Tech Interview Handbook

I believe that to be an incorrect statement, based on my own experience. I have seen companies hire the wrong people and pay the price.

Every company has a “probation period” usually 3 months where either party can terminate the agreement.

I believe that to be an incorrect statement; while I've always seen probationary periods, in this very set of threads "akelly" says that nobody has probation periods. This evidence suggests that "akelly" has never worked at a company with a probationary period (and has foolishly extended their own personal experience into the universal, but that's a separate mistake).

I would also suggest that there is an opportunity cost attached; if someone is fired at the end of their three or six month probation period, the good candidate that replaces them is six months behind.

Some companies end up with drifting dead wood employees; not fired, just moved around from team to team, department to department, because the company makes firing people harder (or more costly to the manager / team-lead) than moving them. This can go on for years. That seems quite a large cost. I've also seen managers simply sideline bad employees rather than dismissing them, for reasons of company politics and face. I've also seen bad hires get promoted, in cases where promoting someone is easier and less costly (to the relevant team lead or manager) than dismissing them; that can be really damaging.

I'm saying that ALL top 10-20% of CS grads will be able to answer questions at this difficulty level in an interview scenario (accounting for nerves and so on). I'm not limiting it to them (i.e. the "only" quantifier).

I know people in the bottom of CS grads (judging by GPA) that worked remote jobs or worked on personal projects during uni that are very talented and would be able to solve this in less than five minutes. But there are also people that merely "got by".

> I’d guess I was getting a random selection of candidates.

I stand by my opinion that if you were recruiting for a software eng role (and not some random front-end position), then blacklisting anyone who failed this problem would be reasonable.

What you want is very good football (soccer) players. Unfortunately you (or upper management) may not know all of the rules to soccer. You may not know the training regime that goes into winning a good soccer game - and it's a big risk spending money training for the big game on the off-season only to lose during the Big Show. So what do you do to test potential candidates? You see if you can get along with them, if they're a team player, and then see how well they play foosball.

It's perfect! There are soccer players on the field, there's a goal, it takes skill and coordination. But oh no, it turns out in the population at large really good soccer players really sort of suck at foosball. After all, they'd rather spend their time and energy playing soccer. So now they spend all their time reading up on books about foosball and what the best foosball strategies are.

You see where I'm going with this? No one uses algorithms in their day jobs. OK a few of you, but come on man, I make full stack web applications. As do most programmers. So why are you testing theory that has literally nothing to do with the job? Somehow someone thought this was a proxy for smart people, but I mean, if the guy who wrote this "Tech Interview Handbook" was really smart wouldn't he have spent his time writing a cool program? I mean how lame is this?

If you want to hire competent engineers tell them what you're building and ask them how they feel is best for them to show they're competent. If you have a big data pipeline in Scala ask if they can construct a data pipeline example that is cool over a few days (take home) or do something similar in the office. Some people like one, some like the other. But just communicate with the people you want to hire! And if not everyone's interview process is the same then maybe that's ok.

I mean I just got a guy who sent me some automated code interview program that had a timer that counted down from an hour at the top! WHO THINKS TREATING THEIR POTENTIAL EMPLOYEES LIKE STAR WARS DRONES IS A GOOD THING? All you have to do is treat the people you want to work with like you would want to be treated and demand that they know their shit.

This. Isn't. That. Hard.

What I struggle to understand is why this sort of thing still serves as a useful weed-out screen in our industry, even for people whose resumes indicate masters degrees and multiple years of experience in development organizations. But experience shows that there really are people who are ‘faking it’.