We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller • Hacker News Board

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#71

Post by robmcm » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 4:48 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #44

robmcm wrote: post #16

Contract to perm is the best way by far. In the UK the contract rates are typically significantly higher, so even if the person isn't offered a job at the end they aren't bothered. Everyone wins

Contract to perm is the best way by far. For whom? It's bad for the worker because you're going to work for a company that is admitting by its behavior that it has little confidence in its abiliity to assess talent. Where else is it weak? (My experience shows that those who can't assess talent usually can't do a whole lot of other important things, too.) It's bad for the company because it limits its pool of candidat…

>Good luck recruiting desirable high achievers by telling them you can't tell if they're good enough to hire.

Typically here in London these people are already contracting, so all you need to do is convert the best ones.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#72

Post by tlarimer » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 4:59 PM UTC

espes wrote: post #9

adekok wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. Why? Because physics is about making a conceptual model. i.e. telling a story about a problem. And then solving it. For interviewing, communications skills are a must. People will be working in a team, and must be able to explain themselves. And get along with others. Another thing rarely checked for is the flip side...…

> As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. That's pretty counter-intuitive. Can you give a source?

Anecdote inbound. I recall our formal lab write-ups comprised a large part of our final grades. Poorly written, poorly formatted formal lab write-ups consistently got C's while well written and formatted write-ups got A's. In this case I can see a strong correlation between English scores and physics scores.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#73

Post by gaius » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:12 PM UTC

robmcm wrote: post #64

gaius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to understand the motivations of any of the parties involved here. Why would someone want to do the same job for less money and let's be honest these days, no more job security? Why would someone whose goal is a perm position, setup a company, just to do job searches with?

You can use one of the many umbrella companies.

No-one whose goal is permanent, would bother to do that, when there are plenty of companies doing normal interviews. No-one who is willing to do it, would want to convert back to permie afterwards.

If it doesn't work out, it looks worse on your CV to be a "failed" contractor scurrying back to a permie role, than if you'd been a permie who'd quit after a few months.

Maybe some people do go down this route - but a company whose policy is to hire this way, won't be able to scale it.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#74

Post by Retra » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

RogerL wrote: post #41

wpietri wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hiring right now, and I read a lot of job descriptions before I wrote ours. [1] I've definitely seen what she's talking about: generic go-hire-engineers job descriptions. I also think the kind of thing you describe, hiring for a very specific technology, is a similar failure mode. The technological pain point of the moment rarely lasts; the more stable needs are actually organizational. For example, over the next…

I've been explicitly told that the code should compile, as I write it (Hi Microsoft!). That's daft, and I told the interviewer that that is not how I think and did it my way.

I would ask for a white-board compiler, then.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#75

Post by agentultra » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:14 PM UTC

The golden nugget for me was the suggestion to ask the candidate to teach you something.

I'm terrible at operating under pressure and generally need to take my time with any problem I'm given. Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to find the solution. The only way I'd be able to do that is if I'd seen the exact problem before a couple of days ago and can recall the solution from memory. For problems I haven't encountered before I need a pad of paper and make a lot of mistakes before getting to the right answer.

I'm just slow, deliberate and not well equipped to win at Jeopardy. It's not my bag.

But if you asked me to teach you something I could go on for hours on procedural generation algorithms, pseudo-random number algorithms, neat tricks from old languages, compilers, macros... yadda yadda.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#76

Post by pekk » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

ctide wrote: post #42

llimllib wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if I were employed at a good company but was possibly interested in leaving, I would never leave it for a contract-to-perm position.

Do you doubt your skills? Why are you interviewing if you're employed at a good company? I hear this position often when people talking about contract-to-perm, and I just don't see it. If you're good at what you do, and people enjoy working with you, why wouldn't you take a contract to perm position? The only reasons I can see are that you are afraid you don't get the job (well, then you wouldn't have been a good fit…

It isn't a foregone conclusion that if you have good skills, you will be permanently hired out of a contract position. If it were a foregone conclusion, they would just hire perm.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#77

Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #75

The golden nugget for me was the suggestion to ask the candidate to teach you something. I'm terrible at operating under pressure and generally need to take my time with any problem I'm given. Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to…

> Unless you actually work in an environment where it's critical find the optimal solution to a large constraint search problem in 30 minutes or the tower blows up I don't see what the difference is to taking a couple of hours to find the solution.

Not to mention, if this scenario is frequent enough that you really need to screen for it in interviews there is probably something fundamentally wrong with the way you are running your business.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#78

Post by rorykoehler » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

gkilmain wrote: post #40

rorykoehler wrote: post #24

As a non-CS graduate looking for my first full-time job as a Junior Developer I can only ask one thing of prospective employers. Please give clear feedback that will help give direction to the candidate if you reject them. I have done a number of code challenges and while I don't mind doing the challenges (I look at them as training) and I can always create a working solution there is nothing worse than receiving a s…

I do not think a company owes you anything with regards to feedback. Why do you think you or the community deserve feedback? If you get rejected you were simply not the right fit.

The reason I believe the community benefits from feedback is because, and I say this from the perspective of a Junior, it improves the overall quality of the entry level talent pool. Done on a consistent basis across all firms it will have a long lasting effect in speeding up the development of Juniors into competent and productive developers. This will benefit the community as a whole.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#79

Post by rorykoehler » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 5:44 PM UTC

robohamburger wrote: post #57

rorykoehler wrote: post #24

As a non-CS graduate looking for my first full-time job as a Junior Developer I can only ask one thing of prospective employers. Please give clear feedback that will help give direction to the candidate if you reject them. I have done a number of code challenges and while I don't mind doing the challenges (I look at them as training) and I can always create a working solution there is nothing worse than receiving a s…

I do think that if a company is going to have an arduous interview process they should try to make it positive one if only for their own benefit because people talk. Having reviewed code samples I can say that it can be exhausting trying to write constructive feedback to the person who wrote it. It is much easier to give a more dispassionate summary to the recruiter than one that would be appropriate to give to the p…

The best ones I got are just commented inline and sent back. Easy to do as you go through it and very helpful.

Re: We’re Bad at Interviewing Developers – Interview with Kerri Miller

#80

Post by pc86 » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #49

PaulHoule wrote: post #46

It tires me that there is so much talk about the problem of hiring developers and very little about the problem of "what do you do once you hire them?" That is, they may treat you like a rockstar when they sign you, but then if you complain because you got a crappy Dell laptop that was a hand-me-down from a salesman who couldn't sell, that your build process takes 40 minutes and that this could cut that to 20 minutes…

Unless you are relocating, fail-fast annulments should be allowed (I can quit after 1 week/month, it doesn't go on my resume). Maybe it should even go both ways.

You are free to leave anything off your resume, and I'm pretty sure you've never been legally required to stay at a job you don't want to, particularly in the first week.

What exactly do you want that you don't already have?