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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

thinkingthrough.substack.com

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Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#231

Post by kovac »

jfengel wrote: post #60
jstx1 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm kind of stiff in conversations with strangers but decent at programming, does that mean that your company doesn't have a place for me?

The problem with "decent at programming" is that it's often only a fraction of the job. You rarely get formal specifications and clear orders. Nearly everything involves discussion of the user's needs or eliciting the circumstances of a bug. Real programming is very little like they teach in school and even less like coding competition. Being good at programming is great, and mandatory, but if you can't also have a c…

This right here is the kind of company any self-respecting engineer shouldn't join unless they are transparent about the fact that they have issues with their processes/don't have people to deal with these issues that they need your help.

If they have a whole arsenal of project managers, architects, product managers, engineering managers, business/product analysts and still give this kind of lousy excuse, I'd probably stay away. Chances are they don't have any real expertise in the domain they are working in.

And btw, requirement gathering and writing technical specifications are taught in school.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#232

Post by iamsb »

ryandrake wrote: post #229
iamsb wrote: post #222

Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews. Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of putting it into practice without thinking through the bias problem. I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follo…

> In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought. Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team, or any other negative business results that were specific to that team? If not, who’s to say which interviewing method was better or worse? As an inte…

> Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team, or any other negative business results that were specific to that team? If not, who’s to say which interviewing method was better or worse?

It did. And even if it had not in this particular case, it will hurt the company in the long run. There is not even a shred of doubt in my mind that diversity (of thought) is the best investment that leads to success.

I have been using scripted interviews, the same method I mentioned in original comment, for more than 5 years now, hiring more than 200 engineers in three continent and I am super happy with my results.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#233

Post by dclowd9901 »

iamsb wrote: post #222

Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews. Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of putting it into practice without thinking through the bias problem. I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follo…

It also means you have definitive qualifications for correctness. It’s harder to say “I’m not sure about this person,” when they quantitatively answered every question correctly. If you “have a conversation,” it’s a lot easier to have those itches, which might be primarily driven by bias, make your hiring immediately become problematic.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#234

Post by dclowd9901 »

ryandrake wrote: post #229
iamsb wrote: post #222

Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews. Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of putting it into practice without thinking through the bias problem. I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follo…

> In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought. Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team, or any other negative business results that were specific to that team? If not, who’s to say which interviewing method was better or worse? As an inte…

Research shows more diverse teams deliver better results. You’re asking something that can’t be proven though: is this thing that is occurring better than the thing that didn’t occur. We can’t know the answer to that.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#235

Post by ryandrake »

russelldjimmy wrote: post #183
nbzso wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, stop. This EXCITEMENT you cannot apply as a Golden rule. You can use it for junior position, may be junior to senior transitions but there is no sane professional with EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE that will communicate and show excitement in a natural way. It is not logical. When you have 20+ career, filled with success and failures, from which you can learn how to see and seek BALANCE, the last thing on your min…

As I near the entry into my 30s, I begin to see this more and more clearly. I used to be EXCITED about my job, about a project, about a task. It also made me very stressed and made me take things personally when they didn’t go according to “my vision”. Back then, I’d have read this sentiment as “jaded” and “cynical”. But as I mature, I find the balance, and I find truth in these words.

Oh yes. Getting genuinely excited about a project is a recipe for burnout, especially when the project doesn’t go in a direction that continues to excite you. I’d argue that an employee who can work on a project despite his lack of excitement is better than one who needs this excitement to function.

What excites me are things like enjoying time with my family, the idea of making enough money to retire in my 50s instead of 70s, working on my hobbies, and so on. Not my JIRA tickets, sorry.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#236

Post by CobrastanJorji »

synergy20 wrote: post #180

Good idea on paper, not practical in real. FAANG etc are whiteboard/leetcode-ing everyone, I believe it's one way to filter out the seniors. Be senior's definition it means people don't spend a few months on algorithms to pass interviews because they had no need to use them in the past 20+ years of their career. It's intentional, talking about 'dont do interviews, do discussions' is missing the point. By the way, I d…

I hate leetcode-style interviewing, but I see no reason to believe that FAANG companies use then primarily because of ageism.

The reasons they're used are simpler. First, these companies need MANY programmers, so they're mostly hiring generalists without a regard for the specific work they'll be doing. Second, they need to conduct many thousands of interviews per week. These two fairly unusual conditions make for a situation where you want a controlled, quantifiable, and simple approach. A leetcode-style interview hits those marks much more easily than other styles. Plus, you can teach someone how to do it in an hour or two (not how to interview well, but how to ask a leetcode problem while not making any headaches for legal in the process).

While I agree that this is probably at least slightly biased against more senior devs, I think senior developers actually get an advantage here. In my experience, as you apply for loftier positions, the technical questions become much more of a conversation.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#237

Post by weq »

swman wrote: post #197

I wish I could a 2-3 hour interview where I (or the candidate) showcase one of my projects and explain the architectural details and decisions in addition to showing any cool/hairy/insane code that got the job done. We can discuss those things and see how to improve them, or laugh at the crazy solutions. Honestly how many times do I need to rehearse these dumbass algos (blah blah blah, so I'll optimize for space with…

100% give me a convo with a dev like this anyday of the week over this crammer whiteboarding l33tcode problems.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#238

Post by CobrastanJorji »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #35
arketyp wrote: post #11

I've been involved in interviews for new hires a couple of years now. I'm pretty sure I could have the interviewee talk about cucumbers for 10 minutes and I could determine if its a good hire or not. It's all about getting insight about how the person thinks.

In all likelihood, you've rejected phenomenal candidates and you didn't even realize it.

This is the thing I most hate about being an experienced interviewer. I've interviewed hundreds of people. Am I getting better? Who knows! I get no feedback. I can find out whether other interviewers come to the same conclusions that I do, so I can learn to conform, but I will never find out if the person I rejected would've been fine, and I won't even find out if the person we hired did well.

How can ANYONE confidently proclaim that they're great at interviewing without some way of measuring the people they reject?

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#239

Post by weq »

kube-system wrote: post #170
joshgachnang wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting! What kind of questions do you ask in the written portion?

The written portion is part of our take-home coding test. We have the candidate do a short and simple coding exercise, and at the end, there's a couple open-ended questions about their approach, what they could have done better, etc. I find it really insightful to give people a simple exercise to complete and then ask them to talk about it. The answers to the questions are almost more telling than the code itself. Yo…

Yes exactly! If you need to have a take home coding test, do something simple and then use that as you discussion starter! Your developer is making decisions everyday on problems they may not have experience with. They are never making decisions in isolation without any internet connection.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#240

Post by Jensson »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #238
sillysaurusx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all likelihood, you've rejected phenomenal candidates and you didn't even realize it.

This is the thing I most hate about being an experienced interviewer. I've interviewed hundreds of people. Am I getting better? Who knows! I get no feedback. I can find out whether other interviewers come to the same conclusions that I do, so I can learn to conform, but I will never find out if the person I rejected would've been fine, and I won't even find out if the person we hired did well. How can ANYONE confiden…

Google still hires people even if one interviewer rejects them, so at least the people doing statistics there knows the difference between having 1 rejection, no rejections and how well each interviewer performs.

But I agree, I interviewed some at Google and we can see the stuff that happened in every other interview. And I was really surprised many times, ultimately I realized that I can't really make good judgements based on an hours worth of data and stopped caring.

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