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Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

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Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#231

Post by mcv »

MattHeard wrote: post #194
ghaff wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, just because you can bang out something in an hour or two doesn't mean that you will spend only an hour or two when you know you'll be competing against people who put a lot of effort into the task. In my case, I do a lot of writing these days and, if someone were to ask me to write a thousand word analysis on some topic I was familiar with, I certainly could knock that off in a few hours. But, assuming…

Given that job searching is often a numbers game, a one-hour homework assignment is a lot of work when multiplied over dozens (or 100+) applications.

That's why it shouldn't be the first step of the interview process, but it's totally fine as the last step. When the hiring party thinks: "we want this candidate if they're as good as they seem to be", then it's a good time to have a look at their code.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#232

Post by ghaff »

elbrian wrote: post #167
scarejunba wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Would you mind sharing in which country you work (or if America, which state), what your field of interest is, and how long you've been in the business? My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this.

>My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this. Anyone with any level of self-confidence, worth and respect.

I don't know if people are getting hung up on the term "full day" but I'm not sure I've ever heard of people being hired for senior (or even not so senior) professional roles without having multiple in-person interviews.

I suppose there are distributed companies that just do things over video link these days (and I've interviewed people over a video link when necessitated by travel schedules or people being in different locations). But some number of in-person interviews over the course of 4 or 5 hours is absolutely standard in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#233

Post by lawnchair_larry »

chillacy wrote: post #53
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends how you do it. When I interview, part of what I do is try to find quirks that they know about, but not count the ones they don’t know about against them. I think you can quickly get a sense of depth, potential, curiosity, and passion if you can get them talking about quirks and their opinions on those quirks. For example, if someone says that they once attached a debugger to the JVM to confirm a pa…

How has that been working out for you? I used to think the same and I'd ask a "programming passion question" right before a simple coding question, and then I'd run into these amazing bullshitters who could talk shop but couldn't write fizzbuzz. But they'd come up with a bunch of excuses as they were writing the code as to why ("oh my company uses this other framework so I forgot how to write a for loop"). So sadly I…

Nobody who can go into that level of detail doesn’t know what a for loop is.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#234

Post by mcv »

sandos wrote: post #178
scarejunba wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Would you mind sharing in which country you work (or if America, which state), what your field of interest is, and how long you've been in the business? My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this.

Wow. I live in Sweden, and I have the same expectations: I would not really want to spend much time on an interview process, and I have never, ever heard of day-long interviews either! We have had a perpetual shortage of developers though, it sounds much harder to land a job in the US.

Netherland here. Interviews take an hour. I don't think I've ever had a full-day interview, though I may have had two interviews in a row. Not sure if they were two half-hour or two full-hour interviews. I have had an on-site assessment of some sort many years ago. Didn't like it much.

I'd much rather do a take-home test than spend a full day getting grilled in interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#235

Post by luord »

The best interview process I've read about is the one detailed here: http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/05/27/a-different-kind...

And sadly I haven't once seen it in action. I really wish I could go through such process, or implementing it in whatever company I work at (or create).

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#236

Post by logfromblammo »

mchannon wrote: post #130
kstenerud wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what interview process tasks are acceptable to you in order to gauge your ability?

Resume review, Phone screen (30 min), on-site (less than 2 hours), probationary period. Everything else is simply busy work for all parties because it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know, plus it scares away quality candidates.

Seconding this. Read the candidate's actual resume, spend 30 minutes trying to suss out any deception on it, then a couple of hours trying to gauge compatibility, and also sell the candidate on working for you.

You don't even really need a probationary period in an "at will" state.

At some point, you either trust the credentials from universities and certification bodies, and take what the resume says at face value, or you have to try to reinvent some wheels, and re-discover that eliminating the phonies and mimics is a very difficult problem that even the experts can't solve entirely.

I don't know what the conversion factor is between running a fruitless job search filled with cargo-culted bozo tasks, and just randomly picking the first vaguely suitable candidate off the stack and letting them run for a few months, but I suspect that filling the position quickly and painlessly is probably worth about one month of having a 0%ile employee, or six months of a 20%ile, or keeping a 40%ile employee until they retire. This rests on the presumption that some work done right now is worth more than the same amount done some time in the future, and that higher %ile-ranked candidates will be less tolerant of any stupid hiring games.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#237

Post by mcv »

ghaff wrote: post #232
elbrian wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My team has full-day interviews and I'm curious to see who has been self-selecting out of this. Anyone with any level of self-confidence, worth and respect.

I don't know if people are getting hung up on the term "full day" but I'm not sure I've ever heard of people being hired for senior (or even not so senior) professional roles without having multiple in-person interviews. I suppose there are distributed companies that just do things over video link these days (and I've interviewed people over a video link when necessitated by travel schedules or people being in differ…

I'm a freelancer, so that's a bit different, but I admit I'm surprised at how brief and superficial the intake to hire me usually is.

For permanent jobs, it's usually an hour long interview followed by a programming assessment; either take-home and then presenting to their developers, or codility. But for freelance work, none of that. Just a talk and they hire me. But of course if I turn out to be useless, a freelancer is easy to fire.

(I don't like video interviews much.)

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#238

Post by mcv »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #99
chrisseaton wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With this approach you'll miss good senior people Aren't you already spending many hours researching a job as the part of the process? Aren't you already taking a full day off work for the interviews? Why is that time all fine to spend, but not fine to spend a couple of hours on doing an assignment?

That's only at a later stage when you get an interview - with a company that looks good. Coding tests are just an early stage filter for experienced people - so those companies get dropped early on.

I have the exact opposite opinion: a coding test is for a candidate you already want to hire and introduce to your development team, to have a look at their coding style.

You don't want to get your developers together for any random loser who'd never want in your team anyway. So the coding is a late stage filter.

At least for me it's always been.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#239

Post by pytester »

luord wrote: post #235

The best interview process I've read about is the one detailed here: http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/05/27/a-different-kind... And sadly I haven't once seen it in action. I really wish I could go through such process, or implementing it in whatever company I work at (or create).

I've set tests more or less like this in the past and I took one just the other day.

It's actually kind of interesting doing this from the hiring side because it became evident that there are a lot of relative "bargains" out there - excellent developers who do poorly in whiteboarding and chatty interviews so have lowered salary expectations but who are nonetheless very good at their actual job.

Re: Ask HN: What should an ideal developer interview process look like?

#240

Post by linsomniac »

I can tell you was a non-ideal interview process looks like from the "coding challenge" POV. I had one company pose a "dev challenge" of taking a multi-million row public sample data set and the goal was to generate a report from it. This was for an operations job "but everyone has to take the dev challenge".

Part of the problem I had with this was that I didn't feel like it was even a dev challenge. I've hand coded reports before and that has always led to a world of pain. I also felt like it was a data sciences challenge, not a dev challenge, and my data science is really rusty.

I spent most of the 1-4 hours they said most people complete it in, just thinking about the problem. "If I had to solve this problem in my company, first thing I'd do is look at Crystal Reports. The last thing I'd do is open a file and type "import sqlalchemy"."

I set up a repo that did all the operations stuff (remember, it was a Ops job I was applying for), and put together deployment parts to set up a test system and load the data into the database, configure everything, etc...

A few weeks later I finally got the parts all to work and was able to solve the problem in an 80x25 screen worth of SQL. I suspect I was the only applicant that solved it in SQL.

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