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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

#311

Post by lmilcin »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #171

Please don't. Better, I'll remove the please and go JUST DONT FUCKING DO IT. Hiring is broken because most people hiring aren't good at it and the people working in tech are pretty much idiots (I'm focusing more on SV-startup, 5hour discussion about aeropress, put people down because they chose vim or emacs - people kinds). From 'cultural' fit interviews (who the fuck cares if you are a sikh or an atheist, whiskey dr…

I understand your frustration, but I somehow need to figure out who to hire and who not to even if it can't be done reliably.

I need to ask some technical questions and I need to give simple coding exercise on a coderpad.

You would be surprised how many people can smooth talk themselves through any non technical person but can't do shit when faced with an actual IDE and a small problem to solve.

The real broken part of this is that there is minority of candidates who just can't develop and go to a huge number of interviews looking for one place where the process slips up and lets him pass or maybe be very lucky with the questions. Even though they are minority the constitute majority of interviews just because of how many interviews they try to attend.

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

#313

Post by thereisnospork »

mwcampbell wrote: post #309
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that the goal of an interview process is not to be fair. This is not a sports event or a court case. Mostly your goals align with "being fair", but not always, and that's OK.

> A reminder that the goal of an interview process is not to be fair. This is not a sports event or a court case. Given the power that companies have over individual workers, I'd say that a job interview should be treated as seriously as a court case. So yes, making it fair should be an explicit goal.

A company's goal isn't to hire every good potential employee, it is to hire a number of good employees, and avoid hiring bad ones. If Factorio wizards make good engineers, who cares if only 1/10 good engineers have even played?

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

#314

Post by BoiledCabbage »

lmilcin wrote: post #310

I remember giving, for a period of time, candidate a simple kids block programming game. The task was to put blocks together to escape ever more complicated labyrinths. I stopped when I noticed candidates do worse at this game than actual 7 year old kids. For example, a simple labirynth. Kids just give simple instructions (forward 3 blocks, turn right, forward 2 blocks, turn left, etc.). Candidates... try to figure o…

90 of it is probably that they're thinking there must be a more involved solution than something a 7yr old could solve, otherwise no reasonable person would use it to differentiate candidates with a university degree for a professional position.

As an option, you could try prefacing the game with saying "the solution to this might be very easy", and see how many more solve it.

Then you'd know you're likely not making a decision based on any signal of skill or ability at all, and just on them trying to make a prediction on what you're looking for.

Edit: I had to come back to this, because the more I think about it the more it's mind boggling to me. You interview is very likely filtering out the smartest candidates and selecting for the rest.

A typical strong candidate, that's prepped on interview questions, has maybe had other interviews at companies with challenging problems is going to look at it and think "This is a problem this interviewer uses to differentiate between top tier candidates and those who don't get offers. There is no way they're asking me a question that's so easy that any 7 year old child can answer it. There's gotta be something I'm missing." And keeps digging into it.

And a very weak candidate will say think "This is my 10th interview, and sweet, finally a question I can answer!"

These absurd backwards mindgames are exactly (one of the many things) thats wrong with software interviewing.

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

#315

Post by barry-cotter »

namdnay wrote: post #300
pmlnr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me one coutry who pays unemployed benefit at the level of the job you need to leave because of that insane hire fast fire fast.

In France your jobseeker's allowance is 80% of the average salary of your last 12 working months. Whether your last employer was for 10 years or 10 days. It starts slowly ramping down after the second year of searching I think

French unemployment has been well above US unemployment since the 70s. This isn’t a free lunch. If the state makes employing people more expensive employers will employ fewer people.

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

#316

Post by thaumasiotes »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #283
brightball wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've honestly simplified my approach to interviewing over the last few years and I'm pretty happy with the results. I just have a conversation and ask them to tell me about a favorite code project they've worked on. Could be school project, previous job, whatever. And just let them talk about it. I'll prod for more detail if I need to give a little nudge. Ask about problems they solved when doing it, etc. The _only_…

This. I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and this was exactly what I did. I made very, very few mistakes, and actually had some pleasant surprises.

> I made very, very few mistakes

How do you know? How often did you follow up on rejections to see whether they should have been hires?

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

#317

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #316
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I was a hiring manager for 25 years, and this was exactly what I did. I made very, very few mistakes, and actually had some pleasant surprises.

> I made very, very few mistakes How do you know? How often did you follow up on rejections to see whether they should have been hires?

Actually, for the company that I worked at, and the level of folks we hired, I often heard about how they went.

The only one that made me sad, was a chap who used to show up on the Adobe Photoshop splash page. We offered, he declined.

In the aggregate, I think things turned out OK for all of us. There are some folks that I have to admit, probably did best by not accepting us.

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

#318

Post by barry-cotter »

omginternets wrote: post #216
tofuahdude wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a company's responsibility to create a well-functioning nation.

Says who, Milton Friedman? Surely companies have some minimal responsibility to act ethically, and surely behaving in a way that causes social dysfunction is not ethical.

Netflix doesn’t act unethically. They are upfront about how they hire and fire and people select into applying there and jobs there based on that. Same as CostCo has much higher standards for employees than Walmart and much higher benefits. If all employers were like Costco lots of people would be unemployed who currently have jobs. Having an employment model that is not perfectly average is not unethical.

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

#319

Post by lmilcin »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #314
lmilcin wrote: post #310

I remember giving, for a period of time, candidate a simple kids block programming game. The task was to put blocks together to escape ever more complicated labyrinths. I stopped when I noticed candidates do worse at this game than actual 7 year old kids. For example, a simple labirynth. Kids just give simple instructions (forward 3 blocks, turn right, forward 2 blocks, turn left, etc.). Candidates... try to figure o…

90 of it is probably that they're thinking there must be a more involved solution than something a 7yr old could solve, otherwise no reasonable person would use it to differentiate candidates with a university degree for a professional position. As an option, you could try prefacing the game with saying "the solution to this might be very easy", and see how many more solve it. Then you'd know you're likely not making…

First of all, this was many, many years ago. Nowadays my interview is half an hour of (hopefully) nice chat, followed by half an hour of technical questions followed by half an hour to an hour of coding exercise with real IDE.

We all learn on mistakes, my interviewing process evolves as I learn which things do and which don't work.

Second, one of the goals of the interview is to see whether you can deal with the problem analytically. I am purposefully setting up problems that do not require (much) prior knowledge to observe the process of how the candidate deals with the problems.

While our knowledge of particular topics changes, our general approach to solving problems is almost set in stone for similar/related categories of problems.

If you are developer who does not predict how the code is going to work but rather rely on running it umpteen number of times and reshuffling instructions until you happen to make it work, this isn't just a sign of your lack of knowledge but rather your general approach to dealing with them. I bet, and I have observed it many times, that the person will do roughly the same when faced with a number of varied problems.

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

#320

Post by johnsmith4739 »

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…

> I don't know of any approach to interviewing that I think is fair.

That is true, because it was my motivation to build a wizard for behavioural interviews designed to remove biases and be objective. In practice, most of the time people are not even sure what they are looking for - I know it when I see it - and default to gut hiring. This leads to teams made of people that think like you, so you're basically paying 2 salaries for one brain.

My formula for removing biases is in 2 steps: first define explicitly the behavioural traits you desire, and second, use falsifiable questions to determine the truth.

Because we're here to help each other, if this is relevant to you, I'd be happy to share this solution with you.

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