So let me get this straight. You’re saying there’s a reality in which we’re all sitting in the holodeck of the Enterprise-D right now, debating the canonicity of the prophetic Discovery show produced hundreds of years earlier, while eating Gorgon soup with our hotdog fingers?
N=1, confounding lifestyle variables not disclosed. Causality denied.
Your mom is factually incorrect and makes no sense.
You didn’t really expect an imaginary triangle to behave like a real one, did you?
Now waitaminit—you’re saying that my Roomba has hallucinogens inside it? I tripped over it the other day, but this is a much different kind of bad trip hazard than I was led to think.
His pecs are legitimately glorious.
Why even bother with the diagnostics? Just reverse the polarity. 7/11 times that fixes the damn problem, and when it doesn’t, then run the diagnostics and then go crawl in some Jeffries tubes for the rest of the episode.
Pretty sure my Calc2 prof pulled this trick on us sometime in the solids of revolution unit. Started deriving something on the board, just another cylinder ok, but wtf are you calling the radius ‘z’?
The article I posted pointed out that they’re trying to not waste the candidate’s time, as well. They used to do 12 fucking rounds of interviews—and because it’s Google, people tolerated that crap. One of my best friends is an old-school Googler that got in through that gauntlet.
Keep that in mind when you claim it’s an employer’s power play—in this case, it’s really not. More than four interviews, twelve, sure I can believe that. You should read about what some of the elite tier government special ops groups go through.
At this point we’re quibbling over a delta of one interview—I think we’re probably pretty close, or close enough to say “agree to disagree on the rest.”
Cheers.
Google has done way more research on this topic than both you and I collectively and they settled in on 4 interviews being the sweet spot to get enough signal to be 86% confident, while not wasting any more of anyone’s time than needed chasing after single-point confidence improvements. In my experience, I agree with this. I’ve been through 6-round and 3-round (both to offer). Even as a candidate I guess I feel like i wanted that fourth round. Kinda hard to tell what a company culture is from just three meets. And after six rounds I was just freaking exhausted and didn’t really have a high opinion of that company-they couldn’t seem to figure out a clear mission/vision for their product and I thought their overly complicated and drawn-out interview process was a reflection of that.
Google goes into more depth as to why the three-tech + 1 behavioral/cultural model works for them. They call it a work-sample test.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
Both articles linked are well worth the time to read. Hiring is a messy and inconvenient process for both companies and employees.
Calzones are just folded pizzas.
I don’t know dude. I took multivariable calculus, ODEs, linear algebra, modern physics; and a numerical methods for engineers class— all in the same semester. I was a fucking mess and swimming in integrals and derivatives and matrices and systems of equations (both differential and ordinary algebraic) 177% of the time. I honestly don’t remember anything of that five months of my life. 11/10 would not recommend.
I don’t know that any one book was a savior. I was reading from like three books per topic all at once to try to make heads and tails of anything and spending every minute I could in my prof’s and TA’s office hours.
Those two books were some of the only ones I kept, and just donated everything else. Maybe it’s just nostalgia.
My Dover Ordinary Differential Equations book is my second favorite math book.
My first favorite is Spivak’s Calculus.
They’re both just so beautiful. Wish I had time to relearn it all again. :)
I’ve rejected someone on their 4th round before—1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stack—at this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.
I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resume—they couldn’t. They’d grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt they’d been involved in implementing, and can code—but it was very clear that they didn’t understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.
Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they don’t know—and we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they don’t know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we don’t have time for people like that on the team either.
Look, I get what you’re saying and clearly I’ve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? That’s a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
… come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if they’d just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And I’m way happier with this company than I would’ve been there.
The Universe does funny things.
I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.
Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasn’t the X they were looking for.
Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the role—and the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying they’d done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.
That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.
Never again.
The funny thing here is that there are many good distributions that are based on Ubuntu. I’m a Pop!_OS fanboy, many of my colleagues enjoy Mint. Yet, almost everyone I know in the Linux world despises Ubuntu.
“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”
—Bruce Feirstein