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A hiring test I'd like to run

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Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#91

Post by bduerst »

avip wrote: post #53
ditonal wrote: post #25

I interviewed at Twilio. My resume and phone chats made it abundantly clear that my professional experience was 95% backend in languages like Java and Go. I looked at their Glassdoor where people wrote they were heavily biased to the algorithm type questions, for better or worse. In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, wit…

I don't do much hiring, but when I do I make an active effort to avoid reading candidates resumes. I've found it's not possible for me to enter an interview with an unbiased mind having read a resume.

You're being downvoted but I've had the same experience as well. They bias interviews that are supposed to be performance based.

Resumes are a carefully crafted signal paper targeted at getting past an algorithm, recruiter, and into an interview. They're chock full of brand names (both education and company) and keywords. There's also unconcious bias based on the person's last name, locations that they've lived in the past, and so on.

I've found the best thing to do is skim their past job roles, to set expectations for where you can start with the level of difficulty in questions.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#92

Post by codyb »

ScottFree wrote: post #72
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I'm very comfortable in JS, valilla, jquery, react and vue. And apparently my customers think I do a decent freelancer work since they keep hiring me back. And yet, an entire SPA in vanilla JS in 50 minutes seems a lot to me. I guess it depends of the size of the SPA, but user input + rendering + routing + whatever logic they ask you for the app is a lot of work. I guess it depends a lot of the requirem…

I've done a similar test. I didn't finish it in the time allotted, but a few other candidates did and they hired one of them. The fact companies can do these kinds of demanding frontend tests and still hire people is what makes me think there's a glut of web developers and not a shortage like people keep saying.

I had an onsite recently that told me were were going to be building something that had to interact with a postgres database.

I built out the entire backend prior and took copious notes because getting stuck looking up things like “how do I initialize a postgresdb” (something I do maybe once a year, if ever) would eat up time.

I think I did pretty well at that onsite because of the fact that I prepped before hand and they didn’t seem to mind that.

It’s weird to me because in general most engineers are rarely if ever creating an entire stack from scratch and it can be very easy to want to do such a thing methodically and with best practices in mind.

How would I enable hot code reloading? How do I set up PostGres so I’m not just connecting as super user which is obviously a security risk? Etc etc.

To be able to do these tasks under pressure with an engineers mindset is tough and you either have to really drill down and focus and stress that in a real setting you wouldn’t be connecting as superuser but for the sake of time in this particular toy exercise you will be.

Being able to prep was essential, and even so, I still stumbled here and there with unfamiliar syntax.

Interviewing is not a solved problem.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#93

Post by bduerst »

tristor wrote: post #79
avip wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rude. People put lots of effort into resumes. But it's ruder to reject a candidate based on age, gender, martial status, education or lack thereof or doing non sw jobs in the past. I always talk on the phone before and that's where we both make sure the interview is of relevance.

If you can't read someone's resume without rejecting them based on age, gender, marital status, education or lack thereof, or for their non-sw work history, then it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates. The concept of "unconscious bias" might be true in an academic sense, but in a very real way you should be treating people with respect regardless of their characteristics, especiall…

Being cognizant of unconscious bias doesn't make someone a bad interviewer, in fact, it makes for the opposite.

It sounds like you've had some combative interviews in the past (it sucks - I've had them too) but that's not the same as being aware of biases.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#94

Post by codyb »

reallydontask wrote: post #54
ses1984 wrote: post #19

Some of the tests in my current company work like this. We don't expect you to have everything memorized. We give you a problem and then say, "feel free to use any reference you want, help, man pages, google, stack overflow, whatever." Some people still stubbornly refuse to look for help. Some people act on the first google search result even though it's obviously wrong. Some people don't know how to read a man page.…

> Some people still stubbornly refuse to look for help. The thing is that some people might feel that they will get assessed lower if they look for help rather than come up or even luck into a solution. Despite making it abundantly clear to candidates that they should take the test(s) as a pair programming sessions, we had candidates struggle with some basic stuff and not ask questions. They just kept trying things w…

One thing I’ve had help melt the pressure on both sides of the table is a laugh. I’m fortunate enough to be able to sort of slice through tension and get a rise out of most people.

Stressing exactly what you’re looking for, that you’re not perfect either, that there’s no one solution, and letting them know things can be collaborative has been helpful too.

Let’s ping pong off each other and see where we get, I mean that’s what we’d be doing in the day to day right?

To this end I’ve sat down and added new questions to the interview guides at my previous position because I was concerned that any person asking the same question over and over again would really start to be biased towards some sort of “ideal” solution.

But there’s really nothing like a good laugh to put people at ease.

After one interview I mentioned that I felt I did a good job of interviewing because I could usually help relax the tensions which generally gets the best out of people and someone said that they didn’t think they’d ever gotten a laugh out of someone during an interview.

That’s a bit too serious for me.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#95

Post by foota »

athenot wrote: post #65
shantly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, without the use of any framework, just vanilla JS. > I was allowed to Google whatever but 50 minutes is still a crazy time crunch to figure out a lot of the stuff that needed to be figured out. This actually might not be so nuts if it were clearly a way to evaluate how you handle u…

> This actually might not be so nuts if it were clearly a way to evaluate how you handle unfamiliar problems and they made it clear they didn't really expect you to finish the whole thing in 50 minutes, I guess. This happened to me. I once interviewed at a place where they presented me with a language I had never seen. Very different concepts than your typical C/Algol flavored languages. They went over the basic conc…

Man, this reminds me of the story about the person that gets a position at a new company and it turns out they have a ridiculous tech stack where it's a custom language. The new person comes in and adds comments which breaks everything and somehow files have like a version history which affects how they run? Anyone have the link to that? There's some individual that developed all of it and gets the new person fired for breaking everything in production (because of course it all runs from head) and was portrayed very negatively.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#96

Post by avip »

tristor wrote: post #79
avip wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rude. People put lots of effort into resumes. But it's ruder to reject a candidate based on age, gender, martial status, education or lack thereof or doing non sw jobs in the past. I always talk on the phone before and that's where we both make sure the interview is of relevance.

If you can't read someone's resume without rejecting them based on age, gender, marital status, education or lack thereof, or for their non-sw work history, then it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates. The concept of "unconscious bias" might be true in an academic sense, but in a very real way you should be treating people with respect regardless of their characteristics, especiall…

>it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates

We agree on that one, but the alternatives are worse. Would you like to take my place interviewing? It's a time consuming task I'd love to delegate to someone more experienced.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#97

Post by clusmore »

foota wrote: post #95
athenot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This actually might not be so nuts if it were clearly a way to evaluate how you handle unfamiliar problems and they made it clear they didn't really expect you to finish the whole thing in 50 minutes, I guess. This happened to me. I once interviewed at a place where they presented me with a language I had never seen. Very different concepts than your typical C/Algol flavored languages. They went over the basic conc…

Man, this reminds me of the story about the person that gets a position at a new company and it turns out they have a ridiculous tech stack where it's a custom language. The new person comes in and adds comments which breaks everything and somehow files have like a version history which affects how they run? Anyone have the link to that? There's some individual that developed all of it and gets the new person fired f…

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#98

Post by tristor »

bduerst wrote: post #93
tristor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't read someone's resume without rejecting them based on age, gender, marital status, education or lack thereof, or for their non-sw work history, then it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates. The concept of "unconscious bias" might be true in an academic sense, but in a very real way you should be treating people with respect regardless of their characteristics, especiall…

Being cognizant of unconscious bias doesn't make someone a bad interviewer, in fact, it makes for the opposite. It sounds like you've had some combative interviews in the past (it sucks - I've had them too) but that's not the same as being aware of biases.

There's a difference between being cognizant of unconscious bias and being disrespectful to your candidate. I am cognizant of unconscious bias, so cognizant that I know it plays a much smaller role in biased outcomes than conscious intended bias. I read candidate resumes and I treat candidates with respect.

The parent is disrespectful to the candidates they interview and I am being charitable in taking their explanation about bias at face value.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#99

Post by city41 »

At my previous company, the technical interview was 2 hours long. The candidate was given a choice of about 10 very small, simple projects. Then we sat at a pairing station and paired on the problem. The candidate can use google, their favorite editor, write tests, anything they want. The goal is not to finish the project, but just code with them for 2 hours. It's the best technical assessment I've yet seen in an interview setting.

One caveat is this company really believed in pair programming, and virtually all code was created in pairs. So that's part of why this interview approach worked.

Re: A hiring test I'd like to run

#100

Post by badfrog »

ScottFree wrote: post #72
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I'm very comfortable in JS, valilla, jquery, react and vue. And apparently my customers think I do a decent freelancer work since they keep hiring me back. And yet, an entire SPA in vanilla JS in 50 minutes seems a lot to me. I guess it depends of the size of the SPA, but user input + rendering + routing + whatever logic they ask you for the app is a lot of work. I guess it depends a lot of the requirem…

I've done a similar test. I didn't finish it in the time allotted, but a few other candidates did and they hired one of them. The fact companies can do these kinds of demanding frontend tests and still hire people is what makes me think there's a glut of web developers and not a shortage like people keep saying.

I think the shortage is _good_ web developers, and it sounds like this test doesn't really help identify those.
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