Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary • Hacker News Board

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#21

Post by jpgvm » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #12

In the HN echo chamber, there isn't a day without some blog post/article describing how our interview process is BS, interview is broken, etc. I don't necessarily dispute this state of affaire, but does anyone know how it compares to other fiels/professions? How about interviewing a lawyer? Or a doctor? Or an account manager? Or a product marketer? Are developers the only one with a "broken" interview process?

We are among the only industries that have multi-stage interview processes as the norm, including a gamut of usually quite gimmicky "technical" stages. It can now easily take more than a month to get hired as a software engineer, which is rather long compared to most other industries.

I think this boils down to the fact our field is young, there isn't professional accreditation in place or anything else for people to have a real idea of what you know without attempting to try assess that themselves (and failing miserably as assessing other people generally isn't their core competency).

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#22

Post by brightball » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

With programmers, the single easiest way to identify good candidates (in my experience) is sheer interest in what they do / desire to learn. This is a learn everyday field and if you're interested in what you're doing, you're going to do a lot better at it. It's hard to apply yourself mentally to something that you don't have a good level of interest in. Given that it's a learn everyday field, people with that level of interest will realistically be able to learn anything they need to do solve the problem you're hiring them to solve.

The only real differentiating factor is your tolerance for ramp up time. I expect a programmer to be able to pick up a new language or database within a couple of weeks (tops) in most cases. If I'm hiring full time, that's something I'll tolerate. If I'm hiring a contractor, I'm going to be uneasy about paying high hourly rates for him to learn the job.

The single most effective way that I've found to interview for "interest" is to just get them talking about something they've done before and ask them to go deep into the details. You get everything you need from watching somebody talk, with a smile on their face, about how they solved some problem in a creative way that makes them show some pride. Doesn't really matter what the problem was, if it was a business problem, code problem or hardware problem. The important thing is the level of attention to detail in addressing it.

I've been using this technique for about 8 years now and while I don't make it the exclusive criteria for hiring, every person I've ever hired who has passed that part has ended up in my "great hire" category.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#23

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #14

colmvp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many employ Kahneman's recommendation based on his book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow": > Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on. Don't…

I like that. But just to be a little bit contrarian for the sake of conversation: Has it been shown that ignoring your gut instinct or even who you like most if inherently wrong? That kind of testing definitely removes a lot of bias, but it just assumes that biases are inherently bad. There certainly ARE bad biases (sexism, racism, etc). But you may also need to work with the individual you're recruiting, so how well…

[deleted]

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#24

Post by kbd » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

I had a really bizarre interview recently where, after the initial recruiter phone screen, I was rejected based on an in-person half-hour very simplistic paired coding exercise, only met with one person, and wasn't asked about my (imo very strong) resume once. I must have said something foolish at some point, which is on me, but the point is: interviews can be hit or miss. Fortunately you only need one hit.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#25

Post by jessedhillon » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #22

With programmers, the single easiest way to identify good candidates (in my experience) is sheer interest in what they do / desire to learn. This is a learn everyday field and if you're interested in what you're doing, you're going to do a lot better at it. It's hard to apply yourself mentally to something that you don't have a good level of interest in. Given that it's a learn everyday field, people with that level…

Interest is not enough, unfortunately. There are plenty of engineers who are attracted to the challenge and excitement of building new things, but have no appreciation for The Right Way to build things.

Great engineers think beyond "how" and ask the "should" questions as well. Mediocre engineers glue things together in a haphazard way with little thought about what's the best way to write things. Caring about maintainability, comprehensibility and extensibility is partially a function of experience, but I've met plenty of experienced engineers who still write bad code and design systems poorly. It has no correlation to how much of a tinkerer and curious person they are, in my experience.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#26

Post by dudul » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

grillvogel wrote: post #17

dudul wrote: post #12

In the HN echo chamber, there isn't a day without some blog post/article describing how our interview process is BS, interview is broken, etc. I don't necessarily dispute this state of affaire, but does anyone know how it compares to other fiels/professions? How about interviewing a lawyer? Or a doctor? Or an account manager? Or a product marketer? Are developers the only one with a "broken" interview process?

most other job interview processes don't involve solving a series of riddles

What do they involve? How do you interview a sales guy? what do you ask him? How do you interview a product marketer?

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#27

Post by grillvogel » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

rewqfdsa wrote: post #20

grillvogel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most other job interview processes don't involve solving a series of riddles

In most other jobs, candidates don't vary in skill by a factor of 10x or more

where did you get that idea?

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#28

Post by 8873872782 » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #11

staunch wrote: post #6

Most interviewers don't ask enough technical questions to have any idea what a candidate knows or doesn't know. If their one or two questions happen to be something the candidate knows well, they'll call them a genius. If they happen to not know, they'll label them an idiot. You can learn a lot more from 20+ rapid fire questions than forcing a candidate to eek out an answer to something they're not familiar with. And…

Along these lines, I start out with very broad questions. Something like, "tell me how you'd troubleshoot a web service that's suddenly not accepting connections / suddenly performing badly." Different candidates will focus on different aspects of that problem depending on their background: low-level networking, cloud environments, application-level problems, databases etc. Based on their resume, I like to see if the…

This is a very good way for senior engineers to interview candidates.

Newer engineers interviewing candidates will typically have difficulty doing this well.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#29

Post by maxaf » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

Take home tests FTW. The thinking goes as follows:

1. If the candidate can't be bothered to complete a 2-4 hour (depending on claimed seniority) code test in the language of their choice, we can't be bothered to talk to them.

2. If the candidate does reasonably well by completing the code test somewhat on time (with a fat margin allowed for them, well, having a life) and within parameters of the task, they're invited for a mostly non-technical onsite meet-and-greet.

3. During the meet-and-greet we make sure that the candidate isn't an axe murderer, is able to hold a quasi-technical conversation, and that both sides aren't immediately scared of each other.

4. The meet-and-greet can also include some low-key architecture discussion. Any nerds worth their salt will be able to conduct this line of questioning without making it obvious that an interview is taking place. Hopefully this isn't a critical step, as a good take-home code test will require the candidate to spend a little time designing or architecting their solution.

After the above has taken place, it should be pretty clear whether the candidate in question is a fit or not. Note that this process is by design missing the useless traditional CS questioning component, contrived problem solving exercises, or a whiteboard code beatdown.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#30

Post by fecak » Wed, Feb 17, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

Great post as always Aline. I'd be most curious as to how well anonymity was kept. Did interviewees identify their employers, schools, or any other information that might create bias while in the interview itself?

I've been recruiting for a long time, and I'm rarely shocked about the result of an interview - maybe a few times a year. There are tons of possible explanations for that, and lots of possible explanations for your results as well.

Keep up the great work.