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Queen Victorian posted:On the flip side, we once had an applicant who revealed in the first five minutes of the technical interview that he was waaay out of his depth. My colleague and I made the snap decision to complete the interview because it seemed less soul crushing than wrapping up and thanking him for his time ten minutes into an hourlong thing. Still not sure if it was the right move, but I personally find the idea of having an interview cut short (which is a strong and obvious signal that you suck) far more devastating than going through the whole thing like everyone else and receiving a normal rejection over the phone later. I don't think there is a right answer there. Personally, I would much rather be immediately walked out. I've planned the time off from work already so if you tell me it's not going to work then I get an hour or two of surprise vacation and that's a nice bonus. Plus, I might be able to learn something about what I did wrong. Like, was it the coding interview that burned me? Was it the behavioral interview? And usually if I blow an interview I know (I think I know) that I've blown it so if you keep the interview going I'm just lowering my opinion of you because apparently you don't reject bad candidates. But I explained this to some coworkers and they were adamant that they'd want to get a two hour faux interview and that they'd be really upset at getting shown out early. 
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Jan 23, 2021 02:23
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kitten smoothie posted:What drove me insane at an old job (and one of the many reasons why I bailed) were the times the majority of the team said "no hire" and yet they'd get offers anyway. Wow, that sucks! I'm happy to have never been in that position. I've certainly been part of a majority "hire" decision where it turned out we were very wrong, but I've never seen a time where even one developer said "we should not hire this person" and was overruled. Partially, this is a matter of building the interview panel that you want. I've worked with people who are bad interviewers and do poo poo like "do not hire: couldn't give the correct syntax for `git merge`". You have to make sure that the interviewers are looking for the right stuff. But after that if the panel doesn't like someone and they still get hired...? I think I would be urgently looking for a new job the first time that happened. Like, that's a clear message that your management does not want to hear what you think.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:10
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Lunch interviews are the best part of in-person work. Whether you're the one conducting it or the one being interviewed, you get some food on the company dime and someone has to pretend to be interested in what you're saying for 30-60 minutes.
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Jan 25, 2021 07:06
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I worked < 40h/wk at a tiny company (15 people, 6 devs) and it was just very chill. We didn’t work long hours because everyone understood that that wouldn’t produce better work and it wasn’t about money anyhow. I’m now working < 40h/wk at Google and making $250k (base+RSU), which is about 3x the tiny company. At Google the organization is just so big that you can’t accomplish much in a week. I’m pretty sure people who put in 60h at Google are doing 20h Internet shitposting, 30h eating, and 10h in the bathroom. The Google version is less fun for me, but I think the money is worth it.
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Jun 26, 2021 19:28
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Volguus posted:Question for the experienced: do FAANG companies (especially the F one) care if you use their products? I have an interview with facebook lined up and I don't know ... I never used it, never cared about it and I have no idea what they're doing there. Would that matter? Not that I would be able to pass their whatever interviews they have, but that's a different matter altogether, neither here or there. But if they deduct a point for not using FB then I wouldn't even bother. The first call with their recruiter was really short and seemed really focused on him selling FB to me and move on (maybe he's getting a bonus or whatever). Next call I will ask the important questions, but I thought I'd ping those in the know first. Last time I interviewed at Google one of the interviewers was asking me to design a certificate revocation system and he started with, "ok, so suppose your web browser -- what web browser do you use  ?" and I said "Firefox" and he just stopped and blinked a couple times before he could remember that that was actually a real web browser still.I didn't get the job, but I don't think that hurt me.
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Aug 3, 2021 00:13
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Vulture Culture posted:I'm guessing he realized 10 seconds into the question that he didn't know how OCSP worked, and tried to suss out if you'd call his bluff I have no idea either! Maybe I should use this interview question myself.
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Aug 3, 2021 01:32
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kayakyakr posted:Well, if it gives you any bit of a confidence boost, my team loved you. Pollyanna, you should definitely tell the Google recruiter "I did an interview an another company and it went really well, so I'm expecting an offer soon". And then when you get an offer mail the recruiter telling them to hurry up.
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Aug 11, 2021 02:14
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When I've gotten emails from Google or Facebook or other big companies it's always an internal recruiter and the outreach is fairly high-quality. When I've gotten from Amazon it's always a 3rd party recruiter who was apparently allowed to use the Amazon logo in their signature. But they're the same kind of poo poo-tier recruiter as Robert Half or private recruiters and they're just going for quantity.
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Aug 26, 2021 02:34
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When I have a bad or good experience I try to spend some time thinking about the causes and how I can make it into an interview question in the future. An important part of this process is thinking out what a "good" and "bad" answer to the question looks like. I had one company where the "unlimited" time off came with a "never stop working" culture. So now I ask the hiring manager either "tell me about your last vacation" or "how do you prevent burn-out in your engineers". When I ask a bad manager (or at least a manager of a bad position), they laugh at the first question (because they never take vacation) and are confused by the second (what is burn-out / it's not preventable / why would I care). When I ask a good manager they recognize what I'm asking and have a ready answer. My current manager (who I think does this well) told me he tracks how much vacation everyone has taken each quarter and if someone hasn't taken at least a week he checks in to make sure they're planning a longer vacation. He said he likes to take his vacation in 1-week blocks and he'll leave himself available by emergency phone (I'm on an SRE team so this felt OK) but he expects his engineers to be totally unavailable during vacations. I don't know if it's possible to plan for sociopaths who just lie to you, but my experience so far has been that I always got honest answers to my questions. Ensign Expendable, I really like the "why aren't you promoting someone internally" question! I'll try that one next time I do interviews.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:52
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huhu posted:Engineering didn't get a seat at the table for like a year and a half. Product told engineering what to do and we didn't have a CTO. For this, I've been asking something like "describe the life of a feature to me. Who comes up with new features? What happens next?" I feel like most of the time when I ask this the interviewer is confused. I haven't determined yet if it's more because I'm not being clear in my question or if everywhere I've interviewed is stumbling around in the dark. An example of an answer I think I'd like to hear would be "Product comes to us with a list of the features they want. The engineering manager and a couple of the lead engineers sit down with them and do some quick triage to get rid of really bad ideas and fast-track really good ideas. Once we've got a really rough prioritized list, the manager breaks features down into areas and a team looks at that. Like, the web team would get the part of a feature that's in their domain and then they'd break it down into actual tickets. The iOS team just has their lead dev write all the stories and the web team does it all in a group -- it's just whatever the team likes. Once we've got stories, Product will prioritize them going into 2 week sprints. For everything except Mobile, we release the feature as part of the ticket being closed. For Mobile we have to batch it up and typically do a release at the end of the sprint." And then I could ask them stuff about how often the sprint-plan gets changed, etc... But usually they seem really vague about where features come from. "Well, sometimes its Product. And sometimes it's things in our backlog. And there's, like, bugs and tech-debt." I guess that's accurate. If someone asked me that about my current job I think I'd say "about half the time, I have an idea I think is important and I work on that. The other half, someone on my team had an idea that I think is important."
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Sep 9, 2021 02:14
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I feel nostalgic for how!! riling up the thread by saying that tech interviews should be week-long implementations of Enterprise FizzBuzz. Those were good times.
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Sep 16, 2021 03:57
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:And the solution to every problem was to rewrite from scratch. When you're L6 it takes them a lot longer to fire you for reimplementing everything. At higher levels you can even make up a new language to use in the rewrite.
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Sep 16, 2021 04:46
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For interviews that I'm going into cold, going over time is usually a positive sign because it happens when they're really enjoying talking to me. Even if I passed the interview already, I want to get some happy personal feelings going because that will affect the offer. For interviews where I know someone there already (and it's small enough that the hiring manager can make unilateral decisions), short interviews are good because they've mostly made up their minds before the interview and are just checking that they weren't wrong.
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Sep 22, 2021 16:57
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Queen Victorian posted:So, one interviewing-related thing that I've been ruminating on: has anyone else here noticed demographic disparity between externally recruited candidates and organic inbound ones? I think you've got three factors here. More senior candidates will tend to be more male and white/asian/indian, so you're working with a smaller pool there. That's both because they started in the industry at a time when diversity wasn't considered as important and because the industry is generally hostile to minorities and pushes them out before they become senior. Recruiters understand that most bosses don't actually want to hire minorities so they won't waste their time trying unless you push really hard. And finally minority candidates often don't have a good network and so don't know the "right" ways to apply to a job. One job a guy knocked on the office door with a paper resume (we did hire him and he was great, but that was down to the manager answering the door, having total hiring authority, and not being lovely). I would never apply to jobs though Indeed or whatever but if the rest of your network is doing secretarial office work you probably look for software jobs the same way.
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Sep 24, 2021 13:35
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A good way to tell managers that is to describe what you were doing at jobs (or parts of jobs) that you liked.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:43
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I wonder how long it would take to grind leetcode up to an L9 interview? lol, I'm kidding. Obviously, you'd hire a team of farmers to grind that for you.
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Oct 12, 2021 01:20
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hendersa posted:- She is going to hand me off to another recruiter, since she said my experience qualifies me for at least an L6 position (possibly L7) and she only handles up to L5. I hate this with the big companies soooo much. Some recruiter seems cool/direct enough that I talk to them and say "sure set things up". But oh! They're a sourcing recruiter so now that I agreed to an interview they hand me off. The next recruiter asks me what I'm interested in and I say "I like doing some SRE stuff" so then I get handed off to an SRE recruiter. Then I make it through the first interview and I'm handed off to a recruiter-for-candidates-who-made-it-through-the-first-interview. Then I pass the interviews and I get a recruiter for telling me that I'm getting an offer and another recruiter for negotiating the offer. hendersa posted:- She was very interested in my embedded systems background. I guess there are way fewer systems/embedded people that apply. I work at Fitbit (now a Google brand). We have a bunch of embedded developers for our fitness devices and Google seems to not have a ton of them. Like, we also have ~500 back-end SWEs and Google feels like SWEs are a solved problem, but there's nowhere near as much directives documentation for embedded work. My group's offices are SF, Boston, Bucharest, and Warsaw. Hadlock posted:L6 and no algo quizzes? Where do I sign up It's just one less algo quiz. But the "domain knowledge" interview they replace it with (when I interviewed 2 years ago) provides a fun break from the algo crap. I did "troubleshooting" and really enjoyed it. I've interviewed people on "system design" and I like that also, though I imagine you could have a bad time on it with the right interviewer.
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Oct 13, 2021 00:20
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luchadornado posted:What about the part of the interview where they try to assess how it would be working with you? Because if you're like this outside of the forums... Pollyanna, you recently did the whole interview; was there any section where they verified that you weren't a monster? The last time I interviewed with Google that section was conspicuously absent. Now as a Google interviewer I have asked such questions ("tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a coworker. How did you resolve it?") but I can't tell how many fellow interviewers ask questions like that.
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Oct 19, 2021 02:23
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I got email from a recruiter asking me to interview with bit.io last week. They claim they do a 4-day work-week. Not 4x10, just regular work-days but Friday is part of the weekend. They're also doing no-negotiation published salaries: I think you get either $150k or $170k depending on level. Dropping a day of work seems like a pretty attractive route for a start-up.
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Oct 29, 2021 14:48
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I would never trust a hiring manager's answer around WLB lmao. Barring something like a forced vacation policy or an insane amount of holidays scheduled with like full weeks off around the "holiday season" anything a HM might tell you could or couldn't be total and utter poo poo. I feel like this is wrong and that you can trust what hiring managers say in the same way you can trust campaign promises from politicians. Or, for that matter, you can trust candidates when you're on the other side of the interview table. You can't ask an opinion-based question like "do you have good work/life balance?" because maybe they think 0% life is good (for them). And I would avoid hypotheticals as much as possible because people always imagine themselves as better in hypotheticals. I feel like I've gotten excellent signal by asking behavioral interview questions: "Something I've seen at previous jobs is that Product wants a set of features on a schedule and the engineers don't think they can do it. The engineering manager ends up in the middle. Can you tell me about how you've handled this in the past?" (A good answer is a specific example and how they negotiated cutting features from it.) "I've had colleagues get burnt out and quit after a big push. How have you dealt with burn-out in your engineers?" (A good answer addresses both how they try to avoid it happening but also what they've done when it happens anyway.) "Tell me about your last vacation." (A bad answer is an embarrassingly long pause or laughter.) So far, jobs I've taken with managers who passed these questions were fine (at least in the aspects that I asked about) and I've had several interviews where the manager fails the question hard and then I feel confident that I don't want to work with them. asur posted:Then compare those answers against at least one person on the team that isn't a manager. This is also a really good idea.
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Nov 12, 2021 03:27
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hendersa posted:- A Roku recruiter contacted me all gung-ho about embedded positions and he keeps asking a random question, disappearing for several days, and then reappearing again to ask another question. At least he is keeping in contact, but I hope this isn't a sign of how disorganized Roku is inside their organization. I mean... do they want to fill positions or not? This guy has been playing hide-and-seek for about two weeks, now... It could just mean that the embedded positions aren't the highest priority and Recruiting is kinda poo poo. If you haven't already, I think it's worth shooting an email to the recruiter saying you've got an interview coming up at Google but that you like Roku and were really hoping to interview with them. If they're any good that should get them to prioritize you enough to schedule something.
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Dec 1, 2021 12:37
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Sivart13 posted:I find take-homes are wack because they allow the firm to take up a lot of peoples' time without making a suitable investment on their side Yeah, strongly agree with this. 2-4 hours sounds too long to me. I know the idea is that it's instead of 2-4 hours of live interviewing, but the live interview is costing the company in engineer hours so I think they'll be less willing to waste time. And saying "2-4 hours" means to me that candidates who sink 4 hours in are going to look better, so if I'm not planning to spend more than 2 hours I shouldn't even bother.
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Feb 3, 2022 23:31
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I feel like video fatigue is a reason to use the camera. It's the same idea as the "stand up" meeting -- if everyone has cameras off half-reading email the meeting lasts forever. If everyone has to be projecting attention at the camera then everyone feels some incentive to wrap things up and they'll speak up and stop someone who's going long instead of zoning out. In giant meetings, I have my camera off but I also often just drop from the meeting when it becomes clear to me that I'm not actually paying attention.
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May 2, 2022 00:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Again, a problem that wouldn't be there if the cameras were off. Is this a username/post joke? If you're suggesting that communication would improve with lower bandwidth wouldn't it be even better as chat-only? And then wouldn't that be improved by going email-only? I think it'd work fine to introduce yourself to people and say, ,"I get overwhelmed by visual stimulus, so I often need to close my eyes when I'm having an important conversation. Will that bother you?" And everyone will say "no" and then you're fine. Pre-video chat meetings were frustrating to me because I got no feedback about whether the other person is bored of listening to me or confused or paying attention at all. I'm willing to accommodate people when they don't want to have their camera on (I assume they are naked and smeared with food), but it's always a better meeting when we can see each other.
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May 2, 2022 04:20
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I sometimes tell teammates "I had three meetings already and now I don't want to talk anymore. We can meet tomorrow." I think that's totally fine! I would do that in-person, too. It sounded to me like you were saying that people would get along better and understand each other more clearly without video.
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May 2, 2022 04:45
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Hadlock posted:Is being at a company when it goes public (IPO) worth anything on the job market, assuming you were there long enough to have an impact. How do you phrase something like that on your resume? Is "took company public" even worth putting on your resume? Maybe pre-series A companies get excited about that kind of stuff Yes, early start ups like to hear that you’ve been part of a success. They’re always bragging about how many start-ups the CEO has successfully exited, and mirroring that same type of brag back is good. I don’t think anyone else would care unless it’s about something you did as part of the IPO. Like, if you did a lot of work with lawyers as part of the filing then that could be a good story about how you work with non-engineers and on regulatory stuff.
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May 19, 2022 14:02
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The Data Engineers who work near are in charge of all the asynchronous big-data pipelines that feed Research and Business Intelligence tasks. Their work looks to me like infrastructure engineering, but focused around delivering good-quality data rather than a service platform. So, one week they might be tuning SQL queries (but actually SQL-ish because they’re running in a “Data Warehouse” like Redshift or BigQuery or Snowflake). Another week, they might be writing Terraform code to manage the pipeline, like having an auto scale group that spins up once a month to process some giant ball of data. Another week, they’re scrambling to do ad-hoc queries because Legal wants some specific weird thing for a case.
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Aug 2, 2022 00:11
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