innovative startup-like full of adults who have a job to support their own goddman life oh please oh please.

speng31b
May 8, 2010

If I find myself in the position of having to interview "for real" and not just getting a job through networking, my usual tactic is just - "that's a cool whiteboard you've got there, but why don't you let me talk about X / show you Y that I've worked on and why it relates your business, why I would add value to your team, why I want to be a part of this place".

If I meet a lot of resistance to steering the interview this way - towards just talking like a human and pitching the things I've done or why I'm excited to work there - it's pretty much 100% a sign that I'm on the wrong track. I work reasonably hard to make sure that I have an online presence and portfolio that demonstrates I'm technically capable of doing what I would be asked to do, precisely so that interviews can be shorter and more focused.

As both an interviewer and interviewee this approach has always made the most sense and seems to save a lot of time for everyone involved. When people talk about all these nightmarish interview machinations I'm just glad that we somehow have such a different experience with the same industry. Yikes.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

quote:

After each interview, I assess candidates on the following metrics. Ability to think on your feet, communication, critical thinking, creative problem-solving, debugging, speed, management of competing priorities, organizational skills, and test driven.

This was the other choice portion of the blog. Dude you're spending 45 minutes talking to someone and coding on Coderpad, for fucks sake. You aren't even doing intense pair programming over the span of a few hours or something, it's under a god drat hour.

Personally, I think interviews like this happen for a few reasons in New York City:

  • People actually think they're a good measure because Google does (can be true if the questions are reasonable!)
  • Gate-keeping the jobs away from those who haven't spent "weeks to months" studying as a way to prove "loyalty" or "dedication" to working "a lot"
  • Ways to turn down candidates so they can hire friends/through their network (my last go-around had like 6 dudes named Pryystynn Smith III, Esq from Yale on one team)
  • Self-serving need to ask pet questions as a confirmation bias-ish thing???? "If they can answer these really hard questions and wanna work here, then they're Smart and I must be Good"

Just this one dude's take, but be prepared for a barrage of trip reports over the next week or so since they're starting.

IAmKale
Jun 7, 2007

やらないか

Fun Shoe
Are most recruiting agencies staffed with people who have no clue how to follow up with you? Email goes unanswered for more than 24 hours, no status update phone calls the day after you expect news to have come in...

This recruiter brings me an offer with a huge company that I feel like Im a strong candidate for and actually want to work for, but staying in touch with them has been less than optimal. Im sincerely doubtful theyre able to put up a strong offensive with the employer when they cant even keep timely lines of communication open with me.

to;dr: I think the phrase Im looking for is, managing expectations. Most agency recruiters Ive worked with are just terrible at it.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

IAmKale posted:

Are most recruiting agencies staffed with people who have no clue how to follow up with you?

Yes. In my experience, recruiting agencies are staffed with people who have no appreciable skills except human language, but are not organized or persuasive enough to succeed in a sales job.

spiritual bypass
Feb 19, 2008

Grimey Drawer
Sales (agency recruiters) is usually the least responsible bunch of people in any given company. Programming recruitment is a hot market right now, so every unprofessional dipshit is trying to get a cut.

fantastic in plastic posted:

recruiting agencies are staffed with people who have no appreciable skills except human language, but are not organized or persuasive enough to succeed in a sales job.

:eyepop:

Shirec
Jul 29, 2009

How to cock it up, Fig. I

Good Will Hrunting posted:

This was the other choice portion of the blog. Dude you're spending 45 minutes talking to someone and coding on Coderpad, for fucks sake. You aren't even doing intense pair programming over the span of a few hours or something, it's under a god drat hour.

Personally, I think interviews like this happen for a few reasons in New York City:

  • People actually think they're a good measure because Google does (can be true if the questions are reasonable!)
  • Gate-keeping the jobs away from those who haven't spent "weeks to months" studying as a way to prove "loyalty" or "dedication" to working "a lot"
  • Ways to turn down candidates so they can hire friends/through their network (my last go-around had like 6 dudes named Pryystynn Smith III, Esq from Yale on one team)
  • Self-serving need to ask pet questions as a confirmation bias-ish thing???? "If they can answer these really hard questions and wanna work here, then they're Smart and I must be Good"

Just this one dude's take, but be prepared for a barrage of trip reports over the next week or so since they're starting.

Super sorry to butt into the oldie thread but are all the NYC jobs that crazy with their interview process???

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

Shirec posted:

Super sorry to butt into the oldie thread but are all the NYC jobs that crazy with their interview process???

You survived hellboss, you're as much of a programming oldie as anyone

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

Shirec posted:

Super sorry to butt into the oldie thread but are all the NYC jobs that crazy with their interview process???

No, definitely not all of them. Two companies ago was my first f/t dev job and I was brought on as a Junior. I had a phone screen with a very basic coding question and OOP stuff. On-site I had two pen-and-paper interview questions that were fairly basic string and tree manipulation with recursion and iteration. Then, just a curriculum and "what do you like about JVM languages vs working in Node" discussion with the CTO.

My last go-around was for mid-level. While the interviews were substantially harder, for the most part I found them "fine" and passed all code writing save for Google + 1 other out of 10 second rounders. Granted, I studied at least 3 weeks before I started. The biggest issue last time around was system design type questions.

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


rt4 posted:

Sales (agency recruiters) is usually the least responsible bunch of people in any given company. Programming recruitment is a hot market right now, so every unprofessional dipshit is trying to get a cut.

There are a few good ones, and they're definitely worth keeping in touch with, but for the most part this is right:

fantastic in plastic posted:

...recruiting agencies are staffed with people who have no appreciable skills except human language, but are not organized or persuasive enough to succeed in a sales job.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Shirec posted:

Super sorry to butt into the oldie thread but are all the NYC jobs that crazy with their interview process???

I can't speak for Google/FB/whatever, but I can tell you with a sample size of 2 (my current job and my past job) other "household name" companies, not all NYC jobs are like that.

$current_job has a small takehome assignment to decide whether you can actually write code. Took me an hour to do; it was a task on the order of "build a mobile app that fetches from this API endpoint and renders the results in a list view." It's like 'Fizzbuzz for mobile' in that it's a simple fundamental task but a surprising number of self-professed senior engineers can't do it right.

If you make it past that and get brought in to interview, I feel like a significant part of our in-person interview process is aimed at making sure you're not a toxic team-killing jerk, not at making you perform at a whiteboard for our amusement.

kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Jun 13, 2018

IAmKale
Jun 7, 2007

やらないか

Fun Shoe
So then whats etiquette for applying to a job if I get fed up working with recruiters? Is it taboo to submit directly through a companys job site when I inevitably find the same job listing the recruiter presented me? Im trying to network my resume in past the resume scanners but I might have to go through regular channels anyway. Not just this particular job posting but in general I just dont want to tank my chances for a position because I applied to the same job twice.

Horse Clocks
Dec 14, 2004


IAmKale posted:

So then whats etiquette for applying to a job if I get fed up working with recruiters? Is it taboo to submit directly through a companys job site when I inevitably find the same job listing the recruiter presented me? Im trying to network my resume in past the resume scanners but I might have to go through regular channels anyway. Not just this particular job posting but in general I just dont want to tank my chances for a position because I applied to the same job twice.

Recruiters can have various anti poaching clauses between them and their client.

And usually, as soon as they send your CV to their client, youre theirs for 12 months or so to the eyes of their client.

Its often not worth the hassle trying to go around. You need to find the right persons name/email/phone, contact them, and then they might only ever deal with that recruiter for convenience.

fantastic in plastic
Jun 15, 2007

The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.
There's usually an arrangement that says if the client company hires a candidate that a staffing agency presented within some period of time, then the agency gets paid. I would skip any job listings that you've previously sent your resume to via a recruiter, but other listings should be fair game. I'd just go ahead and apply - unless you signed something with the agency saying you wouldn't do that, then any conflict would be between the agency and the company. It would only tangentially involve you, and only at a point where the company decided to hire you.

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



Good Will Hrunting posted:

This was the other choice portion of the blog. Dude you're spending 45 minutes talking to someone and coding on Coderpad, for fucks sake. You aren't even doing intense pair programming over the span of a few hours or something, it's under a god drat hour.

Personally, I think interviews like this happen for a few reasons in New York City:

  • People actually think they're a good measure because Google does (can be true if the questions are reasonable!)
  • Gate-keeping the jobs away from those who haven't spent "weeks to months" studying as a way to prove "loyalty" or "dedication" to working "a lot"
  • Ways to turn down candidates so they can hire friends/through their network (my last go-around had like 6 dudes named Pryystynn Smith III, Esq from Yale on one team)
  • Self-serving need to ask pet questions as a confirmation bias-ish thing???? "If they can answer these really hard questions and wanna work here, then they're Smart and I must be Good"

Just this one dude's take, but be prepared for a barrage of trip reports over the next week or so since they're starting.

I just assume it's usually that there are actually so many perfectly qualified candidates that they can't decide without throwing more filters up, but the filters are so specific that they're effectively random. At least you end up with a lucky group under this hypothesis :v:

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
Trip report #2: Slightly modified trie algo question. I got and explained my preferred solution (after pointing out the brute force) and coded it up. It compiled and passed the tests but I did need a little assistance at a few points during and it took too long. Overall not terribly hard but I don't expect a call back.

The hardest thing about this one was they were very insistent on prodding me along with the code and pair-ish-programming instead of giving me a sec to write the algo out on paper and draw my trie so I could go from visual -> code.

Good Will Hrunting fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jun 13, 2018

Jort Fortress
Mar 3, 2005

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Trip report #2: Slightly modified trie algo question.

God, interviews are so loving stupid in this field.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
:shrug: I passed apparently. 3 hour on-site invitation just came through.

Portland Sucks
Dec 21, 2004
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

Good Will Hrunting posted:

Trip report #2: Slightly modified trie algo question. I got and explained my preferred solution (after pointing out the brute force) and coded it up. It compiled and passed the tests but I did need a little assistance at a few points during and it took too long. Overall not terribly hard but I don't expect a call back.

The hardest thing about this one was they were very insistent on prodding me along with the code and pair-ish-programming instead of giving me a sec to write the algo out on paper and draw my trie so I could go from visual -> code.

What kind of positions are you applying for? I've never even heard of a trie.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
Mid-level back-end engineer at a pseudo-robo-advisor.

Jort Fortress
Mar 3, 2005

Portland Sucks posted:

What kind of positions are you applying for? I've never even heard of a trie.

I have 9 years experience and only know what a trie is from studying for Amazon interviews a while back. It's wild that manipulating some esoteric data structure most people never touch is considered a standard interview question.

The Fool
Oct 16, 2003


I believe Hrunting is interviewing for data science positions, which makes the trie question less out of right field.

The Fool fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jun 14, 2018

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I've only applied to back-end (API, service, whatever) and data platform jobs (Spark, Hadoop, etc). All Java/Scala.

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


In theory, if you're good at the basic algorithms and data structures questions, you should be able to do basic things with a trie even if you've never encountered it before.

In practice, everyone knows that it comes up in interviews, and they study it, even if they'll never actually use it.

mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

ultrafilter posted:

In practice, everyone knows that it comes up in interviews, and they study it, even if they'll never actually use it.

Yeah basically this. There's so many goldbrickers out there that can talk a good game about their experience and how they coded an amazing thing on their own, but can't manage a fizzbuzz without copy/pasting stack overflow. So you test fundamentals, since neither side can really disclose the company owned IP they work on day to day.

Good places will use it as a chance to see how you attack problems, deal with ambiguity, and if you consider edge conditions, efficiency, and scale.

Bad places will play gotcha data structures 101 trivia night.

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...
It's a trick question , the correct answer is "Oh, a trie? Hah, haven't used that since the 106b Boggle assignment"

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TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
I'm pretty sure I've never heard the term "trie" before, but looking it up, it's a data structure I'd heard of before. The uses for it were pretty limited though...like, autocompleting words is the only practical one I can remember off the top of my head.

My opinion on most data structure questions is that there's only so many ways to arrange memory that are generally useful, and thus fair game for expecting interviewees to be familiar with. There are of course less common structures that are useful for solving specific problems, but if you choose your interview question with a mind towards seeing if the interviewee figures out to use your special data structure, you're probably a dick.

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