Reading 03: No good solution

Noelle Rosa
Sep 2, 2018 · 4 min read

I started applying for internships fall of my junior year. I know I was “supposed” to start sophomore year but I went abroad instead (sue me). I knew I didn’t want to work at a traditional tech company because I was interested in learning about other industries in addition to tech and programming. I applied primarily to the software development internships at Wall Street firms and I also dabbled in consulting interviews (turns out you can’t successfully “dabble” when it comes to applying to consulting positions at Notre Dame. It’s pretty much go all in or don’t go in at all).

I struggled taking this path at Notre Dame because I found the career center to be very one-track minded in terms of which companies which majors should be applying to. I found that any advice I got from the career center was to pursue bit tech or engineering companies or go into consulting. I found the business school to be highly protective of their relationships with Wall Street firms and every info session I went to looking for information about a firm’s tech roles had exclusively representatives from Sales and Trading or Investment Banking divisions. I was pretty surprised by this because I feel like I’ve heard over and over again about how Wall Street companies are trying to shift towards higher tech and are desperate for developers. Having completed my internship it became pretty obvious that companies are generally targeting very specific schools to fill these roles and I don’t think ND’s career center has pushed very hard to make us one of those schools.

To prepare for my interviews I reviewed a bunch of data structures and practiced on hacker rank. I passed the online coding test and then went to a super day where I had two, half hour long technical interviews. One went very well, the interviewer was very nice and chatty and seemed very receptive to all of my answers. The second was potentially the worst half hour of my life.

I have always been told that the interviewers want you to do well and they will help you through any tough questions. Well this was just aggressively not the case. I go into this room with two interviewers who started asking me questions about my resume before I could even sit down. Within maybe two minutes they switched to technical questions and asked me how I would code some problem (I would love to tell you what the problem was but I have truly blocked it out of my memory). I gave some answer and got a “No, not what we are looking for” in response. So I came up with an alternative solution which was answered with another resounding “No.” The remaining ~27 minutes of the interview consisted exclusively of me floundering, spewing whatever information and potential solutions I could come up with for the problem, and dozens of “No’s.” There were refusals to give me more information or a hint as to the angle they were hoping I would go in and definitely no attempt to “help me through it” as I had been promised.

I went home, cried for a while, and accepted the fact that I wasn’t getting the job. I asked some of my friends in CS how they would have answered and was perplexed because everyone said the same thing I had started with. A couple weeks later I was offered the job which makes me believe that there was no “right” answer and that my interviewers just been testing how I would react under stress. I understand why a company would want to see this but that interview really had me rattled for days. They definitely could have said something at the end to put me at ease but chose not to and I thought that was fairly inhumane.

The hiring and interview process in general seems broken. Nobody has found an accurate, unbiased, and fair way to evaluate candidates. Whiteboard interviews favor people who study algorithms and information generally never used in a job. I for one, never needed to do anything similar to a hacker rank problem in my internship. Taking the “It is better to reject a good applicant every single time than accidentally accept one single mediocre applicant” approach seems to allow and encourage people to hire what they know which reduces diversity in the work place. Google seems to think they have the entire interview process figured out but Laszlo Black even admits “Interviewers can’t stand being told that they have to follow a certain format for the interview or for their feedback. People will disagree with data if it runs counter to their intuition and argue that the quality bar doesn’t need to be so high for every job.” Even though it seems like there is no perfect approach, I really like what Jeff Atwood said about trying different hiring approaches because I think that taking unorthodox approaches is the best way to make room for all types of voices.

I wish I had answers to questions 3 and 4 about career trajectory and promotions but I aggressively do not. Picking a place to start my career was difficult enough. We’re just going to have to go ahead and play it by year from here on out.