When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling • Hacker News Board

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#571

Post by mancerayder » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #384

droithomme wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to covering all interview expenses such as travel food and lodging, candidates need to be paid for their time interviewing by the companies interviewing them. Six hour take home tests is fine, but I want $1350 for that in advance as a consultation fee, and if I hit 6 hrs and it's not done yet they can keep paying until I am done or we can just end it, no refunds. The idea that I should spend six hours doi…

why are you even interviewing for these "random companies desperate to find anyone qualified" if you are so disgusted by them? The elitism of some engineers is mind boggling, instead of being grateful working in an industry that has so much demand that you can easily find a job at anytime, you complain about the process being insulting to your oh-so-important persona. If i really want to work for a certain company be…

It's good to see a full gamut of opinions on here. I'll say that mentalities like yours are why I'm a contractor in the first place -- you should be grateful for the opportunity, etc and so forth. No. I exchange my time for your money. If that's entitlement to you, we come from opposite worlds.

I'm not the guy who says he should be compensated for take-home tests above. I am however a senior engineer. I'm spurning any long interview processes because they cost money. I don't think it's entitlement, but if that's what you want to call it, so be it. It's called hours worked, hours paid, and in the West it's been a concept since at least the 18th century.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#572

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

darkpicnic wrote: post #533

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

To be honest, I don't think your questions were good enough to filter out the smooth talkers. I was in a senior position at a successful agency and was hired before they changed their interview style to match the eye-rolling "technical interview" that is now gold standard. I repeatedly argued they were getting too many false negatives and only a certain kind of developer with this style, but they believed "if Google…

I gave an example of one of our erstwhile technical interview questions below. Batting around interview questions is a hacker sport and I've met dozens of developers who delighted in relaying and evangelizing their preferred questions. I'll admit, candidly, that "what's your favorite tech stack and what don't you like about it" --- a question you can literally just look up blog posts on, and a question I feel I could answer credibly for several languages/frameworks I don't even know --- is a uniquely bad one. But even if I felt it was a good one, I wouldn't trust it. Interview questions don't work.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#573

Post by YawningAngel » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

sethammons wrote: post #486

swish_bob wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends how far back you're starting from. I suspect most Java developers don't spend that much time creating projects from scratch (I do, but the work environments I'm used to suggest I'm an outlier). I tend to give candidates a simple project already to go, with junit and hamcrest, possibly mockito already available, and ask them to go from there using a provided IDE (which I attempt to get set up as nea…

It starts from scratch. Familiarity with one's tooling is important. Setting up a project seems like it should be part of the basics. Would it not be unfair to others who choose a different language if Java gets hand holding in terms of initial classes? For 20% of Java candidates, they do it just fine. Heck, a few echew the IDE and are fine working completely from the terminal (these tend to be particularly very soli…

Do you give them "their" tooling? I can set up a project of the type you describe in about five seconds, because I have a template for it in my IDE. The best defaults for this that I've seen are provided by IntelliJ (do you provide this in interviews? It seems legally challenging to do) and would probably take me 5-10 minutes to navigate.

I think Java depends much more heavily on powerful tooling to do the heavy lifting, and my experience of using that tooling when I haven't had a chance to configure it in advance has been pretty miserable.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#574

Post by C4stor » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #543

darkpicnic wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't think your questions were good enough to filter out the smooth talkers. I was in a senior position at a successful agency and was hired before they changed their interview style to match the eye-rolling "technical interview" that is now gold standard. I repeatedly argued they were getting too many false negatives and only a certain kind of developer with this style, but they believed "if Google…

Does it have to crawl the whole internet or can it just scrape the top 5 or so most important sites?

Please define what is "the internet" first ^^

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#575

Post by C1sc0cat » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

C4stor wrote: post #574

jimmaswell wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have to crawl the whole internet or can it just scrape the top 5 or so most important sites?

Please define what is "the internet" first ^^

Define if you mean "an internet" or "the Internet" before that :-)

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#576

Post by darkpicnic » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #572

darkpicnic wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't think your questions were good enough to filter out the smooth talkers. I was in a senior position at a successful agency and was hired before they changed their interview style to match the eye-rolling "technical interview" that is now gold standard. I repeatedly argued they were getting too many false negatives and only a certain kind of developer with this style, but they believed "if Google…

I gave an example of one of our erstwhile technical interview questions below. Batting around interview questions is a hacker sport and I've met dozens of developers who delighted in relaying and evangelizing their preferred questions. I'll admit, candidly, that "what's your favorite tech stack and what don't you like about it" --- a question you can literally just look up blog posts on, and a question I feel I could…

"a question you can literally just look up blog posts on, and a question I feel I could answer credibly for several languages/frameworks I don't even know"

Really? You mean you could memorize a blog post for random languages, go into an interview and answer a question and not completely fall apart from follow up question 1, 2, n?...

You make it sound like I'm asking this question, getting a monologue response and just moving on. These questions facilitate a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee, which quickly reveals your deeper understanding of a subject.

Now, I think your above approach (lookup, memorize, pretend) works great for the kind of technical interview questions that I've been refuting this whole time.

Finally, I don't think my questions are perfect, nor do I think the interview process in general is that great. I think the best way to find talent is to do a trial run for 1 - 2 weeks and see how good they are at taking fuzzy problems and breaking them down into actionable steps, then executing. This is regrettably hard to do for most people and companies.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#577

Post by AnaniasAnanas » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

aczerepinski wrote: post #505

C1sc0cat wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS is not programming just like 99% of musicians don't have music theory degree.

It's probably a great analogy because the best musicians all know basic music theory, whether they learned it in school or on the bandstand. As for the advanced theory that they teach in graduate programs, it isn't even applicable to most genres of music.

> the best musicians all know basic music theory

Do you have any evidence for such a bold claim or is this just speculation?

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#578

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #334

Aeolun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I had a sample test that I had to do after first being met on-site, which I thought was great. Then they said my work sample was amazing, and they’d like to do an on-site Q&A about it, but when I arrived the engineer hadn’t even seen my work, and proceeded to just quiz me on obscure JS trivia. Which I promptly failed. They then rejected me even though they were happy about my work :/

In addition to covering all interview expenses such as travel food and lodging, candidates need to be paid for their time interviewing by the companies interviewing them. Six hour take home tests is fine, but I want $1350 for that in advance as a consultation fee, and if I hit 6 hrs and it's not done yet they can keep paying until I am done or we can just end it, no refunds. The idea that I should spend six hours doi…

This is pretty silly. Candidates routinely spend integer multiples of six hours running interview gauntlets for tech companies that are notorious for negging candidates. None of them expect to get paid for interviewing. An at-home work sample challenge is strictly less onerous than an interview gauntlet, but because it has the appearance of something people have heard other people get paid for, it's commonly suggested that they should be paid, too.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#579

Post by itronitron » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #523

Ntrails wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge gulf between being able to follow a thought path and being able to find it oneself. I couldn't do the same work in the same timescale as them, I wouldn't make the same decisions or spot the same pitfalls. I am simply not as good. But I spent a bunch of pub/work time discussing it and could project an aura of authority on the projects if I wished. Look at it this way. I was able to understand all of th…

Yeah, that's a great analogy for the core problem. Imagine putting a math problem in front of someone and asking them to solve it. They correctly identify it as a system of linear equations. They volunteer that they would solve it using x algorithm which has a time complexity of y . Then you ask them to actually solve it, and they can't even make the first movement towards doing so. They mentioned LU decomposition, b…

so for data scientists I guess you could ask them to hand calculate the variance and standard deviation for a sample and see how they do on that

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#580

Post by WWLink » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

sheikheddy wrote: post #544

throwawaymath wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, let me give a specific example. Imagine you're interviewing a candidate and they're talking through how to design an analytics service. They begin talking about e.g. database architecture, and how this type of data is most appropriate for a star schema. They start talking about the tradeoffs of row versus column orientation. They mention they'll need to do indexing for performance and talk about the index space v…

Wow, I feel like I'm the sort of person this comment is calling out. What advice would you give me so I can be the real McCoy? The only solution I can think of is to keep writing as much code as I can, so I can get real experience instead of just hot air.

Turn off your internet when doing work. Buy a stack of Postgre books. Memorize them. Never, ever, ever use stack overflow. EVER. Don't use google. Memorize everything.

That's what that asshole is looking for. :)

Though to be fair, if you come up with that strategy and can't do -anything- at a sql console, I'm going to ask how you normally interface with the database, because that's like a Linux expert not knowing how to use tar or ls or something.