Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
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Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
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Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#2It's entirely bullshit, and I regret being on both sides. I used to do coding screens, but I feel like some moderate knowledge of syntax and a decent education is enough to skip the rest. The whole cargo cult of coding screens came up during the 00's when Google made it look important, and you're correct that it's largely an exercise to convince the team that they're special.
Software engineering is the science of avoiding coding! And the code that these elite teams produce is often pure shit anyways.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#3Most thinking people hate them. Everyone at my job believes they wouldn’t would be able to pass the interview again for a job they’ve held for years.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#4Whiteboarding is a waste of time in my opinion. The problems are recycled anyway (reverse singly linked list, needle in haystack search, etc). It doesn’t give you a useful signal about the person’s coding ability when they can just do rote memorization on a toy problem.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#5Personally I'm very defensive against more academic interview processes (like Google's) because I'm a college drop-out and feel some amount of insecurity being ranked among peers with better academic backgrounds who might excel at such tests. In truth it is a personal failure of mine, and something i'll eventually get over through study/training the next time I'm looking for a job (hopefully years from now).
Sure it would be great if we found some super-magical process that didn't irritate or inconvenience incumbent and new developers alike. But you probably can't please everyone, and in the meantime we need to do the best we can because hiring still has to happen. Companies with slightly better processes will be rewarded (hopefully) and companies with more painful processes will face some penalty from losing candidates that would move their company forward. Hopefully this is enough of an incentive to keep companies continually working towards better hiring practices. But I kind of doubt it.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#6Personally I'm very defensive against more academic interview processes (like Google's) because I'm a college drop-out and feel some amount of insecurity being ranked among peers with better academic backgrounds who might excel at such tests. In truth it is a personal failure of mine, and something i'll eventually get over through study/training the next time I'm looking for a job (hopefully years from now). Sure it…
I can tell you from experience ppl with college degrees go through the exact preparation process, aren't well off because they took an algorithm course 2 decades ago.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#7We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it:
I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews.
The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to learn about you, what've you done, what you want, and what you like/don't like.
Next, you'll get access to a git repo. In that git repo is a project with real code and a few features/bug fixes for you to implement. You commit against that repo just like you would at work. After a certain amount of time, you'll lose access to that repo.
One or more engineers will review the repo with no knowledge of your age, gender, work history, etc. Based on that engineer's feedback, we match you with companies that we think there will be a good fit. If there is mutual interest, you meet the companies in person for a final round where you can't get rail-roaded with bullshit questions.
Email me @ interviewingisbroken@gmail.com if any of these are you:
1. You're in the Bay Area or NYC and interested in fair interviews with great companies
2. You're in the Bay Area or NYC and work for a company that wants to offer fair interviews to get great engineers
3. You're a great engineer who would like to get paid to help create interview projects or perform reviews of candidates code - we're paying up to $100/hr. Great side hustle opportunity.
I wasn't planning on announcing anything about this yet but this post got me so fired up.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#8I actually really like the way that my company does software interviews. We do an initial resume check and screener phone call. After that, we send prospectives a take-home code sample that they can work on. The problems are very small and well-scoped and they can take as long as they want to work on it.
We do an initial code review. If we have notes for improvement, we give the candidate feedback and ask if they'd like to do one more pass at it. If they don't want to, but we think that the general thinking and instincts behind the logic is sound, we bring them in for an in-person where we ask them to go over their code review on where the pitfalls are and where they think they could potentially improve.
That gives us the most realistic sense of how well a candidate is going to do at the company, since this is essentially our process.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#9There are tons of threads on HackerNews on this and they all usually follow the same exact pattern of discussion.
Everyone hates interviews and how they are useless but in the the end we settle for the status quo.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#10I conduct this style of interviews. It's easy to complain, but much hard to propose better options. Most alternative hiring proposals do not meet the fundamental criteria of Big 4 hiring: they must reject approximately 99% of applicants while consuming an average of two hours of engineer-time per candidate.