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How Effective are Technical Interviews?

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Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#91

Post by narag »

ultrasaurus wrote: post #62
narag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This method has made me remember an old interview (1998) and smile. The interviewer started explaining what I'd be working on. In a few minutes it wasn't an interview anymore, but a free consulting session. He clearly forgot why we were there and even started to take notes! I was offered the job, but later refused because another offer was better.

I love interviews like this. I imagine most people on HN like solving problems and it answers the question "will this person bring anything to the org?"

I forgot to mention that the subject of the conversation was a roadblock that had them totally stuck and I happened to have the right experience. So it wasn't an strategy. They were desperate.

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#93

Post by jpulgarin »

kenjackson wrote: post #90
bconway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Share them, it might make someone feel smart today. ;)

Sure. They really are super simple. FizzBuzz is simple, but my min bar is a question that no one should miss. Even someone with anxiety should get them right. In theory I could see a good dev getting FizzBuzz wrong or getting flustered. Since I use this as an absolute "no hire" bar it has to be pretty low. Count the number of occurrances of the letter 'a' in a string. And I'm upfront that this isn't meant to be a tri…

What language(s)?

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#94

Post by yummyfajitas »

bconway wrote: post #78
kenjackson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this, IMO, is that it is really soft. Some research has shown we make up our minds within the first 10s (or so) of an interview if we like the person. And the rest of the interview justifies this decision. I have to have some "minimum" requirement questions. These are questions that you have to get right . No matter how good I feel about you, I still will no hire you if you get these questions wrong.…

Share them, it might make someone feel smart today. ;)

I've found a very simple question that weeds out about 75% of applicants:

"You have a bunch of objects which have an implicit ordering. You want to insert them into a collection, look them up, and retrieve the smallest/biggest one as quickly as possible."

You'd be amazed at how many people suggest hash tables.

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#95

Post by [deleted] »

kscaldef wrote: post #54
dkarl wrote: post #49

Many technical interviews are very theory-heavy, muddling the divide between Computer Science and Software Engineering. I've been faulted for this in my interviewing, but I think that you have to pose at least one problem that can be explained precisely in less than a minute and solved completely in less than an hour. Such a problem will inevitably have an abstract, theoretical feel. It's also good to ask more realis…

In my experience, people start complaining that an interview is "theory-heavy" at about the point that you expect them to know when and how to use a binary tree. Binary trees are not hard-core CS theory, they are freshman Intro to Data Structures. They are a very basic tool (almost) every programmer should be familiar with. Moreover, when I ask candidates questions about data structures and algorithms, while it's nic…

[deleted]

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#96

Post by mkramlich »

kscaldef wrote: post #54
dkarl wrote: post #49

Many technical interviews are very theory-heavy, muddling the divide between Computer Science and Software Engineering. I've been faulted for this in my interviewing, but I think that you have to pose at least one problem that can be explained precisely in less than a minute and solved completely in less than an hour. Such a problem will inevitably have an abstract, theoretical feel. It's also good to ask more realis…

In my experience, people start complaining that an interview is "theory-heavy" at about the point that you expect them to know when and how to use a binary tree. Binary trees are not hard-core CS theory, they are freshman Intro to Data Structures. They are a very basic tool (almost) every programmer should be familiar with. Moreover, when I ask candidates questions about data structures and algorithms, while it's nic…

Binary trees are also something you will never need to know about in 99.9999% of real world programming situations, especially if you're using a sufficiently high-level language. In the real world, there are thousands of other factors, tasks and considerations on your plate other than having to figure out exactly how to manually create a binary tree or even think about it. It's one tiny thing in a sea of issues. Speaking from 25 years of programming experience here, about half that in industry.

Useful? Yes. Necessary? No. And in the real world, you could just look it up, give yourself a refresher, etc. as needed.

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#97

Post by toumhi »

jcs wrote: post #53
tptacek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have over the last 8 years or so become terrified of interviewing techniques that revolve around having a conversation with a candidate, even (or, in fact especially) directed conversations. Like many others before me, I've discovered that there is a huge gap between the ability to talk intelligently and productively about solving programming problems, and being able to actually solve programming problems. It's fin…

and watch them code something You may find http://www.interviewzen.com/ useful. It's a hiring tool I'm building around the idea that you can tell a lot about someone's coding ability by seeing them in action.

Ha! I had this exact same idea not long ago, that's interesting. Have you talked to (potential) customers? I've had multiple times questions like "what's the advantage over google docs/screen sharing?" (which is free).

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#98

Post by kenjackson »

jpulgarin wrote: post #93
kenjackson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. They really are super simple. FizzBuzz is simple, but my min bar is a question that no one should miss. Even someone with anxiety should get them right. In theory I could see a good dev getting FizzBuzz wrong or getting flustered. Since I use this as an absolute "no hire" bar it has to be pretty low. Count the number of occurrances of the letter 'a' in a string. And I'm upfront that this isn't meant to be a tri…

What language(s)?

When I was interviewing a lot we were using C and C++. Although I can't recall if I specified language.

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#99

Post by kscaldef »

Silhouette wrote: post #48
lsb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like the AJAX web app was designed to test your sense of taste and your ability to get things done, and the Javascript question was to test whether you've ever done anything numerical in JS. ('4'+4)-4 is 40, whereas (4+4)-4 is 4. There are a lot of people who glue a few things together in Javascript and PHP and call it a day, and their filter against those is imperfect. Interviews as a whole are less inform…

> and the Javascript question was to test whether you've ever done anything numerical in JS. It's a lousy test, then. The fact that someone can't tell you the answer to that question, off the top of their head under interview conditions, might mean they are a newbie claiming to know languages they really don't. However, it could also just mean that they have experience with several dynamically typed languages but, si…

> since they would never write something daft like '4'+4

The question is an artificial simplification. They don't care about that literal construct. They care if you know what the + operator does on strings vs. numbers and what the implicit type conversion rules of the language are (and what the resulting 'gotcha' is). No one is worried about you literally writing '4'+4. They are worried about you writing foo + bar and being sloppy about the types of your variables.

Re: How Effective are Technical Interviews?

#100

Post by toumhi »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #94
bconway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Share them, it might make someone feel smart today. ;)

I've found a very simple question that weeds out about 75% of applicants: "You have a bunch of objects which have an implicit ordering. You want to insert them into a collection, look them up, and retrieve the smallest/biggest one as quickly as possible." You'd be amazed at how many people suggest hash tables.

25%?
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