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Hired – Technical Interview Score

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Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#81

Post by Jach »

troycarlson wrote: post #41
bit_logic wrote: post #24

Have we reached the tipping point yet? How much worse does the technical interview process need to get before the industry finally decides enough is enough? When this all began, it was with the justification that it's not about getting the right answer, it's about seeing how you think and approach a problem. Companies don't even pretend this is the case anymore. It's now just expected rote memorization of algorithm p…

Any suggestions for how to improve the process? I've been conducting a lot of technical phone screens lately and I'm always interested in how to make it better for both parties.

I made my own minor variant of https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... but I think it's still good advice in general and I'm fairly happy with how my version of the process has gone, given I only get 1 hour. If I had 90 mins or 2 hours I could be happier. It doesn't matter now though since higher ups at the company are deciding to revamp the process and remove all interviewer decision making from it in terms of what to ask and how to conduct things, which is probably going to be both good and bad.

If you're pretty happy with your routine the next step is review. Look at candidates who passed a phone screen but were later turned down at a followup stage. Is there anything you could change about the phone screen so that the later time and money could be saved? (If you have no one who passed the screen but failed the later stage, sounds like you could just eliminate the later stage altogether.) Another interesting thing to review is candidates who didn't work out after hiring, or didn't work out as much as hoped. Again, anything at the phone screen that could have caught this? Or for those ones you can look at other stages too. One example for me is an intern that didn't work out so well, we only do a couple phone screens for them though, but still the biggest skill that was missing that I realized I could try testing for was the ability to dive into unfamiliar code they didn't write and make a few small changes at various places to fulfill some business goal. Or in other words, filter out people who can only program if they can keep the whole program in their head (which usually only works for larger things if you wrote everything yourself).

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#82

Post by wbillingsley »

Always embarrassing when after deciding academic results aren't a good enough indicator, the showcase achievement for "a better process" is a single tutorial question from an undergraduate class (or less than a thousandth the evaluation we do of students while they study)...

Welcome to the Cult of Hiring, I guess.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#83

Post by Jach »

throw401 wrote: post #48
kyberias wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think that asking people to write code in interviews brings very _limited_ data. However, from my experience, it usually is also a very _strong_ signal. Narrow but strong. For example, if a candidate cannot implement a simple algorithm (like the factorial here), he very likely has poor skills. If he can implement it without too much trouble, that's a good sign, but he only proved that he probably has so…

And is the signal still strong if candidate has a bad day or for some other reason cannot get the right focus in that specific moment? Moreover, I think it's highly unprofessional to reinvent the wheel by writing most algorithms for production. I always first look for a bullet proof library for that. Won't you use a calculator for 345 x 27?

Nothing but "try applying again in 6-12 months" can fix the "candidate is having a bad day" cause for a false negative, don't know why you're bringing that up. Similarly this thread is about code in the context of interviewing, not production code, so the whole side-argument about when libraries are/aren't appropriate doesn't seem relevant... As a candidate I've been asked things like "write code to reverse this string" and I've given "this_str[::-1] is probably what I'd use on the job. Do you really want me to write a str_reverse() function? Does it need to be in-place?" Each time is yes at least for the first question, so I do it, but I wouldn't expect it to go to production. When I'm on the interviewer side and made to ask questions like string reverse or whatever I say "no, you don't have to do the lower level implementation", all I'm trying to verify is that someone can program, not that they can program arbitrary foo the way I want it done, but typically people start with the low level function, even when I say "use whatever language you want" they still go for Java or similar.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#84

Post by kearneyandy »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #79
kearneyandy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interview data is only ever shown anonymously to companies, even if you apply to a company with it. Only when the candidate and company agree to do an onsite are names revealed. Basically it's a good chance to practice and get feedback in the worst case, and a way to save some time and get your foot in the door in the best case. disclaimer: I work for refdash

Could I ask you to add that to your FAQ? Knowing that the information is anonymous would be super great. It'd be even better if I could TAKE the interview anonymously. Then I wouldn't need to trust Refdash on whether it was recording my information. Bonus: it's much easier to limit bias when you don't know any demographic information about the interviewee. I understand that the downside here is that I could potential…

Thanks for the suggestion, just added it.

Interviews are somewhat anonymous, the interviewer only gets your first name (added that too). We've discussed making it even more anonymous (voice modulation, hiding video, etc.) but it seems like this has been studied before and did not have much of an effect.

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#85

Post by kearneyandy »

goodoldboys wrote: post #23

I'm assuming this is a fake interview to show off the interview feedback for your platform? If so, I think it looks great and is a huge part of what's missing from the current "standard" engineer interview. Receiving feedback like this would be incredibly helpful in figuring out what I'd need to work on to pass technical screens. The fact that there's very little proven correlation between being able to jump through…

Not OP, but I work at refdash

This is a fake feedback report for an interview, to show what companies and candidates can expect.

Thanks for your comment. I do think it's important particularly from a feedback perspective. Since companies don't give feedback, this is one of the first things to attempt to help candidates learn about what is being evaluated and how to improve.

I'm hoping this is a first step to finding out a better way to correlate those things, for now I think that things that help candidates find jobs are a good step :)

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#86

Post by Redsquare »

pseudonom- wrote: post #80
megy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one reason why most interviewing is a subjective clusterfuck (not just software, I suspect). This is the thing, all OTHER interviewing doesn't do this, they do it by talking to the candidates. Damn, I am going to get out of development.

FYI, most evidence suggests unstructured interviews (talking to the candidates) have very low predictive power about job performance and that work sample tests (take home problems and on-site coding) fare much better in that regard.

Where is the evidence?

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#87

Post by NTDF9 »

bit_logic wrote: post #24

Have we reached the tipping point yet? How much worse does the technical interview process need to get before the industry finally decides enough is enough? When this all began, it was with the justification that it's not about getting the right answer, it's about seeing how you think and approach a problem. Companies don't even pretend this is the case anymore. It's now just expected rote memorization of algorithm p…

I LOLed at your comment!

I still remember a recent interview I had with a team at Amazon.

That team had accomplished NOTHING (and I mean NOTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE) in past 3 years, went through re-orgs and new managers, high attrition, nothing to show for.

Here I am with successful products, published code and a track record of delivering. I have the skills to help them out.

What happens? I get rejected because I didn't remember how to use a comparator in merging k sorted arrays and write that perfect code on a whiteboard.

WTF??!! Did hiring rote memorizers really help that team in Amazon? Why do they not have something productive in 3 years despite having hired experts at tree traversals?

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#88

Post by justboxing »

mkozlows wrote: post #60
justboxing wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been attending a lot of phone screens, and in-person interviews for a Senior Software Engineer ( C# / .Net ) Position. Here's some feedback. YMMV. 1. Don't ask questions that are hard to explain over phone. For instance I was asked if I've used Lambdas in C# and I said, "Yes, extensively.", next question was. "Explain to me what a Lambda is.". I gave the textbook definition for it, and he was expecting more, so…

Take home is great, except people cheat. People even cheat on early screening questions knowing that an interview is coming up. (In a previous role, I gave applicants the same -- very trivial -- question that they had already coded the answer for in a do-at-home screening. I wasn't secretive about this, either, I told them that this is the exact same question they had already answered. A significant percentage of the…

> except people cheat.

I never understood this. In a programming / software development job more than any other job, aren't you very likely to fail at delivering on the job, if you cheat on the interview and tests?

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#89

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #72
blktiger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I'd reject Linus. I wouldn't want to work with someone like him even if he is a well known programmer with leading a well known open source project very successfully. I don't think he'd make a good cultural fit at most of the places I've worked.

I think you missed the point.

[deleted]

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#90

Post by lj3 »

throw401 wrote: post #55

The company I work for has turned into an Agile church. My productivity dropped with more than 50%. Most of my colleagues have left already, now I'm stuck with Agile masters, coaches and all the misery they come up with. I know I need to look for a new job, but I hate the hiring process sooooo much that I keep procrastinating. I'm a senior full-stack, have written loads of production software over 20 years of experie…

Ditto. I'm taking steps to move into the business end of things.
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