Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

fagnerbrack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#41

Post by TheGRS »

I'm thinking of a technical screen I did recently where I didn't move forward. The time to do the screen was 30 minutes, and it was where they had a full frontend/backend and I needed to navigate around to fix a pretty arbitrary issue. I'd say this is preferable to a leetcode problem for sure, but also, I do tend to take my time to understand the system a bit before committing to changes, I mean this is sight unseen. I'm wondering if this felt too slow to the interviewer.

They sent me a summary document before the meeting, but I couldn't see the code until the interview. I felt like I identified the issue and where to make changes rather quickly, like 10 minutes of looking around and talking through how all the components and APIs fit together.

Then the interviewer asked me to implement a datetime solution, which in this time-boxed window my mind raced around to multiple solutions that I talked through out loud: I could write it myself which would definitely take some time for me to remember all of the syntax involved and reason through the problem, I could download an existing library which would also take some time to read documentation, I could google around for existing solutions in somewhere like Stack Overflow which is pretty hit and miss, or I could prompt an AI agent to write a solution for me. I talked through all of these, they wanted to know how I'd do it by hand at first, which I talked through for a bit but admitted I wasn't sure if it was a good way to go about it. Then I said given the time constraints the AI prompt route would probably make the most sense. By the time we arrived at that and tried it for a bit our time was basically up. And I got the impression suggesting AI to help code didn't impress the interviewer at all.

If others are able to stand out in this scenario then I guess I'll just admit I'm not the top candidate. My brain just doesn't work that quickly. I like to spend time gathering context and tinkering before really getting into the solution, and that probably doesn't come across well in these situations.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#42

Post by dangus »

ninininino wrote: post #15
dangus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy. At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview. Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job? This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a g…

> an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job? Many many folks are the type that is willing to hard grind/suffer short-term to get through a hoop, but as soon as they are inside they turn that 'optimizer' mindset towards 'how can I do the minimum necessary to coast and collect my paycheck'. And many many folks who are highly motivated to work hard every day at their job…

For your first paragraph, that’s just a risk of hiring employees that has nothing to do with the interview process. You can possibly surface some of that during behavioral interviews.

If you as a manager can’t detect your employees coasting that’s a you problem. Understanding how to motivate your current employees is not in the scope of the interview process.

For your second paragraph, we can use a cynical attitude calling this “jumping through a hoop like a circus clown” but do you really want to hire someone with such a cynical view of the minor inconvenience of interviewing?

A lot of candidates are very accepting of the fact that interviews will take some work to complete and don’t take a cynical attitude to it.

I don’t have any interest in hiring someone who thinks 2-3 hours of time for a short list candidate interview after the screening process is unreasonable.

If you have made it to my 2-3 hour interview process, you are only competing against 2-3 people for the job. This isn’t some kind of unreasonable waste of time, I’m offering salaries multiple times the median salary, sign-on bonus, equity, generous PTO and free healthcare plan, etc. Having a chance to get all that is definitely worth 3 hours of interviews.

I don’t really need to hire the person who has $10 million in their bank account and refuses to lift a finger to get a job. That person can enjoy their life and do something else.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#43

Post by dzonga »

let's say you make a saas for automatic birdfeeders.

if you can scope out your problem to a simplified version & have a pen & paper / whiteboard discussion with a candidate. the candidate starts from a blank slate. they create their own constraints, validate their own assumptions etc. if they can't design something that works - u can prove this since you already have a working product in production. that way interview takes place in less than 1:30hr. saving time for u & candidate.

you cover: communication, critical thinking, technical chops. 3 birds with one stone.

but unfortunately most people don't want to do that - because 1. their products r fugazi (fueled by vc money), they're on ego trips (we gonna scale) & lastly want to make interviewing a hazing|humiliation ritual.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#44

Post by sanderjd »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #26

The main goal of hiring someone should be to assess how well they can do the job you are hiring for, and for anyone with job experience (i.e. not fresh out of college) the best indicator of that is what have they previously achieved (especially in more recent years). How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges. Of co…

Yeah this is my "natural" interviewing style. Like, I have a resume, I'm talking to a person, my natural curiosity about the person and their work leads me to exactly the kind of conversation you're describing. Then my hire / no-hire intuition is basically "am I impressed with them after that conversation?".

But then I've also read a huge amount about interviewing "correctly" over the years, probably starting with the fizzbuzz article, and eventually participating in "Big Tech" interview panel training, etc. And all of this directly contradicts this natural intuition that I have, and which your comment is espousing.

So I'm honestly left with pretty strong cognitive dissonance about it at this point. Are we wrong? Or is everyone else wrong? How can this consensus on the "right way" have become so ingrained for so long while being so wrong?

(I also haven't been involved in a lot of hiring or at a big tech company since 2022, so I also have no idea how things have evolved to adapt to the advent of AI tools. Surely nobody is doing the same kinds of whiteboard problems as they used to do! Right?!)

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#45

Post by zipy124 »

bradlys wrote: post #27
zipy124 wrote: post #7

The main problem is good engineers have no need to sit through your 12 step process. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).

Where are these jobs paying $500k/yr that I can skip these interviews? I haven’t seen them yet. I hear about jobs paying below $100k/yr that do this but that’s not getting us anywhere in SF.

I mean we know the answer to this. As you go up the seniority ladder interviews become less and less onerous and at some tipping point are not required. Aqui-hires such as Alexandr Wang at Meta for example. Non aqui-hire we have for instance when Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. I somehow doubt they went through as many round as those below them.

Apart from that when lower down in seniority generally start-ups. There are many founders who get funding, know good people, and will hire them without many interviews. Having a good network is critical for exploiting all of these, as the interviewer has already effectively judged your skills over many years or decades.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#46

Post by dangus »

andrewstuart wrote: post #16
dangus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy. At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview. Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job? This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a g…

If I think your interview process is onerous, I’ll ditch your company. I’m not interested in companies arrogant enough to think people should want to work there so much that they will endure your hoop jumping.

That’s fine, I don’t need to hire cynical people.

My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.

If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#47

Post by skydhash »

tptacek wrote: post #34
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #26

The main goal of hiring someone should be to assess how well they can do the job you are hiring for, and for anyone with job experience (i.e. not fresh out of college) the best indicator of that is what have they previously achieved (especially in more recent years). How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges. Of co…

Experience-based interviews are a fantastic way to select for candidates who have "failed up" through a long series of jobs. The underlying dynamic is that it usually takes more than a year to sever a technical employee; you can faceplant in a role and still wind up with a resume improvement.

Experience as in numbers of years or project participation is flawed. But experience as in contributions and knowledge of some specific domains is good IMO.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#48

Post by angiolillo »

dangus wrote: post #12
zipy124 wrote: post #7

The main problem is good engineers have no need to sit through your 12 step process. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy. At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview. Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job? This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a g…

Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.

To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.

To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.

To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.

There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#49

Post by Aurornis »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #26

The main goal of hiring someone should be to assess how well they can do the job you are hiring for, and for anyone with job experience (i.e. not fresh out of college) the best indicator of that is what have they previously achieved (especially in more recent years). How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges. Of co…

> Of course the difficulty is how to you assess what the candidate has honestly achieved in prior jobs - what was there personal contribution,

> What was their role, what were their contributions

I got a hard reality check on this when my company was getting close to hiring someone I worked with at a previous company. Their resume claimed a lot of achievements that other teams had handled. Their work was always a problem and had to be quarantined from production systems because they were very careless and would even submit broken code without testing it.

They would spend a lot of time in Slack discussing other team’s work so they got good at talking about it. I think they also used a trick where they claim to have competing offers from other companies and not a lot of time for interviews, pressuring the interviewers to do discussion and resume reviews instead of getting into technical questions.

This wasn’t the only time, just the first time. After that I started doing more checking for claims on resumes, including calling old friends who worked with a person. It’s crazy how often someone will claim some responsibility or experience on their resume assuming that nobody will ever check it.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#50

Post by dangus »

newtonianrules wrote: post #14
dangus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy. At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview. Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job? This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a g…

I don’t want to put my future coworker through six rounds of interviews. If it takes more than three rounds + a phone screen to figure out if someone is a good fit then the process is broken.

Depends how long the rounds are. 6 rounds of 20 minutes is only 2 hours.

If you think that’s unreasonable, please go ahead and add a few fire sauce packets to the bag for me.

Post reply on HN