What do you do?

Khane

Khane

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AladainAF_sl said:
Yeah what the fuck is up with this? My friend had a situation where he was applying for rackspace into a director role. Granted, its up there. But they made him go on 7 different interviews, 2-3 hours at a time, only to in the end tell him no. Every tech interview I've done in the last 7 years has been hours long full of interviewing 10+ people. That's way different than just 10-15 years ago when you talked to the hiring manager and went from there.

It's aggravating because the hiring manager is the one that writes the requirements for the employee in the job description, and the cronies that interview you have no idea what those requirements are, and often never talk about them, or have no idea what they are supposed to ask you.
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Companies who interview that intensely are "usually" clueless. It's mostly bureaucracy. Then you have the other end of the spectrum in positions like mine where I'm usually being interviewed by a consultant that either doesn't really know the software all that well or plain just doesn't give a shit. Which results in about 15 minutes worth of questions and then a tour of the place just to make it last at least a half an hour.
 
C

CnCGOD_sl

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I kind of interview for sport and I found that interviews change a LOT once you get to be an Architect level. Sure you have a bunch but less of the clueless technical gauntlet crap and more conversations. Love the change, hated technical interviews but discussions are ezmode. Long way from the, "So I have a int d=0; d+++; what happens?" kind of gotacha crap.
 
Noodleface

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Well I hate that crap. I mean, they asked me about pointers at my last interview. I had been a dev for 3 years, do you think I don't know about them? Of course I flustered and forgot to dereference one, mainly because I'm a terrible interviewee. I find the questions are usually stupid.

For instance in this job they don't have anyone doing bios before me. The questions they asked had nothing to do with my work and were all trick C questions. If you don't know bios that's fine, but at least make an effort. When I was telling them about what I did at my old job I could tell it was just going right through them.

Can't complain too much since they hired me, but the transition is still really rough here. The job was very well defined at Emc and here it's a bit of a mystery.

Speaking of Emc, I looked out my window today and realized one month in that the office across the street is Emc.

Vinen is that your office or is there a physical separate VMware office?
 
T

Tenks

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Noodlemod_sl said:
Well I hate that crap. I mean, they asked me about pointers at my last interview. I had been a dev for 3 years, do you think I don't know about them? Of course I flustered and forgot to dereference one, mainly because I'm a terrible interviewee. I find the questions are usually stupid.

For instance in this job they don't have anyone doing bios before me. The questions they asked had nothing to do with my work and were all trick C questions. If you don't know bios that's fine, but at least make an effort. When I was telling them about what I did at my old job I could tell it was just going right through them.

Can't complain too much since they hired me, but the transition is still really rough here. The job was very well defined at Emc and here it's a bit of a mystery.

Speaking of Emc, I looked out my window today and realized one month in that the office across the street is Emc.

Vinen is that your office or is there a physical separate VMware office?
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Noodle you truly work for a hipster tech company now. They aren't concerned with hiring the best people for the job they're more concerned with showing off how smart they are and trying to trick you to feel dumb during the interview.
 
Vinen

Vinen

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Noodlemod_sl said:
Well I hate that crap. I mean, they asked me about pointers at my last interview. I had been a dev for 3 years, do you think I don't know about them? Of course I flustered and forgot to dereference one, mainly because I'm a terrible interviewee. I find the questions are usually stupid.

For instance in this job they don't have anyone doing bios before me. The questions they asked had nothing to do with my work and were all trick C questions. If you don't know bios that's fine, but at least make an effort. When I was telling them about what I did at my old job I could tell it was just going right through them.

Can't complain too much since they hired me, but the transition is still really rough here. The job was very well defined at Emc and here it's a bit of a mystery.

Speaking of Emc, I looked out my window today and realized one month in that the office across the street is Emc.

Vinen is that your office or is there a physical separate VMware office?
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Different. VMware is squashed between Google.

Google Maps

Google has a friggen skyway connecting floors (and building more...). VMware just happens to be in one of the buildings they are slowly taking over.

I was actually out at the Cambridge office yesterday. Will be out there again Wed and Thur.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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The trick question for my current job consisted of:

What would that do? Disclaimer: I've likely posted this before and I don't care.

Now that I know the guy that asked me that better, I don't think that question mattered much and I think he was just being "cute". Likely he saw it recently in some piece of code.

The rest of the "technical" interview was installing a broken build of botmanager and all of its dependencies. Sounds a bit odd, but I think it's a good exercise because it shows how people react to unexpected problems and how they tackle them. The rest of the day was just talking to people, which CnCGod mentioned, is the easy part.
 
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Tenks

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I was interviewing (conducting the interview) someone with another guy and the guy went off script and asked the candidate to describe the JVM's GC strategy, the different sectors, how an item moves between sectors and how items are cleared out of the different sectors. I worked with him the week beforehand where we were having issues with our JVM blowing the heap so I knew why he was asking but it is still a dumb question. I just looked at him and said "We literally didn't know any of this until last week I don't find that relevant."

Looking back I kind of felt like a dick but I despise interview questions which are a simple google search away
 
Noodleface

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Vinen_sl said:
Different. VMware is squashed between Google.

Google Maps

Google has a friggen skyway connecting floors (and building more...). VMware just happens to be in one of the buildings they are slowly taking over.

I was actually out at the Cambridge office yesterday. Will be out there again Wed and Thur.
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Ah, so like one block away.

One of our offices is in a Google office too, somewhere in cambridge. Forget which one.
 
C

CnCGOD_sl

shitlord
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Tenks_sl said:
I was interviewing (conducting the interview) someone with another guy and the guy went off script and asked the candidate to describe the JVM's GC strategy, the different sectors, how an item moves between sectors and how items are cleared out of the different sectors. I worked with him the week beforehand where we were having issues with our JVM blowing the heap so I knew why he was asking but it is still a dumb question. I just looked at him and said "We literally didn't know any of this until last week I don't find that relevant."

Looking back I kind of felt like a dick but I despise interview questions which are a simple google search away
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The correct answer to GC question is "FUCK IT, USE G1" for any significant app with Java 8.
 
Crone

Crone

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I agree chaos. Quite the ringer. As mentioned, the only thing I can think of is that the staffing agency has shown some duds before and so this is the new process to try and weed that out.

I did find out that the department I'm going to has a new "director" that just took over in July and I have a feeling he's trying to make a name for himself. He talked a lot about how he pushes his team members and demands a lot out of them. Lotta corporate talk... Bleh...

And I agree with Tenks as well. This is an entry level position, but they've said it's not. More bs? Who knows. But all of the technical questions were Google fodder. Expected for an entry level position I suppose, but I didn't interview in front of a computer so I couldn't look anything up. That was kinda dumb on my part.
 
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Tenks

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I'd be more concerned with giving a candidate a question I consider "easily googleable" and having them come back to me in 15 minutes or less with a competent response that shows a newfound understanding of the problem, why it is happening and how to fix it rather than having this knowledge on the tip of their tongue. Because, honestly, any problem that comes up in programming (especially if you work in a high level language) is easily solved by google. If your first instinct isn't to google an answer that would send up red flags to me. That either shows a willingness to re-create the wheel, a willingness to spin your wheels and the inability to collaborate answers and adapt generic answers to your specific problem. Being able to properly use Google/StackOverflow is extremely, extremely important for your Joe Dev.
 
Cad

Cad

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I think thats still C++ Deathwing doesn't C use like malloc and shit
 
Deathwing

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That is C++. I didn't say it was C, Noodle did
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To be fair, people commonly use C and C++ as an adjective interchangeably. Most of the syntactical characteristics of the first example are both C and C++. Also, I'm betting most of Noodle's work is in C, so he sees syntax very similar to C, he calls it C. I do the same thing.
 
Noodleface

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Sorry, when I said C syntax what I actually meant was it was a variant of C. My work is all in C but my work is also all using UEFI so my code hardly resembles classic C that people would know. There are UEFI standard functions that replace all memory management, protocol installations, etc.

I knew from when deathwing posted this before that it was C++ but I was being short on my phone
 
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