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Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

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Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#81

Post by kwillets »

milesvp wrote: post #51
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encounter people who can make pleasant conversation about programming all day... but literally can’t seem to actually program in practice. Do you see that? How does your interview check for that?

My experience has been that devs who struggle, will struggle with a simple for loop. This seems consistent with what I've heard from an Amazon bar raiser and the existence of fizz buzz. I'd be reluctant to give up this one sanity check of asking in real time a for loop question for whiteboard, or paper, psuedo code prefferably.

At one point for phone screens, I just asked people to code up strcmp. I got some amazingly bad answers.

Some of this code-screen mistrust seems to come from the flood of poorly-qualified candidates; maybe there's a more diverse pool than before, but it comes at the cost of lots of wannabes.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#82

Post by urahara »

rootusrootus wrote: post #80
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encounter people who can make pleasant conversation about programming all day... but literally can’t seem to actually program in practice. Do you see that? How does your interview check for that?

I have not yet run into anyone who could deep-dive into the details of what they're working on and talk about the good, bad, and ugly, who turned out to be incapable of coding. Maybe I've been lucky, but I think it's pretty hard to fake that level of knowledge. For remote developers I do deviate slightly and I actually ask them to do a little coding, but that's because it's always someone in Hyderabad and the cultura…

Great approach! What you describe is pretty close to my understanding of what a good hiring process should be like.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#83

Post by sheeshkebab »

These two below resonate after hiring dozens of engineers:

> – What kind of quality work does this person produce in a normal work environment where someone isn’t breathing down their neck?

> – Can I work with this person on projects that span weeks, months, or years?

No matter how well they anwser questions, how they whiteboard, how high is their IQ, or how well they do homework - none of it would tell you anything about their work quality or actual on the job performance.

Just ask them a for loop question and give them a contract to work on something. If it works, maybe hire them.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#84

Post by tchaffee »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #72
tchaffee wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no right way to do software interviews. In the context you presented this in, I agree with you. However, interviewing is a skill that must be learned or you are going to make loads of beginner mistakes. In that sense there are many right things you should be doing in an interview and whatever your company style is, you're going to want to use at least some of those best practices in your interviews if you…

Isn't this true for anything though? More experience = better (on average). In theory there is an optima between a new hires ideal workplace and the hiring company's style of work. As with most things it's about knowing yourself and identifying in others if there is a match.

Sure it's true for anything. Which is why it's surprising when 95% of the engineering interviews you go on the interviewer doesn't have even a remote clue about interviewing best practices. Which is also why you get so many whiteboard coding interviews. "That's what happened to me once in an interview, so I'll just do the same thing".

It's the very reason I mentioned it. Too many people haven't figured out the very obvious fix: get some training in how to interview!

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#85

Post by ghthor »

naturalgradient wrote: post #43
slap_shot wrote: post #7

We 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…

Love this, although not living in that area. Just to chime in: I'm a PhD student in CS/machine learning with a competitive enough CV to interview anywhere, and I have gone through the motions at many companies previously (e.g. for interning), and there is nothing I hate more than coding interviews. It literally makes me hate companies, it turns me off from interviewing at a place, and it makes me deeply resent them e…

I think you need to grow up some and experience this from the other side. In the past I've felt the same kind of contempt for this process, but after having experienced being on the other side I respect the difficulty in identifying(accuratly) good candidates.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#86

Post by d0paware »

tchaffee wrote: post #65

I would like to offer a partial list of practical ways to make software engineering interviews better. 1. As a candidate, if you are in a strong enough position to refuse the job, then refuse to do white board exercises with no resources. No one codes like this in real life so refuse to do it in an interview. Be willing to walk out. I just say "I'm a good programmer and your interview process is broken. If you want t…

Really good points here, especially #3. In the past, we've looked at all the candidates we hired who turned out to be high performers (gets stuff done in a timely manner, writes tests, pushes back against unreasonable deadlines, doesn't require too much hand-holding) and looked at how they scored on the rubrics / and who was interviewing them. We have even been able to tell whose hires have been relatively not so great, but this takes earliest 4 months and usually up to 6 or 8 months to figure out.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#87

Post by d0paware »

fdw wrote: post #58

I'm getting a bit frustrated with the talk about interviews, as we repeat the basic message every now and then, but nothing changes. I feel we all agree that the current status quo is not good, but so far there has not been any good alternative: - Whiteboards are unnatural. Besides, you don't want to check their knowledge of university-grade algorithms or data structures. - Problems to take home are an artificial set…

> - Not doing any coding opens you up for people who can talk, but not code.

I think candidates should definitely code at least fizz buzz or something as a sanity check. It probably shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

> - Problems to take home are an artificial setting

How do you feel about potential solutions I have mentioned in the post, e.g. exposing the candidate to a project during the on-site for 3 or 4 hours?

I'm also not a huge fan of take home projects unless they can for sure be time-boxed to be less than 4 hours, and it would be ideal if you actually got paid for the 4 hours of time.

> - On the other hand, if you're using real code from your project, you're just asking for unpaid work. And paying every candidate is a significant expense.

Paying every candidate is an expense, but is it less expensive than hiring the wrong candidate and then needing to fire them? It seems like other comments here have already pointed out that they pay something like 160k annualized salary hourly rate, which seems pretty reasonable.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#88

Post by d0paware »

kwillets wrote: post #2

It's entirely bullshit, and I regret being on both sides. I used to do coding screens, but I feel like some moderate knowledge of syntax and a decent education is enough to skip the rest. The whole cargo cult of coding screens came up during the 00's when Google made it look important, and you're correct that it's largely an exercise to convince the team that they're special. Software engineering is the science of av…

Do any of the solutions I've personally suggested or mentioned here in this thread seem reasonable to you though? I was hoping we could at least talk about trade offs or pitfalls of various things people have suggested.

I feel like maybe I screwed up here with the thread since it got flagged early on for having Ask HN in it, and people responded with a knee-jerk reaction going straight to the comments section. Not sure if it's possible to get a mod to rename this and remove the Ask HN, I originally tried to paste in my content directly into the self-post textbox but 9k chars exceeded 2k chars.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#89

Post by naturalgradient »

ghthor wrote: post #85
naturalgradient wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love this, although not living in that area. Just to chime in: I'm a PhD student in CS/machine learning with a competitive enough CV to interview anywhere, and I have gone through the motions at many companies previously (e.g. for interning), and there is nothing I hate more than coding interviews. It literally makes me hate companies, it turns me off from interviewing at a place, and it makes me deeply resent them e…

I think you need to grow up some and experience this from the other side. In the past I've felt the same kind of contempt for this process, but after having experienced being on the other side I respect the difficulty in identifying(accuratly) good candidates.

Honestly I don't think I need to do, I have interviewed many people for doing very code heavy research projects and not once have I felt asking them to do a white-board code exercise would have contributed to my evaluation meaningfully.

Re: Ask HN: Should we change the way we do software interviews? What's stopping us?

#90

Post by d0paware »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #83

These two below resonate after hiring dozens of engineers: > – What kind of quality work does this person produce in a normal work environment where someone isn’t breathing down their neck? > – Can I work with this person on projects that span weeks, months, or years? No matter how well they anwser questions, how they whiteboard, how high is their IQ, or how well they do homework - none of it would tell you anything…

Interesting, have you had success with this approach? I might imagine there could be some stigma associated with this since why waste time if there's no guarantee of full time employment?

In California, it is at will employment anyway but I get the feeling that contractors are easier to fire than employees. Correct me if I am wrong.

On the other hand, candidates who are actually good will do very well and get through without any problems. I feel like it would take at least 2 to 3 weeks to find red flags, then at least 3 months to determine if someone is a superstar, and at least 6 months for everyone else to shine through.

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