
Ask HN: Which companies interview the best/worst and why? - davismwfl
I am doing research as I am pretty passionate about how interviews should work.  But I also recognize there are differing views from both sides so I am looking for some examples of good and bad with reasoning.  I&#x27;d prefer knowing which company(s) or at least a hint so I can understand differences in market, size, capital etc that will obviously weigh on how&#x2F;what they do.<p>What companies do you feel do the best and&#x2F;or worst job at interviewing people and why do you like or dislike their methodology?
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luhego
I don't mind doing whiteboard questions. It's a pain in the ass but it is
bearable. But I can't stand behavioral questions. They are such a bullshit. In
that regard, Amazon is the worst offender. They expect you to learn their 14
leadership principles and apply them retroactively to your past experiences.

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davismwfl
I didn't realize Amazon did that, seems odd.

I totally agree with Behavioral questions. It seems to be a newer trend in the
past 5 years people think they have to ask specific behavioral questions.

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davismwfl
So I asked this question because I am trying to understand how people are
interviewing and like to be interviewed. I have my own style which was
developed in the late 90's during part of the aftermath of the dotcom bust and
everyones egos got put in check about the BS questions we were asking. In the
dotcom days we did a lot of the same stuff happening now in interviews and
eventually most of us figured out what mattered was that people could get the
work to market, not if they could recite some algorithm from memory. So it is
odd to me that the pendulum swung back.

My methodology is to ask people how they would solve problems, maybe even
right out some pseudocode if we are sitting together, but I don't care about
perfection or language or asking esoteric questions that have no basis in the
work someone will be doing. And I don't use behavioral questions and instead
just work through typical work type problems with someone to see if I can work
with them. In fact, it isn't rare for me to bring in code or a problem and be
like ok, we've been playing with this for the past X hours or days or whatever
and just ask for their opinion. And have them walk me through what they might
do differently and why, that right there tells me how you think and if you are
a good fit because I will learn about your communication, if you ask questions
etc. I don't need behavioral questions to answer what is right in front of me
if I just ask good questions.

This is also how I train my teams to interview because I feel it is more
realistic in our professions. But I just don't understand a lot of the
insanity around interviews because if a company is solving mostly CRUD/data
based problems, it seems smart to ask CRUD type questions and probe about
someone's data capabilities, deduping, querying, conflicts, concurrency etc.
But there is no sense asking that person to write a balanced tree from
scratch. I might ask what is the most efficient data structure to store a type
of data and why, but that is directly related to the work and will tell me if
you understand data structures and the choices. I don't need to know if you
can recite Big O for every structure, just that you know the differences and
where to look when you need to figure out an issue.

