Interview at Vietnam's most successful internet company

There are tons of rumor about top tech corporations in Vietnam, but how is it actually like in the nutshell? I got tired of rumors already so I decided to take a look into that world by myself, I applied to the most successful Internet company in Vietnam.

The recruitment information on the Internet in general was very smooth. From the website I was able to learn about open vacants, benefits and perks, and the hiring process. However the sheer size of a 2000-people corporation shows signs of departments stepping on each other foot. The company favors project teams over feature teams. Each team is then responsible for its own vacants. This ends up in numerous job descriptions with the same title "Senior Software Developer" and different human-incomprehensible ID such as 12-WBM-1369 or 13-WTE-1504. Perhaps for insiders, these two codes are as different as e-commerce and social game development, but what I perceived was a confusion (and I didn't fully understand there were different IDs until after the interview).

The application required a CV and a cover letter, which are pretty standard. Mine were written 3 years ago and had never been actually used before (I got my first job via, uhm, word of mouth network). I quickly revised them and submitted the application around midnight. Late afternoon the next day (Thursday), I have got my interview scheduled and confirmed for 9AM next Monday. My phone was accidentally out of battery and I really appreciated that the HR girl patiently tried to reach me 4 times before I could pick up. Though it wasn't a job hooping season, I was still pleasantly surprised.

The night before the interview, I got unconsciously excited. Given that I had interviewed close to a hundred of applicants at the point of time, the excitement was hard to understand. In fact, I got too jumpy that barely could I sleep and that upset my stomach the next morning. 

Couldn't enjoy my breakfast much I came to the company 15 minutes early. When I arrived, the motorbike park and elevator were both crowded. I guess these people don't start a day at 10 like I do. I managed to find a place in the elevator. Standing in a box with other strangers, don't know what to say and what to do with your body was really awkward. I never enjoy sharing the elevator with strangers and I would have took the stairs if the appointment hadn't been on the 13th floor. As the elevator went up and people got in and out, I could see the company offices occupying not one but several floors in this building.

The half of the 13th floor that I was in seemed to be a big meeting area, it was packed with multiple glass-wall rooms named after major rivers over the world. Mekong was the first and Yangtze the last. The company logo and slogan printed on transparent decal were on every walls. I proceeded to meet the receptionist and grabbed a chair next to a few coffee tables in the hall, waiting for my interviewers to come. A big monitor was showing latest K-Pop hits meanwhile. Brochures and posters were scatted every where around the hall. They look really professional. Yet it reminded me of Valve's employee handbook. Of all organizational artifacts, an employee manual served as such a compelling form of global PR for the shift from an industrial biz model to a knowledge management/humanistic model. Brilliant awesomeness was still hiding.

When I was about to finish the third brochure, one of my interviewer, Ms. Tuyen, showed up and took me to a meeting room. It was a little room at the end of an lobby running across the hall. Walking down the dark lobby, I asked whether I would be interviewed in English. "Vietnamese", she replied. "So why the email was in English?". Many Vietnamese companies, most of them, practice this half-baked communication style, English for writing and Vietnamese for the rest. People ended up with some sort of Vietlish that I am allerged to ("Khang oi, can you help me", "Regards em nhe", etc.) Tuyen redirected my question elegantly, but I could tell that Vietnamese was the only language here. I wasn't surprised. In fact it reminded me of Summer, my former employee who couldn't blend into Cogini English-speaking culture.

There were places for 6 in the room. The first impression was the noise of the AC attached to the outer wall of the room. I don't think the noise was that bad, but when I am worried, every external signal seems to be amplified ten fold. The AC was no white noise generator and somehow I started to like the waiting hall better. There was instruction to use VoIP for conference in the room, but I didn't find any devices. The room has a good view over the main street and flower boxes on the pavement but I wasn't left alone in the room to explore the view. The interview happened right afterward. 

Tuyen was an HR staff, she needed someone else to test my technical skills. So she started the interview by talking about the potential project that I would join if hired. "Not launch yet", "Similar to what is happening out there". I couldn't help but think about an e-commerce system, which this corp hasn't succeeded yet, despite of its number of attempts every year. 

Before she finished her last sentence, two men entered the room. The older looked quite casual, actually his outfit looked a bit slipshod and his hair obviously needed some touch. The other guy had tan skin and looked quite sporty. He was very quiet during the interview, in fact, he didn't ask me a single question.

I was asked to give a short talk about myself. Ha! Just like Cogini! And yet I managed t deliver a below average introduction. Knowing the question and listening to countless answers don't make your answer better. The interviewers showed concerns when I expressed my interest in getting a masters degree and being a lecturer in the next couple of year. For a moment I saw my reflection from the other side of the table. 

We moved on through some technical questions, from data structure to database and web server engines, and scaling techniques. The questions had nothing to do with my CV. I didn't mention these skills in my CV and technically database was the only part I know thoroughly and put into my CV (rule of thumb, only put what you really know into the CV). My technical interviewer clearly was asking his concerns, not checking the skills I possessed. I couldn't help but wonder, how can these people detect a candidate that doesn't fit for the position he is applying for (due to the confusing job descriptions) but a true gem for another team right within the company.

The questions were randomly selected, I think, because he didn't have any note with him, just paged through my CV. That gave me an impression that he didn't read my CV before hand. Despite of his randomness, all questions and explanations focused on only one single thing: scalability. For every question, he wanted to know if I knew the implementation and algorithm beneath. Having its success root in online game distribution, the company has a vast number of loyal users. So focusing on scalability make a perfect sense to me. Though, my interviewer had the tendency to go a bit too extreme, I believe he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, not being a big fan of revert engineering, I must have passed 3 questions that related to things behind the curtain. However, after all the interview that I did, I developed a thick skin and defended myself through his questions quite well.

As prospect products and vision are important assets here, we weren't allowed to talk much about those. We went on to have some discussion about software development process and daily activity. The point of view of my interviewer was that processes (he didn't state which) are helpful for outsourcing companies as they indicate what are the steps and what need to be done in each; for in-house projects, processes served little value and yet seemed to create too much bureaucracy overhead (?!). He then went on explaining why multitasking is normal. Their work come from multiple sources, on-going projects and support for live products. The code base also goes through constant rework as "This is the Internet, thing changes fast. The right user experience is unknown and experiments are needed", he said. As we continued to talk about technical work, it appeared to me that his team biggest achievement was to be capable of implementing their own version of world-class libraries and frameworks such as SQLite or jQuery. Couldn't restrain myself, I asked for his opinion about the open source community, about Q&A platform like StackOverflow and Quora. The situation sounded just like the movie "300" to me, just that the Spartan were no better than Persian.

The last couple of minutes at the end of the interview was some casual chit chat about working environment and job description. As far as I could understand, engineers are only given really technical work. My seek for a position with the balance of management and technical work was blocked by the bureaucracy of the 2000-people organization. There weren't many new facts in this last minute talk, but enough for me to confirm that the most successful Internal company in Vietnam has a firm hold on its human resources. Though my time to work for a corporation hasn't come yet, I wish it live long and prosper.

Do unconventional interview questions work?

Whether today's ever-more-polymorphous interviews succeed in identifying better employees is an unanswered question. The use of peculiar questions and arbitrary tests may seem to go against one of the few rock-solid percepts of today's human resources profession. This holds that any method of selecting job candidates should be as closely related to the work as possible. Most HR people place the most faith in work sampling, where the candidate is asked to perform or simulate work similar to which he'd be doing if hired. Statistical studies of work sampling (a famous one was done by AT&T from 1956 to 1965) showed impressive predictive ability.

The usual justification for "creative thinking" riddles and personality assessments is that they test broad, general abilities, not tied to a specific set of skills. Whether they do that is hard to say. What's certain is that "pet" questions take on a talismanic quality for some interviewers. Just as athletes don't change their shirt during a wining streak, interviewers keep asking the same questions because of a few remembered instances where it supposedly "worked". That fact that many of the most admired, innovative companies use such interview questions seems to speak for itself ("You can't argue with success").

It is far from clear that either season holds water. The human resources profession is full of customary practices of no demonstrable value. The psychologies Daniel Kahneman tells the tale of a test once used by the Israeli military to identify candidates for officer training. A group of either recruits, stripped of insignia, was instructed to carry a telephone pole over a wall without letting it touch the wall or the ground. The point was to observe who tool charge (the "natural leaders") and who fell meekly into place behind them (the "followers"). "But the trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell", Kahneman said. "Every month or so we had a 'statistics day', during which we would get feedback from the officer-training school, indicating the accuracy of our ratings of candidates' potential. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. But the next day, there would be another batch of candidates to be taken to the obstacle field, where we would face them with the wall and see their true natures revealed."

Similar tactics are alive and well throughout corporate America. In today's overheated job market, a common test is to seat a group of candidates for the same job around a conference table for a "group discussion". They know that only one will get the job. The discussion becomes a little reality show, with the recruiter quietly noting who takes charge. It's doubtful that it works any better than the Israeli army test did.

Proving that a hiring technique works - or that it doesn't work - is a complex exercise in statistics. Were once to demand that a hiring criterion be 100 percent reliable, employers would have to hand out jobs at random. There aren't any 100 percent reliable criteria - not work history, not grades, not anything. Hiring is always a game of chance. Many job seekers complain that some talented people do poorly on today's unconventional interview questions - ergo no one should use them in deciding whom to hire. This isn't a compelling argument for the reason given above. But psychological studies indicate that people are apt to view almost any criterion as "unfair" when it's used to decide who's hired or promoted. The sense of unfairness is greater when the criterion is unfamiliar. A traditional job interview is a conversation. The job offer or rejection comes days or weeks later, affording a certain emotional distance. Creative-thinking questions often bring the rejection right into the interview, right in your face. If you fail, you generally know you've failed. That feels worse than a rejection days later. Admittedly, this attitude may not make sense, but when have emotions ever had to make sense?

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William Poundstone. (2012). Punked and Outweirded. In: Are you smart enough to work at Google?. New York: Little, Brown and Company. p48-50.