I hate the way we evaluate interviews here

Facebook
CuckerBerg

Go to company page Facebook

CuckerBerg
Aug 25, 2021 17 Comments

Doing coding interview training here. Shadowing, I saw a candidate smash the coding while being completely silent and not explaining anything. Was told that was great performance (he surely already saw them). Was dinged in a reverse shadow for giving hints to a stuck but good communicating and logical candidate. Being a good interviewer apparently means sitting silently and giving a thumbs up if they pass the dumb little question. Also, I hate the emphasis on dinging candidates for little bugs and off by 1 errors. Getting the algorithm is by far the biggest hurdle; off by 1 errors during a speed coding exercise will not translate to someone’s 8 hour workday. I was told a candidate who smoked the 2 questions would’ve been rejected because of small bugs.

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TOP 17 Comments
  • Google
    hLFX01

    Go to company page Google

    hLFX01
    Completely agreed. But the sad part is that nothing much can be done. That being said. Can you refer me to fb?
    Aug 25, 2021 4
  • Google
    d-ll-b

    Go to company page Google

    d-ll-b
    Yes unfortunately FB is specifically notorious for doing this. My interview with Google was more like how you said an interview should be
    Aug 25, 2021 5
    • Google
      d-ll-b

      Go to company page Google

      d-ll-b
      FB is famous for repeatedly asking the same questions on LC which are tagged as FB questions. However there are 100s of these so not sure it helps to memorize them all.
      Aug 25, 2021
    • Amazon / Eng
      rustacean

      Go to company page Amazon Eng

      PRE
      Facebook, Google
      rustacean
      Google questions get leaked too, but
      A) they get flagged as banned the moment they’re found online somewhere
      B) interviewers are free to invent their own questions and not pull from the go/interviewquestions list. I always used my own after my favorite question got banned.
      Aug 25, 2021
  • New
    vin_sanji

    New

    vin_sanji
    I recently gave an interview with booking.com.

    2 interviewers super chilled guy and the first thing they told me is that they are not going to run the code.

    They had the whole hackerrank test cases setup already to run it but they told they just want to see my approach and coding and dry run it.

    That's how interviews should be I feel.
    If as an interviewer you can't find the issue in code you have no right to judge for the silly corner cases.
    Aug 25, 2021 0
  • I agree that it's stupid to ding someone on little bugs after they get the algo correct, but shouldn't the interviewee proactively walk through their own code to find the bugs before they ask you for feedback? That's how I did the interviews.

    Like having bugs in your initial answer shouldn't be a ding, but not walking through your code/not finding the bugs after you write the initial answer is a ding (I do not conduct interviews, that's just how I thought about it)
    Aug 25, 2021 2
    • Amazon / Eng
      rustacean

      Go to company page Amazon Eng

      PRE
      Facebook, Google
      rustacean
      Depends, FB has 2 rounds per interview. So if you get it in 5 min, you definitely have time to look it over. But if it took you some time, taking longer to walk through all edge case inputs could either put you at risk of not having time for #2 or else you might be out of time already.
      Aug 25, 2021
    • Right, in the case where the interviewee is running out of time then it becomes a gray area
      Aug 25, 2021
  • NVIDIA
    bbbbbbb7

    Go to company page NVIDIA

    bbbbbbb7
    Reading this has let me know that I failed my onsite yesterday
    Aug 25, 2021 0