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Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#121

Post by kelvin0 »

marknutter wrote: post #87

Technical interviews are a form of hazing. Engineers often suffer from imposter syndrome, especially during an interview. Those who have already been hazed and accepted to the club will turn around and put potential candidates through the same humiliating process. And what's worse is that demonstrating you have superior capabilities in one area or another can be seen as a threat to the interviewer and they may give y…

Hazing? Really?

Hazing is the practice of rituals and other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating a person into a group...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#122

Post by [deleted] »

lamontcg wrote: post #103
jessedhillon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 maintai…

At the same time you can overdesign something based on how it 'should' be engineered to the point where you haven't shipped anything and your company is bankrupt. You need someone that can pick a decent enough pattern which can get the job done in the time allotted. I would not hire someone that has a list of a hundred 'shoulds' which need to be met for any project to be shipped. That's a recipe for never shipping.

[deleted]

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#123

Post by leeny »

mentatseb wrote: post #75

The conclusion is misleading due to 2 wrong assumptions: 1. The population is heterogeneous: interviews test different skills. All interviews don't test the same set of skills, which is mandatory to compare interview scores because scores are aggregates of these skill tests. Different job opportunities means different skills to test, so it seems reasonable to assume that people evaluation vary for different job oppor…

(1) We listened to most interviews on the platform to establish homogeneity. Interviews were across the board, language agnostic, and primarily algorithmic in nature.

(2) We actually looked into this and noticed that time didn't really affect performance. Usually, people did their interviews over a pretty short time span and then found a job. Or, people were already experienced interviewers and had kind of hit a plateau. You can see the raw data and how it oscillates wrt time in the footnotes.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#124

Post by bsder »

jkyle wrote: post #91
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…

> I expect a programmer to be able to pick up a new language or database within a couple of weeks (tops) in most cases. They may be able to hack around, write a for loop, track down a bug....but you're not going to get the same caliber of work from someone who first saw python two weeks ago compared to someone whose been using the language for 5 years on real projects.

> but you're not going to get the same caliber of work from someone who first saw python two weeks ago compared to someone whose been using the language for 5 years on real projects.

Careful. You probably need to define your terms more clearly.

A CS student who knows Java (4+ years of experience) is going to turn out very different programs from a 20 year veteran of Erlang who is just learning Java.

Even with bad Java idioms, the veteran is very likely to be turning out much better code because he is thinking about the underlying architectural issues (failure modes, recovery, concurrency) with far more experience.

Yeah, I watched this play out in real time when I paired them. It was actually really enlightening and entertaining.

I also found out I didn't know as much about either Java or Erlang as I thought I did.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#125

Post by sheepmullet »

darryl42 wrote: post #53
eropple wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The approach you describe strikes me as shortsighted as well as to no small degree selfish. I don't do take-home tests, as a rule, for one overriding reason: my time is too valuable, and I have so much less of it to expend in discretionary fas…

How do you feel about the all day interview process some large companies are currently using? Keep in mind you probably had 1-3 phone + computer interviews before the in person interview. A take home test seems like a less time intensive process as you at least don't need to take time off from your normal job to do it.

Are you paying as well as these top tech companies? Do candidates know it?

Are you providing as many career opportunities and growth as Google/Facebook/etc? Do candidates know it?

These big companies get away with it because their hiring funnel is jam packed with top talent.

Rejecting a lot of top talent is no big deal for these companies. There is still tons of top talent who will jump through the hoops.

But a big hint: they won't jump through the hoops to work at your company!

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#126

Post by RogerL »

LanguageGamer wrote: post #7

The problem is, whether or not interview performance is consistent, we still don't know how or when it's correlated with performance if hired, and that's the sort of thing you would need to actually help people making better hiring decisions. Does interviewing.io have any plans to collect employee performance metrics from companies that hire via their platform? Is that something companies would be willing to cooperat…

We know big companies go through tons of people. Isn't stack ranking supposed to eliminate 10-20% a year.

All this noise about avoiding bad hires while ignoring the elephant in the room - companies claiming that bounce as many or more people as the companies that don't use these foolish interviewing practices.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#127

Post by sheepmullet »

Retric wrote: post #56
maxaf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of depends on where the candidate is coming from. Those who're applying directly are obviously already expressing some desire to work with us. Recruiters should be instructed to give a consistent narrative, too. Good recruiters will also pitch the code test as a sign that we're a serious employer and take people seriously. I don't like phone conversations that serve as the first line of candidate triage. Ma…

A 4h test when your still rejecting 90+% of people is ridiculous. You are basically rejecting anyone that is talented ahead of time. I personally know two programmers that did not create a resume for 20 years and still got jobs offers. Remember anything more complex than a phone screen is going to start turning people away.

Yep, I have gotten my last three jobs simply by strong recommendations.

A 4 hour test and 90% rejection rate? I better know you are paying at least double market rates before I start it!

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#128

Post by Retric »

jkyle wrote: post #91
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…

> I expect a programmer to be able to pick up a new language or database within a couple of weeks (tops) in most cases. They may be able to hack around, write a for loop, track down a bug....but you're not going to get the same caliber of work from someone who first saw python two weeks ago compared to someone whose been using the language for 5 years on real projects.

That's far less true than you might assume.

I have seen a company pay someone 100$/hour to learn a new language as part of a 6 month contract. They were producing better code than the company's staff within 3 weeks and finished the project ahead of time.

Granted, he was an EE not a software developer. But, deep knowledge of a platform is often more dangerous than helpful. The surface layer tends to be the least buggy parts of most systems.

PS: I wish more people heard "Let's use reflection!" as "Let's use regular expressions!" for similar reasons. Yes, it can help, but you can also dig a ditch using grenades...

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#129

Post by marknutter »

kelvin0 wrote: post #121
marknutter wrote: post #87

Technical interviews are a form of hazing. Engineers often suffer from imposter syndrome, especially during an interview. Those who have already been hazed and accepted to the club will turn around and put potential candidates through the same humiliating process. And what's worse is that demonstrating you have superior capabilities in one area or another can be seen as a threat to the interviewer and they may give y…

Hazing? Really? Hazing is the practice of rituals and other activities involving harassment , abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating a person into a group... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

#130

Post by kelvin0 »

marknutter wrote: post #129
kelvin0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hazing? Really? Hazing is the practice of rituals and other activities involving harassment , abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating a person into a group... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazing

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Maybe you should tell us which companies haze the potential candidates so we can steer clear of them? At least some hints?
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