I'm sure the post's author doesn't need interview advice anymore but in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal. Even if you need to manually multiply out 2's on a whiteboard it would be more productive than saying "I don't know".
In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with "but if I had to guess" or similar. Sounds like the interviewer definitely came on strong but being able to ace the psychological part of an interview is often as important or more important than the actual solution.
Very few of us have had to do difficult math in a high pressure social situation. Having someone sitting there and pushing for instant answers is just going to sink most candidates for no real reason.
I've found you often need to directly ask the interviewer not to do what they're doing when they try this sort of thing. Sometimes they're just bored and want to talk because there has been a moment of silence, or because they're enamored with their interview question.
I haven't done a whiteboarding interview for a while, but I remember them vividly. Hot flashes, sweating, stomach churning, anytime I'd be asked a question I am definitely capable of answering, my brain would shut down and refuse to start back up again. The most apt thing I could compare it to is stage fright. Even something like simply multiplying 2's would seem impossible to me in that state of mind.
Aside from seeking professional help for dealing with anxiety, I'd recommend programmers with anxiety to avoid whiteboarding interviews [1] or at the very least let it be known ahead of time that you get stage fright.
If you do NOT know, then answer that you do NOT know, unless you can speculate. Noone is omniscent. I really dont like when people with no knowledge trying guess the answer or speculate without any background. Im sure I would NOT want to work with such person.
I think it's a negative signal to not have the imagination to realize that anyone who has frozen during an interview due to performance anxiety is well-aware that their freezing was likely a job-candidacy-ending mistake. This is not particularly shocking information and it makes one wonder if you think they're just doing it on purpose or something or that they have control over it.
> completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal.
I am sure you also go to your employers and tell them that asking super unnatural questions in a super unnatural pressure environment is also a super negative signal.
in case there are any prospective interview candidates out there, completely freezing during an interview is a super negative signal.
Remember to take you Vyvanse so that you can stay focused, and make sure to throw in some beta blockers so that you stay calm during this toxic hellscape of modern interviewing.
That’s pretty dumb. I want to work with people who say “I don’t know.”
Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.
I’d rather someone tell me they don’t know something than feed me a line of BS then show up to the job and not be able to do it. Not that leetcode is necessarily a true indicator of competency.
> Sounds like the interviewer definitely came on strong …
Possibly, but I’m sure these aren’t exact quotes after 15 years and I expect they reflect how the author remembers feeling a lot more than the actual conversation.
Indeed. Those interviews measure whether you can dutifully perform the dance the organization wants you to.
But if that doesn't come naturally to them, "prospective interview candidates" might also consider if that's really a problem. There remain plenty of fantastic engineering opportunities that don't involve memorizing dance steps.
Someone who doesn't handle rejection well are often were not told no a lot growing up. I personally went through this phase and so I have a bit of sympathy for OP.
Looking back at my younger self and this person I can't help but cringe. It was a long uphill battle to be okay with rejection and I still struggle with it but I can't change my natural emotional response but I can control how I react to rejection.
I hope that OP will find his way without channelling his anger in ways that is counter-productive.
> He continued to ask more questions about numbers of bits. I couldn’t answer any of them without a lot of help. He didn’t ask me about my PhD work building a new theory of natural language semantics.
This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.
Also
> At the time “Don’t be evil” still meant something. Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.
Seems really petty. It’s a shame because we could good big tech alternatives, but building something out of spite without much perspective is unlikely to create a good alternative.
I think it should be fairly standard expectation to be asked relevant questions to your expertise and not trivia. The interview seemed like a really low-signal interrogation where the folks that pass such an intense "psychological game" don't necessarily correlate to required expertise on the job.
I do agree that the spite aspect could have been reduced or removed. In fact, I couldn't really see the point the article makes: they had a bad interview, a 15 year gap, then they're building yet another search engine... to contest Google?
True, the hiring process working as intended - I don’t want to work for an employer that would waste my time having me solve irrelevant problems to placate some weirdly misplaced ego-driven attitude. Seems fairly gatekeepy, and I think it selects for a certain type of cult member, not necessarily “good team members.”
In my interviews I now throw out these dumb google style questions, not to see how they think, but to see how they react to a silly question. The person I’d like to hire, when asked “how would you calculate how many ping pong balls fit in a 747?” they would answer “I wouldn’t.” Only one so far has given me an answer like that and has been delightful to work with.
On the one hand, yeah, this guy is to some degree complaining on the internet because he was rejected. It’s annoying: No one likes listening to complaining.
On the other hand, a) this guy does have a point - it’s very very strange that you can have all sorts of interesting, highly relevant expertise and tech interviews don’t care at all, they just ask you generic stuff that has nothing to do with the job, b) he’s allowed to complain c) you’re complaining about him complaining.
I see a sort of weird logic all the time (usually around interviews or dating) where someone is complaining on the internet about how the system is broken and they are subsequently accused of some moral failing (being “petty”). I don’t think you know anything about this guys attitude or how this guy works on a team - you don’t know him!
I guess the lesson is “don’t complain on the internet”, which I suppose I agree with.
I guess I’m complaining about people complaining about complaining, so I’m part of the problem, too. But seriously, let’s engage with each other in good faith and not just assume someone’s a bad person because they’ve been hurt by rejection.
> This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.
Imagine some weird employer where a narcissist has managed to capture the hiring process. They might well ask the wrong questions to torment, and in that case someone who became flustered could well say that to them without it being petty and without the hiring process working as intended. So no, I don't believe necessarily that someone with "that attitude" would always make poor team members.
> Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.
I know it's just empty rhetoric for most, when they use the word "evil"... but it's still amusing to me. How many times do you have to flippantly suggest that they're evil before you start to believe it literally, and what happens when you start to literally believe that? Is it possible to remain rational afterward?
I like this interview question. It's perfectly solvable without a calculator as the interviewer said. It doesn't rely on having memorized some weird binary tree inversion algorithm. It tests the ability to take facts that you already know (e.g. 2^8 or 2^10) and use them to solve a problem that might appear out of reach at first glance.
I don't really find it even that offensive question. Then again my schooling was more network engineering. Powers of two are pretty natural part of software engineering. And as such having to do some simple math of them seem more like easy soft ball starting question.
Now if powers of 3 or 5 or 6 or 7 were asked... Eff them...
The actual link from it says the rankings are, like everywhere else:
> To train a learning to rank model. No matter how many queries are manually curated, most user queries will be organic because of the natural diversity of user queries. Curation is still important for these results since it impacts the machine learning model that will be trained on the curated rankings.
Assuming the quotes are accurate, interviewer was indeed being a bit of a dick, but being able to tell approx how many bits a number needs is something I'd expect any programmer to be able to do, and I would also give negative feedback to someone who could not do that in an interview.
It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds.
I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right.
The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, saying if he wanted people to google that a "thousand Indians graduating in computer science every day" could google it.
I tried to argue that I was looking to be employed for my problem solving skills and experience rather than rote knowledge, but he was really angry. He literally said to be verbatim, "Let me give you some interview advice, NEVER tell an interviewer you'd google something". He also made a mildly off-colour remark that if he "wanted someone just to google, [he] could hire one of thousands of fresh graduates coming out of India".
It was an experience so bad that it inspired me to create a glassdoor account just to leave negative feedback, something I've never done before or since. The recruiter was absolutely pissed, and still doesn't provide me leads, which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area.
But my point is that some people have absoultely atrocious interview manners. Interviews are a two-way street and I discovered that there was absoultely no way I'd want to work with them. (Even when I just thought they were a team lead rather than the CEO it was enough to put me off.)
> I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds.
Had somewhat similar scenario. Company's internal headhunters had reached out to me once already before and I did few interview rounds with them and said no. Year later they reached out to me again and had to go thru tech interview again.. during that I did help(sleep) on python repl and mentioned why; since I haven't used sleeps on my own code I wanted I make sure that if sleep will yield cpu time or not. Mood of the interview changed at that point and got rejected by not having enough skills in Python.
Another case; One of the interviewers was late to the meeting and started to shout profanities cuz my Audio Quality was poor. And it was - thanks Sony XM's but the way he acted on the call really gave lasting impression on their "company culture"
> which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area
Tangent: I like .NET as a platform, but I get the impression that a lot of .NET shops tend to be toxic in this particular way.
.NET attracts bigcorps — and I don't really that they're toxic. Working in a big enterprise environment is actually fine most of the time.
But because .NET attracts bigcorps, .NET also attracts development agencies that mostly want to work with bigcorps — i.e. agencies whose sales process is designed around attracting and retaining solely enterprise customers. These agencies market to middle-managers' needs to check checkboxes and satisfy scrum tasks; and then they skate indefinitely in their contracts on a basis of "shoddy work in bounded time" and infinite make-work extensions.
These "enterprise agencies" exist to deliver internal political value for the people hiring them, rather than delivering any business value for the company as a whole. (As such, they mostly get hired by bigcorps that are themselves dysfunctional in some way. But there's enough of those to keep quite a lot of these agencies in business.)
In agencies like this, I find that the only people who stay working there, are either burn-outs trying to keep their heads down and take home a paycheck, or some flavor of awful people.
If you want to avoid this kind of experience in the future, I'd highly suggest either focusing your search for enterprise-y language shops on actual enterprises rather than agencies — or marketing yourself for your talents in less enterprise-y languages, to shift your appeal more toward SMB employers.
There are a few things worth remembering. 1) "Interviews" as a process to select employees is probably so broken as to to be completely useless to employers, 2) they are not aware that it's completely useless and believe in their own supernatural ability to use interviews to select ideal candidates, and 3) each and every one of them thinks that it works completely different and that all other hiring managers agree with them on every detail.
If we start with the assumption that (for the most part) interviews are a useful HR tool to hire people with, supposing we have a skilled manager to give the interviews (haha!), they will ask a series of questions, and otherwise engage in conversation which will elucidate whether or not the candidate should be hired. Presumably they are relying on the answers given, but they might also be relying on non-verbal clues... body language, facial expressions, who knows maybe even pheromones. Whatever the correct "answers" are, what if we train a candidate to give those answers without actually understanding them? What if he rehearses it? What if he can even do the body language and facial expressions?
We've just cheated the process. Candidates are incentivized to cheat the process, and you can vilify them all you like, but if they can manage the trick they can (at least temporarily) receive a paycheck which all of us seem to need. No matter how difficult it is to do this, it's likely some have managed to perfect that trick.
Furthermore, no one gets a bachelor's in "assessing interview performances". There are no degree programs for it. No training bootcamps for it. I've never worked anywhere that they send the hiring managers away to some seminar specifically about this. So even if it were possible to assess the performance, the people doing the assessing likely aren't very good at it.
If magically someone developed some brain scanner that gave perfect, empirically verifiable answers in a "hire/don't hire" format, what are the chances that a hiring manager could do even 60% of what the machine says? Flipping a coin should get 50%, if we limited the candidates to a matched set of hires-don't-hires, right? Would the hiring managers even do as well as random chance? Or are there some personality defects that have some of them do worse even than that?
Interviews are more in the realm of superstition than sound practice. They're polygraphs without the polygraph machines.
Not sure how "need a few more to get 56, well 6 would be enough. So 26 bits?" is a solution.
If he remembers that max signed int is ~2 billion, than easier to divide 4 billion by 2. 2b/1b/500m/250m/127m/64m - got 6 divisions, 32-6=26.
If you think that max int is irrelevant to the position - it is so relevant, I can't even describe, this number is everywhere, from database design to js-wasm (limited by 32-bit), from deep-learning (where some libraries still limited to 32-bit buffers) to networking (hello ipv4)
Search engines are dying. Information retrieval and recommendation engines are still mostly living in the dark ages from all the work that's been done in the last 50 years.
Figure that problem out first (something novel and useful), then start marketing yourself.
Right now you just gave us a story we've all lived (academic hazing) without any plan of action -- so 2010.
I took the page down as it was attracting the wrong sort of attention. As some commenters surmised, the goal was to promote the search engine, but it wasn't working out that way...
Whenever I hear about alternative search engines, I try out a few famous people hoping to see Wikipedia entries towards the top. And almost always I see nonsense.
For instance, if you search for 'Trump', the top links are
2. https://itep.org/md/ — found via Mwmbl -- Trump Tax Proposals Would Provide Richest One Percent in Maryland with 69.7 Percent of the State’s Tax Cuts Earlier this year, the Trump administration r…
3. https://is.gd/mUHYTg — found via Mwmbl --- Trump embraces QAnon conspiracy because ‘they like me’ After skirting the issue for weeks, President Donald Trump offered an embrace Wednesday of the fri…
4. http://dict.cn/trump — found via Mwmbl -- trump是什么意思_trump在线翻译_英语_读音_用法_例句_海词词典
```
Surely there are millions of results more relevant to the phrase 'Trump' than trump.de. The other links aren't better. A random article from 2017? Another one from 2020. A Chinese dictionary definition of 'Trump'?
I get that search is hard, but what's going on here? You can try any phrase, and you just get weird results.
I'm wondering the same thing. Google gives me _exactly_ what I want without me having to add keywords or cajole it. All of these other search engines give me such weird irrelevant results. If I search "python reverse string" on YaCy's demo peer, the third result is the ArchWiki page on ... MATLAB.
I really wish I knew what to do to help the situation here because distributed p2p search engines seem so cool. But then again, Google wouldn't be so dominant if it were so easy.
I sympathize with some of what the author has to say. That said, Google's choice to do business with Israel does not represent "support for genocide." It is also within their prerogative to dismiss employees who protest company policy.
Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.
Yeah, but you still reserve the right to not crawl sites (or to remove them from your index), yes? So there's still the opportunity to do evil.
I'm still waiting for a "raw" search spidering provider. One that:
1. runs a web-spidering cluster — one that's only smart enough to know what robots.txt is, to know how to follow links in HTML pages, and to obey response caching-policy headers;
2. captures the spidering process losslessly, as e.g. HAR transcript files;
3. packs those HAR transcript files, a few million at a time, into tar.xz.tar files (i.e. grab a "chunk" of N HAR files; group them into subdirs by request Host header; archive each subdir, and compress those archives independently; then archive all the compressed archives without compression) — and then uploads these semi-random-access archives to a CDN or private BitTorrent tracker (or any other data delivery system that enables clients to only retrieve the blocks/byte-ranges of files they're interested in);
4. generate a TOC for the semi-random-access files, as a stream of tuples (signed archive URL, chunk byte-range, hostname, compressed URL-list); push these to a managed reliable message queue on an IaaS, publishing each entry to both an all-hostnames topic, and a per-hostname topic. (I say an IaaS, as this allows consumers to set up their own consumer-groups on these topics within their own IaaS project, and then pay the costs of message retention in these consumer-groups themselves.)
5. Also buffer these TOC-entry streams into files (e.g. Parquet files), one archive series per topic; and host these alongside the HAR archives. Prune TOC topic stream entries if (entries are at least N days old AND the entries have been successfully "offlined" into a hosted TOC-stream archive.)
---
This "web-spidering-firehose data-lake as-a-Service" architecture, would enable pretty much anyone to build whatever arbitrary search index they want downstream of it, containing as much or as little of the web as they want — where each consumer only needs to do as much work as is required to fetch and parse the HARs of the domains they've decided they care about indexing something under.
This architecture would also be "temporal" (akin to a temporal RDBMS table) — as a consumer of this service, you wouldn't see "the current version" of a scraped URL, but rather all previous attempts to scrape that URL, and what happened each time. (This would mean that no website could ever censor the dataset retroactively by adding a robots.txt "Disallow *" after scrapes have already happened. Their robots.txt config would prevent further scraping, but previous scraping would be retained.)
And in fact, in this architecture, the HTTP interaction to retrieve /robots.txt for a domain, would produce a HAR transcript that would get archived like any other. Domains restricted from crawling by robots.txt, would still get regular HAR transcripts recorded of the result of checking that their /robots.txt still restricts crawling. (Reducing over these /robots.txt HAR transcripts is how a consumer-indexer would determine whether they should currently be showing/hiding a domain in their built index.)
I'm not sure you would like the results of what you suggest - if you are really going to crawl everything indiscriminately, you will end up with a lot of rubbish. Just check out Common Crawl if you want to get an idea of what it would look like.
I've no idea what that refers to but you can't post like this to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that do it.
kevmo314|1 year ago
In my experience the only reason you should say "I don't know" is if you're going to follow it with "but if I had to guess" or similar. Sounds like the interviewer definitely came on strong but being able to ace the psychological part of an interview is often as important or more important than the actual solution.
withinboredom|1 year ago
nitwit005|1 year ago
I've found you often need to directly ask the interviewer not to do what they're doing when they try this sort of thing. Sometimes they're just bored and want to talk because there has been a moment of silence, or because they're enamored with their interview question.
toastercat|1 year ago
I haven't done a whiteboarding interview for a while, but I remember them vividly. Hot flashes, sweating, stomach churning, anytime I'd be asked a question I am definitely capable of answering, my brain would shut down and refuse to start back up again. The most apt thing I could compare it to is stage fright. Even something like simply multiplying 2's would seem impossible to me in that state of mind.
Aside from seeking professional help for dealing with anxiety, I'd recommend programmers with anxiety to avoid whiteboarding interviews [1] or at the very least let it be known ahead of time that you get stage fright.
[1] https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Borg3|1 year ago
pelorat|1 year ago
ninininino|1 year ago
nine_zeros|1 year ago
I am sure you also go to your employers and tell them that asking super unnatural questions in a super unnatural pressure environment is also a super negative signal.
You do this right? Right?
robofanatic|1 year ago
snozolli|1 year ago
Remember to take you Vyvanse so that you can stay focused, and make sure to throw in some beta blockers so that you stay calm during this toxic hellscape of modern interviewing.
EGG_CREAM|1 year ago
Edit: to clarify, your advice is good, what you said isn’t dumb. That criteria is dumb, in my opinion. I don’t want my colleagues to spend a bunch of my time guessing on an answer I could easily lookup or find on a calculator.
JojoFatsani|1 year ago
harles|1 year ago
Possibly, but I’m sure these aren’t exact quotes after 15 years and I expect they reflect how the author remembers feeling a lot more than the actual conversation.
swatcoder|1 year ago
But if that doesn't come naturally to them, "prospective interview candidates" might also consider if that's really a problem. There remain plenty of fantastic engineering opportunities that don't involve memorizing dance steps.
crazygringo|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40850725
Rather than this clickbaity "Google rejected me" story about something that happened 15 years ago, here's a link to the actual project:
https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl
localfirst|1 year ago
Looking back at my younger self and this person I can't help but cringe. It was a long uphill battle to be okay with rejection and I still struggle with it but I can't change my natural emotional response but I can control how I react to rejection.
I hope that OP will find his way without channelling his anger in ways that is counter-productive.
sowut|1 year ago
[deleted]
harles|1 year ago
This strikes me as fairly petty “I didn’t answer wrong, you asked me the wrong questions!”. Honestly it’s the recruiting process working as intended - folks with this type of attitude don’t make good team members in my experience.
Also > At the time “Don’t be evil” still meant something. Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.
Seems really petty. It’s a shame because we could good big tech alternatives, but building something out of spite without much perspective is unlikely to create a good alternative.
euvin|1 year ago
I do agree that the spite aspect could have been reduced or removed. In fact, I couldn't really see the point the article makes: they had a bad interview, a 15 year gap, then they're building yet another search engine... to contest Google?
JohnMakin|1 year ago
In my interviews I now throw out these dumb google style questions, not to see how they think, but to see how they react to a silly question. The person I’d like to hire, when asked “how would you calculate how many ping pong balls fit in a 747?” they would answer “I wouldn’t.” Only one so far has given me an answer like that and has been delightful to work with.
mariusor|1 year ago
Comparing this line here with what TFA is saying, the lack of empathy is astounding.
actionfromafar|1 year ago
nimithryn|1 year ago
On the other hand, a) this guy does have a point - it’s very very strange that you can have all sorts of interesting, highly relevant expertise and tech interviews don’t care at all, they just ask you generic stuff that has nothing to do with the job, b) he’s allowed to complain c) you’re complaining about him complaining.
I see a sort of weird logic all the time (usually around interviews or dating) where someone is complaining on the internet about how the system is broken and they are subsequently accused of some moral failing (being “petty”). I don’t think you know anything about this guys attitude or how this guy works on a team - you don’t know him!
I guess the lesson is “don’t complain on the internet”, which I suppose I agree with.
I guess I’m complaining about people complaining about complaining, so I’m part of the problem, too. But seriously, let’s engage with each other in good faith and not just assume someone’s a bad person because they’ve been hurt by rejection.
Edit: grammar
NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago
Imagine some weird employer where a narcissist has managed to capture the hiring process. They might well ask the wrong questions to torment, and in that case someone who became flustered could well say that to them without it being petty and without the hiring process working as intended. So no, I don't believe necessarily that someone with "that attitude" would always make poor team members.
> Now it seems like their mantra is just “Be evil”.
I know it's just empty rhetoric for most, when they use the word "evil"... but it's still amusing to me. How many times do you have to flippantly suggest that they're evil before you start to believe it literally, and what happens when you start to literally believe that? Is it possible to remain rational afterward?
snozolli|1 year ago
Sounds more like a bored sadist who's throwing away talent entertaining himself instead of focusing on finding suitable candidates.
Reminds me of the stories about Steve Jobs 'joking' that people are fired when they were trapped in an elevator with him.
bowsamic|1 year ago
Imnimo|1 year ago
Ekaros|1 year ago
Now if powers of 3 or 5 or 6 or 7 were asked... Eff them...
daemonologist|1 year ago
ryandrake|1 year ago
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859051
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859389
philipwhiuk|1 year ago
The actual link from it says the rankings are, like everywhere else:
> To train a learning to rank model. No matter how many queries are manually curated, most user queries will be organic because of the natural diversity of user queries. Curation is still important for these results since it impacts the machine learning model that will be trained on the curated rankings.
so this not true in the long term.
daoudc|1 year ago
dmitrygr|1 year ago
foota|1 year ago
eterm|1 year ago
I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right.
The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, saying if he wanted people to google that a "thousand Indians graduating in computer science every day" could google it.
I tried to argue that I was looking to be employed for my problem solving skills and experience rather than rote knowledge, but he was really angry. He literally said to be verbatim, "Let me give you some interview advice, NEVER tell an interviewer you'd google something". He also made a mildly off-colour remark that if he "wanted someone just to google, [he] could hire one of thousands of fresh graduates coming out of India".
It was an experience so bad that it inspired me to create a glassdoor account just to leave negative feedback, something I've never done before or since. The recruiter was absolutely pissed, and still doesn't provide me leads, which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area.
But my point is that some people have absoultely atrocious interview manners. Interviews are a two-way street and I discovered that there was absoultely no way I'd want to work with them. (Even when I just thought they were a team lead rather than the CEO it was enough to put me off.)
JohnFen|1 year ago
The minute that he showed aggression or anger, I 100% would have just walked out. Life is too short for that nonsense.
rasjani|1 year ago
Had somewhat similar scenario. Company's internal headhunters had reached out to me once already before and I did few interview rounds with them and said no. Year later they reached out to me again and had to go thru tech interview again.. during that I did help(sleep) on python repl and mentioned why; since I haven't used sleeps on my own code I wanted I make sure that if sleep will yield cpu time or not. Mood of the interview changed at that point and got rejected by not having enough skills in Python.
Another case; One of the interviewers was late to the meeting and started to shout profanities cuz my Audio Quality was poor. And it was - thanks Sony XM's but the way he acted on the call really gave lasting impression on their "company culture"
derefr|1 year ago
Tangent: I like .NET as a platform, but I get the impression that a lot of .NET shops tend to be toxic in this particular way.
.NET attracts bigcorps — and I don't really that they're toxic. Working in a big enterprise environment is actually fine most of the time.
But because .NET attracts bigcorps, .NET also attracts development agencies that mostly want to work with bigcorps — i.e. agencies whose sales process is designed around attracting and retaining solely enterprise customers. These agencies market to middle-managers' needs to check checkboxes and satisfy scrum tasks; and then they skate indefinitely in their contracts on a basis of "shoddy work in bounded time" and infinite make-work extensions.
These "enterprise agencies" exist to deliver internal political value for the people hiring them, rather than delivering any business value for the company as a whole. (As such, they mostly get hired by bigcorps that are themselves dysfunctional in some way. But there's enough of those to keep quite a lot of these agencies in business.)
In agencies like this, I find that the only people who stay working there, are either burn-outs trying to keep their heads down and take home a paycheck, or some flavor of awful people.
If you want to avoid this kind of experience in the future, I'd highly suggest either focusing your search for enterprise-y language shops on actual enterprises rather than agencies — or marketing yourself for your talents in less enterprise-y languages, to shift your appeal more toward SMB employers.
NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago
If we start with the assumption that (for the most part) interviews are a useful HR tool to hire people with, supposing we have a skilled manager to give the interviews (haha!), they will ask a series of questions, and otherwise engage in conversation which will elucidate whether or not the candidate should be hired. Presumably they are relying on the answers given, but they might also be relying on non-verbal clues... body language, facial expressions, who knows maybe even pheromones. Whatever the correct "answers" are, what if we train a candidate to give those answers without actually understanding them? What if he rehearses it? What if he can even do the body language and facial expressions?
We've just cheated the process. Candidates are incentivized to cheat the process, and you can vilify them all you like, but if they can manage the trick they can (at least temporarily) receive a paycheck which all of us seem to need. No matter how difficult it is to do this, it's likely some have managed to perfect that trick.
Furthermore, no one gets a bachelor's in "assessing interview performances". There are no degree programs for it. No training bootcamps for it. I've never worked anywhere that they send the hiring managers away to some seminar specifically about this. So even if it were possible to assess the performance, the people doing the assessing likely aren't very good at it.
If magically someone developed some brain scanner that gave perfect, empirically verifiable answers in a "hire/don't hire" format, what are the chances that a hiring manager could do even 60% of what the machine says? Flipping a coin should get 50%, if we limited the candidates to a matched set of hires-don't-hires, right? Would the hiring managers even do as well as random chance? Or are there some personality defects that have some of them do worse even than that?
Interviews are more in the realm of superstition than sound practice. They're polygraphs without the polygraph machines.
nine_zeros|1 year ago
Not every programmer is skilled to be an interviewer. Not every manager is skilled to be a hiring manager.
gorbachev|1 year ago
Juliate|1 year ago
financltravsty|1 year ago
Lockal|1 year ago
If he remembers that max signed int is ~2 billion, than easier to divide 4 billion by 2. 2b/1b/500m/250m/127m/64m - got 6 divisions, 32-6=26.
If you think that max int is irrelevant to the position - it is so relevant, I can't even describe, this number is everywhere, from database design to js-wasm (limited by 32-bit), from deep-learning (where some libraries still limited to 32-bit buffers) to networking (hello ipv4)
financltravsty|1 year ago
Figure that problem out first (something novel and useful), then start marketing yourself.
Right now you just gave us a story we've all lived (academic hazing) without any plan of action -- so 2010.
1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4652446581392&w=-V-8V9bl07...
yashasolutions|1 year ago
Kagi is great but more options would be good too.
OP's product is clearly at a very early stage. OP's post is also pretty opinionated.
Hard to say which impact on product it will have - but as long we have more options for search engines, this will be one out of many options.
jerryjose|1 year ago
if you need a job or financial aid kindly contact us now via email : shalomagency247@outlook.com
Thanks.
swyx|1 year ago
zer0zzz|1 year ago
nwienert|1 year ago
daoudc|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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joatmon-snoo|1 year ago
It's also easy to read this as "interviewer hand-held a candidate through a problem".
marcosdumay|1 year ago
There's nothing in there about the candidate.
Anyway, I don't think this is the kind of attention the author would want. Nobody even talked about the search engine yet.
bko|1 year ago
For instance, if you search for 'Trump', the top links are
```
1. http://www.trump.de — found via Mwmbl -- Trump
2. https://itep.org/md/ — found via Mwmbl -- Trump Tax Proposals Would Provide Richest One Percent in Maryland with 69.7 Percent of the State’s Tax Cuts Earlier this year, the Trump administration r…
3. https://is.gd/mUHYTg — found via Mwmbl --- Trump embraces QAnon conspiracy because ‘they like me’ After skirting the issue for weeks, President Donald Trump offered an embrace Wednesday of the fri…
4. http://dict.cn/trump — found via Mwmbl -- trump是什么意思_trump在线翻译_英语_读音_用法_例句_海词词典
```
Surely there are millions of results more relevant to the phrase 'Trump' than trump.de. The other links aren't better. A random article from 2017? Another one from 2020. A Chinese dictionary definition of 'Trump'?
I get that search is hard, but what's going on here? You can try any phrase, and you just get weird results.
skulk|1 year ago
I'm wondering the same thing. Google gives me _exactly_ what I want without me having to add keywords or cajole it. All of these other search engines give me such weird irrelevant results. If I search "python reverse string" on YaCy's demo peer, the third result is the ArchWiki page on ... MATLAB.
I really wish I knew what to do to help the situation here because distributed p2p search engines seem so cool. But then again, Google wouldn't be so dominant if it were so easy.
daoudc|1 year ago
bentobean|1 year ago
Naive / biased statements such of these cause me to lend less credence to author's other points.
alextingle|1 year ago
If they are performing their duties adequately, then that's absolutely wrong.
It's also utterly stupid. Employees who think about what they are doing are far, far more valuable than mindless drones.
superb_dev|1 year ago
derefr|1 year ago
Yeah, but you still reserve the right to not crawl sites (or to remove them from your index), yes? So there's still the opportunity to do evil.
I'm still waiting for a "raw" search spidering provider. One that:
1. runs a web-spidering cluster — one that's only smart enough to know what robots.txt is, to know how to follow links in HTML pages, and to obey response caching-policy headers;
2. captures the spidering process losslessly, as e.g. HAR transcript files;
3. packs those HAR transcript files, a few million at a time, into tar.xz.tar files (i.e. grab a "chunk" of N HAR files; group them into subdirs by request Host header; archive each subdir, and compress those archives independently; then archive all the compressed archives without compression) — and then uploads these semi-random-access archives to a CDN or private BitTorrent tracker (or any other data delivery system that enables clients to only retrieve the blocks/byte-ranges of files they're interested in);
4. generate a TOC for the semi-random-access files, as a stream of tuples (signed archive URL, chunk byte-range, hostname, compressed URL-list); push these to a managed reliable message queue on an IaaS, publishing each entry to both an all-hostnames topic, and a per-hostname topic. (I say an IaaS, as this allows consumers to set up their own consumer-groups on these topics within their own IaaS project, and then pay the costs of message retention in these consumer-groups themselves.)
5. Also buffer these TOC-entry streams into files (e.g. Parquet files), one archive series per topic; and host these alongside the HAR archives. Prune TOC topic stream entries if (entries are at least N days old AND the entries have been successfully "offlined" into a hosted TOC-stream archive.)
---
This "web-spidering-firehose data-lake as-a-Service" architecture, would enable pretty much anyone to build whatever arbitrary search index they want downstream of it, containing as much or as little of the web as they want — where each consumer only needs to do as much work as is required to fetch and parse the HARs of the domains they've decided they care about indexing something under.
This architecture would also be "temporal" (akin to a temporal RDBMS table) — as a consumer of this service, you wouldn't see "the current version" of a scraped URL, but rather all previous attempts to scrape that URL, and what happened each time. (This would mean that no website could ever censor the dataset retroactively by adding a robots.txt "Disallow *" after scrapes have already happened. Their robots.txt config would prevent further scraping, but previous scraping would be retained.)
And in fact, in this architecture, the HTTP interaction to retrieve /robots.txt for a domain, would produce a HAR transcript that would get archived like any other. Domains restricted from crawling by robots.txt, would still get regular HAR transcripts recorded of the result of checking that their /robots.txt still restricts crawling. (Reducing over these /robots.txt HAR transcripts is how a consumer-indexer would determine whether they should currently be showing/hiding a domain in their built index.)
unknown|1 year ago
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daoudc|1 year ago
I'm not sure you would like the results of what you suggest - if you are really going to crawl everything indiscriminately, you will end up with a lot of rubbish. Just check out Common Crawl if you want to get an idea of what it would look like.
temptemptemp111|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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sowut|1 year ago
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nothrowaways|1 year ago
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bowsamic|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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zooq_ai|1 year ago
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dang|1 year ago
We've already warned you recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40515896. If you want to keep posting here, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules!
roschdal|1 year ago
ninininino|1 year ago
byyoung3|1 year ago
ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago
You should try and avoid competition but taking on a failing monopoly like Google is a great thing to try and strive for.