The anatomy of the perfect technical interview from a former Amazon VP

Post by realspeech » Thu, Aug 15, 2013, 6:48 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #45

hobb0001 wrote: post #40

> [he] believes every phase of the process needs to be meticulously designed to drill deep into skill sets, ... and leadership potential Ugh. I hate this. For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority? Speaking for myself, I've done the leadership thing and don't care for it. People tell me I'm good at it, but I still prefer dealing with algorithms over humans, and I actively decline offers for "p…

> For a technical interview, why is leadership potential a priority? Probably because in many modern ways of organizing knowledge work, distributing leadership roles is an important part of the way organizations operate. > Unfortunately, no matter where you go, there's always the deep-seated cultural mindset that manager > worker. The places where that is least true are also the places where evaluating leadership pot…

Post by Zimahl » Thu, Aug 15, 2013, 6:55 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #42

kenster07 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re Wall Street: It's unfortunate that some of our brightest are tempted into playing multi-million dollar poker, rather than focusing their energy on producing any significant long-term value. I believe software engineering wages will continue to rise over time, and will eventually reflect the true value the industry produces.

I think I'd rather use my tech skills to play multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street then create yet another beautiful, responsive, flexible, tweet-able, location-based, modular MVC library API component framework backbone architecture.js.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 15, 2013, 6:58 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #20

jmduke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't downvote you, but calling Amazon a startup is pretty ridiculous -- and your spelling/grammar isn't lending your argument any favors. (Though, ironically, it does fit into PG's description of "a company optimized for growth.")

I think it should have been obvious from the context that I was talking about a substantial number of the HN commentators who are working at me to start ups (nothing wrong with that but its not world changing rocket science) Soory if you have problems with reading as a literate dyslexic I had no problem with reading writing not so much :)

Post by Terretta » Thu, Aug 15, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

jpalioto wrote: post #50

umsm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the hungry part (if you are referring to someone that needs the money). Being "hungry" just means that they will be stuck with a company but will not love what they do.

Less about needing money and more about being ambitious. Hungry for success I should say.

Post by dylangs1030 » Thu, Aug 15, 2013, 7:17 PM UTC

jpalioto wrote: post #32

dylangs1030 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I don't think it's a solvable problem. It's like people who champion the removal of SAT/ACT from college admissions. Okay, so statistics demonstrate the SAT only correlates with the first year of college...great, what do you have to replace it with? We work with what we have, and take the benefits it gives us. Systems can always be gamed, and that's an unfortunate (fortunate for some, I guess) reality.

It's a maximization problem. The goal is to have the best possible ROC curve for your hiring process. Maximize true positives while minimizing false positives. My personal threshold attempts to minimize false positives even to the extent that I will pass on people that would probably have done a good job. I tune it this way because I think that bad hires are one of the worst things that can happen to a team. But, eac…