God, this is just painfully embarrassing. It's a real shame we -- as an industry -- haven't pushed back against these kinds of practices (maybe the pay is just too good). At this point, technical interviews are just a meme.
So its basically extended interview for like 8 weeks where your every move is being watched/judged.
When did it become ok to treat people like shit and humiliate them with these ridiculous "interviews". Seems like we keep coming up one worse idea after another.
Shame on everyone who thinks its ok to humiliate people with your idiotic algorithm/whiteboard/big O interviews.
This is getting so out of hand. Can we bring some humility and kindness to tech interviews.
I think everyone and their mother knows the sad state that is technical interviewing. Any technical interview I've done is _so_ far removed from any practical knowledge/experience that it's asinine.
I've had interviews where the guy will ask me a technical question, and I won't answer it to his liking. Then, he'll proceed to answer the question himself at nauseating length to the point where I can see his original intention was to show me his 'brilliance'.
It's shitty and lacks courtesy in standard conversation to do stuff like that, so it's even worse during an interview when the candidate took the time to prepare, dress up in nice clothes, and show up on site for the interview.
What bothers me about a lot of technical interviewers is they don't set out to measure a candidate's qualifications so much as to reinforce their own feelings of self-importance. It's because they have little incentive to surrender their own statuses within the organization because then they won't be the ones giving interviews and deciding who they get to work with.
I've almost always done really well at technical interviews.
But I support this because a lot of technical interviews are ripoffs of people's time. I've put a lot of effort into technical presentation, done well, and then been disqualified based on other criteria. That sucks and the companies have done it that way because it's easy for them.
I completely get that technical interviews aren't great at accurately predicting success on the job.
What I don't get is all the whining that seems to happen from interview candidates who seem to think they are hot stuff and deserve to get hired but blame it on a bad interview process. It's not like the interviewers aren't aware of the shortcomings of the technical interview.
I have yet to learn of another industry where people routinely blame interviewers for their being rejected. I mean it seems like in other industries people are just hired almost solely based off resumes, and while everyone also realizes it sucks, they don't seem to think the interviewer is an idiot for not hiring them.
Forget it. Technical interviews should have stopped years ago. Getting a candidate to solve interview problems on a whiteboard gives you nothing about his/her abilities as an engineer. Time to flush all of that garbage away.
technical interviews are the worst thing ever. They prove nothing except that a candidate crammed for you exam and/or work well while being watched. I can't imagine either of those are useful.
I did an interview with one of the FAANG.Co once and ended up arguing with the technical interviewer because he was a douche. When I found out he would have been on my team I told the recruiter I wasn't interested anymore. They ended up turning me down anyway because I didn't get along with the guy. Basically he was asking me to implement a JSON parser in brainfuck, not a legit use for either of our time.
Yet another article showcasing how the tech interview process is fundamentally flawed.
Personal anecdote: I recently underwent an interview process for a position in my field of expertise (computer vision) consisting of multiple in-person stages, whiteboard coding, product design and a take-home assignment that required developing a foundational (bubble-sort like) algorithm from scratch. After successfully completing all of these hurdles, I ended up with a low-ball offer targeting entry-level candidates. If we could have discussed the compensation up front, I wouldn’t even have bothered.
Seems the reports of the death of the technical interview have been greatly exaggerated. I remember reading a post on TechCrunch that announced the death of coding interviews as a way to assess candidates. The premise of the article was that since the whole purpose of an interview was to serve as a proxy for actual performance, due to the lack of the tools and infrastructure to easily observe and measure the latter, but now that we do, “it is the height of cargo-cult stupidity not to use them”.
This trend is absolutely ridiculous. I'm currently in "Round 3" and have FIVE interviews this week, four of which are technical. I already passed the technical in Round 2.
As someone with 10+ years experience in the industry, I've about had it with these technicals. I'm just going to start refusing. I'm happy to have a long technical discussion on my work experience and to provide you with portfolio examples. Take your hacker rank problems and get out of here.
This story reminds me of how broken software engineer interviewing is. Imagine if a company decided to hire software engineers by giving them five 6-sided dice. Then they have to come to the company building and roll each dice once every hour. And during that hour they have to dance and sing in front of someone while being recorded. If they roll all 6 on all 5 dice, their dancing and singing will be judged by the committee! And if the committee likes their performance they might get the job! The acceptance rate is 0.01%, the company is so elite. And this company is also complaining about a software engineer shortage. They wish they could find more good engineers!
It's pretty obvious which company (or group of companies) I'm referring to. The interviewing process of these companies has done great harm to the software industry. And now they're trying to do further harm by using it as an excuse to get cheap foreign labor to reduce salaries.
This is not something we should normalize. Interviewing at tech companies is already terrible, and asking people to do it more frequently is not something we should encourage.
I also don’t follow the conclusion that because tech jobs pay well we should be ok with unprofessional behavior from employers.
Yeah, these kinds of interviews are epically stupid. What's worse is that practices like this and similar ones from places like Google, etc. give credibility to dumb things that make for a terribly inefficient (at best) or outright toxic (at worst) job marketplace.
Other places follow the same practice because they hold these market leading companies up on a pedestal, which is tantamount to argument by appeal to authority.
But, but, but all the top companies do this and they're successful!!! Yeah, well they're successful despite stupid practices like this, not because of them. Their business models are so resilient that they can tolerate a whole shitload of failures in other aspects or dimensions and still come out on top.
Come on, this interview process is going too far... I think most of the people working in tech knows that the interview process is just plain silly, but we keep doing it because reasons...
And, the worst of it, it doesn't make any sense that for a senior role you get a code interview (or multiple), and then, if you don't pass it, they encourage you to re-apply in 6 months or a year...
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