

The Toughest Companies for Job Interviews  - cwan
http://www.fins.com/Finance/Articles/SB130826852769924133/The-Toughest-Companies-for-Job-Interviews?Type=0

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flyt
No-Hiring somebody after they get one wrong answer is ridiculous. A wrong
answer during an interview and how it's followed up on is one of the most
telling parts of the whole process.

If you want to hire people that are good at taking tests then by all means
require every answer to be correct. If you want people that understand
themselves enough to recover and think critically about their own mistakes
then treat a wrong answer as what it is: being a human being in a stressful
situation.

edit: also any company that still asks "brain teaser" questions in 2011 should
not be one that you consider working for.

~~~
lsb
I did a study of Wikipedia, and 75% of contributions from registered users
came from someone who got a contribution reverted at least once.

[http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/vandalism-second-
cha...](http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/vandalism-second-chances-and-
bots.html)

~~~
gnosis
A reversion on Wikipedia doesn't necessarily indicate that the reverted edit
was wrong.

Wikipedia is a highly politicized and point-of-view pushing place, so it's
quite common for edits get reverted by others who simply have a different
opinion or a contrary agenda.

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nostrademons
Some of this list is pretty much expected (McKinsey, Bain, Jane St, Palantir,
Bridgewater), but some of it seems pretty ridiculous. BP? Really? My sister
interned there (and was in charge of on-campus recruiting for oil companies at
her grad school), and thought they were a bunch of idiots, something
apparently confirmed by Deepwater Horizon. Amazon and eBay ahead of Google and
Apple? I think anyone in Silicon Valley would think that a bit off. And the
only hedge funds were Jane St and Bridgewater - where's D.E. Shaw, or
Renntech, or Citadel?

~~~
curtis
For what it's worth, my Amazon interview was probably the hardest one I ever
did -- much harder than my Google interview. At Amazon, every single one of
the 7 or 8 people I interviewed with asked me a coding question, including the
guy that had done the phone screen, and he'd asked me a coding question in the
phone screen too. I also got a coding "homework" problem in the phone screen.
I don't have any problem with coding questions in interviews, but it seemed
like total overkill.

~~~
spaghetti
Were the coding questions themselves extraordinarily difficult? It just
doesn't seem unusual to be consistently asked coding questions during
interviews for a software engineering position (assuming that's what you were
going for).

~~~
curtis
No, it's not unusual for all your interviewers to ask you coding questions. It
is, however, a lot more work to have 7 or 8 people do that rather than 4 or 5,
which is the point I was getting at. That was just a really long and tiring
interview.

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student818
I don't see how you can compare interviews at companies that do different
things against each other in terms of difficulty. In fact I don't even know
what this means for interviews _within_ the company. For instance, Amazon: is
it a difficult interview for a programmer, any technical person, or even for a
marketer? If it's for a software engineer, is it as difficult for new grad
entry positions as it is for higher positions? Which is being evaluated?

This comes to mind mostly because I'm surprised at who ended up on the list in
terms of tech. Palantir, for instance, is indeed one of the hardest interviews
out there, if only because the variety of programming questions they ask you
is so large.

Salesforce on the other hand, while not a cakewalk, is definitely not on the
level of difficulty of a Google or Facebook technical interview, at least for
their university hires.

Lastly, I'm glad to see Teach for America up there. It's become a pretty
competitive program to get into and this just further proves it, and I hope it
gets expanded so more people can be out there doing good.

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msort
Coding questions are often not the toughest interview questions.

Tough questions could be some "soft" non-coding questions like: design
questions (how to design a class hierarchy for a blog), behaviour questions
(if your boss is wrong, what to do?), experience questions (why did you use
tool X in your previous project Y? I think tool Z is better.)

Those questions are tough because your performance on those questions are very
subjective. It depends highly on if the interviewer likes you or not.

Coding questions can be tough, but they are much more objective. Google's
engineering interview mostly asks coding questions. Questions can be
difficult, but at least, if you write great code, you will pass the interview.

In this sense, Google is not a very tough company for job interview.

In general, the degree of interview toughness depends on the job supply/demand
ratio. When many people apply for positions at company X, the company has to
apply a high-rejection rate, based on whatever (sometime very random)
criteria.

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hugh3
I'm surprised not to see D. E. Shaw here. Unlike, say, Bain, which actually
needs to hire people, D. E. Shaw seems to hire about three people a year but
actively collect thousands of CVs just so they can brag about how many people
they reject.

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floppydisk
Having interviewed with Amazon before, they ask lots of optimization type
questions and if you can make it faster. For instance, take some algorithm and
can you make it linear? They do the same thing with their coding questions,
they'll have you solve a problem and then ask you to make it faster. I
wouldn't say it was the hardest interview I've seen, but it was definitely
more challenging than most others I've done.

~~~
busted
My favorite interview questions are the ones where they have you figure out an
algorithm for something and then say, "Ok, but you can do it better (faster or
with less memory)."

It's slipped into how I do my work. I write something that I want to be
optimized and say "Ok, but I can do it better", regardless of whether I know
it can actually be done better or not. Very fun.

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jchonphoenix
As someone who has recently interviewed at most of those software related
companies and got offers from most of them, I can confirm that some of these
ranking seem really arbitrary.

Amazon was definitely one of the easier interviews I had. Microsoft had one of
the harder ones (but this might have just been a case by case thing).

Jane Street and Palantir, however, I can say for sure had two of hardest and
most intense interviews I've ever done.

I've now learned, after being trained to conduct interviews, that these
interviews aren't meant to be fair. Companies are afraid of getting any single
person that isn't competent because people tend to hire others like them. A
single bad person is a cancer. Thus, the hardest interviews are meant to
reject 99% (or even more) of the qualified candidates so their false positive
rates are ridiculously low. This is how scared these companies are of false
positives.

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purplefruit
I did 2 rounds of interviews, 9 interviews in total if I recall before
starting at McKinsey. Though I have to say, the whole case interview thing is
a hack that can be taught to anyone. I knew a lot of not very brilliant people
who got in because an alumni pretty much showed them exactly how to do it.
Like any test, you can study the fuck out of it and get in.

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larryfreeman
I interviewed at Amazon once. They gave me three phone screens but I didn't
get invited for the 1:1. I greatly respected the interview and it was my first
wake up call that I had lost some of my technical edge as a manager.

At Google, at the same time, I almost got a job offer. I got all the way
through the interview (phone-screen, all-day in-person interview) and then
they said they didn't know what to do with me could I come back in 6 month and
make a presentation on a business idea. I took them up on it 6 months later
but they passed on my business idea (2004, a rich text wiki).

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blumentopf
What I don't understand is that this report seems to contradict other reports
of software engineers being in high-demand, which presumably should lead to
_lower_ interview barriers?!

~~~
prodigal_erik
It's a market for lemons. When devs are in demand, that brings in applicants
who are only in the industry because the wages went up, while the good ones
are more likely to be taken. These each lead to a greater proportion of
incompetents to filter out, and the cost and risk of accidentally hiring one
have not improved.

~~~
wnight
What risk though? Instead of these days-long interviews with multiple people
(and the inevitable meetings after to discuss their results) why not just hire
people provisionally and see how they do? Especially if you pair-program, code
review, or anything that will expose them to evaluation.

I'd advertise with something like "Job coding X at a company that does Y.
Finish the Ruby Metakoans and be prepared to discuss your answer. You will be
asked to code in Ruby and C during the interview."

These huge processes just seem like HR trying to justify their existence.

~~~
prodigal_erik
After a phone screen, we spend maybe five hours of developers' time on each
candidate and reject 80–90% of them. If we provisionally hired all of them
expecting useful work, we would invest far more time ramping them up on our
system, risk outages from their early mistakes, disclose trade secrets to a
bunch of devs who end up unhappy with us, and lose out on all the employed
candidates up front (who aren't going to quit just for an extended interview).

Then there's the moral hazard of paying anyone who can get into our filter,
rather than just the ones who can get all the way through it. It's the same
reason we can't expect candidates to compensate us for the cost of
interviewing them—it's better if a bad match is lose/lose than if anyone could
reliably expect to be rewarded for wasting everyone else's time.

~~~
wnight
I wasn't suggesting you hire everyone who walks through the door, but I bet my
hour-long test is within 80% as accurate as those crazy all-day stress tests,
and much cheaper. Asking for code (even a few lines) in the application itself
would further reduce the number of applicants.

Your system/circumstances seem like they'd make trusting and benefiting from
new hires quite a hassle. Ideally you'd have some public and open-source app
to have new hires hack at, but there should be tests to be written, etc, which
shouldn't leak trade secrets. (If you don't have docs for which
files/components implement your trade secrets, and therefore which ones do
not, I don't see how you have any hope of keeping anything straight.) If their
early mistakes cause an outage I think it says more about your build processes
than them.

As for people not quitting for what's in essence an extended interview, that's
what they are doing for you and others already. You fully intend to dump them
if they don't prove to be good, but you don't have a quick process to
determine this so you aren't as up-front about it.

But yes, not every place has it as easy as Github, for instance. They have a
ton of publicly available code an applicant could work on, and in doing so
they'd show they could use the company's products and tools. I don't know, but
would bet they have a comparatively easy interview process.

------
known
I think the toughest companies are where _interview == quiz_

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tomjen3
The interesting thing is that almost all of those companies are companies
where I wouldn't want to work - with the possible exception of Jane Street
(though that depends on whether or not that company pays is programmers 10% of
what it pays its traders) and Amazon (assuming that the stories Steve Yeggy
tells are exaggerated and they have brought actual desks for their
programmers, instead of the doors they used to have).

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maeon3
I interviewed at Salesforce.com in mid January 2011. It was at 300 Market
Street San Francisco, bright and early 8:30AM. Linda Ellis, Raja Bhamidapati,
Allison Nishioka, Kei Tang, Ranjani Salur, Rhoita Misra, Sagar Wanaselja, Sam
shoute. I didn't get the job. I was put through the ringer. I completely agree
with this (difficult interviewers) report. Here are some notes:

I met with 10 people during the interview. A complete battery of psychological
analysis. In that group was every kind of co worker I've ever dealt with. I
could tell some were acting the part to try to throw me off base and test me
for any sociopathic or personality problems. Some were insulting me in my
face, some were super charismatic, some people with impossibly hard questions.
Some questions were strangely easy. The whole gambit, it gave my personality
side a workout (Programmers usually don't work hard on dealing with the 50
personality types).

They planned the sit down coding test an hour after lunch, to test if you know
how to deal with the 'afternoon dip' in energy. The coding test I did well on,
it was to create functionality to replace the "String" class with char * in
java. And more importantly is to unit test. Do this in one hour.

On the plus side, they paid my entire way. and got me into the "Omni hotel"
one of the best hotels I've ever stayed in. Paid for the Car. It was by far
one of the most exciting experiences of my life.

They analyzed my personal life as well and ask questions about what I'm doing
when I'm here, what I like to do, what kind of person I am.

The majority of the questions they asked me were a subset of the questions in
the book "Cracking the coding interview" by Gaylle Laakman. They were tough
questions, but if you are prepared you can give them canned responses.

After that Interview, I felt like I've never been so probed in my life. From
stem to stern. Every part of me, everything that makes me a human was
analyzed. I left feeling like I've just been scanned by the Borg. I didn't get
the job. but I made it to the 'short list' of 13 candidates up for
consideration. I left my heart in San Fran California.

