I especially love being asked questions from university CS courses that I completely forgot in the 20 years since I graduated - because they were completely irrelevant in the real world. It's like reliving the exam nightmare throughout your entire life.
Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#22I conduct this style of interviews. It's easy to complain, but much hard to propose better options. Most alternative hiring proposals do not meet the fundamental criteria of Big 4 hiring: they must reject approximately 99% of applicants while consuming an average of two hours of engineer-time per candidate.
In a sense maybe this is how it should be. The interview should reflect the company's culture. The candidate is trying to make a decision just as much as the company is.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#23We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
So your solution is to have people work a second for free with the hope that maybe they'll get a job after a while?
We're still new to this, but we have tried a few interviews where we pay the candidate $80 an hour (~$160k salary annualized). On average, good candidates complete the projects in about 3.3 hours, so that's a ~$270 expense to us, which we've been fine with.
Candidates who did the unpaid version saw the clear value: they invest 3-5 hours once, and potentially cut out 20+ hours of first round interviews, or even all the studying like the OP did.
Nobody that we've tested in the beta complained about a few hours of free "work" - they were actually excited about it.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#24Isn't this obvious blog traffic generation against HN guidelines? I'm flagging it.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#25Absolutely. I've seen companies send an intern to do a technical interview for someone with over 10 years of experience. The intern's feedback was that the guy had a lot of experience, but made some syntactic error on a whiteboard exercise so it was a pass. I don't know who gets to dictate shit like that, but it's absolutely broken. For reference two days later I overheard the same intern saying that JavaScript was f…
Agreed. The best two interviews I've had was one that was similar to your experience. The other was being invited to pair with a team member for an afternoon.
Interviews where people just wait for you to make a mistake should be not a thing anymore.
(Looking at you, Google)
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#26We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
So this is just minor tweaks (not that anonymity is not a bad idea per say) to the already despised status quo.
How is this going to broaden the application pool to include neurodiverse candidates and not just pander to the credentialist notion that rote leaning to get a piece of paper makes you the best candidate.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#27We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
Here is idea for you, aspiring recruiter - you want great engineers to interview? Pay them $150/hour to work on your github repo that you want to use in interview.
Everyone wins - engineers don’t get their time wasted, and interviewing companies are quite interested in not to waste theirs.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#28I actually really like the way that my company does software interviews. We do an initial resume check and screener phone call. After that, we send prospectives a take-home code sample that they can work on. The problems are very small and well-scoped and they can take as long as they want to work on it. We do an initial code review. If we have notes for improvement, we give the candidate feedback and ask if they'd l…
I like that it's transparent, and I've gone through a similar enough process several times, but as much as it gives your company a realistic sense of future performance, I think it's unfair to candidates. One job made me do this with two onsite interviews and then I waited three weeks to hear back. They were comparison shopping during that time, but as a candidate it was stressful.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#29We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
> In that git repo is a project with real code and a few features/bug fixes for you to implement.
Is this from you or from the company? If it’s from you what kind of project is it? Web development? It seems like the technology stacks are so diverse it’s hard to give a coding test that’s applicable to a wide range of companies.
Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?
#30I've been through and used several different styles of interview and the one that stands out as being "the best" at predicting whether a person will fit on the team is just to bring them in and work with them for a day on your actual product
1) You don't do problems you've already solved that they have to come up with same answer to.
2) You don't do algorithm / problem testing that they're never going to use on the job.
3) You don't do whiteboarding except as you would in real life.
Engineering teams are people working collaboratively to solve complicated problems where nobody knows the "right" answer. Any interview that's going to tell you something is going to measure along those metrics, and not "can you invert this b-tree on a whiteboard."