Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hiring Without Whiteboards

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 471 posts

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#431

Post by rendaw »

red2awn wrote: post #277
rendaw wrote: post #221

I haven't seen portfolios mentioned yet, but that's another option. Pros: do it once, use it at multiple interviews. Cons: more difficult to make sure it's original work, difficult to come up with ideas. I did CV screening and very few people had anything, it's not like a portfolio project needs to take more than 2-3 hours to create. Portfolios are a common requirement in other fields where creating a portfolio is ev…

What kind of portfolio worthy projects take less than 3 hours to create?

Scraping Kickstarter projects with certain keywords and sending yourself an email, a tool for slicing csv files, reimagining various basic command line tools in new languages, a tool to scan a file with an unused filename in the current directory, a program to sort music by idv3 tags, an http media server, etc...

All of these would show 1. basic language ability, 2. some simple algorithms, 3. ability to do something to completion.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#432

Post by bananaface »

GordonS wrote: post #418
bananaface wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone else from the UK verify this? Still seems crazy to me. Edit: reading around it seems like they're standard, but have no legal weight regarding termination? I.e. you're entitled to 30 days pay regardless. This seems very weird on all sides.

Also from UK and can confirm that 30-day probation is pretty standard. In 20 years, I think I've only seen employees terminated during their probation 2 times. They were non-dev roles, and both times it had transpired that they were totally incapable of the job (one had also lied on their CV).

Damn. That sucks. At least it isn't common, but I'd like some legal protection against it. Guess it's just a matter of minimising uncertainty for your employer & having the leverage to negotiate your contract.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#433

Post by gfxgirl »

jeffe wrote: post #401
gfxgirl wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2012 I was told Google gets 1 million applications a year. How do you decide which 1000 of those get 6 month contract offer? How many millions of dollars in lost productivity are you willing to lose of the people who don't pass your 6 month test that you had wasting space, taking up training time, having people have to review and reject their code, etc? What will those people do who gave up their lives somewhere e…

The value is similar to that of internships - the amortized cost of a 6 month 'trial period' should be similar if not cheaper than false positives that are a lot tougher to fire so you avoid dumpster fires like Amazon's mandatory attrition rate. I also wouldn't call it giving up there lives, when they know what they're signing up for and are presumably getting paid a similar amount to the the full time role they're a…

They still have some selection criteria for internships. It's not like they take the first 100 students at random so you're left with the same issue. You have to narrow the selection. That likely includes interviews.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#434

Post by b112 »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #291
b112 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but... Now one worries, is this itself a test? Are they judging my desire to donate.

Well, honestly - if I wanted to donate, I could do so myself after they pay me. Then I'd be worried... are they watching to see whether I engage in hollow virtue-signalling?

No, they're watching to see if you're worried about whether they're watching to see if you're engaged in hollow virtue-signalling. :P

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#435

Post by pc86 »

wildrhythms wrote: post #314
fiblye wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people in other comments below are criticizing take-home tasks, but honestly, this sounds nice and balanced. I'd much rather have a couple days to think about a problem and a few hours to implement it over having to take time off work, pay to go all the way to your company at a time that works for both of us, and deal with a white board interview. It's a way bigger investment. So long as it's a small, confin…

I oppose take-home tasks as an interviewer. I don't think employees or prospective employees should be taking work home with them, ever. Instead, collaborating on a problem with the interviewee, discussing the problem and potential solutions, observing how the interviewee recognizes when they go off-track, how they respond to hints and suggestions... these are all better signals than the culmination of some homework…

If you're working on hard problems, 30-45 minutes isn't even enough time to fully context shift and get into flow, let alone in an interview where you are a) stressed, b) trying to impress, c) unfamiliar with the specifics of the organization, d) potentially unfamiliar with the industry entirely. This simply isn't enough time to get a sense for how someone thinks or approaches things that are going to be impactful to a large organization except at the most superficial levels. However, if they have a couple hours at their leisure to approach a problem, it's very easy for them to go over how they approached it and where they got stuck in just a few minutes.

The compromise here is to talk about the employee's past projects. The downside is now the interviewer needs to get up to speed quickly, and won't have all the necessary context of the organization and (potentially) industry. Not to mention the fact that candidates lie a lot about how much of a role they actually had in projects.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#436

Post by learc83 »

autarch wrote: post #429
learc83 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>or perhaps even the other party that paid you What are the damages? As for suing you? Again what are the damages? It’s almost certain there are no damages assuming you are just working on a take home project not something that they are going to actually use to compete with your employer. Just because something is in the terms of your contract doesn’t actually mean you really need to worry about a lawsuit. A company…

IANAL. I am just saying that some employment contracts forbid side work. I imagine many companies would prefer not to get in the middle of that, and so might be reluctant to pay people for work done in interviews.

Some people have contracts that forbid divulging any information or techniques they learned during their employment. This doesn't stop companies from asking questions about previous work projects, or asking them to solve problems on white boards despite that fact that some candidates are certainly violating the letter of their employment contracts to do so.

People have contracts with all kinds of stupid things in them. If they aren't practically enforceable, they can safely be ignored. Any company saying they don't pay for take home projects because of employment contracts is just using that as an excuse not to pay.

There are people out their with contracts that say they can't even interview at rival companies, how many companies out there refuse to conduct interviews because of this?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#437

Post by [deleted] »

wvenable wrote: post #214
nilkn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid awarding candidates who violate your request of no more than two hours and spend considerable time coming up with something amazing? They may still produce 100 lines of code — but those 100 lines may end up being unusually elegant, beautiful code that stumps 40 year veterans. How do you avoid punishing someone who took your requested time constraint seriously (or otherwise didn’t have enough free tim…

I reject entire the premise of this question. Anyone spending huge amounts of time is either going to produce way too much or they just took too long. There is nothing magical about programming where taking 8 hours to solve a 2 hour problem is going to stump 40 year veterans or be unusually beautiful. That's just unrealistic.

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#438

Post by [deleted] »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #331
nilkn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid awarding candidates who violate your request of no more than two hours and spend considerable time coming up with something amazing? They may still produce 100 lines of code — but those 100 lines may end up being unusually elegant, beautiful code that stumps 40 year veterans. How do you avoid punishing someone who took your requested time constraint seriously (or otherwise didn’t have enough free tim…

Actually, if they spend more than two hours, the question is why. We are happy to see them get interested in the task and dive deeper, but we just don't want to ask for more, that would be unreasonable in our view. It's fine if the code is broken, or has a couple of bugs. (It's best if it compiles though!) The goal is as much to learn how they think, solve problems and communicate as it is whether they know how to wr…

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#440

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

fogetti wrote: post #257
logicslave wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but in some ways this is what they need. Someone who can stare at computer science material, that is probably boring, for long periods of time. Someone who has a good memory for details, can remember routines. Can "solve" problems that have been solved before by applying theory. Someone who is willing to follow the rules and go through the process.

I think you made a logical somersault. Leetcode doesn't imply any of those, neither good memory for details or that you can "solve" problems that have been solved before by applying theory. You missed the whole point of the OP's post it seems. The only thing that leetcode implies is that you can solve leetcode tasks.

Leetcode implies all of those, and just like in mathematics competitions, being able to solve these problems implies a high level of ability.
Post reply on HN