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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#381

Post by tchaffee »

smashface wrote: post #316

A thought I had recently was to shift from having candidates write code to have them review code. I'm sure it's not an original thought, but it comes with a few advantages. 1. Reading someone else's code is usually harder than writing your own and in most projects you spend more time reading code. You're seeing how they'd handle the more common work. 2. You can still pick how deep you want to go in the interview. Lik…

Some of the very productive developers I have worked with are not great at code reviews. It's a different skill from writing code and not everyone who is good at coding is good at reviewing other people's code.

Considering most of us spend about 90% of our time coding and a very small amount of time doing code reviews, your best signal in my experience is just giving candidates something to code.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#382

Post by danjac »

rocqua wrote: post #376
bananaface wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just look at their GitHub and if it looks good, dive in at the interview to make sure they actually wrote the code. Isolated take-home tests seem ridiculous to me if the candidate has public code available. You're filtering out anyone who likes to avoid duplicated effort.

Requiring github as a CV is worse from the POV of not forcing people to spend a lot of time outside work programming. Not everyone has the inclination or time to code outside of work. Many of these people are still very competent developers.

If a person has some interesting Github activity (that they can back up) I would certainly discuss it with them. If I'm hiring for a Django developer and the candidate has contributed to the Django core or a related library, that would be a strong signal - but it should not be a requirement. A strong candidate is typically a mixture of good work history, side projects, hobbies and interests, personality and other things that indicate they would be a good fit for your team. How much and in what way depends on the job and the person. Maybe the startup company needs a person who does lots of side projects, builds stuff on their own etc because you need self-starters that don't require lots of hand holding and are ready to take the initiative to learn. On the other hand your 1000-strong engineering subdivision at big corp needs more heads-down 9-5ers who just produce reliable output. Maybe the things you ask a junior dev out of college are different to what you would ask a mid-career developer. There's no one size fits all approach that people seem to be looking for.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#383

Post by tchaffee »

usgroup wrote: post #252

It’s a funny cultural thing. Here is a caricature: Hiring managers have a real problem to solve: “how do I hire?”. They don’t have the time to conduct actual experiments and work out what actually relates to better hiring. So they trivialise the solution into some assumption about how the information captured in an interview generalises to overall suitability. They then proceed to defend the process and it’s results…

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation

That sounds at the least unethical and perhaps illegal in some countries. You're messing with people's lives, their ability to pay their mortgages, support their children, and other commitments they might have. While hiring mistakes sometimes happen, you should not be using firing as a tool to make your hiring more cost effective.

And I also think word would get around pretty quickly not to apply to companies who did this. Per the article we are already making lists of who uses ineffective whiteboard tests. I very much doubt any company wants to be on the list of "hires you and then fires you instead of doing effective interviews".

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#384

Post by autarch »

learc83 wrote: post #286
autarch wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can add a lot of overhead, and some candidates may have jobs that forbid them from accepting outside work. A good middle ground would be to have the company make a donation to the candidate's choice of nonprofit.

>This can add a lot of overhead, and some candidates may have jobs that forbid them from accepting outside work How is this enforceable? Even in the case that someone finds out about it, what’s the company going to do? Sue the interviewing company for the rights to a few hours of work?

Well, if the employer finds out you violated your employment contract in this manner they could sue you, or perhaps even the other party that paid you. But IANAL, I'm just saying that contracts forbidding side jobs are not unheard of.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#385

Post by perl4ever »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #357
perl4ever wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a point that many others have made, and it makes me unhappy to see it yet again. What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority. Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive…

Hmmm; I feel you are making some interesting and valid points, and I would like to engage in a conversation; but I am (genuinely) having trouble articulating/parsing what they are. I don't know if you are trying to be diplomatic if the message may not be politically correct, or are the key points very generalized and lean more toward implication/insinuation; or whether it's a philosophy-textbook-style language and I…

>trying to be diplomatic if the message may not be politically correct

Not exactly; whether my message is politically correct depends on how you generalize it and what groups you apply it to.

You could use it selectively in other contexts and demonstrate either a left or right wing allegiance, but right here and now, I'm talking about people suited to whiteboarding vs. take home tests as the groups.

>that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible

It's what we've got though, and always have. In your words, "the underlying...reality". Of course we agree things can be improved somehow. I think hiring should be more inclusive, and I think most people would at least give lip service to that.

But if different people are always going to be different, then a hypothetical convergence on a single "fair" standard means telling some fraction of the population they have no place in society at all.

Eliminating whiteboarding, strictly speaking, seems reasonable to object to. It would be unfairly discriminatory. But wanting that to be the only standard also is an extremist position.

If you want to draw a more general opinion out of what I wrote, one of the things on my mind is the general scourge of optimization by tech people who assume the solution to anything is to find the one best answer based on some metric.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#387

Post by jnwatson »

azangru wrote: post #325
underwater wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how take home interviews are being held up as a better solution. They have two major flaws: They lower the cost for the company to zero. So they can widen their pool, and take a chance on more candidates, with no extra cost incurred for them. If you take this to the extreme – every company asking every candidate to complete a take home – then the result is far worse for candidates. There is no feed…

> I can say "you shouldn't spend more than two hours on this" until I'm blue in the face, but candidates think they need to polish far beyond what is reasonable > I'd prefer to design a better in person interview than take the easy route that is disrespectful of candidates' time. Why don't you just let candidates decide for themselves how much time they want to spend on the task? You can set the expectations, saying…

You're trying to evaluate a candidate's ability to accomplish something with finite resources. If you allow someone to put additional time into it, you're biasing the results towards the more desperate and less in-demand individual.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#388

Post by jnwatson »

sangli wrote: post #57
mbil wrote: post #45

This is a great list. Thanks for sharing it. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing at one of these companies before. They had a take-home project, which was to choose and implement and couple enhancements to a toy app. In the subsequent conversations, we discussed how I approached the problem, details of my design, technical tradeoffs, etc -- all the sorts of things you would expect a professional sw engineer t…

I would rather spend 3-4 hours working on a take home test rather than writing on whiteboard. Last year, I did take home test for 5 different companies and all 5 of them invited me to the next round. I yet to have a successful whiteboarding interview.

So you're saying you spent 15-20 hours just in order to get interviews. Many, many folks would not have the time for that.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#389

Post by vageli »

marcinzm wrote: post #50
victor9000 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the interviewer should ask specific and thoughtful questions about the project, so they can gauge the candidate's level of understanding. This concern could also be addressed by introducing a trial period.

>This concern could also be addressed by introducing a trial period. Why would I leave a stable well paying job for a job that basically says they don't trust me enough to not fire me in two weeks?

> Why would I leave a stable well paying job Well, why are you doing that in the first place? Maybe the new opportunity is worth it or the current one is so bad that it's worth it.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#390

Post by azangru »

jnwatson wrote: post #387
azangru wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can say "you shouldn't spend more than two hours on this" until I'm blue in the face, but candidates think they need to polish far beyond what is reasonable > I'd prefer to design a better in person interview than take the easy route that is disrespectful of candidates' time. Why don't you just let candidates decide for themselves how much time they want to spend on the task? You can set the expectations, saying…

You're trying to evaluate a candidate's ability to accomplish something with finite resources. If you allow someone to put additional time into it, you're biasing the results towards the more desperate and less in-demand individual.

- If the more desperate and less in-demand individual writes bad code, or makes poor judgements, you will be able to see it in their submission, won't you?

- Whereas if such an individual, because of their desperation or lack of demand, has enough time and motivation to elegantly solve the problem, then what's not to like?

I think a greater concern would be that with take-home assignments it's impossible to be sure you are actually evaluating the right individual. How can you be sure they didn't receive help from someone else?

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