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Comment by kmarc | Hacker News Reader

This happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right.

Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my lack of knowledge and me trying coming up with ad-hoc data structures.

Needless to say, I continuously refused all their recruiters since then.

(For the interested: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/LinkedHa..., "This kind of map is well-suited to building LRU caches." - part of Java for more than a decade.)

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This is pretty much why no one should feel bad if you're rejected after some FANG interview. It all 100% comes down to the people in your loop. You're likely to hit an ass hole or two.

I made it into Amazon, but honestly, after sitting in on a bunch of interviews, I now appreciate the amount of pure dumb luck involved (i.e. I got a loop of people who liked me and had questions I understood) rather than any skill (which is, well, pretty limited in reality).

Well I appreciate these interview loops because at least they are still far more objective than big company promo processes when whoever lies the most and forces others to do their dirty work gets promoted. I do wish the interview process was even more objective, just administer and extremely difficult IQ Test instead.

IQ tests are rarely objective and they most definitely don't measure the things most important for a large company.

Nor for a medium or small company. (I say this as someone who tends to take these tests very well, but they’re not that commercially relevant.)

Doesn't have to be a standard IQ test, I would be fine with the test being about algorithms and systems design type questions. Just please remove the biased human component from interviews and use a more standardized metric across a group of people instead of randomly chosen questions for each candidate with subjective evaluation. The current process is not great even for people with good tech skill due to the randomness and subjective evaluation factors.

Also you are wrong about standard IQ tests not being able to measure relevant skills for tech companies. They not perfect but I bet even those would do a better job than the current process. The psychometric research is clear that they are useful for predicting results across a wide variety of domains.

> standard IQ tests not being able to measure relevant skills for tech companies

I am basing this on what the HR department for the company that I work for tells me. They have been administering them for years and they have never been a reliable indicator of company performance. That doesn't mean they're not used - management loves them.

> The psychometric research is clear

Do you have some sourcing for me? Perhaps I can read up and improve my own professional experience with new colleagues.

Skills you can learn. Obviously if you have them already, it is a big plus. Otherwise, if you show you have some skills, that’s a good sign that you can learn new ones too. That’s why some interviewers ask questions more relevant to your CV than the job requirements.

It’s more important that you have a professional attitude and can contribute to the culture and values. That’s much harder yo learn. And a wrong character with even all the hard skills can ruin everyone.

My story: an interviewer stubbornly insisted that my code had to be O(n^2) because it had an inner loop, even though the inner loop was only iterating over the substructure of each element, rather than every pair of elements, and then demonstrated that he had no idea how to resolve a disagreement of that kind, and then immediately vetoed me from the rest of the day's interviews.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ilh7o/w...

If you manually unrolled the inner loop during the argument, would that have worked? (I’m not saying you should have had to, but sometimes you need to pick up a clue by four and whack someone with it.)

See the follow up comments about the experience in the Reddit thread. Everything bounced off this guy. He even thought he had “got me” by asking “what happens when the words are really long?” And I was like, “if the average word is long, that just means there are fewer of them for a given n and it cancels out.” I then clarified definitions about what “n” refers to and showed how it’s the same thing as “average word length L times number of words w”.

I even asked him what he would need to see to believe it was O(n) and he had no answer.

Nothing worked!

I've (nicely) reported interviewers like this to the recruiter. If other feedback comes back good, they might look back on the interviewer's past feedback, and they might request a follow-up interview.

> I continuously refused all their recruiters since then.

Even the almighty Google has people who don't know what they're talking about. Unless they're all like that, I'd write it off as a fluke. It's an embarrassing fluke for the interviewer--this is their problem, they should know it forwards and backwards and all the common solutions. If you get a lot of interviewers like that, then you should run.

Of all the interviews I've been to, I felt the most uncomfortable at Google. I was surprised how obvious it was that many Googlers are stuck-up, full of themselves, not just the aforementioned person.

Just because, they are Googlers.

Disclaimer: I'm not generalizing, and do have friends working for Google. Also this wasn't in the US.

Just for technical closure: Is the idea that you move an entry to the front of the linked list on access and then expire from the back of the list?

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