Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I performed under pressure.

Having been on both sides of the hiring table now many times, there is only one approach that makes sense to me:

1. Speak to them over the phone to make sure they are decent human being, verify again in person.

2. Be upfront with general compensation ability and expectations so that neither of you waste the others time.

3. Do a pair-programming exercise where they build a small piece of software that mirrors something that would be working on as a day-to-day there. Make it clear that finishing is not important, you just want to see their thought process and how they communicate. Ask them to refactor parts of it at some point to see how coach-able they are and how they respond to criticism.

This strategy has worked exceedingly well for me, and when I was on the other end of the hiring table the companies whose process generally looked like this were great places to work with good people.

Algorithm questions are a hazing ritual, and so many junior devs get sucked into wasting hundreds of hours practicing them when they could be building real-world skills. This practice has got to stop, IMO.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

I expect, though, that the issue is that the degree of correlation measured will depend on the population you're screening with it. If you are wanting to screen out fraudulent or otherwise utterly non-programmer persons, it will show a good correlation. However, among those who are actually programmers, it will show much less correlation, and if you're in a condition of developer scarcity, the false negatives could be more costly than the false positives.

I've had recruiters talk to me at length about each of the people I'd be meeting in the on-site, their backgrounds, what they'd be covering. I've had ones give me broad strokes about why previous candidates were passed on. At the end of the day, it's not in their interest to bring too many people to an on-site who will fail spectacularly, because that means they're not doing their job properly.

I may just be lucky.

Do you even understand what correlation means? There is a significant random element to it, yes, but that doesn't mean that there is no correlation, and the random parts from the same individual can be mitigated by doing many interviews after which you have reasonable correlation. Most interview styles has close to zero correlation, so even if we don't reach anything remotely close to 1 it is still pretty good.

Edit: About the points that it is enough to weed out people using simple problems, that isn't true either. There was significant correlation between job performance and interview performance even among those who did well. The statistics showed no signs of it capping out either, so for all we know we could make them even harder, just that there wouldn't be that many left that could pass them then.