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

51–60 of 111 posts

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#51

Post by myself248 »

root-parent wrote: post #13
kadhirvelm wrote: post #11

We’ve added collaboration and communication as big facets in our hiring loop rubrics, and reduced the complexity of our questions. We also tell candidates this ahead of time - been honestly working pretty well so far, it indexes more on those soft skills and gives us just enough insight into the hard skills to make a call. We’ve also been increasingly finding very few candidates know how to solve a complex question t…

>> few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol Please tell me you are joking.

If you're hiring from the town where Kool-Aid is headquartered, don't be surprised if most of the candidates drink a lot of it.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#52

Post by glaslong »

TheGRS wrote: post #41

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.…

It often selects for a confident first shot, which is why we see these orgs drift towards lots of engineers who can blast out code but cannot maintain or evolve any existing systems proficiently. On rare occasion that is even the hiring goal!

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#53

Post by andrewstuart »

dangus wrote: post #46
andrewstuart wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the mechanism:

“Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#54

Post by dust-jacket »

m_m_carvalho wrote: post #33

As a former IT instructor, I've seen students who performed brilliantly in exams and interviews but struggled when faced with real-world ambiguity. I've also seen quieter people who were average in interviews become excellent builders once they had a real problem to solve. Interviews are useful, but the ability to ship, maintain and improve real projects should probably carry more weight.

> Interviews are useful, but the ability to ship, maintain and improve real projects should probably carry more weight.

But how do you assess this? Maybe we should get them to write a document that details what they've done, and then invite them to a conversation to discuss it.

Oh wait...

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#55

Post by jghn »

sanderjd wrote: post #44
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 th…

This is still my preferred method.

The one counterargument that I accept as valid is that this method struggles with equity and bias. It's impossible to have a conversational interview style and ensure everyone is getting equal treatment. And it's impossible to rule out subconscious biases as a factor while you're having that conversation. While giving people cookie cutter panels doesn't completely remove those issues, it helps a lot.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#56

Post by dangus »

andrewstuart wrote: post #53
dangus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the mechanism: “Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”

I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.

However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.

Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#57

Post by pcan77 »

I love how people in this thread are ABSOLUTELY BAFFLED at "how do we do this a better way." How about the same way doctors, lawyers, and literally everyone else does it? Look at credentials, schooling, past experience, references and personality interviews rather than 99% leetcode? I have lawyer, doctor, etc friends (aka high up professionals who get paid what we do or more) and they think it's absolute insanity what SOFTWARE engineers have to do to get a freaking job. They think it's asinine, quite frankly and all go "well what did you even go to school for? Don't they know you worked at a Fortune 500 company for over a decade? Why are they having you do trick questions from CS101 courses?"

Y'all, it's not that difficult. You can just pretend we're like everyone else because gasp our profession simply isn't that special like we all think it is for some stupid reason.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#58

Post by zipy124 »

angiolillo wrote: post #48
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…

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…

Thank you for explaining my point. The fact these two are orthogonal is exactly the point I was trying to make.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#59

Post by Aurornis »

sanderjd wrote: post #44
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 th…

Hiring based on gut feeling about how impressive the candidate feels can be misleading when you only do a little hiring. It can work for small samples sizes if you have a strong front end filter or you are primarily getting candidates through trusted referrals.

Then one day you encounter a candidate who is great at impressing people. They leave you feeling excited with the possibility of working with them. You feel delighted after each encounter. Then you hire them and they’re not good. At all. They don’t know basic things that you assumed they would based on how they spoke in conversation. They used all the right words and maybe even recited the precisely correct things to say for a system design question about past work, but when they have to do the same work they’re lost.

It’s a weird feeling to discover your intuition about someone was completely wrong, because we all think we’re better than average at separating the wheat from the chaff. I think it happens to everyone who does hiring at scale.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#60

Post by siliconc0w »

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…

Just do one project. Ask them for an interesting or challenging problem they had, go over it at a high level from a business and technical perspective, and then dig in as deep as you can on specific parts. Ask about business impact, how was that measured, what were the tradeoffs, what made it especially difficult, what were the alternatives, what they'd do differently, etc. If they can go deeper than you can, then that is a good sign.
Post reply on HN