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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

#61

Post by Raidion »

blacktriangle wrote: post #41

I have a question about whiteboard interviews. I have used and continued to use whiteboard coding in interviews. However I emphasize to the person that I am interviewing that there is no expectation that what they write on the whiteboard compile, or even be a real language. I'll usually do a quick demo and joke that my own white boarding looks like the bastard child of Python and FORTRAN. The point of the exercise is…

I don't think anyone is expecting syntactically valid code (or at least that would be huge red flag for me if I interviewed). You do get bonus points the more "real" and consistent your whiteboard code is though.

I think people dislike whiteboard interviews because there is a significant subset of people who do not perform well under pressure, combined with the fact that a lot of software development is not terrifically algorithm heavy. This means that it's a (by nature) uncomfortable task and does not adequately represent the value the developer can bring to the business. In my current role, I would much rather have someone who can show strong knowledge of dependency injection and unit testing on my team over the person who understands how to balance a binary tree from memory.

I really only use algo/code/sql whiteboarding for junior devs now, and most mid/senior devs get asked about some hard code bug they've solved, what their preferred software patterns are, and we whiteboard some architecture.

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

#62

Post by rhacker »

kentonv wrote: post #58

We used this a couple times at Sandstorm back in the day. At the end of the interview the candidate would play Factorio cooperatively with the team for a while. I think it is remarkably effective at identifying the kinds of skills and personality traits that a software engineer actually needs to have in day-to-day work. You can find out if someone is self-directed, how fast they work, whether they produce clean desig…

There really isn't. At the end of the day every company I have been in has: the asshole, the smart guy, the idiot, the guy everyone is scared of, the guy that can't be fired ("the originals"). Then you just kind of multiply them randomly depending on team size.

These hiring articles are a huge pointless waste of time.

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

#63

Post by SilasX »

lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

Disclaimer: I've only played the Factorio demo.

If that's the analogy, then I don't think it captures the core difficulty of software, which is unknown unknowns. That is, you write something that depends on an external system working a certain way, you follow its spec and depend on it working that way, and then it just ... doesn't, and you have to find exactly where it deviates, possibly making up some complicated kludge.

To capture that, there would have to be e.g. some hidden logic about which direction the output comes out that you have to deal with and work around until you understand it.

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

#64

Post by willis936 »

kleff wrote: post #50
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

Satisfactory is really great, highly recommended from me as well. I think the verticality really adds a lot of fun over Factorio where you are restricted to keeping everything on the same level. Can make some really confusing spaghetti though...

The loss of 3D was one of the biggest things I missed when moving on from industrial mods for minecraft (the inspiration for factorio).

I recently got an RTX card and played around with the minecraft RTX demos. I decided to look further into behavior packs, and apparently the scripting API is much more capable than it previously was. The community of people making content is basically nonexistent, but I now think it's just because people have moved on.

Everything is in place to have added blocks, oregen, ticking tile entities, power generation/distribution, multiblocks, etc. It would be nice to see a behavior pack that picks up the torch of gregtech/industrialcraft.

Unfortunately, most of the unofficial GT versions have lacked proper vision. That is, vision in a way that is not aligned with GT proper, and what really draws players of industrial games in.

Anyway, here is a promising example. I hope to see more industrial content for minecraft for windows 10.

https://mcpedl.com/advanced-machinery/?cookie_check=1

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

#65

Post by plank_time »

me_me_me wrote: post #29
Toutouxc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But its biased against people who can't use mouse and keyboard :) But on serious note, People who played the game could just hide the fact that they know the game mechanics. And act like they are catching up faster then normal person would.

Most interviews in other industries try to figure out how much a person knows at that point in time. Software interviews try to do the impossible and try to figure out how quickly someone learns. That’s because this can be gamed, as you mentioned. I know people that have memorized 800 leetcode questions and got jobs at all the FAANGs, even though they were average developers. For the record I’ve never gotten into FAANG (although I have gotten into FAANG-adjacent) so my evaluation should be taken with a grain of salt.

The best interview is one that can’t be gamed. Just like Hollywood auditions. Give the people the script and see how well they do. Tell the interview candidate you are going to give them 3 questions and they pick the one they want to do, even if they know it already. This strips away all pretense that they are figuring it out on the spot. At least then you are on a level playing field.

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

#66

Post by horsawlarway »

kleff wrote: post #50
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

Satisfactory is really great, highly recommended from me as well. I think the verticality really adds a lot of fun over Factorio where you are restricted to keeping everything on the same level. Can make some really confusing spaghetti though...

Yeah, I love both factorio and satisfactory, but factorio ended up being the one I dumped more hours into.

Satisfactory ended up hiding too many details as you move around - the first person view and the very large structures made it really hard to untangle the mess.

Satisfactory felt like writing regexes - Basically write only, hard to read and parse afterwards.

That said, man the first person view is fun when you're actually doing the building. Just not nearly as fun once things have gone wrong and you need to debug.

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

#67

Post by neogodless »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #25

Click-Bait title, and judging by comments here everyone went for the click-bait. The author doesn't actually use factorio for interviewing, and thinks it world be a bad idea to do so. A more accurate title would be "Comparison between Factorio and Software Engineering Concepts" - but that wouldn't have gotten it to the top of HN so fast, nor gotten so many comments so quickly.

I believe we may be at a point where it is understood that headlines are created with the goal of attracting readers to the article, and it may no longer be necessary to point this out for each article we come across.

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

#68

Post by innocenat »

zionic wrote: post #47
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

+1 on this. I could never get into Factorio with the simple graphics and 2D top-down. Satisfactory is freakin incredible and it is easily the best new game I have played in the last 10 years.

I am the complete opposite of you.

I could never get into Satisfactory with the 3D graphics, but I absolutely love Factorio.

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

#69

Post by bentcorner »

lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

I haven't played Satisfactory since the water update, so I have no idea if my approach still works, but IMO the easiest way to design an efficient factory is to not bother trying to balance anything, and scale out in only one direction as needed. Feed everything along a central stack of belts, and multiplex inputs/outputs via splitters/combiners so any individual machine line will always have throughput.

It doesn't make for a very exciting build, but it's very rote and dependable.

Also - build the entire thing high up in the sky.

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

#70

Post by plank_time »

boomfus wrote: post #45
me_me_me wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its biased against people who can't use mouse and keyboard :) But on serious note, People who played the game could just hide the fact that they know the game mechanics. And act like they are catching up faster then normal person would.

Isn't that a common criticism of every interview style? Whether it's whiteboard questions, take-home projects, soft skill questions, lots of people will lie and say they've never seen the question before.

At this point, you would be foolish to admit that you’ve seen a question before. Everyone is faking it, and if you be honest, you’ll just keep getting harder and harder questions from the interviewer. The only time you should not fake it is if you’ve been asked that question at the same company. I think they would keep track of that and if you didn’t mention it, they would look deceitful on your part if they catch you.
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