Ask HN: Do interviews give higher signal than an online tests like HackerRank's?

It's good to know that a candidate gets the right answer, but just as important to know how they got to the answer (communication, thought process, coachability). Tells more about what working with them would be like. Online tests can't do that

Also, to your second point, I can tailor to candidate - i.e., hints for someone struggling or adding layers of complexity.

Neither choice is valid. Software development interviewing is broken. We are starting to finally collect data to prove this. https://blog.interviewing.io/technical-interview-performance...

Humans are bad at evaluating candidates and generally we do a bad job of creating criteria to assess people because what we are doing is attempting to assess risk and humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. Here is one example of how poorly investors assess risk because of our inherent biases and bad information http://www.nber.org/papers/w22143. The same concept applies in interviewing. With all due respect, the software community has no established criteria for what makes a good software developer or engineer bases on hard evidence. It's all anecdotal and every hiring manager leans on their own flawed biases based on their experiences.

Are you gonna tell your product manager that it will take you 5 days to write a linear solution for your feature? O(n). Are you gonna fix a critical bug in production by using a depth first search instead of a breadth first search?

What does it even mean? When are we gonna stop lying to ourselves?

The only way to evaluate someone for a software engineer position is to assign a mini coding project. The result should be a working product, packaged and ready to be shipped. It will tell you how fast someone can deliver a solution, how someone would design a solution, code quality, performance, etc. It doesn't have to be a gigantic app or website, just a basic working product and not a basic CS coding question that no one cares about. If you're applying for a backend position then it should be about building a backend. If you're applying for a mobile dev then it should be about building a mobile app, etc.

The whole hiring process is a joke, companies like google are focusing too much on college stuff and not enough on reality. Plus look, It's clearly written "Masters Degree in CS" on my Resume, that alone should tell you I already got evaluated on basic CS crap. So, let's talk about what I can really do to help your team and the company. What can I bring on the table besides a Masters Degree?

I understand that there is variance in interviews. However, I don't understand how interviewing.io is fixing it? Or are you just collecting data to prove it?

While I agree that interviews have high variance and a lot of times the interviews don't test what's required for the job, mini projects are a huge time sink for candidates too. Most candidates aren't going to spend a couple of days working on a project just to apply to a company. Unless all companies decide to just switch to using project-based interviewing, interviewing is here to stay (despite its quirks).