Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article)



  • @dkf The key difference is that your answer displays knowledge; the other answer displays understanding.



  • @CrazyEyes said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):

    the interviewers are always way worse at communicating than you'd think for people whose job it is to, you know, communicate.

    Huh? The interviewer is, 9 times out of 10 (in my experience on both sides of the table), some random cow-orker who got handed your resume 5 minutes ago and is even less prepared for the interview than you are. Also, depending on the company, approval has to be unanimous; of the several people who interview you, all but one may think you are the perfect candidate, but the one "Nah, I don't think so" vetoes the enthusiastic approval of the others. How good the individual interviewers may or may not be at communicating with you doesn't matter, because they have no idea what will happen outside their own time slot until everyone is done and they get together afterwards to discuss the candidate(s) or, as often as not, just submit a written evaluation to the manager; the individual interviewer may not even learn the result of the interview until the candidate actually becomes a cow-orker.


  • FoxDev

    @Rudolf-Polzer said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):

    Whenever a candidate says they're going to implement a breadth-first search (BFS), the probability that they're actually going to implement a depth-first search (DFS) is exactly 100%.

    i'm going to stop reading there and see if i can implement such a thing from scratch without reading any other posts or references online (or offline)....

    let's see how i did in TypeScript.

    class BaseNode {
    }
    
    class LeafNode extends BaseNode {
        public value: any;
    }
    
    class TreeNode extends BaseNode {
        public left: BaseNode;
        public right: BaseNode;
        public search (target: any): LeafNode {
            const map: BaseNode[] = [this.left, this.right];
            
            while (map.length > 0) {
                const node: BaseNode = map.shift();
                if (node instanceof LeafNode) {
                    const leaf = <LeafNode> node;
                    if (leaf.value === target) {
                        return leaf;
                    }
                } else if (node instanceof TreeNode) {
                    const tree = <TreeNode> node;
                    map.push(tree.left);
                    map.push(tree.right);
                } else {
                    // something strange is going on here... 
                    // i should probably throw an error or something
                    throw new Error('TreeNode contained a child that was not a TreeNode nor a LeafNode');
                }
            }
            return null;
        }
    }
    


  • @cartman82

    Would it not be a red flag if a company did not do ANYTHING to vet you as a candidate? What kind of a team/codebase would you be subjected to.



  • @dkf This, or they're the kind of coder who start with a "stack" but then use it as a queue, or vice versa. The answer is correct only if they actually use it right.



  • @The_Quiet_One For the record, it was a mass lay-off due to poor circumstances. If I had not been laid off, I would still be working happily at my first job. It was on the search engine team for a dating site you've definitely heard of, was a lot of fun and everyone was great to be around. I got to work on several cool projects and learn a lot of stuff. Also, there were social activity clubs, like a board game club and a video game club ("social" being a relative term here), so I got to play new board games every Wednesday after work for free. Unfortunately, I was also fresh out of college and on the domestic site team (as opposed to one of the subsidiaries). Along with myself and other developers, it seemed like the majority of domestic QA were also laid off. Funnily enough, I managed to get a close friend hired via referral, and he was placed on a small subsidiary team which suffered no lay-offs. He told me about a month later that the CTO who made the decision was also fired, and I was left to draw my own conclusions. For some reason, their testing was also much more painful.



  • @HardwareGeek Of course, I know these things now, but unfortunately I am an optimist and I tend to assume the best until worse happens when I know very little. When I was fresh-faced out of college, I assumed that every interviewer was more prepared and professional than me. Actually, I guess you could say it was kind of a pessimistic approach, because I assumed every interview would be my hardest for those reasons.


Log in to reply