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Comment by kidintech | Hacker News Reader

Question banks that are too big: huge variance, and OP's point stands.

Question banks that are too small: leaked on eastern forums immediately, candidates show up reading answers out to you (some of the guides include guidance on when to pretend to think, I am not kidding).

The idealized version of "question banks" might work. The real one does not; you'd require employees constantly scouring forums in every language known to mankind, immediately removing anything that gets leaked. On top of that you'd probably require a competent committee overseeing all questions in the bank constantly and ensuring the lack of variance in difficulty.

Source: I interviewed at and for Goog and Pltr.

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I agree with you, but I don't really see how this invalidates the style of interviews where you're presented with some timeboxed coding problem (of reasonably scaled difficulty) and are asked to solve it.

There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know.

If they BSed their way through a leetcode interview, then they probably won't make it past a behavioral interview where they have to go in depth on some past project. And if they BSed that as well as every other round, then hey maybe they are crafty enough to succeed at the actual job.

> and are asked to solve it.

I think this is where our different opinions come from, while we agree on the other aspects.

In my personal experience, I have never felt that the hire/no-hire decision relied exclusively on my ability of solving the presented problem; I have passed interviews where I did not solve the LC-style problem optimally but I communicated clearly, picked up on hints, was aware of when I hit "walls" and provided working but less than ideal alternatives when I could not figure out the neat tricks.

Reading through the thread it seems that my experience is not universal, and the majority here have had less pleasant interviews, so I understand where you are coming from.

I have had all possible experiences. Sometimes I feel like genius and ace some leetcode with an almost novel solution. Sometimes I missunderstand the question/scope and mud myself into the hole of despair.

I have been rejected for one mediocre interview among many good ones. Or the other way around accepted even though I didn't perform well.

Sometimes the interviewer works with me. Sometimes against me. Sometimes a war story impresseses positively, sometimes raises suspicions.

At this point it feels like gambling.

I have also ran almost 400 interviews on the other side over the years, and to me it seems quite clear when somebody cannot write code at all. I like to think I am not biased. But who knows.

>Reading through the thread it seems that my experience is not universal, and the majority here have had less pleasant interviews, so I understand where you are coming from.

it changes immensely based on the job market. I've defintiely tanked some inerviews hard, stumbling on softball questions that shoulda been a bullet point. But I get pretty far or even gotten offers.

The last 12-18 months though? I've had interviews that felt like a dream but got zero follow up to. Been ghosted after seemingly final rounds where I spent 5+ hours on technical tests. It's not even enough to "understand the problem and communicate steps". You gotta be flawless, and you still might be cut compared to 3 years ago where a "C" performance could still land multiple offers as long as your experience made up for the quiz questions.

> it changes immensely based on the job market.

I dodged the .com bust because I worked for the U.S. DoD at the time.

But I got laid off for the first time during last year's "15% bloodbath".

If I compare my current job search vs. all of my job searches in the past:

(1) As parent comment said, the bar seems to be much higher. I've thought that I did really well on some interviews, only to not get an offer.

(2) Some interview processes are way more rigorous. For a DevTech role within nVidia, I had 12 interviews + 2 take-home problems. (BTW, the take home problems were incredibly fun. Well done nVidia!)

(3) I've finally accepted a job offer from a large, established tech company, and the pre-onboarding process is amazingly slow. I accepted the offer a month ago and still don't have a start date. In a better job market either (a) they'd probably work harder to be good about this stuff, or (b) I'd just take a different job because of the delay.

I forgot to mention another:

(4) Ghosting candidates seems common now. I'd never experienced it before now.

> (2) Some interview processes are way more rigorous. For a DevTech role within nVidia, I had 12 interviews + 2 take-home problems. (BTW, the take home problems were incredibly fun. Well done nVidia!)

That's ridiculous, tho.

Did they really not have enough information on the 11th interview to know whether or not they wanted to hire you?

That was my take as well :)

FWIW, the take-home problems were the most fun I've had in front of a computer for a long time.

That made up a bit for the Marathon of interviews.

> leaked on eastern forums immediately

What exactly are "Eastern forums"? "Eastern" what? Europe? Asia? The world?

The most common example would be 1point3acres.

I'd prefer to not be more specific; I chose the word Eastern on purpose.

For DEI committees reading this: I am both eastern european and asian, so I hope to be exempt from any scrutiny.

So you wanted to say "Chinese forums" but couldn't say it out of fear?

no.

I wanted to say Eastern, as I have examples from both Asia and East Europe.

I wished to not be more specific so as to not derail the discussion into "user kidintech implied that nation X has a tendency to cheat".

Out of curiosity, can you share some examples from eastern Europe? Where does one find such websites?

Also, IMHO, blanket generalizations like "Asia" and "Eastern Europe" in such contexts can actually be more offensive than just mentioning the one country where the thing happens since you're basically painting with tar a whole sub-continent with dozens of different countries, just for the things happening in one country.

What I mean is, if by Eastern Europe, you actually mean some dodgy Russian forums, I think a lot of Eastern Europeans from Bulgaria all the way to Poland and the Baltics might feel offended of being included since we are not the same.

No, because I feel like mentioning previous employers AND mentioning the languages I speak would get quite specific.

You are interested in Eastern Europe, so you should be familiar with olympiads; ask around any circle of ex-olympiad participants and you are bound to find something.

I am not sorry if you took offense; you're either from one of these countries and are clueless to the circles that exist next to you, or you are not from one of these countries and are trying to be offended on behalf of others.

>ask around any circle of ex-olympiad participants and you are bound to find something.

Obviously I'm not a golfer.

Yeah, there's also the implication here that Americans rarely cheat. They aren't as public because English is under a microscope, but there are definitely answer banks if you know the right person and can fork over the cash.

If it's anything like High School/College, the sad part is these kinds of people could probably do well in interviews regardless. These answer banks are simply the difference between an A and an A+. And sadly the current market seems to only want A+ candidates. Who's fault is it really?

> And sadly the current market seems to only want A+ candidates.

You mean the current FAANG market paying top dollar. I know plenty of unknown companies taking B candidates because they aren't paying top dollar (in Europe at least)

>Who's fault is it really?

The governments and central banks for devaluing the currency post-2008 with their zero interest rates, causing the value of savings and wages to plummet and the value of assets, housing and stonks to skyrocket, causing people to chase get rich quick schemes on the stock market and on the jobs market. Coupled with the VC promoting for an unsustainable growth (more like pump and dump) of so called "tech companies" who's products were not economically viable from the get go, they just survived on zero-interest money and fake promises, artificially boosting the demand for SW workers casing many young people to go into tech just to chase money, money that's now gone and so is the demand for coders.

Without this artificial demand for devs caused by zero rates and overhype in the tech industry of financially unsustainable products that were banking on skirting the local laws (AirBnB, Uber, etc), then those people chasing money would have went into finance or investment banking to chase money there instead of causing a huge backlog of candidates in tech. Just my 0.02$

> I know plenty of unknown companies taking C-/B+ candidates because they aren't paying top dollar.

in my experience: not these days. And I work in games, so "top dollar" was never in question.

>My 0.02$

That's a fair take. Tech in some ways was indeed a necessity with a huge reach, so I don't think the overhype was the difference between being a trillion dollar industry and a million dollar one. But tech would probably still be a billion dollar industry without all the factors you mentioned.

Games... well, stability was never a factor, and I knew that going in. It's a shame they are doing the exact same pump and dump schemes tech has fallen into. And it's not like layoffs were uncommon after a project finished; it's just that they are doing it purely for better looking earnings call instead of "we cannot keep funding studios anymore".

So New York, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, Main, Connecticut, Rhode Island, etc?

Or by "cheating" are you specifically referring to the lying cheating treasonous fraud from New York who was just found guilty of 34 felonies to cover up cheating on his wife with a porn star to inflence the election?

Washington is a state on the west coast. Washington D.C. straddles Maryland and Virginia. Baltimore is a city in Maryland.

Why are you double-dipping on examples? If people don’t know their geography it’s meaningless, and if they do (like me) it makes you seem disingenuous.

Oh but then you bring up politics so it makes sense. Fuck this bullshit world, it’s so exhausting.

>> I am both eastern european and asian, so I hope to be exempt from any scrutiny.

This only works if because I'm western and white I must ALWAYS be scrutinized.

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