<story><title>The dystopian world of software engineering interviews</title><url>https://www.jarednelsen.dev/posts/The-horrifically-dystopian-world-of-software-engineering-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilk</author><text>I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.&lt;p&gt;Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their &lt;i&gt;idealized&lt;/i&gt; self-image.&lt;p&gt;Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?&lt;p&gt;Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.&lt;p&gt;I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Hah! Reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don&amp;#x27;t want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.</text></item><item><author>ideal0227</author><text>When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.&lt;p&gt;AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions.&lt;p&gt;Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did not hire me back then.&lt;p&gt;Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview at &amp;quot;Giant Search and Advertising Company&amp;quot;, but they run a lot of my code in production :P.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cmrdporcupine</author><text>Google gets so many applicants it&amp;#x27;s irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is. It selects for people similar to the interviewers, but that matters little, since they can afford to say No to 99% of candidates because thousands will still apply.&lt;p&gt;What boggles my mind is to see the same type of &amp;quot;skill testing&amp;quot; whiteboard coding interviews at smaller companies and startups that pay far less and don&amp;#x27;t have golden handcuffs to offer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been at Google for 8 years. If I went to one of these smaller companies to interview and they asked me to whiteboard a data structure or algorithm problem I&amp;#x27;d just walk out. I&amp;#x27;m not the best programmer in the world or particularly shit-hot, but I&amp;#x27;m sure there are many that are that would do the same.&lt;p&gt;Companies copying this process are doing themselves a disservice.</text></comment>
<story><title>The dystopian world of software engineering interviews</title><url>https://www.jarednelsen.dev/posts/The-horrifically-dystopian-world-of-software-engineering-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilk</author><text>I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.&lt;p&gt;Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their &lt;i&gt;idealized&lt;/i&gt; self-image.&lt;p&gt;Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?&lt;p&gt;Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.&lt;p&gt;I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Hah! Reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don&amp;#x27;t want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.</text></item><item><author>ideal0227</author><text>When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.&lt;p&gt;AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions.&lt;p&gt;Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did not hire me back then.&lt;p&gt;Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview at &amp;quot;Giant Search and Advertising Company&amp;quot;, but they run a lot of my code in production :P.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numpad0</author><text>One thing I wasn&amp;#x27;t aware as a nerdy teenager was how everything is valued IRL in its guaranteed minimum performance, not conditional maxima.&lt;p&gt;No one is interested in your peak performance, all it matters is consistency, predictability, stability, those robustness metrics. Say interview questions kinda sucks, but you show some competency still, means predictable most of what they have to throw at you will at least partially stick, minimizing factors.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that a workplace that prefers a trait like that doesn&amp;#x27;t sound like a place for artists&amp;#x27; dream place we all desire, but more towards a &amp;quot;software manufacturing factory&amp;quot; envisioned by electric companies like Hitachi in the &amp;#x27;80s, if you do I think maybe it is and maybe they were right to a certain extent.</text></comment>