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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

#451

Post by jkchu »

marcosdumay wrote: post #320
vhab wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If hiring a freelancer to do a little thing tends to generate all sorts of nightmarish legal liabilities, your company is either a government contractor or it has even bigger structural problems than hiring. It might not be an issue for your company, but your candidate might have a non-compete (or other clause) preventing them from accepting compensation or even performing work for another company at all. Things ge…

Then the candidate says something like "Well, you know, I can't take any payment before I'm out of this job. Can't I just do it for "free", and payment come as a bonus on hiring?"

What if you don't get an offer or if you decline their offer?

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

#452

Post by ebrenes »

ohitsdom wrote: post #83
paxy wrote: post #38

This is one of those "aha" solutions that people keep mentioning, but completely ignore how it would work in a non-ideal world. • What 2 hour project can you assign that would let the candidate go into enough depth for you to judge their code, design decisions, architecture skills? • If you give them more time (e.g. a weekend like in the article), is it still financially viable to the company, especially at $100/hr??…

Exactly. Their example: > "Create a single page app that lets me enter movies in my home movie collection, store them in offline storage and search through them. I want to search by Genre, Title & Actors." Significantly more than 2 hours, unless you are looking for a quick hack and for the candidate to repeatedly explain "I would have done it this other way if I had more time..."

That's only if you're expecting a candidate to provide a perfect solution; and don't make it clear that the time limit should inform their design and not just measure their speed of implementation.

Part of software development is tailoring a solution to the scope of the problem, and this includes taking into account the time and effort available to come up with a solution. Someone who looks at that problem statement and designs something that will take a week has missed a very important requirement.

You could reasonably scale up any problem to take an arbitrarily long amount of time, by adding onerous requirements (must have 7 9's of reliability). What I've found more rare and precious is the developer who can limit the scope so that items that are not up for negotiation like time (2 hours) & resources (1 developer) are respected.

I fully expect a developer to state their assumptions up front, so that I can judge their design based on the stated assumptions and not some unstated imaginary assumptions. It also lets me see how or if they prioritize.

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

#453

Post by duderific »

Tistel wrote: post #434

I did CS and have been a professional programmer for more than 15 years on pretty much every platform under the sun. I am very introverted. I still panic during the whiteboard phase of the interview about 75% of the time. Like go blank on simple stuff. Some problems need collaboration but I find I can only really think clearly when alone. I have been debating taking one of those public speaking classes because I prob…

> (love programming, but, my hair is starting to turn grey and I hear we kick everyone out of the club when the grey happens).

Please, no. There are plenty of companies that respect experience and the wisdom that comes with age. It may be challenging to find them, but don't go management just because "you're getting too old." If you love programming, keep doing it, and find a place to work that suits you. Signed, a gray-haired 47 year old programmer.

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

#454

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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…

> I spent 20 minutes reading the prompt, looking at resources and making an outline of my code. Then I step away for the afternoon and don't think about it. Let the subconscious internalize the problem for a while and when I come back, I've got a much better mindset to approach it.

That's definitely a thing, and I believe it applies to some extent to everyone.

But here's the other side of the coin - the ability to operate efficiently when the world is burning. I've been in the industry for a while, and this sort of thing definitely happens. But it's very hard to simulate in an interview. You don't know who the adrenalin junkies are on your team until PagerDuty lights up glowing red across the board.

The only indication I've seen is the correlation with a preference for risk-taking activities, such as sky diving, etc. But it's quite circumstantial. And there's definitely also the true reverse of it: some of the car racers and bull fighters out there are not good team players in times of peace.

Well, if at least a few key players can handle pressure gracefully, I guess you'll be fine, since it's a skill rarely used. You don't need everyone to be able to switch to catastrophe mode at a moment's notice.

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

#455

Post by user5994461 »

majormajor wrote: post #199
ghaff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point. But, in practice, there's a big difference in many situations between free and even a nominal sum. I do agree that if people are flying around, that represents a fairly significant investment in any case. But in Silicon Valley, that often isn't true. It's hopefully a case of coming up with processes that don't encourage people to waste others' time. But that also assumes some reasonable balance of p…

Yeah, sorting out serious people from those wasting time is a hard one. Though I'm generally pretty sympathetic to employees/candidates on that one - am I wasting your time if I'm pretty sure I don't want to leave my current place, but want to keep a hand in and know what the market looks like? I would say know, but I know some people who would disagree, and have decent reasons for it. Even after that, the "experienc…

> Yeah, sorting out serious people from those wasting time is a hard one.

It's easier than it seems.

Just put a HackerRank test with a single question. "Print the numbers from 1 to 10 [inclusive, one number per line]".

20-30% of candidates won't attempt the test. 20-30% will be unable to give a decent solution.

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

#456

Post by Nacraile »

tdeck wrote: post #110

Love the idea of paying people. That's great. However, consider the perspective of someone who already has a job in the industry. If every company did this, I wouldn't be able to interview at more than one per week. Not only that, but the Friday and Monday onsites mean I miss work on TWO separate days. This would be a non-starter for me if I had any decent pool of interest from other companies, although it's great fo…

From the perspective of someone who already has a job in the industry, I'm really not going to want to do more than one interview per week anyway.

This format also doesn't appear to want full days: it should be an hour or two Friday afternoon, plus a half of Monday. Two part-days isn't really that worse than a full day off (Mileage may obviously vary; particularly the mileage to get to the interview). The initial interview could also very easily be done remotely.

Even if it is a bit higher-impact, I would still prefer it simply for the greater quality of experience, and that's before throwing in the payment.

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

#457

Post by user5994461 »

ceronman wrote: post #373
pgl wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not possible to design and evaluate a weekend project for each one of them Can't you just design and evaluate one project that they can all do?

Even if you design only one project. You still have to evaluate them, have a discussion, etc. That takes time. It doesn't scale to hundreds of interviews per week.

It's absolutely doable to evaluate one hundred take home tests in a week. It is a full time job though.

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

#458

Post by user5994461 »

dgudkov wrote: post #430
redwards510 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind homework, but companies need to start specifying their salary range up front. I've been having a lot of time wasted lately by getting through Tech Interview #1 or Homework #1, only to find out their max salary is laughable for San Francisco. "You should just find that out upfront" I hear you saying. Well that is not always possible. Recruiters either don't know the range, or lie about not knowing, or you…

Alternatively, you can specify your expectations up front. It doesn't have to be an exact number, just a hint -- e.g. "No talk if the salary isn't well north of 100K".

You're anchoring them to offer you 100k. Pretty sure that's not what you wanted to do ^^

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

#459

Post by user5994461 »

mjevans wrote: post #106
bigiain wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about Google, but I've got a friend who's legal advice was "Stop working on your phd immediately" when his lawyer read the new employment contract we was being asked to sign when his company got acquired by Oracle. It took months for him to get an extremely limited exemption to the standard contract to be allowed to publish his thesis according to his phd requirements...

That's just one more reason to not work at someplace as notoriously 'litigious' as Oracle.

Close... but the problem is not Oracle, it's the USA.

In the country I come from, the master/PhD students working at a company are under a special set of contracts & laws (slightly different from the usual employment rules). Legally speaking, the company cannot forbid them to perform what is mandated for their school & necessary for their grade.

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

#460

Post by sqeaky »

snsr wrote: post #360
walshemj wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In addition to being bullshit it is also a hint you should be moving on.
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