
Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews - leeny
http://blog.interviewing.io/6-red-flags-i-saw-while-doing-60-technical-interviews-in-30-days/
======
StillBored
Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers
because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be,
the answers weren't clear.

From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense
contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what
your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring
manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply
building an empire.

At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like "you get to
define your role". Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your
selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than
"evolve our huge product, and justify it". Which is frequently just make work,
and you won't be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you
can see this stuff in the public releases of products. Its the split
personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current
one wasn't good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower/political
will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the
results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1/2 a wing glued to
a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.

~~~
vlovich123
Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've
still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem
to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I
don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would
propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then
executives would be responsible for building a theme around those developments
& how that fit larger company-wide themes for iOS. On the other hand, I don't
know if that was an Apple-wide thing or iOS-specific (at the time it was hard
to distinguish since the entire company was largely organized around
iOS/MacOS).

Another difference is that design is top-down at Apple. Any UI redesign was
driven by Johnny's team which was responsible for a holistic and consistent
across-the-board implementation. I don't believe you were allowed to deviate
from the design language. This one I have less visibility into as I worked on
technology pieces rather than things that had a user-facing component.

~~~
fragmede
The way Apple manages to do this is that, _to a larger degree than others_ ,
the company is run as a collection of different companies. This has pros AND
cons but one of the pros in this context is that their hiring is less "work at
Apple", and more "work for THIS team at Apple". Hands-down unbeatable for the
specific question of role clarity, but it's naive to pretend there aren't
downsides to the practice.

~~~
greyhair
This is how Bell Labs was back prior to divestiture, up until the mid 1990s.

There really wasn't one huge Bell Labs, there were literally hundreds of
hundred person teams run as if they were little companies, but with a huge
bureaucracy providing funding, guidance, and all sharing a knowledge pool.

If you changed teams, you could find a completely different team culture using
completely different tools. And like biology, some teams thrived, and some
failed.

~~~
ImaCake
This sounds an awful lot like research at a university. It definitely has it's
strenths and weaknesses. Some labs collaborate more than others. Some feel
like islands in the ocean, while others feel like a townhouse in the city.
Some labs are poor and a few are incredibly wealthy. All of them seem to
filled with hard working interesting people.

------
cmrdporcupine
As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being
expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar)
coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and
whether there's a fit, etc.

I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high
paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before
demanding I do stressful work to prove myself to you.

The vibe I get from that is: they're not interested in senior or experienced
talent. What they want is new grads. So I just tell them I am not interested.
Either that or the hiring market isn't nearly as tight as people claim. There
must be a surplus of talent if companies can get away with this.

I don't like whiteboard coding exercises, but would be willing to do them for
the right position. We need to see if this is the right position for me/them
before we proceed to that phase. That means that that process comes as one of
the last steps, before an offer. If they're not willing to do that, I just
politely decline.

~~~
Galanwe
After being on both sides of the interview situation for quite a while now, my
feeling on this is more nuanced.

The thing is, when you look for a job, you will often go for 5 to 10
interviews.

On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team,
I will interview at the very least 50 candidates.

That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more
incentive than the interviewee to go straight to the point, and thus perform a
technical check early in the process.

Also, you have to realize than the vast majority of candidates applying for a
position are highly unfit for it. Seriously, even for very senior positions,
you would be amazed at the sheer amount of people applying with grossly pumped
resumes, and overall low skill level once tested.

Even after careful picking of resumes, I would estimate that 80% of candidates
end up being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical
interview. That's why, as an interviewer, I'm not very inclined to have a long
open discussion about the job until I have at least some degree of confidence
that the candidate is worth it.

Of course that process is unfair for the "good" candidates. Those who apply to
positions fitting their skill set. But when you have more than 50 interviews
ahead of you, and an actual job to do, you have to make compromises and tailor
your process for efficiency.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Honestly, I question most interviewers ability to evaluate someone as low or
high skill. I honestly don't think the testing works most of the time.

~~~
AshamedCaptain
If you really believe so, then I think you are failing to grasp how low "low
skill" truly happens to be.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Nope, I think lots of people perform 'low skill' in a whiteboard scenario that
are not. And the arrogance of their interviewers gets them on HN making very
bold claims about other people's skill levels without consideration for the
scenarios involved.

Don't get me wrong-- I've worked with very incompetent people. Many of them
would have passed a coding interview though.

~~~
dmoy
My whiteboard coding interviews now mostly consist of asking someone to write
a for loop with one state variable. That's my bar for low skill. If you can't
write 6 lines of code in 45 minutes with one loop and one variable, then you
and I are going to have problems working on logic problems on a whiteboard on
the actual job.

I've interviewed enough people who don't even know the _syntax_ of a for loop
for the language that they chose to use.

As a general matter for how the industry as a whole interviews, I agree
though; I am no longer a fan of tricky algorithmic or esoteric data structure
questions in whiteboard interviews. The problem I find with other people's
interviewing questions is that most people are still asking things that are
way too difficult, and they don't end up judging anything other than "Did this
person just cram hundreds of hours of algorithms questions?" or "Did this
person get lucky and happen to know this type of problem ahead of time?".

For better or for worse, my company schedules me for like >90% system design
questions now, which I prefer anyways. Start with a very simple problem and
system, and then just throw wrenches.

~~~
sobani
I'm only 90% sure I know the syntax of a for loop in my chosen language, C#.
The reason for the missing 10% is that I never write this syntax.

Most loops are covered by a foreach or by LINQ (think: map and reduce, buy
nicer).

The few times I actually need a for loop I type: "for" <press enter> <type the
limit for i> <press enter> and then I focus on the loop body. If my needs are
more complicated, I _modify_ the for loop my IDE gives me.

~~~
dmoy
Yea I meant a for-each loop.

~~~
dmoy
I'm not sure the last time I wrote a for loop that wasn't for-each.

------
sna1l
"Not Enough Clarity about your Role" \- Like the author mentions, this can
definitely signify that the role is not important. The other thing I've
noticed over my career is that it could be that the role involves "grunge"
work (awful oncall shifts, doing backend work when you want to do only
frontend, etc). Companies hide behind cool titles/department names/etc,
promising whatever you want to hear to get you in.

~~~
duxup
IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'.

Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what
they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me?

Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance,
but they can't tell me what they want...

There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but
it's a really bad foot to start off with / makes me worry.

~~~
pmichaud
You're probably right that sometimes people are hiding something from you. But
I think a lot of the time it's more like "I have 10 people doing a bunch of
things that vary over time and on a day to day basis, and what each of them
does specifically really depends on what they are good at and what comes up. I
really want those 10 people to be able to do 10% more of that confusing mix of
activities than they are currently doing. So I guess I'll hire someone new."

And when that new person asks what they will be doing, the answer actually is,
honestly, sort of ambiguous.

It's not a great sign for how organized they are, but it's still a realistic
way someone could both be hiring and not know exactly what the new person's
day to day will be like.

~~~
duxup
Yeah I don't think of it as 'deceptive', but more so just not through through
or even clearly sharing what the situation is.

For me "we've got like 20 things going on, here's a little about them, so that
kinda stuff, but I've no idea day to day how it will play out" is actually
plenty honest if that's the case.

------
compiler-guy
The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many
potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview
with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly
better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very,
very late in the process, if you even do.

One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move
around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could
be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the
company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around
fairly easily to almost any team in the company.

When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that you would be
expected to move every two years or so. That's probably softened a bit, but
it's still a part of the culture.

So even if you don't love where you're initially slotted, nobody is going to
frown excessively when you transfer elsewhere after getting past your noogler
phase.

I've found it frustrating to interview at other places and get blank stares
when I ask about how team mobility works within the company, what happens when
the team is restructured, etc.

~~~
dddbbb
Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone
joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they
probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or
is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
1 point by kinkrtyavimoodh 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–]

Among the bigger companies, Google is by far the friendliest when it comes to
intra-company transfers. All you need is the manager of the destination team
to accept you. If the team is in a different country, the immigration teams
will do what needs to be done. You don't need permission from your current
manager.

Maybe you don't care about this, but many would consider this a huge 'perk',
that justifies Google's focus on hiring good generalist SWEs who are not too
wedded to a specific team.

It's a very strong part of Google culture, and it manifests itself in every
aspect of Google life, such as general openness wrt code and documentation
across the whole company, internal job boards etc. which make it easy to take
a call about what team you want to work on next.

------
subsubzero
Some of my hall of shame interviewers:

\- Everyone I interviewed on my would-be team felt like they were attending a
funeral, never met a more depressed unenthusiastic bunch.

\- One of the interviewers wondering why I wanted this job as it was terrible,
he stated he was looking to leave and warned me about the company.

\- Meeting room of interview room(conference room) reeked of sweat(when no one
was there), it was disgusting, this from a company that was heavily
funded(going public this year!) also trash on the floor and interviewers
unprepared as well.

\- Interviewer saying there was not much work here, the company mainly
collects royalties from IP and the position would see alot of downtime/doing
nothing(manager saying this!).

~~~
starfallg
Why hall of shame? 2 and 4 are top mates.

~~~
JimTheMan
I once had a manager try to hire me back from another position:

'Look you will be overworked and underpaid, but you will get to do really cool
hands on things here.."

I appreciated the honesty.

------
lgleason
I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the
offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place
do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.

~~~
nickff
On the other hand, there often needs to be a time limit, or else they will be
too late to make an offer to the runner-up (when the leader turns it down). I
am not sure what a 'reasonable period' is.

~~~
compiler-guy
A reasonable period is: You tell them up front your ideal timeline, that you
have a couple of other irons in the fire (if you do), and you keep them
informed of the progress of those other fires. And they do the same for you.
Maybe you can't get a timing that works for both sides together, but that is
OK. The pressuring is what isn't.

~~~
jnwatson
I've been the recruiter in this position. I think it is unethical to string
your runners-up along in this situation. You're essentially taking up their
(and your) valuable time with little chance at success.

Exploding offers are the least bad solution. Give them 48-72 hours, with a
small extension if they are currently talking to someone else.

~~~
victor9000
If you don't like being a runner-up then you should negotiate with the
candidate so that your company ends up in a more competitive position.

~~~
duderific
It's extremely hard for smaller companies to compete with the likes of Google
and Facebook, who (I've heard) offer 25% more than everyone else. Which is why
they end up with all the talent. Lather, rinse, repeat.

~~~
victor9000
If this is a company's reason for not finding talent then the hiring team is
simply not competent at hiring.

You can do any number of things to differentiate yourself from a FAANG to make
your company more appealing. However, each candidate will have different
values, so in order to gain an edge you first have to engage each candidate
with the goal of discovering these values.

For example, this morning I was reading a recruiting email while considering a
Sr SDE role on the AWS S3 team. They list 4 basic requirements for candidates,
one of which reads:

· Able to debug, troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues reported by
customers

This screams of being responsible for legacy code and spending time on-call
resolving other people's bugs. Can your company offer green-field development?
Then congratulations, you've just gained an edge over a FAANG!

Other ways to differentiate are to consider the candidate's career trajectory.
Maybe they want to become a manager, a technical lead, or pick up new
technical skills. Can you place them on a team that will facilitate their
professional development? If so then holy cow, this small company is looking
better and better!

The point is that you can't go to war with a Goliath and expect to win using
brute force. So if your opponent has 10 ships while you only have 1 then do
yourself a favor and fight on land.

For context, I've had to lead and grow technical teams in the Seattle market,
which means competing with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree
Apple and Google. Having filled ~50 technical roles, I can say that succeeding
in a competitive market requires you to be hands-on and highly engaged. And if
your recruiting pipeline begins and ends with a submit form then you're going
to make life really hard on yourself.

------
ThePadawan
I complained about there being very few posts about how _companies_ (not
applicants) fail interviews only two weeks ago [0].

Thanks for showing off this side!

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24323816)

------
dehrmann
I generally agree with the points, but have a few places of disagreement:

> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

If this is someone you'll be working closely with, it's a yellow flag, but the
common complaint you read here about algorithmic interviews not being the best
way to evaluate someone for a job, this really just tells you how good this
person is at either that problem or interviewing.

> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers

Normally, I'd agree fully, and as an interviewer, I go in with a sales hat on
over my technical hat. During covid, I have no idea how to read low morale.

> based in Palo Alto...a six-figure offer definitely didn’t seem like a bad
> start

This is table stakes for a software engineer in the Bay Area, now. Not sure
why it was worth adding.

~~~
blablabla123
If the interviewer has no flexibility in understanding algorithmic solutions,
it means they accept that applicants spend a month or more exercising
whiteboard riddles while the interviewer just compares the solution with
existing notes. I think there is a valid case for whiteboard interviews,
especially when the company needs to optimize code a lot.

------
dkarp
Tech interviewing articles seem to do well on HN.

I'm guessing because it's something most of us can relate to and that's what
made me click on it. But I feel like I've read this same content in different
articles, that I've found on HN, multiple times.

~~~
sdfhbdf
I like to think that it's one of the few factors that really unite the whole
HN community - most of us lurkers here have gone through or will go through a
tech interview at some point. So it's universally educational for the HN
audience and it's not a polarizing topic.

It's also kind of like somebody posting true life pro tips because it's useful
for most of us hence why it gathers so mony upvotes probably.

~~~
dkarp
That's a nice way of seeing it and there's definitely good information being
shared in these comments, which may help many people.

Maybe these transparent content marketing articles ignite my skepticism

------
hinkley
I sometimes feel self-conscious asking deep questions about morale, especially
when I'm on the fence about working at a place and am just being polite in
case I need this as a Plan C.

There are some questions where if you get the person to take them seriously
you may pop whatever bubble they're living in that helps them get through the
day.

One place, I was not doing so great. I was participating in the interview
process, mostly trying to make sure our candidates were better than our status
quo, so new people would make my life better. This one kid asks, "what do you
like about working here?" and I froze. I didn't have an answer. Luckily there
were three of us, and I had time to come up with a half-assed answer that
didn't consist of "Run!"

Shortly after that I decided to leave, and just making that decision let me
make it to the next bonus payout, which was something on the order of 10% of
salary after taxes (so ~8 weeks?), plus a few more options vesting. And then I
was out the door, along with about 1/5th of the engineering department. It's
like people forget there's a door until someone else goes through it.
Afterward, the members of the exodus sat around over beers to celebrate the
check clearing. Someone (possibly me) asked if sticking around for the bonus
was worth it. Almost all of us said no.

~~~
pnw_hazor
Interesting. It seems almost immoral to interview new hires when you know
there are insurmountable problems at the company that make you consider
leaving.

Not saying you are immoral here -- just that it does seem to pose a dilemma. I
have not had to interview someone for a company that I want to leave. It
sounds like it would suck and require some level of internalized
rationalization to go through with it.

~~~
hinkley
Two things. One, you don't always know the answer to a question until someone
asks it, and then you can't un-hear the question. I thought I was just grouchy
until asked, and then I realized I was properly unhappy in this role. Which I
said makes me uncomfortable about asking hard questions of people I don't know
and probably will never work with.

Two, it's easier to leave a place when you know you've left a project in good
hands, instead of knowing things will unravel if you do. Mostly, it's an
ethical problem if you sabotage the hiring.

But I'll agree that there is a tension between professionalism and social
responsibility. What do I owe to my employer, what do I owe to the local
developer community? The next time I interviewed, a guy I had a lot of respect
for referred me to a used-car-salesman of a recruiter for a place he was
leaving. I did contract-to-hire, walked away from that one. Felt a bit like a
meat shield to cover his retreat. I realized all the things I respected him
for were past tense, and honor that but stay the hell away from him now.

------
guhcampos
I had already accepted a position in a local bank when they called me again
because one of my future colleagues wanted to ask me some further questions.

I got there and met with a guy who had 3 or 4 "AWS Certified" pins attached to
his shirt. He wanted to know how I had learned AWS since I did not have any
courses or certifications on my resume.

I dropped the position immediately after.

~~~
nomagicbullet
The disregard for proper process would already a red flag, but the prospect of
working with that coworker would make me nope out of that job before I left
the building.

------
mroche
To the page author: if you adjust the following link (logo) to be the https
variant, the site should read as fully secure:

[http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/just-...](http://blog.interviewing.io/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/just-logo.png)

Also, maybe add a redirect from http to https?

------
yowlingcat
Great list. For big companies, I'd also add looking out for tenure in the
management chain that you'll be reporting into (although this information can
be a bit tough to get). Walking into a musical chairs situation above your
head may land you in a position where gravity lands you in harms way.

------
mcguire
" _Not enough clarity about your role_ "

:-) Back when I interviewed at Google, this was their signature. If they made
you an offer, it could be to work on any team, anywhere. Their choice.

" _Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers_ "

And this is why I never got a research job. Telcordia Research, 2004. The only
group actually hiring was really doing product development. Everybody else
left in the big, empty building were the people who hadn't already escaped.

------
site-packages1
This is a really good list, and I don’t think I can add much to the discussion
already here. But the article introduces the author as “passionate about
architecting and building scalable software systems.“ Is _anyone_ passionate
about this, or is this just marketing speak. It’s like introducing someone as
“passionate about customer service,” give me a break.

~~~
jdgiese
Maybe it depends on what you mean by “passionate,” but I would say I’m
passionate about customer service and about architecting and building scalable
software systems. I cofounded a professional services firm, and it makes me
happy to provide our clients a lot of value, and I do really enjoy thinking
about scalable systems.

------
justinzollars
> If through all the different stages of the interview process, you experience
> a consistent lack of interest or low morale from your interviewers, you
> might want to pay attention

This is good advice. I certainly have a different perspective of a number of
companies, where my outlook of those companies has changed are after
witnessing this. It was easy to pass on those companies.

~~~
rurp
Agreed and I want to add that it can go the other way as well. I've
interviewed with a few companies that I was ambivalent about going in, but
after interacting with some extremely sharp and pleasant interviewers I got
quite a bit more excited about the job.

------
NewOrderNow
I would just be happy to get an interview.

~~~
Tade0
Now is the perfect opportunity. Q4 is coming and while the company you're
interviewing for may not think in quarters, their client or somebody further
in the food chain definitely is.

------
tilolebo
One of my unmentioned red flags is a company with significant funding, no
monetization plan and caring only about growth.

That's 100% personal taste, as I'd rather work for a "calm company".

------
xtracto
> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

Haha, I've happily been in the "interviewer" side of this two times:

One time, as part of a DevOps interview I asked the candidate to run something
in a POSIX OS every 15 seconds using a cronjob (that was the general idea).
Crontab granularity is only in minutes, so you have to use your head or Google
to get a Cronjob answer. The interviewee however told me about the 1 minute
granularity of CronJob, and offered instead to create a small service on
init.d. with a while/sleep 15. I loved his response :-)

The other was someone who, while solving a binary search problem without a
ceiling integer value, used the fact that his language of choice C++ has an
INT_MAX macro defined to set the limit of the search... TOUCHE.

As an interviewer I personally love when these sort of things happen because
it shown the interviewee is really thinking about the problem.

~~~
user5994461
That's the first thing I thought reading your sentence, cron cannot do seconds
granularity (I think the lowest was 1 hour on the last OS I was working with).

Why would you ask questions which you know are impossible? That's setting up
the candidate to fail.

~~~
twinkletwinkle_
It's not "impossible", just not natively obvious. The solution I remember
using is

    
    
        0 * * * * foo()
        0 * * * * sleep 30; foo()
    
    

It's not the prettiest but is a reasonable imitation of a 30 second cron.

~~~
xtracto
You got it! the main idea is for it to be a "solve the problem" thing with
certain framework.

I've got guys that just google it, others that do a script and sleep within
the script, and the guy that suggested the while. All of them are "right"
answers for me... I don't really care about how they do it, but the process
perform while doing it.

Fact is, during the life of a DevOps, they will need to solve things that they
don't know how to, so they'll need to be able to at least Google-fu themselves
out of the problem.

------
NHQ
How did they get 60 interviews? Do I really need to join LinkedIn?

~~~
ericmcer
He is exactly what most tech companies are trying to hire. Very strong resume,
masters from respected college, clearly passionate about tech, and a PoC to
top it off, he literally checks every box.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Is that actually a helpful comment, its certainly not in the sprit of HN

------
dang
The HN thread this article refers to is at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555).

------
Cthulhu_
I applied for jobs last year, after having been on the reviewing side of
technical interviews for a good while (at my second job). I found a few
things.

One, wrt the companies I worked for, I didn't feel like they were vetting my
technical skills enough; at best it was an hour of chatting and going through
some of the code I wrote, but in my head there's just so much more to it. I
felt like they were easily impressed. I also felt like I was cheating because
I had reviewed so many interviews, so I knew what to look out for.

Second, I initially went in there just to orient myself, to prove myself in
technical interviews, but for both recruiters and employers, it felt like
going into the process already meant I really wanted to work there. I never
felt like I learned enough about the job to make that decision yet (although
there is usually a one month grace period where you can quit or get fired
without cause).

Third, wages varied wildly. One job that was interesting was right across the
street from me, flew through the interviews easily etc, but their offer was at
best 2/3rds of what I earned at the time, it would have put me back years. I
wonder if their wages were just not that great in general, or if they were
betting on me preferring a one minute commute over a decent wage. I couldn't
afford to live here on what they were offering so I declined. They did get
back to me a few months later, I wonder if they changed their wage structure.
I might reconsider if they can go over my current income.

I did find a new job in the end, one where I didn't actually do a technical
interview, but where I felt like they actually needed me (instead of just an
ass on a seat), like I had a Mission to accomplish. Still working on that,
slowly. What also helped is that while I work 4 hours / week less now (I was
looking for that), I still earn the same as I did at my previous job - less
taxes for a lease car, and income tax laws changed.

------
Seb-C
With experience I have learned to stop relying on how the interview feels, but
look more at the facts instead.

Some companies who did feel strict during the interviews actually were really
good companies.

The opposite is true, I interviewed a company that seemed open minded and fun.

The interview in appearance was quite enjoyable, but with huge red flags. The
CTO was always talking (super fast) and just wouldn't let me speak. I could
ask only one question (during 1h) and was rudely interrupted in the end
because he had no more time.

The CTO also said something like "If you join this company you will work with
very competent engineers, smarter than you". To which I humorously answered
while defending my pride, but probably ended up looking like someone full of
himself.

Clearly this is not someone I would enjoy working with on a daily basis.

------
m0zg
Take this with a grain of salt, however. You will see some of these "red
flags" in a Google or Facebook interview (I've done both), and yet they're
some of the world's best places to work, and you can have a _great_ time
there.

------
rkangel
I want to make the point that I always make on this topic - as software
engineers we are very lucky to be in a sellers market. We get to pick and
choose companies and have the luxury of rejecting 10 companies based on small
negative signals (however valid).

It is important when thinking about social issues that the VAST majority of
the population have very much the opposite experience - they might have to
apply to 20 jobs to get one interview and if they get an offer they _have_ to
take it or they won't be able to make rent. The knock on effects on that on
their work life are enormous.

------
hagoseyu
I had technical phone interview with one big electronics company. At the end
of the interview when I asked the interviewer his daily work and how it looks
like, he was honest and told me something that he don't like it. Something the
problem is ill-defined with the manager only cares about end result. He seems
very depressed from how he talked about the company, and at the end asked me
if I am still interested working for such kind of problems. Decided then not
to move to next step.

------
mberning
I do take exception with “no clear direction on where the company is headed”.
You have to consider who is interviewing you and the size of the company you
are interviewing at. I don’t expect a low level hiring manager inside of a
fortune 500 company to give some amazing elevator pitch. If they could they
would likely be a C level exec. Everybody knows where companies like P&G or
Coca-Cola are headed. The candidate might reasonably assume they intend to
keep developing and selling new shampoo and drinks.

------
nunez
I’ll add one more red flag: your team is comprised mostly of contractors [1].
This is a common occurrence in big-co corporate engineering. Often times, this
indicates that tech comes third fiddle to sales and accounting and that you
will not only work with every enterprise-y tool you can think of, but you’ll
work crap hours with little time for learning.

[1] This doesn’t apply for those new to tech or, well, contractors!

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WhyKill
Red flags: ask if they have a standard operating procedure document or
employee handbook. Basic stuff like where to go for healthcare, who to talk to
about sick leave etc. This sort of logistical stuff is a weight on employee's
to have to constantly be asking direct reports about. It's a bad sign when a
company can't take the time to do a basic doc like this.

------
abhinai
Some of these points make me feel that this person is trying to read too much
from few data points in a rather noisy world.

~~~
erikerikson
Sounds like what's required by the constructed circumstance on both sides.

------
BJBBB
A view from another side. I am not a recruiting specialist, but have been
retained by clients to "screen the candidates for someone like me". Greed and
avarice typically win, so I tend to accept these follow-up gigs.

The types of engineering that I do are not the most technically difficult. But
it is a very small piece of the engineering pie, so there are not many out
there with my combination of skill-set and education and experience. That is,
I may not be representative of what the client probably needs in the long-
term, as I was hired by the client to solve a particular and unique problem.

So I typically screen for someone under 45 (I am over 60) that has done and is
interested in certain types of math, programming, test, and hardware design.
This is how interviews need to be structured - and just devolving algorithms
and citing random information and doing circuit node calculations from
schematics will be less likely to identify the engineer that you need.

As for the problems cited by the writer - they are relevant, but are
structural and should be self evident to anyone out of school for more than
one or two years.

------
iratewizard
This article seems like another example of mid-level people giving advice to
junior-level people. There are far more red flags you can expect from a
company by asking the right questions. The article doesn't dive into any of
that and reads more like a few gripes from a guy who did way too many
interviews and became jaded by it. The technical interview itself is not
likely to be a good indicator of what work looks like at the company, and
without experiencing the other side of things these red flags become 'things
that rubbed me the wrong way.'

Questions you ask are what dig up the red flags. Who am I replacing and why
did they leave? What's the largest obstacle the engineering team is trying to
overcome? How do you (the manager) manage your team differently? Is there
anything you as a manager would like to improve at?

90% of workplace satisfaction can be attributed to (or sabotaged by) one's
direct manager. Make sure you'll appreciate their style.

~~~
intricatedetail
It's good to ask a manager whether they read the CIA simple sabotage manual
and if they practice any of the techniques in the company.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Id be impressed if that I have worked where third part agencies whet that
would be an improvement.

Seeing a set of minutes/notes from a couple of meetings would be a good filter

------
jl2718
At first I was surprised that he didn’t mention companies that interview many
candidates endlessly and never actually intend to hire. But then I realized,
he was the other side of that.

------
tor291674
> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers

Describes my experience with Conoco-Phillips 7 years ago.

------
x87678r
I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a
blog will give me some feedback.

~~~
kthejoker2
Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews
are just noise with very little signal.

Some basic red flags:

* Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences

* Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking

* Inability to communicate

* Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't do "adversarial" interviewing, but I do throw a lot of spanners into their answers to see if they can vary their approach)

* Inability to demonstrate handling challenges and negative experiences constructively

* Poor decorum - "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel." There's not always one single thing that becomes a red flag, but things like badmouthing 3rd parties, airing of grievances, extreme arrogance, and so on. The proverbial "Would I like to work with this person?"

~~~
starfallg
The worst candidates know the exact way to act in the interview process. Once
they're in, it's really difficult to get them out. I've seen some pretty
terrible behaviour, all performed absolutely fine in interviews. So much so
that I believe that interviews are only useful to establish basic suitability
and that most companies should hire loosely with a long probationary period.
Employees that don't perform would be let go.

~~~
confidantlake
That is definitely one model. The downside is that people are less likely to
go to a company with high turnover (high turnover is a red flag for
candidates).

------
president
These red flags are the norm in the last decade that I have been interviewing
in SV. Issue is that everybody is in the game to further themselves first and
foremost rather than helping the company or the candidate. I have talked to
many colleagues and managers who are only looking for people that can be
"used" to get them promoted and this mindset shapes how they interview
candidates.

~~~
IggleSniggle
I am a career switcher who did code "for fun" and only figured out that I
would like my life more if I did it as my job in my 30s. Somehow, I had built
my life around the assumption that your job had to be "hard" as in "you need
to constantly force yourself to do the work" as some kind of masochistic
virtue, and it took me that long to realize that I could actually _enjoy_ my
work _AND_ get paid well for it if I just did what I loved (software).

Anyway, to your comment: there are people like this everywhere, in all
industries. The more money there is involved in a domain, the more you will
find people that are only in that domain for the money. Doesn't mean those
people wont have legit skills that can be utilized, but there are some
downsides as you note.

------
stephc_int13
I don't like this company. Their business model is parasitic.

------
paulyy_y
Is it just me or did he Photoshop those glasses into his pic?

------
toxicFork
Regarding this

> Undue pressure to accept an offer

Sometimes the recruiters may do this even the company may be cool about you
taking your time. So don't take the recruiter's attitude being representative
of the company.

Especially if it's a third party recruiter.

------
nunez
This is a solid list of red flags. Thank you!

------
moxylush
I found this article inspiring. Thanks!

------
geebee
Thanks for writing and posting this article. Technical interviews are one of
the more essential topics in our field right now, and I do think 1) they're
badly handled, and 2) difficult to get right.

A couple of thoughts on two points raised here:

1) Pressure to accept an offer. I may have lost out on an offer from a
promising company by asking for a decision too quickly, and I did this because
I was under pressure to accept a different offer. I believe the company's
policy is that 1) they'll never rush their own decision to make an offer and
2) they'll never rush a candidate to accept. They figure that if they want to
hire you, that won't change a month from now.

This position has a lot of integrity, but it does come from a position of
great stability. Small companies may have only enough funding for one
position, and they're terrified that by waiting for a strong candidate who is
unlikely to accept, they'll lose out on another excellent candidate. The
company I applied to was well established and well funded enough that they
could hire anyone they felt was an excellent candidate. They were, in short,
always recruiting, never desperately. The scenario I can't really respect is
the company that takes weeks or longer about getting to an offer and then
wants an answer in 3 days. I suspect that it's always usually best to pass on
a company that is so desperate it needs to do this.

2) Not enough clarity about your role, and underprepared interviewers.

I think this can result from the "always recruiting" mentality. When it's
tough to hire, and you have the money to hire, it really becomes about finding
people when you find them. Companies are less concerned about exactly how to
use a new hire, they're more concerned about finding someone they believe can
make a strong contribution. As a result, they don't really hire for a specific
role. Now, this is understandable as a motivation, but it leads to interview
that are bewildering to a candidate. I've had full day whiteboard interviews
covering data structures, SQL, and math, but without having read the company's
website in advance, I'd be damned if I knew what they did, at all. That just
can't happen. It shouldn't be possible for a candidate to go through an entire
day of draining exam style interviews and not have the faintest idea what the
company does. Even my interview at Google, which was very whiteboard-examish,
the interviewers still took the time to explain what they work on before
saying "so, suppose the search space were no longer rectangular or convex, how
would you modify your code to find all matrices with positive determinants".

They aren't thinking about a role, they're thinking that if you can solve
difficult code/math problems at the whiteboard, present and explain your ideas
clearly, and seem professional in your interactions with people, they'll find
something worthwhile for you to do (or, perhaps, they have confidence you'll
find something worthwhile to do). It does make a certain amount of sense, but
it leaves the candidate in the dark, and I don't want to join a company where
my only interactions have been algorithm and data science questions at a
whiteboard.

------
repler
Yes

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irrational
Why is the font on this article so hard to read? Maybe it’s not the font, but
the weight. I had a hard time reading it and stopped part way through.

~~~
tantalor
font-weight: 300 is a bit light.

Bump it up to 500!

~~~
minxomat
Dear website creators: Just leave it alone. The default font width is just
fine!

------
sbussard
Mic drop

