The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well.<p>Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set.<p>It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare time for personal projects.<p>In essence, a day job of simple Linux administration may pay the bills, while in my spare time I'm working on large infrastructure automation, deep learning, developing new blockchain technologies, etc.<p>I don't know how sustainable this is. I have three children and a wife, and I'm getting tired of only being paid for work I can do while asleep just because I'm afraid of rejection.<p>Any suggestions on how to "toughen up"?
One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO interviews.<p>I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills.<p>Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire. You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay motivated as months start to go by.
So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple) which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people who couldn't do the most basic things.<p>I think one of the most important aspects of hiring is getting potential candidates in front of the team and letting them talk to the team, to see how they handle questions from other developers (and yes there is always that guy who tries to make the candidate look dumb for some reason).<p>The most telling question I typically ask when interviewing is what have you worked on recently, why is it cool, and how have you added to the project. This gives the candidate a great opportunity to dive into their own experience. This way if they didn't answer my questions well it will give me some idea of their background. Oh hey this guy didn't know basic Javascript stuff off the top of his head because he's been working on the back end for 3 years. That's cool.<p>I'd personally take someone who can talk to me about practical design decisions they've made on a project rather than knowing how to solve basic algorithms. If you graduated 8 years ago and you STILL know exactly how to implement a Binary Search Tree without needing a 10 min refresher then you are a better man than I am. I forgot that about 3 years ago.<p>I don't mind that we expect developers to study for a tech screen but how much does that really tell us about them? They can study and know the basics, but have the ever worked on a large scale project where you have to make something work now vs, having time to do a perfect implementation? Where is their ability to tell their manager no, or their ability to weight COTS vs Custom Build?<p>Sorry this touched a nerve, I just had a bad interview with a company. The tech screen was outside my IDE, couldn't copy paste (which sucks when you want to move a line or do some refactoring) and it was on topics I haven't looked at in 4 years. Luckily I'd spent 15+ hours studying so one of the questions was a gimme.
<i>So, how did you get to where you are today?</i><p><i>I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college.</i><p>Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. But that's about it.<p>[1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take).<p>And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze.<p>EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.
I read the article as:<p>"It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without his pay)"<p>I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers. Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not qualified for the job of interviewing.
Some really great advice within that forms a foundation for the narrative. I can really appreciate the diligence and apparent 'no hard feelings' kind of pragmatism. I especially liked the closing part:<p>><i>If you fail 10 interviews in a row, go for the 11th interview. But take a look at all the variables, and see if there’s anything you can do differently to improve. Take the pressure off, and work through problems routinely to keep your muscle memory in shape.</i><p>That reminds me of being in 'game shape' as I call it for playing and soloing - standing around thinking about notes to play doesn't come off nearly as fluid as being so practiced as to get into the groove and run with it. Good parallel. Nicely framed conversation, glad to read it.
Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success.<p>HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences.<p>It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees. Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power is extremely damaged.<p>For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and actors who are "offer only" -- they won't respond to your inquiry about hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate clearly. Ridiculous.<p>Employers often say they want to "see how you think" -- when they say this, it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success. Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very dysfunctional boss.<p>I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in denial about it).<p>This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.
A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and those can be done outside of a startup.<p>Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know.<p>I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.)<p>All of the above is opinion.
<i>> "Job interviews are difficult by design."</i><p>In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace.<p>Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology, and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team) capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that organization's constraints are.
Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and linked list operations as well as their complexities.<p>Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a bug.
I applied to around 100 jobs over the course of 9 months when starting to learn how to program. For the startups I would get to a phone screen and potentially a technical challenge then be turned away. At the job I am at now, was contacted by CTO online, and had phoned/on-site/started within 5 days of initial contact.<p>I've seen a bunch of blog posts recently about some companies priding themselves on who they turn down versus who they accept and I feel that is one of the bigger problems we have as an industry in hiring.
I realized something a while back... My entire career, if I've made it to an on-site interview, I've only had one company NOT make me a job offer.<p>That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag, okay? Immediately after I sucked at that, they walked me out the door. It was emberasing. Two steps out the door, and my brain is filled with POP AND PUSH! AAAH! I knew the answer, I've KNOWN the answer since I was about 14. No joke. So, I've been on that side of the "every now and then people interview poorly" thing. And I can only blame the jet lag, because I KNOW the ridiculously easy answer to that question.<p>Here's the funny thing - if I would have been offered a job there, I would have accepted. And the company went on to crash and burn in terrible fashion. And two months later, I got a job at a MUCH better company.<p>TL;DR: I've only failed at one interview, and it was arguably the best thing that ever happened to me. (Life is weird!)
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment.<p>Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves: Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and say "Hey, I'm not really good at whiteboard coding. Do you mind if I write the code on my laptop here?"
During the last 10 years i always go for a solution, just a coded solution (and if you do it quickly, or even while doing it, you can frequently improve upon it significantly). Doesn't work for Google/FB - they probably want the elegant super-performant solution that i usually come up with in the next few minutes after the interview is finished :) - yet it works just fine with the rest of the companies.<p>Hint: almost always start with putting the input into a tree, and if tree is completely out of question - into hashmap :)
There's too much missing information in this article. In today's environment, a qualified programmer with the background this guy appears to have should get offers at a much higher percentage of companies.. IF everything is on the level: decent communications skills, applying for jobs whose requirements match skills, realistic compensation expectations, and (my guess in this case) already authorized to work in the US.<p>I would expect this low hit rate from a qualified individual looking for a job AND an H1B sponsor.
"I got into the final interview for an extremely high-growth human resources startup. That was exciting, and I really thought I was going to get an offer. But, eventually, the last round of the interview was super hard. I just failed."<p>Been through this too many times.
When I was first applying for internships (as a college junior with sort-of-interesting projects on my resume but no real experience) I think I applied to 75 positions, heard back from maybe 20 and got to the first round at 5 or 6 (including code challenges).<p>The 6% return rate (application to interview) wasn't exactly encouraging. I made a habit of working hard on each application, sending it out and then immediately assuming that I'd been rejected, putting me right back in that stressful place I'd been before.<p>Being able to leverage that stress into something productive was huge, I'd wake up early and spend my mornings working on cover letters (useless) and researching companies, and eventually took myself across the city to crash another University's career fair to try and meet a recruiter from my then-dream-company (one I'd applied to online months before and never heard back from). That turned out to be one of two offers I got and where I spent my summer.<p>Keeping up a grind on applications and not getting discouraged is huge, getting into the mindset of "constantly apply until I'm employed, don't assume anything will work out" was probably the real reason I got the job I did.
Lol, 38. Only 38. In today's job market one should expect rejections from dozens, potentially hundreds of companies. With hundreds of qualified people apply for each job (thank you electronic CVs) 99+% of applications, of interviews, result in a rejection. It's the new normal. The days of interviewing only a handful of people are long over. Nobody should take it personally.
Excelling in an online programming competitions sounds like a fun, exciting way to showcase myself to multiple companies all at once. Way better than white boards, for sure!
Recently came across an example where someone entirely different person went for the interview answered, cleared but the another person reported for the job.<p>I must say I am extremely disappointed at bay area job scene.
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment.<p>Ironically, HackerRank itself is a part of this problem. All of those are true for HackerRank coding challenges.<p>As another commenter has pointed out here, HackerRank (and other coding test platforms) want to commoditize the hiring process, but in a way that ensures that candidates are the ones who are doing the all the work. The companies just don't want to spend any time in the interviewing process. It's no wonder that so many companies are struggling to hire good engineers.<p>If you as a company throw me an online coding challenge as the first interaction, you can be rest assured that you won't be hiring from me again (and many others).
I have bootstrapped startup and I was rejected by at least 380 companies. Ok I'm not talking about hiring but about sales pitches (with demos and what not).<p>So again if you are looking for a job, think as salesman. And in sales rejections are part of life.
I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best, but it's important to be honest about your capabilities.<p>I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well, but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of any of them.<p>From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.
There have been a few articles on the hiring/interviewing practices. As someone who has not worked/interviewed in a startup, I have a few rhetorical yet sincere questions:<p>Does every startup implement their own algorithms etc. from scratch. Isn't it the reason why we have libraries? I thought most software was mostly glue/crud.<p>Do engineers at startup only code? Do they never talk to customers or need to clarify requirements or work on timelines or deal with scope creep, since it seems that these skills aren't evaluated at interviews.<p>If the answer to these questions is what I think it should be, to what end do we have this dog and pony show?
I've come to the point where I walk out of interviews that involve whiteboard questions. I have conducted my fair share of them, and I have been on the interviewee side as well, and in no situation have I ever found any modicum of value in a whiteboard question. They are a complete waste of everyone's time, and to me, they are the hallmark of an incompetent interviewer/manager (and yes, I felt that way about myself back when I used them).<p>There are plenty of companies out there who agree that whiteboard questions are ridiculous, and I'd rather work for one of them.
Why not show the questions to the candidates say 45 or 60 minutes in advance of the whiteboard session itself, and let them take notes on pencil and paper in an examination-hall like environment during that interval? Even without Internet access it would still be a lot closer to a realistic test of skill at normal software development activities than a set of surprise questions. If you pipeline the candidates it shouldn't add too much time. Please excuse my ignorance if this is something which is already being done, or has already been tried and given up on.
Anyone who is a great engineer shouldn't need to go through 38 interviews to get a position. Something is amiss here. Perhaps he has flaws outside of his supposedly amazing coding abilities.
I was laid off from my job as a Python programmer in San Francisco on 07AUG2015. It took me 4 1/2 months to find another job working remotely as a Python programmer.<p>I did not keep an accurate record of the number of resumes that I sent out, but I archived 110 cover letters during that time. I would bet that I probably sent out about 150 resumes.<p>I had scores of phone interviews and a dozen to fifteen in-person interviews a few of which ended abruptly. I will turn 69 years old in October 2016.
"Even though algorithmic challenges aren’t really used on the job much in production, it’s still really important to keep revisiting your fundamentals. It’s just like a muscle–if you don’t train it, it’ll become weak."<p>So we are testing for stuff that no one actually uses in the job. We are testing for those that have time to practice for interview tests·
My current position offered $X to do a pilot project. They then turned me down---and later called me back when the candidate they chose didn't work out. I took the position.<p>Companies that want to hire, will hire. Companies that think, "Oh, it'd be nice to hire Jeff Dean maybe" won't hire.
Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
"I got turned down by 38 companies, nobody wants to pay me 100k mimimimi" Murican Coders of the 21st Century at the biggest whiners ever...And honestly if you fail to get a job within 3-4 interviews then you are a) doing it wrong or b) applying for the wrong jobs.