
Show HN: interviewing.io is out of beta and open to engineers of all levels - leeny
http://blog.interviewing.io/interviewing-io-is-out-of-beta-anonymous-technical-interview-practice-for-all/
======
dvt
I really wish there was more work done in changing the terrible interview
culture in software, instead of doubling-down on bad practices with low
signal-to-noise ratios.

It's clear that whiteboarding and impromptu coding have little-to-nothing to
do with real-life coding capability (let alone with generating real business
value), while _actual_ signals (e.g.: GitHub projects, OSS contributions,
StackOverflow, take-homes, etc.) are ignored by interviewers. I've interviewed
dozens of engineers and it's always been a miserable experience because my
hiring manager (or other senior engineers on my team) always insisted on using
these kinds of "grilling" methods which were never good signals to begin with.

It's a shame how our industry is the only highly-paid professional industry
where this kind of sophomoric "intellectual hazing" is not only accepted, but
also encouraged. I mean, hell, I have like three books on my bookshelf not
about how to write _good_ code, or _scalable_ code, or _performant_ code, but
merely about how to pass interviews. Yuck.

~~~
opportune
Here’s a counterpoint: I don’t want to be forced to do OSS as part of my
resume. I already write software over 40 hours a week for my job. And I won’t
do a take home that takes longer than a regular interview unless the place has
really good pay (I’ve never heard of a take home place paying top of
industry).

Meanwhile I’m very good at competitive programming, I actually find it
enjoyable because of the challenge, and I don’t need to practice it much even
when interviewing.

Also to be perfectly blunt I think this just ties into people generally being
uncomfortable with tests. All the examples you gave have the benefit of
allowing unlimited time. What’s wrong with a test that challenges your
knowledge of data structures and algorithms? I actually find that in general
the very smart people I know are good at them and most of the people who
“don’t test well” aren’t. And even then they can just practice them. They
might even learn something. Sorry if that sounds mean, I don’t mean it to be,
just blunt.

~~~
dxbydt
> Meanwhile I’m very good at competitive programming

Not to burst your bubble, but you aren't. You are very good when you get it
right. You aren't when you don't get it right. But then you are leaving out
that part because nobody likes to focus on the negatives. Consider this - at
some point of your life, you didn't know competitive programming. Were you
100% un-hireable at that point ? Most likely, you would have done perfectly
fine if you were hired without all this ceremony. That's what people are
frustrated with.

People dismiss college credentials as elitist gatekeeping, When you create
entire artificial domains out of whole cloth, like "competitive programming",
that's gatekeeping on steroids. Because that whole domain is artificial, I can
stuff anything into it. The surface area of that domain is practically
infinite. Forsure there's some patch where you'd under-perform. And I reckon
the area of that patch is quite large. You just haven't found it yet.

~~~
alecbenzer
> Not to burst your bubble, but you aren't. You are very good when you get it
> right. You aren't when you don't get it right. But then you are leaving out
> that part because nobody likes to focus on the negatives

I'm sorry, what? "No one is right 100% of the time so there's no such thing as
being good at anything"?

------
leshow
This site is amazing. I had a real problem with nerves during interviews, I
did about half a dozen practice interviews on the site over about 2 or 3
months, while I was brushing up on algorithms and data structures in my spare
time. It was great, if you have issues with interviews I recommend the site.

One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by
studying first for a few weeks.

~~~
programbreeding
>One bit of advice though, don't just jump into a mock, make sure you prep by
studying first for a few weeks

Once I realized the interviews were done by real people, I realized that would
be the case. I was looking around to see if that was something that could be
done on their site. It looks like it isn't but I found the following in their
FAQ [0].

>If you need a place to start, we heartily recommend Interview Cake [1].
There, you can work algorithmic problems at your own pace and get nice hints
as you go.

I wanted to post it here for anyone else wondering the same.

[0] [https://interviewing.io/faq](https://interviewing.io/faq) [1] I don't
want to put the link here but the link from their FAQ does appear to be a
referral link, or at least some kind of coupon code. I have absolutely no
affiliation with either site but if you want to support this site then I'd
recommend checking the FAQ and getting to Interview Cake through there.

------
npiit
I don't think practicing interviewing should be encouraged even though I know
this has been done for years and years. If you want to end up working on
something you actually love in a place you like, you should just learn what is
interesting to you. Your "dream" job at a FAANG might be more unpleasant and
boring than you've been expecting.

~~~
johnfn
Conversely, interview questions often have very little to do with the content
of the day to day work. So while studying the things you like may help you ace
the day to day work, you could still struggle on the interview if you don’t
prep for it specifically.

~~~
nefitty
This is confusing to me, because supposedly there’s a shortage of “good
engineers”. That may be the case or not, but if so, why are these additional
bottlenecks being added when these interviews universally seem to be perceived
as irrelevant to the daily work of engineering? What would make more sense to
me is if the focus moved toward architecture design instead of leetcode.

“What stack would you propose for this product?” Instead of, “Take these two
arrays of strings and output a new array where no strings has a letter found
in another blah blah blah...”

~~~
tmpz22
There isn't a shortage of generic developers, but there are shortages of
specialized developers. One shortage example would be an SRE who knows Azure,
Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Jira, very well. Another example would be a front-end
developer who knows iOS development so well that they can make up for the pit-
falls of React Native while also writing half decent typescript code.

It's often difficult to interview specialized developers because the
specialist often understands (or pretends to understand) the specialty better
then the interviewer themselves.

These hiring opportunities represent a large number (maybe even a majority) of
roles at small, medium, and large, companies.

FANNG and maybe a few other companies which have custom tool chains from top
to bottom are a little bit different because Google probably doesn't care if
you know Jenkins because you'll have to be trained in their homegrown
alternative anyways.

~~~
Apocryphon
The demise of training in this industry is pretty lamentable. While companies
can't be expected to turn generic developers into incredibly specialized
developers, they probably could do more to help the former move closer to the
latter.

------
unkirte
Practicing interviewing always seemed to me like studying the day before the
exam: if you're lucky and the things you studied actually helped you to pass
the exam, you would be lying to yourself because a couple of days/weeks later
you won't remember anything of what you just studied. You didn't deserve to
pass the exam, but, hey, nobody knows.

Similarly, if you practice an interview and you're lucky enough to being
questioned the topics you just practiced and they hire you, what kind of
impression are you going to give to your future teammates when some
weeks/months later they ask you something related to that topic but you don't
remember/know? You just Google it? Well, you can google "how to render a
template in Golang", that's fine, but you should not google "what's the
difference between a compiled and an interpreted language" because there are
some things that you should know before starting to work as a professional
software developer.

I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that
process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and
personal benefit.

~~~
karatestomp
> I know that "the tech interview process is broken", but we, as part of that
> process, should aim to improve it, not to trick the system for our own and
> personal benefit.

It's not broken for FAANG, because what they're looking for is _willingness_
to spend time studying hard for their interviews over material that's
(certainly not _all_ ) useful in one's day-to-day job (if it were then this
wouldn't measure one's willingness to spend lots of time studying), to
whatever degree is required by your _raw natural intelligence_ /ability, to be
able to pass their tests.

They're looking for (what they consider to be) a sufficient amount of wanting-
it + intelligence (IQ, more or less), in whatever proportion is necessary to
get the candidate through the gauntlet. That's what the interviews filter for,
and it's what they _want_ them to filter for.

(yes they're also favoring recent grads and people who have lots of time on
their hands—notably those two categories overlap strongly—but I'm pretty sure
those are secondary goals, if they're goals at all)

------
k8t
I've used interviewing.io a lot and it has been immensely helpful. Not only
did I get a lot better at interviewing, I also got a referral from the
practice interviewer which eventually led me to my current job at a FAANG.

------
lukethomas
This is awesome! I've really enjoy watching the interviews they publish on
Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-
Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNc-Wa_ZNBAGzFkYbAHw9eg)

------
gaukes
I used this website in my last round of interviewing. The interviewers were
hit or miss but I definitely got a lot out of it.

~~~
leeny
If you had any interview experiences you weren't happy with, please email me
directly, and we'll make it right. We definitely want to do better than "hit
or miss". aline@interviewing.io

~~~
iio_throwaway18
What counts? I'm reading that this is resume-blind:

>Fast-tracking means that you bypass resume screens, scheduling emails, and
recruiter calls, and go straight to the technical interview (which, by the
way, is still anonymous1) at companies of your choice. Because we use
interview data, not resumes, our candidates end up getting hired consistently
by companies like Facebook...

but I definitely remember all or most of them asking about my resume, at least
at the onsite.

(FWIW, interviewed two years ago, 8/9 for passing technical screens on
interviewing.io, 0/8 for onsite.)

------
hysan
I find it confusing that the software development industry both rejects any
sort of standard certification bar, yet there is a fast growing industry built
around helping job seekers pass a standard technical interview loop.

Given that this overlaps with the HN community, how does everyone feel about
the growth of these types of companies?

~~~
diffrinse
Selling shovels to gold miners

------
lukeplato
The issues being brought up are very similar to the things talked about in
PG's "The Lesson to Unlearn" [1], i.e. "hackable" tests in university.

IMO, I don't think there is anything wrong with expecting candidates to be
knowledgable about basic algo/data structure for a SWE role -- instead, the
issues are with the evaluation process. Namely that it's become hackable using
these preperation services (resulting in false-positives), it doesn't capture
or indicate a candidate's real-world knowledge/experience/abilities, and the
typical questions and whiteboard approach is likely outdated when there are
probably better alternatives.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html)

~~~
Apocryphon
Goodhart's Law, writ large!

------
agentultra
I understand there is some value in using a technical screen to see if a
candidate has the viable expertise and skills required but how do we find that
if everyone is doubling down on _generic_ competitive-programming style hiring
sites?

After crunching through many leetcode problems I see the problems they give
have really poor APIs and many posted solutions people share have memory leaks
and other problems that you would absolutely want to avoid on a production
code base.

Competitive programming is _fun_ for sure but where is the data that it has a
high correlation to job success? It seems to me like a completely different
skill set. Writing fast, sloppy code in order to solve a puzzle is fun but
it's quite another when your library brings down a production server because
it leaks memory like a sieve.

~~~
hysan
leetcode is the StackOverflow for interviews. If all you do is copy paste the
problem, you end up with a bad interview process. If instead you use the
problem as a base, understand what signals it is _trying_ to test for, and
change it to implement your specific needs, you have a much better shot of
gauging the right skills.

Of course, that requires putting time into designing an interview pipeline
full of things like rubrics, bias training, and sometimes realizing that
leetcode questions don’t evaluate for the skills you need. Most companies
aren’t willing to invest time into this and prefer to just copy <big co X>
which is why you hear so many bad stories with what sounds like the exact same
interviewers.

------
codingint2009
How does this compare to similar sites like Pramp.com, Gainlo.co, and
PracticeCodingInterview.com?

~~~
maverick2007
I used interviewing.io and pramp really heavily in my most recent job search.
I found that interviewing.io interviews were of a much higher quality in
general vs pramp which was pretty hit and miss, some interviewers were well
prepared and helpful and some clearly checked out after their half of the
interview. But I ended up using pramp a lot more since they had unlimited
interviews and used interviewing.io as benchmarks to see how close I was to
where I wanted to be. Recommend them both!

------
satvikpendem
With regards to interviews, there is no free lunch. Interviewees don't want to
do at least one of the following:

1\. Data structures and algorithm questions - they don't want to study for
months

2\. Take home exercises - they don't want to spend hours unpaid without
knowing whether they got the job

3\. GitHub / Stack Overflow / Open source contributions - they don't want to
code outside of work

One last one, paid interviews about the work itself, may be untenable for
employers to pay every single interviewee.

~~~
Apocryphon
Well, there is the suggestion of the paid lunch- short-term contract-to-hire
situations that last a week or two? Of course, this only helps new grads and
the unemployed.

~~~
satvikpendem
Yeah even for this, if you already have a job, you can't quit your current to
work full time for this other job without even getting the actual job.

------
former_iio
As a former interviewer at interviewing.io, the CEO of this company is
committing fraud. She has done the following:

\- Been consistently late in paying out interviewers. Sometimes over 60 days
late. \- I am owed over $50k in money for several months earlier this year.
She has stopped responding to emails and calls. I am hiring a lawyer to get my
money back.

This platform is a guise for funneling people through to subpar jobs.

------
the_arun
Haven't tried it yet. FYI, blog.interviewing.io is running on HTTP (port 80)
as well.

------
layoutIfNeeded
* in North America and the UK

------
P-ala-din
As a student, I prefer the interview culture in software because at the very
least there is an objective component in the evaluation.

------
allarm
Ok I am confused - I am a network engineer, but I could not find anything
network related. Is it for software engineers only?

------
harry-s
visited the site - read somewhere - anonymous interview practise - clicked on
give it a try - and signup/login screen opened - doubted, if it is really
anonymous!

------
forkLding
Watched a lot of your youtube videos, really great help :)

------
mhh__
> Virgin Websafe has blocked this site

God Bless David Cameron

------
derwiki
Congrats!

------
azinman2
Congrats Aline!

------
johnsykes
this is great, can't wait to try it

------
throwaway298471
I've been in this industry for a few years and I still don't get it. It seems
like people in this industry constantly do things against their own interests
to me.

In terms of interviews:

A lot of these practices are designed and driven by _other developers_ , not
PMs or business people. And yet most devs won't work for FAANG, and will
likely have a much lower salary. And yet the _ask_ from these dev interviewers
is something like this:

\- "You don't know language A and/or framework B that are very similar to
language X and framework Y that you know very well? Sorry we can't hire you.
We expect good devs to spend day and night reading up on the latest
fashionable library, framework and language and have no life."

\- "Can you spend several hours every day for the next few months studying
leetcode? I hope you don't have performance anxiety, try Valium sometime. No,
we won't expect you to solve arbitrary puzzles in front of a semi-hostile
interviewer grilling you as your day job, it's just for kicks really."

\- "Can you spend 4 hours doing this coding assignment as part of the
interview?"

    
    
      "We want you to do your best and include x,y,z and the kitchen sink and not just solve the problem (add 4-8+ hours)."
    
      "Let's review your work -- you displayed exceptional skills and a deep understanding of our core competency. However, you didn't include our favorite coding style that you didn't happen to guess we would use --that you totally would've just adopted from day one during onboarding-- so we can't hire you."
    
      "We didn't see X in your code. No we can't schedule a 15 minute interview for you to explain your 4-14 hour coding project, why you did what you did, and that X is actually in there on L56 -- we're busy and decided to review your code only for 5 minutes after a heavy lunch and already passed on you for someone else. Sorry. We will keep your resume on file to wipe our *sses with."
    
      OR
    
      (interviewer disappears like a ghost after dropping a 20+ hour coding project for you to do and never follows up after)
    

\- "Can you build a full-stack app for us from scratch as the coding project?
Oh no, you won't be building a full-stack app from scratch when you start with
us, but we want someone who can do it in 5 minutes for the exactly 0-1 times
we'll ever need it"

\- "You haven't learned fancy new library/framework/language X yet? Are you a
dinosaur?" ...4 months later...

    
    
      "Fancy new library/framework/language X sucks, it turned out to be a fad. It turned out it doesn't do anything better than dinosaur library/framework/language D and is actually really buggy or complicated. What you _really_ need to know is fancy new library/framework/language Y, that's where it's at. We only want people who keep up with the industry."
    

_Me now doing the mental math of how I completely fcked myself over going into
this industry_

The math:

Average expected time doing the job after leetcode, coding project interviews,
open source, stack overflow, learning fancy
library/framework/language/whatever:

60+ hours/week.

No you can't reduce that to a normal 40 hours/week unless you want to be a
generic Java/Javascript code monkey, sir/madam.

Average salary: Not even near enough to justify that, considering the salaries
of other engineering and STEM fields. Unless you count FAANG, which you
probably won't be working for.

What did I get myself into?

------
fadifrancis
congratulations!

