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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

erikmcclure.com

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Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#11

Post by KineticLensman »

The conclusion of the article somewhat contradicts the title:

"What's the takeaway from this? I don't know. We certainly can't switch to using Factorio as an interviewing method - you might as well just give a candidate a take-home assignment. At the very least, we can do better than whiteboard interviews."

So it's not a description of how to use Factorio for interviewing, beyond a simple assignment of Factorio tasks to seniority levels. It does however make an interesting comparison between Factorio and software mechanisms.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#12

Post by kevincox »

I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior too effectively as these two things don't require much leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone interview questions at this point.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#13

Post by Toutouxc »

francisduvivier wrote: post #6

How can this not have a huge bias in favor of gamers? Might work for them because that's the kind of culture fit they need, but I doesn't look all that generalizable for other companies.

You only have to understand how to move your character using WASD, the concept of Inventory and pointing at different places on the ground with a cursor. Failing to understand this simple set of rules would disqualify a person from most jobs ever invented.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#14

Post by endisneigh »

isn't the best technical interview inherently just doing the job itself? find some aspects of the job that's representative of it and have the candidate do it - if they can, then you're hired.

the issue is with technical jobs it's difficult to surmise what exactly is "representative" to begin with. I imagine the only reason candidates aren't just asked to work in the actual job for say, 8 hours instead of doing say, 7 irrelevant 45min interviews is because of intellectual property.

I wonder if Google or another large company has ever tried to re-interview all employees with more than say, 4 years of experience and correlated their interview performance with past job performance.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#15

Post by fudged71 »

francisduvivier wrote: post #6

How can this not have a huge bias in favor of gamers? Might work for them because that's the kind of culture fit they need, but I doesn't look all that generalizable for other companies.

Worth pointing out that McKinsey developed their own game for demonstrating problem solving in interviews.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that McKinsey has a bias towards gamers.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#16

Post by shawnz »

S_A_P wrote: post #7

I don't know that I agree. I don't really play games so I would be a bit lost here, but if you needed me to design and start coding a large distributed system I would happily oblige while he watched...

Isn't a factory a large distributed system? What's the difference between this and a visual programming language like LabVIEW?

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#17

Post by huehehue »

arcturus17 wrote: post #10

An amusing thought experiment but obviously it would have catastrophic consequences in real life... Pretty much anyone can get good at the game by watching Let’s Plays or reading guides.

I agree with the sentiment, but the ability to study (read guides) and demonstrate understanding/retention of the material by actually doing something (playing Factorio) is a good signal.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#18

Post by doix »

When I was responsible for recruiting interns, I always wanted to use TIS-100 as an interview tool, or more likely a modified version of TIS-100 with different instructions/architecture to not give an advantage to people that have "played" it before.

It would test their ability to read documentation and apply what they've read to problem. It also doesn't rely on them memorizing frameworks/API's etc. And it even in the early "levels" you can ask them to optimize for program size or cycle-count. Unfortunately no one would let me do it.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#19

Post by Toutouxc »

arcturus17 wrote: post #10

An amusing thought experiment but obviously it would have catastrophic consequences in real life... Pretty much anyone can get good at the game by watching Let’s Plays or reading guides.

Sounds like copying and pasting jQuery snippets from Stack Overflow.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#20

Post by wskinner »

It’s unclear if this article is satire or not. Given that you will be spending 20 hours of at least two people’s time (one candidate, at least one employee), the space of alternative interviews is quite large. You could, for example, spend 20 hours observing them perform an actual software task. This piece doesn’t consider alternatives at all, merely asserting that this particular 20 hour game is the best that can be done. I see no reason to believe that comparing the play of a practiced factorio player to that of a brand new player would carry much signal at all. That means that a company carrying out this type of interview would need to ask candidates to study by playing the game.
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