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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

thinkingthrough.substack.com

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Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#421

Post by wpietri »

Jensson wrote: post #191
wpietri wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.

> extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. No, conscientiousness doesn't correlate that much with neuroticism. You can care about the results without getting cripplingly anxious, the anxiety isn't a good thing.

I agree one can care without getting "cripplingly anxious". But you're ignoring how being anxious can definitely make you conscientious, something very helpful in work where fussbudgetry is half the job.

If you have evidence that software developers and sysadmins are no more anxious that the average person, I'd be interested to see it. But my experience is definitely different.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#422

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #369
Hermitian909 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company. How empowered are new senior hires, and how expensive is the time of the team? At larger companies senior engineers are often phenomenally expensive and at smaller companies controls over potentially business ending operations are usually minimal. A friend of mine at a FAANG recently dealt with a bad hire. Their guess was that in t…

> It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company I'm always curious how people interview doctors. As bad as getting a bad programmer might potentially be, getting a bad doctor must be exponentially worse, so you'd think they'd have vetting the unqualified folks down to a science by now.

> "I'm always curious how people interview doctors."

They go through several years of medical residency under supervision before becoming a full fledged doctor and are burdened by expensive liability insurance and ongoing education requirements. That takes care of the competency beforehand.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#423

Post by 01100011 »

throwaway98az8 wrote: post #399
wiseowise wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so upset that somebody considers themselves smarter than you? Serious question.

Nope, not upset. Just trying to make OP aware of their contradictory behavior. OP might be smarter than me, who knows. I don't really care, I feel pretty good about my intelligence level even though I know there are plenty of folks smarter than me out there. What I am is annoyed at the elitism that OP shows. I work at a FANG, have worked at a couple SV unicorns too. There is plenty of work happening here that is not…

I think your biases have caused you to misread my original comment and attribute to me some beliefs with which you disagree.

> vastly more boring CRUD work

I don't do CRUD work and no one even close to my group does that. Are you a web programmer by chance? We work on systems software. If you've dealt with that I think you might agree that there isn't a lot of grunt work involved. Maybe when it comes to writing some tests but even then it can be fairly technical and require a lot of systems-level knowledge.

FWIW, I'm not saying I'm personally smarter than anyone. I got lucky and got a job working with the smartest, most dedicated and focused people I have ever met in decades of work. They're smart, and working with them requires some combination of extreme personal sacrifice, intense focus, and a deep and wide knowledge of software, hardware, CS theory and language issues.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#424

Post by grvdrm »

danielvaughn wrote: post #23

I tried the discussion approach instinctively in most of the interviews I performed. I tried to look at it as if both the interviewee and I are evaluating each other to see if we're a match. Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new. The only difference is that I would drill into sp…

> Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new.

I like your phrasing. I'm not in tech and don't interview folks for tech jobs, but do interview plenty of people for technical roles in financial services (for me: insurance industry). There are lots of ways to dig into their technical skills - white-boarding, take-homes, etc. but I am often digging instead for fit.

By fit I don't mean whether a candidate has the skills. I ask questions about interests. What does the person do with their free time? Is there something they are obsessed with? What would their friends tell me they talk about way too much? What topics eat at their brains at all hours regardless of time of day. What do they do to feed their interests?

Have had the most success with candidates who come alive (or more alive) answering those types of questions. They show their drive and passion with their hand motions, facial expressions, tone, and more. It's awesome, but importantly, it IS a discussion. It's no longer Q&A to me.

And if those folks fit my other needs (e.g. tech skills, requirements for job), I hire them.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#425

Post by [deleted] »

russelldjimmy wrote: post #415
ryandrake wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inste…

Thanks for your perspective. I have been burning out job after job and could never tell why. It’s like my mind was excited but my body could not go on.

[deleted]

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#426

Post by native_samples »

chakkepolja wrote: post #320
native_samples wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but the article isn't about difficulty of coding challenges, or where you get them from, but about doing them at all.

It's a vicious cycle. As companies ask 'Leetcode easy' questions, there came to be thousands of online blogs, youtube channels etc.. which trained even the n00bs who can't write good code otherwise. If they train very well they can solve 2sum or write binary tree level order traversal without understanding much. Of course not all interviews can use novel exclusive questions, and these have a non-negligible chance of…

I haven't actually seen that cycle in practice when I've been hiring. Maybe a small number of people practice a lot on leetcode, but it seems most don't. And I think it's hard to get better at those sorts of problems and not get even a bit better at programming in general. Remember the problem here is people who can't code their way out of a paper bag, not people who just struggle with exotic algorithms questions.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#427

Post by cema »

cema wrote: post #103
metters wrote: post #5

Not the main topic of the article, but in my opinion an interview/discussion also is supposed to answer another (third) question: Does the company fulfill the expectations of the potential employee? Not only the candidate has to sell their own service/skill during the interview/discussion, the company is being evaluated, too.

One of the business for interviewers our company has is to leave a good impression even on a weak candidate. This makes for an overall better experience and, should the candidate become a better fit in the future, we do not want to lose them.

One of the "goals" not business but ok.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#428

Post by dclowd9901 »

serial_dev wrote: post #296
dclowd9901 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So which one is it? Is it"already shown by research" or "something that cannot be proven". You can't have it both ways.

What I said was:

> 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.

Research is based on the cumulative results of many recorded events, in which we try to garner a pattern of relationship.

A singular event might have two inputs: we either do the thing or we do not. We can observe the results of what we do, but we cannot observe the results of what we do not. With the aforementioned research, we can _estimate_ the results, and, in some cases, we should make decisions with those estimates in mind, but these are two entirely different concepts. Macro and micro.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#429

Post by dclowd9901 »

josephg wrote: post #241
dclowd9901 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Research shows more diverse teams deliver better results. FYI, there's plenty of nuance in the research that people like to gloss over. My understanding is that diversity of background / experience improves team performance. But having a diversity of values amongst your team decreases performance. For example, if you form a diverse team where some people care about profits above all else, and other people care more…

I would ask if there was any published studies showing that "diversity of values" was bad, because searching Google for "diversity of values bad" does not yield any relevant results.

Then I would ask what her political leanings were next.

Studies seem to show that diversity initiatives fail mostly because of a lack of comprehensive diversity and inclusivity effort, e.g. companies talking big about it, but not backing it up with action, money, people, etc.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#430

Post by flerovium »

The problem with this piece is that it spends more time discussing a word change that how to make interviews more like actual discussions.

The word "boss" was original chosen because it avoided implications of a power dynamic between the boss and the worker. Centuries later, it has re-acquired the same connotation.

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