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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

The thing that appears to me, most overpoweringly, is the bitterness.

I understand, I've felt bitter about interviews before, I'm sure some interviews were unfair. But I also recognize this bitterness is a weakness of mine, unproductive, unattractive.

The way the author indulges in this resentment would make me very cautious about recommending him regardless of technical capability. An employee who has low tolerance for the massive randomness/unfairness in the world probably would get sick of most companies pretty quickly.

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The frustration mounts over time - give the person some slack, they’re probably just venting. Most everyone hates the interview process. The way I see it is if perfectly qualified and not nervous, you have a 40-60% chance of passing an interview - it only takes a few coin flips for someone actually competant to go “hey, this shit I’ve worked much of my life for is arbitrary and random”.

The issue I think the poster is having is they just don’t understand how algorithm interviewers think - it’s totally reasonable to think oh, frontend has a DOM tree usually, so they should know BFS (even though you’d rarely if ever use your own traversal alg - leave it to the people actually researching it, not the person building a frontend).

This was my impression as well. There were likely real issues that made the process annoying, but the tone of the post is basically "how dare you ask me those stupid questions at the interview you invited me to?".

On site interviews usually evaluate not only technical competency but also whether that person is OK to work with, especially during crunch times. Being able to point to a few github projects is good, but not sufficient. When faced with a question one cannot answer staying positive and trying a few options is often sufficient to get off the hook.

It is insulting to someone with tens of thousands of lines of public code in open source. You can work at a tech giant for half a decade and slip under the radar with no way to prove or disprove your competency there unless you can get references from the job, but for those who have put out tons of work for free having those who want them to write code for them asking for grade school pop questionnaires is an insult to their expertise.

You don't ask a published drug researcher with patents or papers written to build simple molecules out of building blocks during the interview, but in software even senior engineers are asked to regurgitate things from CS202 for decades on end instead of actually acknowledging their accomplishments or talking about their legitimate capabilities.

I only skimmed this rant, but if one interview is terrible, then the interviewing party might be an asshole.

If every interview you ever took is terrible, then you are probably the asshole.

The "surrounded by idiots" theorem.

What if you’re only “surrounded by idiots” while in an interview, but otherwise well-regarded amongst family and friends, and most of their acquaintances you meet? Or other strangers, whether on the train/bus, at meetups or online?

On a more serious note, I’ll offer as a point of contrast The Sane Society[0], which puts forth that society can itself be sick–despite it’s being the status quo–detracting from the wellbeing of individuals.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40717990 by Erich Fromm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm

An employee who has low tolerance for the massive randomness/unfairness in the world probably would get sick of most companies pretty quickly.

Another way to look at it that they're a ... human being, attempting to come to terms with a truly toxic and dehumanizing system.

In response to which my gut instinct is not to defend the system, as would appear to be yours. But to recognize, as the original author does, that the system truly is fucked.

And if we're to maintain our health and sanity -- at some point one has to simply decide to "just say no", and start looking for and building an alternative.

It only failed 5 times, try more times and u will master all the interview process! maybe the hiring statistics is 1/6 smart guys get the job and u just had to try a little bit more.

I got this quote after failing google interview in the last round.

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

Winston Churchill

> unattractive.

You're hiring a software developer, not an actor portraying a generic love interest.

It's likely they're referring to the person's attractiveness as a potential candidate, not their physical appearance.

And yet, it boils down to the same issue, and the issue with interviews in general: they're highly subjective in ways that often end up exclusionary (and in specific, racist and sexist), with a significant amount of smoke and mirrors (of varying levels of annoyance) designed to distract both sides from what's actually happening.

Here it was quite clearly used to express the idea of "makes other people less want to give you job" rather then anything vaguely subjective.

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