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A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

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Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#351

Post by mathw »

SamUK96 wrote: post #312
zachd1_618 wrote: post #49

This. 100% this. As many others are saying, I find that this is the most comfortable way for me as an interviewee to demonstrate that I do in fact know what I'm talking about. Put me in front of a room full of people and a whiteboard and throw something at me, and I'll freeze. Freezing in that situation and being a bad engineer are wholly separate things. Anecdotally, when I get one of these problems, I spent 20 minu…

> actually-there-is-a-correct-answer situationals Ugh. The worst step of interview process. Remember that guy who wrote a post about Google's hiring process, where they outsourced the asking of technical questions to untrained call-centre staff. "Standard way to allocate memory in C?" "malloc" "Incorrect. Actually there's this cool library that does it for you with additional checks. Sorry, you have failed the interv…

FWIW, my experience of Google's hiring process wasn't like that at all. Sure, it was hard, and they did do whiteboarding problems in the interviews (all seven of them), which is in its own way terrible, but it was all done with people who really did know the stuff they were asking me about.

I didn't get the job, but it was an interesting experience. Certainly selects for a certain kind of engineer, and would not be my preference for how to hire people if I was setting up my own operation.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#352

Post by tthbalazs »

sundvor wrote: post #331
msimpson wrote: post #318

We use a similar system which involves: 1. A phone interview to validate the applicants resume. 2. An in-person interview where the applicant is given an hour to complete level 10 of Blockly Maze ( https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze?level=10 ) after being briefed on the wall follower rule (if they are unaware). 3. Completion of an outside example project in the applicants strongest language, for which they are no…

That sounds like a great way to do it; if I were an applicant, I would have liked process. (I am currently looking for jobs, and do have a recent experience of an on the spot test which I just hated). I thought I'd try your step #2: I have no idea of the wall follower rule, and no prior experience in maze solving, but did bring it home in 18 minutes. That included figuring out this particular Blockly UI (have admitte…

Hey!

You might be interested in a solution that uses less blocks (i would be). I might have been lucky, took me 2-3 minutes to find this.

https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze?level=10#taj4p4

Does anyone know of a better one?

Edit: just as i posted this i saw that you dont even need the first "Move Forward", so it is 10 lines total with 4 blocks left

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#353

Post by sundvor »

tthbalazs wrote: post #352
sundvor wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a great way to do it; if I were an applicant, I would have liked process. (I am currently looking for jobs, and do have a recent experience of an on the spot test which I just hated). I thought I'd try your step #2: I have no idea of the wall follower rule, and no prior experience in maze solving, but did bring it home in 18 minutes. That included figuring out this particular Blockly UI (have admitte…

Hey! You might be interested in a solution that uses less blocks (i would be). I might have been lucky, took me 2-3 minutes to find this. https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze?level=10#taj4p4 Does anyone know of a better one? Edit: just as i posted this i saw that you dont even need the first "Move Forward", so it is 10 lines total with 4 blocks left

Had another look before I saw your comment, down to 3 blocks left now (12 lines). Thought my previous one was a bit messy, much better now, not sure if it can be optimised any further. Will check your link next. :)

EDIT: Nice. I was doing it slightly different to yours, https://blockly-games.appspot.com/maze?level=10#foif9x , two if statements instead would have fixed that, and the pattern becomes perfectly clear. Cheers. :)

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#354

Post by kriro »

rizzom5000 wrote: post #98
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to not pay them. Most candidates will do this for free, as it's far better than traditional ineffective hiring practices. The thing is, there are always reasons why this method isn't viable. It's not till you try it that you notice huge gains.

That only makes sense if you're talking about people who are unemployed. As someone who is already employed full-time, I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview. I avoid these problems like the plague and very much prefer to whiteboard. If you pay me consultant rates, I can more easily justify the effort.

I hear this argument quite often but my reaction tends to be...

...as someone that's fully employed I'm probably only looking at jobs I'm really interested in. I don't mind doing some free work for stuff I'm interested in. I also enjoy doing small unpaid side projects or programming puzzles in my free time...basically the same concept.

That being said, my guess is (ignoring legal implications) paying 200$ or whatever for it is actually more beneficial to the company than expecting you to do it for free so it seems like a nobrainer (once again assuming you can handle legal). Reciprocity and all.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#355

Post by elcct »

This approach is much better than something like solving another puzzle in Hackerrank. It also working both ways, because by the quality of assignment you can see through what kind of company you are really applying to. I personally find most of the time such assignments to be a good thing and enjoyed doing them, but also had one case where company asked me to do self-contained module that solves one of the problems they had and on the follow up interview they asked me to refactor it so that it could be embedded into their product. Which I did and they liked it and then decided not to proceed. I could sense they didn't actually need a new developer, but needed someone to extend their product for free.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#356

Post by coderjames »

StreamBright wrote: post #278
pakitan wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you have any statistics about the different interview styles/processes. Obviously it's hard to figure out the false negatives (good engineers you didn't hire) but how about false positives? Also, is homework assignment now a part of the standard interview process at Amazon or is this just your team/department?

Sorry but no stats. Amazon has different hiring procedures for different teams. This was for a particular team in one branch.

> This was for a particular team in one branch.

Which is a bummer. When I interviewed at Amazon a few years ago, it was a day of coding on the whiteboard. Turned out I didn't have the Java experience that group wanted, and I'm allergic to pager duty so that was a non-starter for me.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#358

Post by yesiamyourdad »

stillworks wrote: post #248
blowski wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like I'm completely the opposite of you! I'm fine with someone sitting next to me - I love pair programming. But cutting off internet access means no StackOverflow, no online documentation. The test should be very similar to normal working conditions.

Interesting to note how different people are indeed. I am fine with white board type situations, don't worry about writing code without IDEs etc (in my very first job vi editor was the only thing we had to write code so I still have instinctive memory to be resourceful without an IDE but I love IntelliJ for most things). Happy to discuss/draw out ideas/solutions on whiteboards. But find it very seriously annoying tal…

Some of that really depends on the problem and the language. I program Java full time, yet I'd be useless with vi. I lean heavily on the IDE. I've done this a long time and I firmly believe that I should use the best tools available, not just a text editor or a TEXTAREA, even with syntax highlighting.

Having suffered through a couple code interviews in Java, I now pick Python when allowed to pick a language. It seems like the language for me that allows me the best chance of coding effectively without an IDE.

I just did a phone screen yesterday that was extremely painful. After 45 minutes of fumbling around the thing mercifully ended and I googled for a few solutions. According to what I read on stack overflow, the problem is unsolvable with the constraints given. I expect to get the "no thanks" email from the recruiter soon and I plan on asking him what the proposed solution to the problem was - not out of spite, but because I'm genuinely curious. Maybe I misunderstood the problem statement.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#359

Post by daxfohl »

StavrosK wrote: post #323
daxfohl wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the task should be a test of the stuff you'll be doing on the job. If the job is to create quick websites without a whole lot of complexity for lots of clients, this would be an apt test. I'd fail that miserably and probably not like the job anyway. If the job involves working on more complex backend systems, then have the candidate write an async messaging system or DB storage system from scratch. I'd ace…

Maybe we're just very different. It would only take me minutes to whip up a few Django models, a few CRUD views and a Bootstrap frontend, but I've never needed to write a messaging system or DB storage from scratch (there are dozens of these off-the-shelf). That having been said, most of my value is writing sane, readable, cohesive code that can easily be extended years later, with a minimum of refactoring. That's wh…

Yup, everybody's different, nothing wrong with that! I appreciate people who do the work you do, but not every software company does websites at all. And even of those who do, plenty have grown to the point that off-the-shelf doesn't work anymore and some specialization is of greater value. (Think Uber, Slack, etc)

I agree with your second paragraph completely.

Re: A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

#360

Post by snsr »

walshemj wrote: post #282
creatine_lizard wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be legal issues from the candidate's side too -- people on an H-1B visa in the US may not be able to accept payment for work outside of the company they've been hired by.

Actually its common for many if not all employers to ban outside work with out approval from your manager.

Which is bullshit and absolutely none of their business.
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