Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#121

Post by anonzzzies » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #115

anonzzzies wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have no standing (as a junior) then sure, but as a senior, you can simply ask previous employers. If that’s not enough then indeed, I will refuse. I am not going to solve some crappy leethcode crap just because they are paranoid.

Lots of employers will not answer to that request for various reasons. So you may get a phone number of a buddy of the candidate that will tell you he was stellar.

Not my experience, but then again, I am only one guy with one life so.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#122

Post by specialist » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #25

rr808 wrote: post #22

For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. Lucky I'd done a few before so knew the tricks. Now I work there the job is basic crud style work, nothing fancy required. Employer also hires grads almost exclusively from Ivy League universities and they mostly suck. Makes me look good. :)

I think most work is CRUD related, and I also think that it's actually counter productive to hire leetcode or university crowd for these jobs, as they will naturally try to treat CRUD problems as the problems they have been studying and practising, which would mostly yield something that could be done in a few lines of code as something that is really over engineered. They will start trying to figure out problems tha…

Yes and: CRUD (and ETL) is just data processing.

Find something, copy some strings, munge, paste some strings.

ADTs, IDLs, validation goo, logging, tests, etc can help. But also can get in the way.

Sometimes, if we're really lucky, we get to mix in some indexes, caching, parsing, undo/redo, and release notes.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#123

Post by specialist » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

Interviewing practices are little better than folklore.

Has anyone figured out how to do this? Like reproducible experiments, formalisms, checklists...?

Last time I got good, actionable advice was from Journey of the Software Professional by Luke Hohmann. Covered stuff like self-selecting teams, assemblying a team with complimentary skills, and so on.

Or maybe there's some secret manual for interviewing as hazing and torture? Like the CIA's simple sabotage field manual?

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#124

Post by harshalizee » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:06 PM UTC

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #113

rr808 wrote: post #22

For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. Lucky I'd done a few before so knew the tricks. Now I work there the job is basic crud style work, nothing fancy required. Employer also hires grads almost exclusively from Ivy League universities and they mostly suck. Makes me look good. :)

I did recruiting for Full Stack developers for a number of years. I only gave two programming problems, one to be completed before an initial phone screen and one to be completed in the first part of the interview. Myself and another team member worked on the questions, and we gave them to the team. Everyone was able to complete the exercises in a reasonable period of time, so we knew they weren't going to be too cha…

Looks like I'd fail your pre-screen test. What's the "mathematical" solution if you're not allowed to convert strings to ints? Ascii math?

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#125

Post by andrewingram » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

surgical_fire wrote: post #53

albert_e wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not from the states but my IT career involved working on teams with US clients and also working in the US for a few years. I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish. In typical work projects even the best of ideas always need to be bought by rest of the team and also executed collaboratively by the team. I would be dishonest if I were to…

> I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish. I come from a culture that has a similar approach, where taking sole credit for team efforts is typically viewed negatively. Took me a few years to get the hang of lying on interviews and taking sole credit for team efforts. And ironically, it only dawned on me when I became an interviewer myself.…

Reminds me of the thing where apparently every guy adds two inches to their height on dating profiles, whereas I deducted an inch because of poor posture.

Apparently I was born with no guile (probably an exaggeration), which means in a world where nearly everyone tells what they consider to be harmless little lies, I’m actively damaging my own career prospects.

I think everyone has their own definition of deception, and mine is the act of allowing (by making no attempt at intervention) someone to go away believing something you yourself know to be false. Which seems to be quite a strict one from what I’ve seen.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#126

Post by monkeyjoe » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

harshalizee wrote: post #124

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did recruiting for Full Stack developers for a number of years. I only gave two programming problems, one to be completed before an initial phone screen and one to be completed in the first part of the interview. Myself and another team member worked on the questions, and we gave them to the team. Everyone was able to complete the exercises in a reasonable period of time, so we knew they weren't going to be too cha…

Looks like I'd fail your pre-screen test. What's the "mathematical" solution if you're not allowed to convert strings to ints? Ascii math?

I think it just means taking the input as an integer and then separating out the “ones place”and “tens place” using integer division and modulo operator. E.g.,

  ones = number % 10

  tens = number // 10

  do_print = (ones + tens) == 10

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#127

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

harshalizee wrote: post #124

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did recruiting for Full Stack developers for a number of years. I only gave two programming problems, one to be completed before an initial phone screen and one to be completed in the first part of the interview. Myself and another team member worked on the questions, and we gave them to the team. Everyone was able to complete the exercises in a reasonable period of time, so we knew they weren't going to be too cha…

Looks like I'd fail your pre-screen test. What's the "mathematical" solution if you're not allowed to convert strings to ints? Ascii math?

[deleted]

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#128

Post by harshalizee » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

monkeyjoe wrote: post #126

harshalizee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like I'd fail your pre-screen test. What's the "mathematical" solution if you're not allowed to convert strings to ints? Ascii math?

I think it just means taking the input as an integer and then separating out the “ones place”and “tens place” using integer division and modulo operator. E.g., ones = number % 10 tens = number // 10 do_print = (ones + tens) == 10

That's what my solution after the parsing would be.

OP mentioned reading from a file, which you would only be able to use after string conversion to ints.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#129

Post by BiteCode_dev » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:49 PM UTC

anonzzzies wrote: post #67

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #47

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a div…

Hmm. I have majors in CS and electronic engineering and minors in maths and physics. In EE I had jobs without any interviewing at all; just sending my diploma and resume. The CS interviewing system is highly broken compared to anything else I have been in touch with. I have been a software engineer, electronics engineer, ceo, cto, pre-sales and some more things. Software engineer interviews are sad shitty affairs; it…

This is what I mean.

Make a test for competences, and people will complain.

Don't make a test, and people will complain.

Make the interview process short and to the point, and people will complain.

Make it long and thorough, and people will complain.

No matter what you do, there is always someone on HN that will tell you that you're doing it wrong.

I've yet to pass an interview process that I would qualify as good, myself.

So if it's the case, it's probably because it's not very common.

Turns out hiring is not a solved problem, and it's easy to be a critics when you don't have to do it.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#130

Post by Ekaros » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

ResearchCode wrote: post #72

panxyh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salt thing isn’t in the same league of nonsense as the foot thing. It does tell something about the person.

Tells you something about their salt tolerance. It makes all the difference in plumbing together CRUD applications effectively.

My salt tolerance is so screwed that maybe I deserve to get failed in interviews for that... Still, seems quite unreasonable.