People suck at technical interviews (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#121

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:09 PM UTC

_asummers wrote: post #98

singingfish wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently got into the interviewing for devs game. Now we're a perl fairly specialised shop, and we only hire experienced people so that makes things relatively easy (candidates need to demonstrate a depth of knowledge, and . The pool of people around is relatively shallow too. We don't actually need to ask people technically detailed questions about specific algorithms. We have a conversation. From that conversa…

One of my favorite questions is asking people their least favorite and favorite languages then asking people to give one of their favorite features in the least favorite language, and least favorite features in their favorite language. Shows that they've actually spent time thinking about their tools. You get a surprising amount of insight from it, depending on the answer.

This question would throw me for a loop because I don't have anything I think of as my least favorite language.

I could pretend that Python was my favorite language, but that's more that I'm comfortable with it than any sort of actual feeling that I should prefer it over others. That is, I use it out of inertia and familiarity, not out of some sense that I've found something.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#122

Post by mtreis86 » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:12 PM UTC

MrLeftHand wrote: post #54

greggman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me to supposed mechanic: "Can you repair my car?" Mechanic: gets out the yellow pages and calls a real mechanic. Me: ok I'll hire that guy you just called They're not hiring someone to search. They're hiring someone to code. You proved you could search but not that you could code

Me to supposed mechanic: "Can you fix my car?" Mechanic: "Yes, of course!" - he gets up and collects loads of bits and pieces, metal bars and stuff, then starts to hammer away to create a car part. Me: "What the hell are you doing?" Mechanic: "I'm building the part for your car." Me: "Don't you have a spare or something?" Mechanic: "Well I don't, but there are spares I could order." Me: "Then do it man, order one." M…

What if that shop builds race cars and trophy trucks? Are you okay with the part being replaced being of higher quality and finish than the original? What about some advanced alloy that would not have been financially do-able for a manufacturer to use?

When hiring someone with "fabrication skills" into a machine shop, you certainly don't expect them to order a part during the interview when you just asked them to make a part on the lathe. Which position are you interviewing for, machinist or administrator/purchasing?

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#123

Post by arethuza » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

MrLeftHand wrote: post #119

arethuza wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years of SQL experience and no idea of what a join is? Isn't that like saying 5 years of C/Java/C#/... experience and not knowing what assignment is?

I don't thinks so. You don't have to use join, but you might end up with loads of queries instead of having just one, but the end result will be the same set of data.

If the data you are querying is spread across multiple tables (and in "enterprise" environments databases with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of tables or more are fairly common) then you have to do a join somewhere - in SQL, in your application or even manually. Given that doing the join in SQL is by far the most common scenario not being aware of it is a bit odd!

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#124

Post by mlvljr » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #111

MrLeftHand wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potential Employee Perspective: they can't be serious!!! A lot of times a job spec contains a minimum of 10-15 skill you need to know. And that's just the modest one. Maybe employers should stop trying to find the non-existing 'developer rock-star' and people would stop lying. The funny thing is that even the developers themselves start to behave like that when they are on the other end of the hiring (Been there, don…

I think the laundry list interview happens most when you're hiring to replace someone. My last job is having that issue, we were an R&D team so we learned on the job. They're having an impossible time replacing any of us because to combine that specific skill set you basically have to have been on that team (or its twin) for a couple of years. What they should be looking for is just someone with good basic skills who…

Because they are themselves scared to not follow this (ill) pattern, in some cases, I suspect :)

Someone has to have guts in this relationship, and if both sides are shy, things drive themselves to the sorrow state we're discussing.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#125

Post by heartsucker » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

hanginghyena wrote: post #76

Hiring Manager Perspective: Everyone lies, sorry. As a candidate, I hate technical interviews. For the reasons above. As the poor schmuck asked to make the hiring decision, however, I've learned that I can't live without them. My technical isn't complicated. A very basic SQL assignment (delivered to an audience which claims to know SQL) that is followed by a few broader database design / data process QA questions. En…

I've had the same experience. Someone listed 2 years Scala experience on a resume, but couldn't explain Unit, None, null, and Nothing to me. Or the guy this week who had several years of ops experience and when asked "how can you tell what indexes are being used in a SQL query" didn't even know about EXPLAIN.

Basic technical interviews are a must, but someone people get hung up on "they couldn't explain a hash map implementation," because sometimes "you put a thing in the map and then get it back out later" is good enough for 99% of startup engineering tasks.

Somewhere out there is a sweet middle ground, but it seems not one agrees where it really is.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#126

Post by CSMastermind » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

hanginghyena wrote: post #76

Hiring Manager Perspective: Everyone lies, sorry. As a candidate, I hate technical interviews. For the reasons above. As the poor schmuck asked to make the hiring decision, however, I've learned that I can't live without them. My technical isn't complicated. A very basic SQL assignment (delivered to an audience which claims to know SQL) that is followed by a few broader database design / data process QA questions. En…

I honestly can't think of a time I lied during a job interview. Am I doing it wrong?

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#127

Post by skay_ » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

A lot of people are saying that technical interviews are not good because some people are not good at them but they are indeed good software developers.

Other people are saying that is impossible to judge someone in a few hours of technical interviews/exercises.

I agree with both, but what's a better alternative? How to you minimise the risk of taking hiring a bad developer? At least, it is my belief that the technical interviews minimise the risk which is far better that ending up hiring someone who is not technically strong.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#128

Post by pjmorris » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

MrLeftHand wrote: post #119

arethuza wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years of SQL experience and no idea of what a join is? Isn't that like saying 5 years of C/Java/C#/... experience and not knowing what assignment is?

I don't thinks so. You don't have to use join, but you might end up with loads of queries instead of having just one, but the end result will be the same set of data.

Arguably that's one year of SQL experience repeated five times.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#129

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

zeemonkee3 wrote: post #52

k__ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It speaks for broken hiring when even skillers like you can't get a job. I always thought I just wasn't as good as I think when I didn't get a job, but I know your work and it is amazing, so hiring companies just don't know what they doing anymore

Hiring right now is a shitshow of old wives' tales, cargo-culted practices from big name tech companies, shady recruiters, mismatched incentives, interviewers who have no experience or training in interviewing, gimmicky apps trying to somehow gamify technical interviewing and endless whining back and forth on HN and Medium. I'm sure a lot of developers who are currently employed are put off applying elsewhere because…

[deleted]

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#130

Post by yeowMeng » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

MrLeftHand wrote: post #88

hanginghyena wrote: post #76

Hiring Manager Perspective: Everyone lies, sorry. As a candidate, I hate technical interviews. For the reasons above. As the poor schmuck asked to make the hiring decision, however, I've learned that I can't live without them. My technical isn't complicated. A very basic SQL assignment (delivered to an audience which claims to know SQL) that is followed by a few broader database design / data process QA questions. En…

Potential Employee Perspective: they can't be serious!!! A lot of times a job spec contains a minimum of 10-15 skill you need to know. And that's just the modest one. Maybe employers should stop trying to find the non-existing 'developer rock-star' and people would stop lying. The funny thing is that even the developers themselves start to behave like that when they are on the other end of the hiring (Been there, don…

> Most jobs are just 'stuck in a loop' ones. Where you inherit legacy stuff and you're not allowed to change anything.

You are not allowed to change anything and commit it :) But it's amazing how much cruft you can dig out by say, re-writting the build system so that everything links dynamically and then running an address sanitizer build in dev env.