361–370 of 538 posts
Criticism of interview practices is very common. However, I can't imagine that large companies that hire in the hundreds/1000s every year (say, FANG) don't have enough data to have optimized their interview practices. These companies know in the last 10-20 years who interviewed who and the performance of everyone after hiring. With enough data you can: - A/B test which interview questions better predict future perfor…
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>Not according to me, according to many in this thread, in dozens of articles posted on this site, and many more across the industry. Yes, that what said, but I doubt according to the people who do the hiring . It doesn't matter if you think you are right candidate according to you or other people. Ultimately its the people who going to hire you who is going to judge you according to his/her subjective criteria.
Right, but this entire discussion is predicated upon questioning if perhaps the hirers are wrong. Are their interviewing practices serving their organization? A lot of the employers themselves have expressed difficulty at hiring and dissatisfaction with the process. Are they screening for the optimal qualities? There's no shortage of engineering projects that have gone bad. Could that be because the candidates being…
> Four meticulously orchestrated Google interviews could identify successful hires with 86 percent confidence, and nobody at the company—no matter how long they had been at the company or how many candidates they had interviewed—could do any better than the aggregated wisdom of four interviewers.
So it isn't that interviews have zero correlation, it is that they fond no case of a single interviewer being better than the aggregate of four algorithm interviews. And as you see, four algorithm interviews combined have a very high success rate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-sci...
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Honestly, the "coding" is rarely the issue. For most software engineering roles you generally want someone who can: understand problems, figure out possible solutions, decide on which is best, communicate why it is best and (importantly) be flexible when the company wants you to do some other solution. Meet all those requirements and you are a useful member at most companies. I think a general chat about a broad prob…
I completely agree. We had this exact discussion at work the other day. I mentioned to a colleague that what I value most is someone who is creative. There are many candidates out there who know all the buzzwords or can discuss features of a programming language purely from memory, etc. This can make for some impressive interviewing, but it tells nothing of their ability to use that knowledge to solve real problems,…
Criticism of interview practices is very common. However, I can't imagine that large companies that hire in the hundreds/1000s every year (say, FANG) don't have enough data to have optimized their interview practices. These companies know in the last 10-20 years who interviewed who and the performance of everyone after hiring. With enough data you can: - A/B test which interview questions better predict future perfor…
> Four meticulously orchestrated Google interviews could identify successful hires with 86 percent confidence, and nobody at the company—no matter how long they had been at the company or how many candidates they had interviewed—could do any better than the aggregated wisdom of four interviewers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-sci...
I've mentioned this before. I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author. I've written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard). I've writte…
I think the root cause of all interview issues is that interviewers aren't incentivized to care. You're never going to get promoted or even a good performance review for reading a candidate's code or ask them meaningful questions. On the other hand, it takes little effort to pick a couple algo questions and use them for everybody, and they still provide some meaningful signal. With alternative interview methods, apathetic interviewers will just rely on their intuition, which is how a "good ole boy's club" is formed.
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Another perspective to consider as well: while you are spending the time investing into and training people who needs the training and investment, your competitors are throwing money luring away the ones you have already trained, and leaving you in the dust in terms of velocity. Turtles all the way down. Once a game shifts into zero-sum, it's not gonna stop getting played until it collapses. Normally, I would say to…
Or is it? I think this ignores the human psychology factors. Like actually following through with being loyal to employees, training as a benefit etc. Also if you are going to lose employees because you can’t match competitive salaries than i would say you are losing them if all other things are equal. In another words this greatly oversimplified version of events here only allows for you to come to that conclusion a…
This logic is sound, but I don't personally agree that bureaucracy is gonna solve any of our problems.
The rest of your comment, I believe if you spend time reading my OP carefully and spend some time noodling over it then you'd find that all of it had been covered already.
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You’re probably speaking as someone who is not early in their career. But we are talking about junior developers. I’m nowhere near west coast salaries but just big city America salary for context. At my age now in my mid 40s, married, making about the average salary of a top IC in my market, with the big house in the burbs (again not bragging, any developer with 5-10 years of experience could easily afford it), with…
Well, your 12 years my senior so age is something else eh? ;) I started out at 19 working at a FANG (because of privacy and such I don’t want to drop which one) not as an engineer but doing support work. Within a year I got the chance to be a junior engineer no questions asked (basically) because my manager at the time was impressed at my grasp to “get it” when it came to application usability. That is to say I got e…
I’ve worked at smaller companies by choice or at smaller divisions of large companies (occasionally). One developer salary is a major cost and can add to their revenue.
If you only have a few openings, you better make them count.
For instance, I know that some features I designed and developed from the ground up was the difference between us getting a client (B2B) and not getting a client. I also know how much revenue that client added directly to our bottom line. I was what is usually called a Single Responsible Individual. When one hire needs to be that impactful, there is no room for training juniors. All of our local software engineers can point to a feature they spearheaded that added measurably to our revenue.
Now the hard truth is, why hire junior developers locally when you can hire people with much more experience overseas for the same price? I know the stereotype of the crappy outsourced developer, but I haven’t found that to be the case.
Anecdotally, I was lucky enough never to be a junior developer[1], I got my first job out of college with a small company based on an internship the previous year. My first assignment was create a networked data entry system in C that was the basis of a new department that they were starting that allowed them to double in size. But I had been a hobbyist programmer for a decade. By the time I got my next job, I was already considered a mid level developer.
[1] yeah that did hurt me later on. I didn’t get any type of real mentoring and stayed an “expert beginner” for a decade.
When hiring 40+ people for a neo-bank, I did what you should have experienced: listen to people and get to know them.
The key point of success in a team is of course their skill set, but also the potential synergy.
Lots of developers are very bad if not terrible at presenting themselves, be it on a résumé or during an interview. And this has no relation to their actual skills.
So I always try as hard as I can to actually extract information from them.
First, I let them feel at ease, telling them that this is not a challenge but a time to get to know each other (which is actually true).
Then I ask a lot of questions about their experience, both in the technical sense, but also human one.
I try as much as possible to understand how they think and feel, what do they value, aspire to, try to achieve by joining the company.
I’m not a hiring manager but a 15+ yrs of experience developer. Yet, I find that hiring developers by actually being one goes much smoother than when you’re not.
Last but not least, I think that this crazed interviews are becoming more and more common practice because developers agree to pass them.
If you want to change this, then don’t go through them. There are thousands of other great companies that do no torture their candidates.
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I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." Other than asking about failures (not everyone does) it was just "eh, wing it, tell us what you think." The hiring manager had to then weigh the responses and convince his/her manager if it was a go (we once rejected someone on ethical grounds aft…
> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and struct…
Depends what you mean by "use your gut" but that's not my experience. Currently at a well known public tech company in silicon valley and there isn't any standardized interview process. Every interviewer is free to approach it as they wish and the hiring manager gets to listen to all input and decide. This is a strength.
Perhaps (very likely) as a result, this company is also rated highly in diversity.
A standardized interview process will inevitably lead to a standardized employee pool, as only the candidates who fit the very narrow profile (willing to memorize endless algorithms they will never need or use in real life) can get in.
I should add that my current employer is not, in my experience, unusual. In my ~25 years in the valley, it's how it's always been. I have not worked (and never want to) for the companies which value conformity in hiring above all else (infamously, google).
Hiring is broken, but so is all of software as a profession: 1) Terrible Algorithmic interviews, AI-based evaluations, whiteboard coding. 2) Hey you are hired! Now move to $BigCity, with expensive real estate, schools, transit and everything else. 3) So, welcome to the job. You'll be maintaining this shitty old python 2.4 CRUD app that multiple people have tried and failed to upgrade. And one of the web guys wrote hi…