
For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies - rvivek
http://blog.hackerrank.com/for-anyone-who-has-been-turned-down-by-38-companies-120-interviews/
======
deftnerd
The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected
me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very
well.

Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk
because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set.

It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of
time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare time for personal
projects.

In essence, a day job of simple Linux administration may pay the bills, while
in my spare time I'm working on large infrastructure automation, deep
learning, developing new blockchain technologies, etc.

I don't know how sustainable this is. I have three children and a wife, and
I'm getting tired of only being paid for work I can do while asleep just
because I'm afraid of rejection.

Any suggestions on how to "toughen up"?

~~~
lostcolony
I actually found 'toughening up' the wrong mental strategy, but rather "not
giving a damn".

You're in a position where you have a job. Anything you interview for you
-don't need-. You may want, but you don't need. You also sound very
comfortable in a specific role. That's a great place to start from, because if
someone rejects you...what are they rejecting? How does it effect you? You
know you're good, at least in certain areas. Either they don't need your
knowledge in those areas and aren't convinced you'd be an asset in others
(which is fair, and a reflection not on your abilities but your experiences),
or their process is broken. Neither is a reflection of you.

I've gotten a lot more comfortable in interviews just recognizing that, that I
have successes under my belt, I've already proved I can learn and adapt and
get difficult things done. So if in an interview I don't get an offer...that
speaks more of their process, or the minutiae of what they're looking for,
than it does of my capabilities.

And what's funny is that that devil-may-care attitude, has made me both more
willing to speak confidently about what I can do, -and- to more readily admit
what I can't. I don't fumble and stutter when asked do I know about (a thing I
don't know about), and give some half-truth, I just flat out say "I don't.
What is it?" And that has led to better interviews, and more offers, than I
ever got when I was a scared junior dev looking for work.

~~~
bcook
I think the "not giving a damn" statement belies that you do actually care.

Like someone saying "I don't care" implies... yes, you do care, otherwise you
would not state such a thing.

~~~
lostcolony
Being a bit pedantic there aren't you? Sure, if I wasn't interested, I
wouldn't be interviewing. But recognizing that the interview's outcome doesn't
reflect who I am, nor does it mean 'my life is over and I'll never get a job I
like', or any of the other anxieties common to those first few job hunts,
means I am not so invested in -succeeding-, and far more invested in just
scoping the company out, seeing if this would be a good fit, and accepting a
"no" as in no way a reflection of my quality.

Obviously, "not giving a damn" is hyperbole; as I said, if I really didn't
give a damn I'd not be interviewing in the first place. But it is the most
accurate description of the attitude I find myself having when interviewing.
"Toughening it out" was what I did as a college student and junior dev, trying
to fight the impostor syndrome as I try to convince strangers I'm worth
hiring, and trying to hold down the feelings of depression and self-loathing
afterwards as I criticized every single thing I did that I thought was a
mistake in the interview (even successful ones that in hindsight I realize I
absolutely aced), and tried not to think about how I just blew my chance at a
dream job (because every company that I talked with was a dream job, after
all; someone who would actually -pay- me to write code and solve problems!)

I instead describe my current attitude as "not giving a damn" to demarcate it
as very much different than that prior experience; my feelings now are "I am
good, I know a lot, I learn fast, and I have a track record to prove it, and
if you say no it means either you want someone with different experiences who
is looking for something very different than what I am, or you've been
interviewing for (and thus hiring for) the wrong thing; in either case I don't
think I'd enjoy it here. So, while I hope this works out in the
affirmative...I will view a 'no' from you as a positive as well, because it
tells me more about you than it does about me. Regardless of your response, I
am relieved to hear it, hence, I don't give a damn what it is".

------
dsmithatx
One very important thing strikes me about this. Getting 38 job interviews is
very much a sign of the times. In 2002 I was a highly skilled senior
linux/aix/hp-ux/Solaris admin and PHP programmer and I got laid off. I
submitted my resume more than 1000+ times in the first year and ZERO
interviews.

I hate to sound alarmist but, I fear many younger tech people may not realize
how lucky they are currently. If the economy turns south you are not going to
get 38 job interviews unless you seriously have some needed skills.

Don't be like this guy and accept you are bad at interviews thinking there is
plenty of opportunity. Don't blame the white board if every job in your field
expects you to be able to white board. If you plan to survive during the next
downturn or bubble burst you better be someone companies really want to hire.
You may be lucky to land one job interview and it will be hard to stay
motivated as months start to go by.

~~~
dominotw
>Getting 38 job interviews is very much a sign of the times.

I've noticed that many employers have copied google and have stated to
interview with as many people as possible. Lots of them take pride in their
acceptance ratio, some even advertising that on their careers page. Def a sign
of times but might not in a way that you are suggesting.

Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview
with google/facebook ect pretty easily.

~~~
berdario
> Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an
> interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily.

Maybe... I got contacted by 2 google recruiters in 2 separate instances. I
replied to them, but I never heard back.

I would've probably failed at the whiteboard, but I never even got a chance to
attempt the interview.

~~~
ktRolster
Yeah, that just happened to me this week. I'm sitting here wondering what I
said wrong in my reply email.

Was I not enthusiastic enough? What was it?

~~~
dmoy
You should get _a_ reply; it is possible the recruiter is no longer working
there, or something else. Or maybe they're just being slow.

Some more info: [https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-recruiting-take-as-
lon...](https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-recruiting-take-as-long-as-it-
does/answer/Bob-See)

Also down with kt, long live cj. :(

~~~
ktRolster
lol despite my username, I'm more of an MVP fan. <3 Taeja, HerO, Life!

------
bargl
So I've been on the flip side of this. I've worked at a company (multiple)
which had no F-ing clue how to hire. They'd constantly hire terrible people
who couldn't do the most basic things.

I think one of the most important aspects of hiring is getting potential
candidates in front of the team and letting them talk to the team, to see how
they handle questions from other developers (and yes there is always that guy
who tries to make the candidate look dumb for some reason).

The most telling question I typically ask when interviewing is what have you
worked on recently, why is it cool, and how have you added to the project.
This gives the candidate a great opportunity to dive into their own
experience. This way if they didn't answer my questions well it will give me
some idea of their background. Oh hey this guy didn't know basic Javascript
stuff off the top of his head because he's been working on the back end for 3
years. That's cool.

I'd personally take someone who can talk to me about practical design
decisions they've made on a project rather than knowing how to solve basic
algorithms. If you graduated 8 years ago and you STILL know exactly how to
implement a Binary Search Tree without needing a 10 min refresher then you are
a better man than I am. I forgot that about 3 years ago.

I don't mind that we expect developers to study for a tech screen but how much
does that really tell us about them? They can study and know the basics, but
have the ever worked on a large scale project where you have to make something
work now vs, having time to do a perfect implementation? Where is their
ability to tell their manager no, or their ability to weight COTS vs Custom
Build?

Sorry this touched a nerve, I just had a bad interview with a company. The
tech screen was outside my IDE, couldn't copy paste (which sucks when you want
to move a line or do some refactoring) and it was on topics I haven't looked
at in 4 years. Luckily I'd spent 15+ hours studying so one of the questions
was a gimme.

~~~
mcv
Still my favourite interview process was a small coding assignment and
presenting the resulting code in front of the devs, who got to ask questions
about it and then vote in private on whether to hire.

Everybody got the same assignment, everybody solves it in a different way, and
everybody makes mistakes[0], but how they handle that and explain it tells a
lot about how they are as a programmer.

[0] Except for one who was insanely thorough and still apologized for really
minor imperfections in his code. He got the most enthusiastic votes ever.

------
kafkaesq
_So, how did you get to where you are today?_

 _I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at
Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college._

Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical
scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense.
Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say
they are. But that's about it.

[1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill
down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that
generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in
any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure
that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their
coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams
take).

And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be
made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you
know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for
all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-
hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds)
of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze.

EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking --
known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff
over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently
consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning
indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that
rejected him.

~~~
timbofoo
I see the whiteboard coding test as an attitude-test. If you have too much
attitude to sit down and write some code for an hour, then you aren't someone
I want in my company. It shouldn't be hard if you're skilled. Sorry to be that
way, but that's the way I (and we) see it.

~~~
yarou
Probably one of the most insensitive posts I've ever seen written on here.
There are many people who have crippling anxiety and social phobias, and your
post chalks that up to them having an "attitude".

~~~
argonaut
Not to be harsh or anything, but this kind of proves the point. Crippling
anxiety and social phobia are _not_ things I would want in an employee, all
else equal, because they will need to be able to communicate in meetings and
present findings/work to different teams / executives.

Reply: baseline social comfort is not a generic personality type.

~~~
yarou
Isn't that your job as a manager, though? To balance the various personality
types on your team?

Seems like you just want one generic personality type on your team to make
your life easier.

------
NTDF9
I read the article as:

"It's not enough to be a mediocre engineer for a mediocre paying job. If you
want to play in the local tennis league, you better be Roger Federer (without
his pay)"

I think software engineers should counter-question the interviewers.
Interviewers should be allowed to judge the candidate only if they can answer
the candidate's questions to them. If the interviewer cannot, he/she is not
qualified for the job of interviewing.

~~~
edabobojr
I have done this and have done interviews I did most of the questioning as the
interviewee. In my experience, this approach turns off a lot of people.

~~~
NTDF9
The point is:

If the candidate asks a relevant question that the interviewer cannot solve in
time, the company failed at its own game because the candidate proved that
he/she is better qualified than the company's representative, given the rules
of the game.

What excuse does the company have for not hiring the candidate now?

~~~
mahyarm
The company is paying you money. The company is the customer of your services.
This is why.

~~~
hayd
Except they're not. Companies rarely, if ever, pay interviewees.

Sure, it's true if you become an employee or contractor... but til then
they're speculating (as are you).

~~~
mahyarm
Kind of like a salesman trying to sell you something... Enterprise software
companies don't get paid until they say buy, and in the mean time the company
hasn't been paid anything.

------
6stringmerc
Some really great advice within that forms a foundation for the narrative. I
can really appreciate the diligence and apparent 'no hard feelings' kind of
pragmatism. I especially liked the closing part:

> _If you fail 10 interviews in a row, go for the 11th interview. But take a
> look at all the variables, and see if there’s anything you can do
> differently to improve. Take the pressure off, and work through problems
> routinely to keep your muscle memory in shape._

That reminds me of being in 'game shape' as I call it for playing and soloing
- standing around thinking about notes to play doesn't come off nearly as
fluid as being so practiced as to get into the groove and run with it. Good
parallel. Nicely framed conversation, glad to read it.

~~~
civilian
Yeah. When I was job hunting ~3 years ago I knew I was going to have to do a
lot of whiteboarding problems. I only had two 2 years of coding experience,
and for the last six months I had been freelancing, which doesn't often
encourage algorithms. I was working through "Cracking the Coding interview"
and "programming interview exposed" but I was worried.

So I sent an email to everyone in my coworking space that I'd put a six pack
in the community fridge for every person who did a mock whiteboard interview
with me. Some of them came with their own problems, some of them picked
problems from websites or the books that I hadn't done yet. Some of them were
doing it as a favor, and some of them wanted to practice interviewing people.
I got five mock interviews over a week, many of them with strangers. Best 40
bucks I ever spent. (I nailed the next real interview I had and got a job
offer.)

~~~
kilroy123
That's a damn good idea. I completely agree, a job interview is something that
you need to practice to be good at. Just doing code exercises isn't enough.
Having someone do a real interview is the best way.

------
p4wnc6
Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them.
It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe
the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success.

HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing
evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates
immediately that creativity is valued less than standardization, and that your
uniformity and compliance are more valuable than your experiences.

It's also a way to position developers as lower-status employees -- you
essentially have to capitulate to the judgement of higher-status employees.
Even if you ace the code test, it puts you in a defensive position to justify
yourself, which inherently reduces your negotiation power. If you submit
something that is even slightly unconventional (even if it's provably just as
or more accurate than conventional submissions), then your negotiation power
is extremely damaged.

For example, think of the difference between actors who must audition and
actors who are "offer only" \-- they won't respond to your inquiry about
hiring them unless you're prepared, based on their previous work, to make an
offer already. If you ask Robert De Niro to audition, you'll get laughed out
of the room. HackerRank is often like asking Robert De Niro not only to
audition, but to do some kind of two-bit community improv class warm up
exercise for his audition, then grilling him because he didn't enunciate
clearly. Ridiculous.

Employers often say they want to "see how you think" \-- when they say this,
it's a good idea to run the other way. No one can grok some whiteboard code or
some timed code test on standardized examples and draw any meaningful
conclusions about "how you think" or how it will relate to job success.
Someone who believes they can "see how you think" from narrow, time-
constrained examples is going to be a terrible colleague or, worse, a very
dysfunctional boss.

I think the trend of cultivating "full-stack" developers (instead of
benefiting from specialization and separation of concerns) is the number one
problem facing the software industry right now (and folks are largely in
denial about it).

This nonsense with commodity interviews via HackerRank is the number two
problem, followed closely by the prevalence of open-plan offices and the
prevalence of Agile-like workflow management processes.

~~~
frcknfrckn
Ugh.

Using a coding test shouldn't be a red flag. They are an incredibly useful
tool for weeding out the applicants who, quite frankly, don't know their ass
from their keyboard.

I've done hiring at several companies over the years, and I can honestly say
that the signal-to-noise ratio for programmers tends to be very low. Even
eliminating the obviously unqualified resumes leaves us with dozens of
supposedly 'qualified' developers. Further followup however in most cases
(probably 60 to 80% of the time, depending on the seniority of the position)
reveals that the applicant is all talk, and can't solve even the simplest of
problems.

Eliminating that 60-80% of applicants is an issue. We could have, say, a brief
phone interview with each applicant, trying to figure out which ones are
garbage and which are good. But that would tie up actual employees for hours
and hours, doing something that most of them would much rather not be doing.
Instead, using a coding test to weed out the morons can work wonders. We set
them all up with a simple problem set, and a day later it becomes very obvious
which of the applicants are worth bringing in for a real interview.

Now don't get me wrong - if an employer rejects you because of a spelling
mistake or judges you because they say you solved a problem 'wrong', then
yeah, that employer likely sucks and you should be happy to have been passed
over. But rejecting an employer simply because they asked you to do a test?
The only one you're hurting is yourself.

~~~
p4wnc6
The flip side of this is that most companies are "garbage" as you put it, and
a lot of them simply do cargo cult imitations of the more popular companies.
If a startup is saying they're going to disrupt the online vegan running shoes
market and then tells me they have to weed out the "80% garbage applicants"
with some parochial trivia about binary search trees that let's be honest none
of us has given a shit about since we passed the exam on it in undergrad, then
the code test absolutely is a big red flag to nope on out of there.

Since so many jobs are just shitty talent wasters, and you are just treated
horribly, given poor equity terms, not paid what you're worth, etc., it
unfortunately means that unless you have special knowledge that some
particular job is non-shitty (like a trusted recommendation) then you're just
better off erring on the side of nope.

~~~
frcknfrckn
If the company looks like garbage though, why are you applying?

~~~
p4wnc6
If the candidates look like garbage, why are you screening them?

You can't always tell. You begin part of the process, then the company says
how great their Agile teams are, or how "collaborative" their open-plan
surveillance workspace is, or they invite you to do a HackerRank test, and
only _now_ do you know the company is shit and you pass.

It's the same problem you face with the 60-80% unqualified applicants. I get
messages from head hunters, direct recruiter emails on Stack Overflow,
traditional recruiting firm phone calls, as well as occasional job listings
that I locate through a job search.

80% of these jobs are shitty and need to be weeded out, even when they have
plausible-seeming job descriptions and acceptable GlassDoor reviews.

~~~
yeukhon
Most people don't get to choose who to interview. Your manager or your
recruiter does not have enough data to eliminate the 60% unfit. But the first
40% are already eliminated because those candidates did not pass even the
first phone interview with a recruiter (think Google hiring process).

~~~
p4wnc6
My point is that candidates face that exact same problem when trying to weed
out bad employers. That's why good developers reject the employers who try to
use commodity tests like HackerRank. We do it for the same reason that the
employer wants to use the commodity tests to weed out bad candidates. But
somehow the employers don't understand they are just signalling how bad they
are (apart from a very rare few companies).

~~~
frcknfrckn
Don't be so quick to speak for all developers. Most good developers I've
encountered are willing to put some effort in to find the right job.

~~~
p4wnc6
HackerRank-like lazy, commodity evaluation is not remotely close to "put[ting]
some effort in to find the right job." It's very critical that we don't allow
people to make the false comparison between actual interview effort and daft
HackerRank time-wasting.

In fact, doing the emotionally difficult task of rejecting an employer who
tries the HackerRank commodity nonsense represents putting in more legitimate
effort to find the right job and to judiciously choose to complete code
evaluations for companies that aren't being lazy and wasting your time.

~~~
frcknfrckn
Ha ha! Wow, that does sound difficult. You're a real trooper.

~~~
p4wnc6
There's no need to be insincere or intentionally hurtful. Trust me, when you
need a job and you've got a lot of life and family pressures building up, but
you can clearly see how dysfunctional an employer is and how bad your life
will be if you agree to work for them, it can be extremely hard to make the
choice to do the right thing and reject them. It's even worse when you get to
the stage of an actual job offer and an employer starts revealing how
dysfunctional they are when they won't negotiate on basic features that are
necessary for minimally acceptable worker health and quality of life.

It seems you really desire to deride me simply because you disagree with me. I
don't take it personally, but I will say that the attitude you've displayed
throughout these comments defending HackerRank-like evaluations is exactly the
kind of attitude that would be indicative of a badly dysfunctional employer,
and it's often exactly the kind of dysfunction that HackerRank requests are
indicative of. Especially the parts where you try to turn it around and assert
that a candidate standing up for minimally acceptable, reasonable treatment is
equivalent (for you) to having a "bad attitude." It's quite alarming that you
feel entitled to declare candidates as having "bad attitudes" for doing
something that simply makes common sense from the point of view of avoiding
employers who will waste their time. Contrary to suggesting that the
_candidate_ has a bad attitude, it highly suggests that the _employer_ has a
bad attitude, bordering on feeling like they are _entitled_ to candidate
labor, instead of _privileged_ to have that labor, and somewhat whiny about it
too. Definitely a bad signal when coming from someone involved in the hiring
process.

~~~
frcknfrckn
Was the sarcasm a bit much? Yeah, probably. But really, everyone makes hard
decisions when it comes to jobs. I just find it somewhat amusing that someone
would reject a company entirely because they disagree with one single facet of
a multi-step interview process.

While we're at it, I don't particularly appreciate many of the insinuations
people have made about my team and my employers based simply on the fact that
I see a role for automated coding tests in the interview process. But like you
said, I don't take it personally either.

Coding tests are just one tool in an interviewing toolbox. Like any tool, they
can be - and are - abused. You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of
some unredeemable flaw in the company as a whole. I feel that the tool has a
genuine role in the initial candidate screening process. We obviously
disagree, and are spinning our tires trying to convince each other, so there's
really no point in continuing the discussion.

~~~
p4wnc6
> You feel that any use of that tool is indicative of some unredeemable flaw
> in the company as a whole.

This is a good summary of my position, except that it's not unredeemable. They
could just stop using short, standardized, timed tests as a candidate
evaluation, and instead they could acknowledge that there is no effective
substitute for actually speaking with candidates, probing them about their
experiences, and developing more nuanced understanding. Doing so would be time
consuming and expensive ... that's life. Papering over the reality of the
situation by pretending like automated, timed, standardized tests can measure
the thing you need to measure won't make reality go away.

If a company is verifiably an excellent place to work and has excellent
technology culture, and this can be verified ahead of time, then they do have
the negotiation power to respectfully require completing code trivia (although
most of the firms that actually are excellent don't do it this way even though
they could).

Firms that are question marks to a candidate prior to some kind of phone
interview to assess the fit, experience, and the nature of the role have no
business trying to cheaply avoid the required costs of candidate evaluation.
By trying to be cheap about it, they send a bad signal (and also generally
don't succeed in getting the candidate pool they want to get).

Short, standardized, timed tests have no place in professional software
hiring. Literally none. A company that uses such tests definitely raises red
flags. It may be a sign of unredeemable dysfunction in the company, it may be
some misguided HR initiative, it may be a totally fine place to work. The
candidate can't tell and it's seriously not in their interest to waste effort
on whatever the test is going to be.

There are just too many bad jobs ... the better decision rule is to always
reject and if you end up rejecting an otherwise good job that somehow ended up
using short, timed, standardized testing, oh well. The loss function is not
symnmetric. Ending up in a dysfunctional job just because you felt good about
acing their code test is a far worse outcome than rejecting an otherwise good
job and being overly selective about where to work.

~~~
frcknfrckn
Yup, I still genuinely disagree with most of your points. Just not seeing the
connection between using an interviewing tool and being a dysfunctional
company. But like I said, spinning tires, etc. All the best to you going
forward!

~~~
p4wnc6
I think the problem is that you continue referring to it as an interview tool
just because it is a thing that can be used for interviewing.

Making candidates stand on one leg and recite the alphabet backwards would
also be an "interviewing tool" but it's not legitimate, just as short, timed,
standardized coding tests are also not legitimate. Playing semantic games
about whether it's an "interview tool" is not worthwhile. The question has
nothing to do with whether it's logically possible to be used as part of an
interview. The point is that it cannot provide the kinds of evidence that
people claim it provides, and so continued usage of it for interviews can only
be explained by other reasons, which is when it begins to be evidence of
dysfunction.

~~~
frcknfrckn
That's not 'the problem'. That's the disagreement. You claim it's not a
legitimate tool. I say that it is. We obviously disagree and this is going
absolutely nowhere.

~~~
p4wnc6
You say

> Just not seeing the connection between using an interviewing tool and being
> a dysfunctional company.

This is problematic because you're not representing my position. It's somewhat
of a straw-man. You're saying that _I 'm_ saying that the use of some legit
interview tool spells dysfunction.

But I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the use of an _illegitimate_
interview tool (timed, standardized tests) is a sign of dysfunction.

Whether or not you see a connection between using an interview tool and
dysfunction is irrelevant, because we would _both_ agree that there's a
connection between using an _illegitimate tool_ and dysfunction.

So the disagreement happens at least one layer back, at the point where I
claim that timed, standardized tests are not actually useful for determining
who will be good at a job. The disagreement, and the whole discussion, has
nothing whatsoever to do with "just using an interview tool."

I think it's very important to be pedantic about this, because in a lot of
cases you keep referring to the timed tests as an interview tool, and speaking
about them that way fails to acknowledge that the tests are not capable of
producing the kinds of evaluation output necessary for actually determining
who would be good at a job.

For example, a great engineer with loads of experience and glowing letters of
recommendation about how effective they have been in previous roles might just
be a very anxious timed test taker and tend to do badly on timed tests for
reasons mostly of anxiety. Since the test is artificial and has no
relationship to the actual work they would do if hired, rejecting them based
on a failure on the test is a poor business decision.

It doesn't even have to be as extreme as an anxiety issue with test taking. A
person could just simply _disprefer_ working in a constrained, timed
environment like a browser-based IDE with a literal clock ticking down. They
might be a great developer, yet cannot even write FizzBuzz in that situation
because it is so utterly and unreasonably alien compared to the manner in
which they would do work in a real job.

The tests just simply are not legitimate ways of measuring programming
ability. They do not control for all of the bespoke ways a person can appear
bad via a timed test, yet still be good, nor do they account for all of the
ways a person can appear good on a timed test, yet perform badly on higher-
level thinking tasks, open-ended time management, or creative tasks like
system design.

Very truly, the tests, and organizations like HackerRank, exist because it's a
convenient fiction for HR and management, especially in companies that doesn't
have very much of a technology staff to vet candidates. These places are happy
to drink the HackerRank Kool-Aid because it gives them all kinds of plausible
deniability about hiring the wrong people. It's very similar to the way that
management consultants, far from actually functioning in any analytical
capacity that benefits their client, really just exist to sort out internal
power struggles through means of credential and prestige. It's very much a
status-signaling sort of behavior. And it's even worse in the cases when a
company adopts something like HackerRank just because some other, supposedly
fancy, company adopted it.

Because of all of this and much more, it's just very critical to continue
pedantically ensuring that no claim of the tests being valid, legitimate
evaluation tools goes unchallenged.

~~~
frcknfrckn
And yet you are misrepresenting what I have claimed about coding tests. I have
never once claimed it as useful for determining who would be GOOD at a job. I
have claimed they are useful for filtering out applicants who are completely
unable to do a job. This is an incredibly useful thing to do when swamped with
dozens of similar applications for, say, a junior developer role. But again,
this is just a first step. By no means should this test determine who gets
hired, it merely helps narrow down the interview pool to something more
manageable.

Is there a risk of falsely filtering good applicants? Yes. But that is the
exception, not the rule.

Sigh. Why do I keep letting myself get sucked back into this? You see it as an
illegitimate tool. I see it as legitimate. We disagree. I'm not going to agree
with you, and you're not going to agree with me. So I'm done here. If you'd
like to keep arguing by yourself, you go right ahead.

------
accidc
A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized
that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup
interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not
to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and
those can be done outside of a startup.

Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your
relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and
I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump
through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40
minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know.

I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it
being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get
together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me
how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge
right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that
conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine
(collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management
etc.)

All of the above is opinion.

------
im_down_w_otp
_> "Job interviews are difficult by design."_

In the tech-sector at least they're not "difficult by design." They're obtuse
and absurd due to laziness and lack of rigor applied to the problem space by
individual firms as well as the aggregate marketplace.

Almost nobody applies anything remotely resembling a scientific method or
includes the massive body of research available in sociology, psychology,
and/or neurology for understanding even their own needs as a company trying to
accomplish something, let alone building an effective social group (i.e. team)
capable of cooperating together to get there given whatever that
organization's constraints are.

~~~
maerF0x0
Would you, kindly, start us off with whichever pieces are best for a company
to implement/utilize in interviews?

~~~
im_down_w_otp
Well, a good first place to start is to survey the various profile models that
exist and figure out which one you can get most comfortable using/assessing.

[http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm](http://www.businessballs.com/personalitystylesmodels.htm)

I personally use OCEAN because I'm most comfortable with its scaffolding and
applying it via field testing.

Then move on to how those models can be tracked/verified through neurological
study. Dario Nardi @ UCLA is probably the most "renowned" researcher in this
field, though there are many more.

------
sotojuan
Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a
whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy
student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and
linked list operations as well as their complexities.

Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a
bug.

~~~
fapjacks
Yep! I have been interviewing for fun for the last few years (averaging maybe
one or two interviews every few months), and I've seen all kinds of stuff. Way
too many whiteboards. In fact, even after all these years, whiteboards still
make me nervous, and basically makes it impossible to get into flow, or have a
reasonably nice mindset for solving problems. And if I do this for fun, you
can bet that people who depend on those interviews for their livelihood aren't
feeling much better. I think it's a really stupid way to interview. Anyways, I
agree with you: The best and funnest interviews -- and therefore the
interviews I feel most comfortable (and therefore able to really show what I
know) -- are the pair programming interviews. You build a special rapport with
a single developer on the team, who gets a really good idea of the kind of
coder you are. It's like a nice, calm conversation about technology.

~~~
bgribble
While I appreciate that this process has been great for you, I would think
that it probably sucks for all the engineers and managers whose time you took
up interviewing "for fun". Have you ever tried to hire engineers? It is a pain
in the ass, and giving serious consideration to every candidate takes up a
huge amount of time even before the interview, much less taking a significant
chunk of a day for a significant chunk of the team to actually do the
interview.

If I found out someone had interviewed with me "for fun" I would be very
tempted to send them a bill for "employment search consulting services" at my
team's market rate per man hour!

~~~
busterarm
You go into this process knowing that it consumes time and that not everything
is going to pan out. If you had the data and processes to identify the perfect
candidate, you wouldn't need to bring people in to interview.

It's not waste, it's data collection. If you're not building usable data out
of your interview process, your hiring process sucks.

My team was interviewing candidates recently and we brought in a guy that was
great on paper and in the interview but we had other candidates scheduled and
two of them ended up blowing the first guy away. I'm glad we delayed that
hiring decision until we had an appropriate amount of data.

Also, think of it like dating (or any other matching market). Being outcome-
dependent says nothing about your candidates but a lot (that's unattractive)
about you.

The best way to do things is to build good relationships. Your company and
your developers should have a network of people you can bring in at any time
to interview for a position. As a developer you should also have a network of
contacts to know who needs developers. Instead you're waiting till you're
desperate and coming off as needy. If I see that, I'm going to ask for a lot
more money or as an employer offer less.

Thankfully for my wallet, almost everyone else is in the same boat as you.

...and if I'm out interviewing for fun and find a better fit, I'm probably
going to take it.

~~~
fapjacks
Here's really the meat of it (and well said!): I interview "for fun" because
1) I've always got my ear to the rail for a better opportunity, and 2) I
_love_ meeting cool, smart people working on awesome projects! I'm not a VC so
this is my way of touring the technology industry and networking. The thought
that I'm "wasting" someone's time I think is really strange.

~~~
busterarm
I've had people bring me in to chat telling me ahead of time that they weren't
interviewing me but they wanted to get to know me so that when I had the years
of experience they were looking for they'd call me up.

------
blklane
I applied to around 100 jobs over the course of 9 months when starting to
learn how to program. For the startups I would get to a phone screen and
potentially a technical challenge then be turned away. At the job I am at now,
was contacted by CTO online, and had phoned/on-site/started within 5 days of
initial contact.

I've seen a bunch of blog posts recently about some companies priding
themselves on who they turn down versus who they accept and I feel that is one
of the bigger problems we have as an industry in hiring.

------
VikingCoder
I realized something a while back... My entire career, if I've made it to an
on-site interview, I've only had one company NOT make me a job offer.

That interview, I was asked to do something using recursion. (Ug.) The next
interviewer asked me to reverse a singularly linked list, and because my brain
was still in recursion land, I tried to do it recursively. Blame the jet lag,
okay? Immediately after I sucked at that, they walked me out the door. It was
emberasing. Two steps out the door, and my brain is filled with POP AND PUSH!
AAAH! I knew the answer, I've KNOWN the answer since I was about 14. No joke.
So, I've been on that side of the "every now and then people interview poorly"
thing. And I can only blame the jet lag, because I KNOW the ridiculously easy
answer to that question.

Here's the funny thing - if I would have been offered a job there, I would
have accepted. And the company went on to crash and burn in terrible fashion.
And two months later, I got a job at a MUCH better company.

TL;DR: I've only failed at one interview, and it was arguably the best thing
that ever happened to me. (Life is weird!)

~~~
jblow
Except ... reversing a singularly-linked list recursively is trivial.

If you can't do this, you are not qualified at basic manipulation of data
structures and you _should_ fail the interview if they want someone with basic
competence in data structure manipulation. Sorry but that is how it is.

~~~
laichzeit0
Because so often we are faced with having to implement singularly linked-list
reversal.

I wouldn't even bother implementing this myself in the real world and I have a
degree in computer science and 10 years experience doing dev work. I would
type the problem into google, survey a couple of solutions and pick one I
liked. Done. Next problem please.

This is pedantic crap that is a waste of anyone's time. I can't believe people
actually get asked shit like this at interviews? Well, at least none that I've
ever been to. They look at my resume "Oh, CS degree at well respected
University." and you can deduce that this person can probably work out trivial
crap like this or look it up in a book or the internet. At most ask them for
their academic records. What a complete waste of time in an interview..

~~~
jblow
The point is that if you can't do this, there is no way you can do stuff more
complicated than this, which will actually be necessary during regular work.
(And which you won't be able to type into Google).

I run a software company and I'll say straight up I would not hire someone
with your attitude.

------
chvid
This is just an ad for hackerrank.

And yes; it is hard to find a job in Silicon Valley if you are sitting in
Kazhakstan and need a visa too. Duh.

~~~
chvid
And honestly; don't spend you time practicing silly brain teasers and
programming quiz questions. Write meaningful software that you into
production.

~~~
stuxnet79
I've been struggling with this issue for months. I really want to be hired by
Microsoft, Amazon or Google, but I feel like the time required to prepare for
the inevitable "hazing" would be better served exploring new technologies and
creating new software.

------
13of40
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of
> time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment.

Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves:
Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've
fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring
a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and say "Hey, I'm not really good
at whiteboard coding. Do you mind if I write the code on my laptop here?"

~~~
pklausler
If your interviewer really dings you for the appearance of your scrawled code
on the wall, they're being self-defeatingly stupid and you'd probably be
happier working with other people.

I do lots of tech interviews, and I always make it clear that I don't care how
pretty the ink looks. I stick with the whiteboard because it's the best way
for candidates to explain their analyses and algorithms before they write the
code.

~~~
craigyk
My Google interview in 2008, one guy asked me to write a binary tree structure
and implementations of depth and breadth-first search (maybe also balanced
insert?) on the whiteboard in C, which I blew through in no time. He then
immediately said it was wrong and let me wither for a few minutes trying to
figure out what the problem was before pointing out I forgot a semicolon.

~~~
pklausler
I hated seeing that kind of crap when I was on the hiring committee, and I
think that it's less likely that you'd run into it today.

~~~
craigyk
Thanks, it does sound like things have changed. I probably would have been a
better hire back then than today though. I was younger, cheaper, and had an
almost OCD drive to learn everything CS since I had a complex about getting
into the game a little late. Today I feel like I wouldn't be able to maintain
my current lifestyle with a wife, two kids, two dogs in the bay area.
Occasionally I think about it though...

------
trhway
During the last 10 years i always go for a solution, just a coded solution
(and if you do it quickly, or even while doing it, you can frequently improve
upon it significantly). Doesn't work for Google/FB - they probably want the
elegant super-performant solution that i usually come up with in the next few
minutes after the interview is finished :) - yet it works just fine with the
rest of the companies.

Hint: almost always start with putting the input into a tree, and if tree is
completely out of question - into hashmap :)

------
bgribble
There's too much missing information in this article. In today's environment,
a qualified programmer with the background this guy appears to have should get
offers at a much higher percentage of companies.. IF everything is on the
level: decent communications skills, applying for jobs whose requirements
match skills, realistic compensation expectations, and (my guess in this case)
already authorized to work in the US.

I would expect this low hit rate from a qualified individual looking for a job
AND an H1B sponsor.

~~~
kafkaesq
The H1B factor certainly has weight - I can imagine it leading to a 2x factor
in his rejection rate. But not the 5x rate he's apparently had to suffer
through.

~~~
basseq
I would also have to imagine most of the H1B fallout is at the initial screen,
not after multiple interview rounds.

------
ideal322
"I got into the final interview for an extremely high-growth human resources
startup. That was exciting, and I really thought I was going to get an offer.
But, eventually, the last round of the interview was super hard. I just
failed."

Been through this too many times.

------
strongcrypto
When I was first applying for internships (as a college junior with sort-of-
interesting projects on my resume but no real experience) I think I applied to
75 positions, heard back from maybe 20 and got to the first round at 5 or 6
(including code challenges).

The 6% return rate (application to interview) wasn't exactly encouraging. I
made a habit of working hard on each application, sending it out and then
immediately assuming that I'd been rejected, putting me right back in that
stressful place I'd been before.

Being able to leverage that stress into something productive was huge, I'd
wake up early and spend my mornings working on cover letters (useless) and
researching companies, and eventually took myself across the city to crash
another University's career fair to try and meet a recruiter from my then-
dream-company (one I'd applied to online months before and never heard back
from). That turned out to be one of two offers I got and where I spent my
summer.

Keeping up a grind on applications and not getting discouraged is huge,
getting into the mindset of "constantly apply until I'm employed, don't assume
anything will work out" was probably the real reason I got the job I did.

------
sandworm101
Lol, 38. Only 38. In today's job market one should expect rejections from
dozens, potentially hundreds of companies. With hundreds of qualified people
apply for each job (thank you electronic CVs) 99+% of applications, of
interviews, result in a rejection. It's the new normal. The days of
interviewing only a handful of people are long over. Nobody should take it
personally.

------
tomnikl
Excelling in an online programming competitions sounds like a fun, exciting
way to showcase myself to multiple companies all at once. Way better than
white boards, for sure!

~~~
kbart
That might sound "cool" if you are straight out of a college with plenty of
time to spare, no full-time job and family to support. Otherwise, it's not so
compelling.

------
tn13
Recently came across an example where someone entirely different person went
for the interview answered, cleared but the another person reported for the
job.

I must say I am extremely disappointed at bay area job scene.

------
karterk
> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of
> time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment.

Ironically, HackerRank itself is a part of this problem. All of those are true
for HackerRank coding challenges.

As another commenter has pointed out here, HackerRank (and other coding test
platforms) want to commoditize the hiring process, but in a way that ensures
that candidates are the ones who are doing the all the work. The companies
just don't want to spend any time in the interviewing process. It's no wonder
that so many companies are struggling to hire good engineers.

If you as a company throw me an online coding challenge as the first
interaction, you can be rest assured that you won't be hiring from me again
(and many others).

~~~
TranquilMarmot
My favorite interviews have been ones that started with the company giving me
a choice between a few small programming projects. They usually let you do it
in your own time, over a week or so. When you turn it in, they can see how
cleanly you write code, how careful you are about edge cases, whether or not
you write unit tests, etc. etc.

Of course, then they call you in to their office and...... give you a
whiteboard interview that lasts 5 hours.

------
tlogan
I have bootstrapped startup and I was rejected by at least 380 companies. Ok
I'm not talking about hiring but about sales pitches (with demos and what
not).

So again if you are looking for a job, think as salesman. And in sales
rejections are part of life.

------
accidc
There have been a few articles on the hiring/interviewing practices. As
someone who has not worked/interviewed in a startup, I have a few rhetorical
yet sincere questions:

Does every startup implement their own algorithms etc. from scratch. Isn't it
the reason why we have libraries? I thought most software was mostly
glue/crud.

Do engineers at startup only code? Do they never talk to customers or need to
clarify requirements or work on timelines or deal with scope creep, since it
seems that these skills aren't evaluated at interviews.

If the answer to these questions is what I think it should be, to what end do
we have this dog and pony show?

------
xvolter
I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and
while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing
and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good
engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe
really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a
technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter
order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a
developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I
wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done
enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be
honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or
incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best,
but it's important to be honest about your capabilities.

I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do
whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly
more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well,
but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than
the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working
with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of
any of them.

From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview
poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're
actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses
on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to
college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't
think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's
about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young
and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write
software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of
time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a
delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.

~~~
kbart
" _if you 've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the
function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers
to questions."_

That's not true unless you work with very narrow technology or single
framework. For example, good luck trying to remember all these POSIX API
functions. I don't even try to remember mundane things by heart, because it
takes a precious and very limited resource (brain memory) for a very small
gain (few seconds saved that would cost to look it up).

~~~
vonmoltke
"Never memorize something you can look up" \-- Albert Einstein

"I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember!" \-- Professor Henry Jones

Two of the pearls of wisdom I live my life by. Actually, most engineers do.
That's why huge books of nothing but formulas, lookup tables, and reference
data exist.

------
innocentoldguy
I've come to the point where I walk out of interviews that involve whiteboard
questions. I have conducted my fair share of them, and I have been on the
interviewee side as well, and in no situation have I ever found any modicum of
value in a whiteboard question. They are a complete waste of everyone's time,
and to me, they are the hallmark of an incompetent interviewer/manager (and
yes, I felt that way about myself back when I used them).

There are plenty of companies out there who agree that whiteboard questions
are ridiculous, and I'd rather work for one of them.

------
leoc
Why not show the questions to the candidates say 45 or 60 minutes in advance
of the whiteboard session itself, and let them take notes on pencil and paper
in an examination-hall like environment during that interval? Even without
Internet access it would still be a lot closer to a realistic test of skill at
normal software development activities than a set of surprise questions. If
you pipeline the candidates it shouldn't add too much time. Please excuse my
ignorance if this is something which is already being done, or has already
been tried and given up on.

------
leed25d
I was laid off from my job as a Python programmer in San Francisco on
07AUG2015. It took me 4 1/2 months to find another job working remotely as a
Python programmer.

I did not keep an accurate record of the number of resumes that I sent out,
but I archived 110 cover letters during that time. I would bet that I probably
sent out about 150 resumes.

I had scores of phone interviews and a dozen to fifteen in-person interviews a
few of which ended abruptly. I will turn 69 years old in October 2016.

------
colordrops
Anyone who is a great engineer shouldn't need to go through 38 interviews to
get a position. Something is amiss here. Perhaps he has flaws outside of his
supposedly amazing coding abilities.

------
rvivek
Great discussion! HackerRank founder here - in-case anyone would like to ask
questions about what we have seen in different hiring practices.

------
ballpark
Does anyone have any insight on this reflecting on a higher supply of devs
and/or lower demand of employers (bad market for developers)?

------
collyw
"Even though algorithmic challenges aren’t really used on the job much in
production, it’s still really important to keep revisiting your fundamentals.
It’s just like a muscle–if you don’t train it, it’ll become weak."

So we are testing for stuff that no one actually uses in the job. We are
testing for those that have time to practice for interview tests·

------
dropit_sphere
My current position offered $X to do a pilot project. They then turned me down
---and later called me back when the candidate they chose didn't work out. I
took the position.

Companies that want to hire, will hire. Companies that think, "Oh, it'd be
nice to hire Jeff Dean maybe" won't hire.

------
known
Rejection massively reduces IQ
[http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051](http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051)

------
hotcool
My comments on HN get shadowbanned for no discernable reason. Does that count?

~~~
kelukelugames
HN has shadowban?

~~~
vonmoltke
Sort of. There is a mechanism to "kill" a user's posts; these are posts that
get flagged "[dead]". A logged-in user with showdead checked in their profile
can still see them, though. In fact, as of several months ago users can
"vouch" for dead posts that should not be dead.

------
exabrial
Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as
hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the
culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.

~~~
EricScottTaylor
Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two
reasons:

(1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my
daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's
lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that.

(2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be
evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes today deal with culture
fit at the end, but should it be item 1 and then coding skill item 2?

~~~
exabrial
My answer to #2:

Being from the midwest, doing interviews in silicon valley was like stepping
into Charlie's Chocolate Factory at a few places in LA and SF. It made me
smile to see people using their freedom to do whatever they wanted, but I
really felt like -I- was being judged: you know for not wearing skinning
jeans, feeling comfortable in my (literal) boots, being clean shaven, dressed
in a long sleeve, and of course I have a soft spoken midwestern accent. You
can't fake sincerity, and despite knocking the coding interviews out of the
park, I felt like some (not all) of the interviewers were threatened by me
somehow and mocked me gently with "well you did a really good job despite..."
like they were talking to a three year old.

Really left a sour taste in my mouth how it seems the region preaches equality
and acceptance, but that's only equality and acceptance of the non-
traditional.

TL;DR: It's easy to say "We have a great culture" at your job if you hire
hipsters homogeneously. The company I want to work for is color blind: we grow
to appreciate each other. People of all walks, western, eastern, european,
russian, christian, cat worshipper, whatever, just respect each other believe
something different and learn how to communicate across these boundaries.

~~~
santaclaus
I thought the common stereotype is that most 'hipsters' are from the midwest?
Go to any gentrifying neighborhood on the east or west coast and a common
refrain is 'go back to Ohio!'.

~~~
TranquilMarmot
That's so funny- I've been living on the west coast for around 6 years now,
and I originally hail from Ohio (but mostly Colorado).

But, I'm decidedly not a hipster; no flannel, no beard, no skinny jeans, no
boots, the sides of my head aren't shaved. I always had the impression that
the hipsters were native to the west coast and it's always felt like I'm
encroaching on their territory.

------
known
I celebrate my failures

------
known
Quiz != Interview

------
odinduty
What do you do to be turned down by 38 companies? Do you turn on your laptop
and it's running Windows?

------
kinai
"I got turned down by 38 companies, nobody wants to pay me 100k mimimimi"
Murican Coders of the 21st Century at the biggest whiners ever...And honestly
if you fail to get a job within 3-4 interviews then you are a) doing it wrong
or b) applying for the wrong jobs.

~~~
mstrem
I somewhat agree with your statement. Mainly because I personally put a LOT of
effort into each job application and I would not be able to apply to more than
2-3 jobs a week. Takes time to find the right company, do research, make a
perfect personalized application etc.

As a result to that pretty much all applications I have ever made have at the
very least gotten back to me. I would never be able to apply to 38 jobs in 2
months. I feel like a lot of copy paste went on and that sets you to a
negative start.

~~~
lqdc13
Most applications are quizzes + resume. There is only one way of applying for
it.

I got turned down by over 100 companies before I even had an interview. The
process is really random.

~~~
mstrem
Right, I personally literally change my resume based on each application
focusing on the experience which I think would be most relevant for each
position. I also change the introduction sentence and when I respond to open
ended questions (in the quizzes) I always refer back to the company and
relevant examples. Cover letter, when requested, also takes me a lot of time
to write up.

~~~
lqdc13
I did that too. Perhaps it's a skill of some sort.

The only thing that worked was making a site that went viral. Then I got like
20 unsolicited messages/requests for an interview.

