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An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

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Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#231

Post by thot_experiment »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #225
thot_experiment wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, yes, actually that's exactly what it means. If bots can solve CAPTCHAS then the CAPTCHAS are poorly designed, that's the whole point. I don't think this sort of CAPTCHA type step should have a significant place in a good interview process in the first place, if it is important to you to put your applicants through this sort of gauntlet you're not treating them with the dignity they deserve. If you're just…

Right, so the problem with the interview process isn't that it tests the wrong skills, but that it fails to prevent the secret use of AI such that a human can appear to possess those skills when they do not, in fact, possess them. It seems there are at least two different perspectives: A) If a human can use AI to pass a remote interview that they would otherwise fail, then the questions are unsuitable for use in inte…

The types of questions that an AI gets right are still bad questions to ask in 2024, regardless of being remote or in person.

If you're allowing your programmers to use AI on the job you're not getting particularly useful information if unaided someone fails a question that they would answer correctly with AI assistance. Sure, being able to answer the question in person may still correlate with being a better applicant, but that doesn't mean it's a good question.

Interviews take time, you should make good use of the time by asking questions that tell you a lot. Questions easily answered by AI (this also goes for questions easily answered by studying interview questions by the way) are not good questions. Measure the things that matter.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#232

Post by rahimnathwani »

thot_experiment wrote: post #231
rahimnathwani wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the problem with the interview process isn't that it tests the wrong skills, but that it fails to prevent the secret use of AI such that a human can appear to possess those skills when they do not, in fact, possess them. It seems there are at least two different perspectives: A) If a human can use AI to pass a remote interview that they would otherwise fail, then the questions are unsuitable for use in inte…

The types of questions that an AI gets right are still bad questions to ask in 2024, regardless of being remote or in person. If you're allowing your programmers to use AI on the job you're not getting particularly useful information if unaided someone fails a question that they would answer correctly with AI assistance. Sure, being able to answer the question in person may still correlate with being a better applica…

   (this also goes for questions easily answered by studying interview questions by the way
I agree, but it’s easier said than done.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#233

Post by dahart »

lordnacho wrote: post #205
dahart wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, to some degree, is guaranteed to happen naturally. But why not use a sieve approach and narrow the pool exponentially using a range of tools that goes from automatic and instantaneous at the start to manual and time-intensive interviews at the end? The potential upside for a company is relatively large - with a small amount of work they have the opportunity to get the approximately best 30 people out of 100k gr…

The problem is noise. Say you want to take 10% at each round. You have to do this three times to get 100 people, and then another round to get the top 30. If you tighten the criterion, noise matters more, so you will drop your actual best candidates, since people need a high skill+noise. But if you try to keep the unlucky "good" candidates by having a wider band, you pay more. Also, if you are successful at finding t…

Noise is a reality and a potential problem in ranking candidates for sure, 100%. Of course it’s worse than just measurement noise; the noise in hiring is subjective and situational and human. The sampling method doesn’t fix it, using the Secretary Problem approach doesn’t give you less noise, it gives you more noise in the result. The benefit of stopping early is that it reduces the cost of sampling, but if the company doesn’t care about the cost of sampling, there is no “problem” there to solve.

If you want to reduce noise, the way to do it is to have more independent measurements (interviewers), not to stop interviewing early.

The good news is that there’s no such actual thing as “best” in this situation and people have many dimensions, they can’t be ranked perfectly, but they can still be ranked approximately. We also don’t need to get the exact 30 people out of 100k people with infinite precision, we will get an amazing set if we can take a random sample of the top 1000 candidates out of 100k candidates. Having 100k candidates gives us the opportunity to end up with a selection from the top 1%, say, whereas if the number of applications was 40 people for 30 jobs, you might be stuck accepting people who are below average.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#234

Post by 4dregress »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #182
4dregress wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re useless unless they touch some part of the domain you’re howling to work in.

Why do they need to touch the domain? The point of generic interviews is to find smart people who can learn any domain.

I’m using the term domain very broadly here, I apologise.

What I mean is, if the job your applying for is mostly about working with implementing 3rd party APIs IMO it makes sense that your tech test represents that to some degree.

Can you understand basic documentation.

Can you use data structures.

Can you write tests and understand what actually needs to be tested.

Can you handle exceptions.

Do you try and get the entire resource?

Believe it or not I’ve joined a team in the past who owned a service where no one knew what pagination was.

Bonus points if you demonstrate that you understand what a transaction is.

And I forgot to add, can you design a sensible database schema.

Can a candidate talk about those simple concepts?

Now, would I be able to do a tech test based around domains in machine learning? I would have to do a lot of research first!

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#235

Post by gopher_space »

vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

You're complaining about a process you've implemented yourself. Have you tried hiring in a completely different manner?

At what point do you question an approach so easily gamed, or any derived metric?

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#236

Post by RadiozRadioz »

vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

> Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure.

I think performance under pressure is a virtue. An important job is never going to be entirely free from stress - you want somebody reliable who will take that in their stride, you don't want someone who will buckle when things get difficult.

I'm all for in-person live collaborative problem solving, be it on a whiteboard or just a discussion. You see first-hand exactly what the person has in their memory, their problem solving techniques, how quickly they get things, their communication skills, and yes, their ability to work under pressure. If done correctly and collaboratively, you get a dry-run of a real design meeting and have some feeling of what it would be like to work with the person.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#237

Post by rootsofallevil »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #236
vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

> Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. I think performance under pressure is a virtue. An important job is never going to be entirely free from stress - you want somebody reliable who will take that in their stride, you don't want someone who will buckle when things get difficult. I'm all for in-person live collaborative problem solving, be it on a whiteboard or just a discussion. You see firs…

> I think performance under pressure is a virtue. An important job is never going to be entirely free from stress - you want somebody reliable who will take that in their stride, you don't want someone who will buckle when things get difficult.

Some people experience extraordinary high levels of stress in an interview setting. From your comment, I suspect that you are not one of them and might have trouble imagining what these levels of stress feel like.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#238

Post by sirwhinesalot »

geraldwhen wrote: post #202
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been lucky to never have to deal with that. Sucks for everyone that has. On the other hand, I personally cannot code properly while someone is conceptually "breathing down my neck". A for loop sure, but I'd probably fail at writing a hash table or whatever despite nearing 10 years of experience on many different projects, including compiler frontends and a simple garbage collector I wrote for the fun of it.

When I say for loop, I mean for loop. No tricks. Declare a variable with any number type initialized to the value 0. I’ve seen candidates fail that, spend 30 minutes attempting to declare a variable in the LANGUAGE OF THEIR CHOICE.

That is really grim. I work on rather niche systems engineering stuff so that already serves as a pretty major filter, your average codemonkey won't even bother applying to this sort of stuff.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#240

Post by kazinator »

vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

> Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping.

Selecting people for a job is literally gatekeeping. The company has the equivalent of a gate (or perhaps an actual one), and most people are kept out of it by the fact that they are not employees or authorized visitors.

No part of would-be employee screening can be faulted for being gatekeeping; i.e. being that which it is.

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