I will not do a tech interview • Hacker News Board

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#151

Post by jnbiche » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

lumens wrote: post #30

What about just setting the interviewer's expectations up front? "Hey, as I'm sure you may understand, these sorts of on-the-spot interviews are a significant departure from the day-to-day environment under which I normally perform these sorts of tasks. I know this stuff well, but still might fumble a bit because of this atmosphere. Do you mind if I talk through this problem with you as I would if we were working on…

Sounds like an interesting service, and I will e-mail you shortly for an invite. That said, can anyone recommend a good recruiter like you refer to here, who is good at helping candidates with good skills learn how to interview better? (if so, e-mail is my username at gmail)

I know recruiters have a bad reputations among most developers, but someone like that would be worth their weight in gold to me.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#152

Post by YZF » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:44 PM UTC

maxk42 wrote: post #100

crazygringo wrote: post #62

Granted, there are a lot of bad tech interviews out there (asking about algorithms that nobody ever uses) ... but I do not understand this. Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed. I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/…

Just replying to state my shock at how many people are defending poor interview performance. If you freeze up during interviews because it's "high stress" then maybe you need to practice going on more interviews until it doesn't bug you any more. When you're a developer -- especially at a senior level -- you need to be able to work well under stress. Hell -- you need to be able to do that for nearly any job in the wo…

The main issue is that a lot of those interviews are poorly correlated with actual job performance. (People should familiarize themselves with Daniel Kahneman's related work there). Even the outcome of the interview may have more to do with the mood the interviewers are in and various social factors and signals then some objective measures. Most of my experience is interviewing others but it is certainly a reality check, which everyone should go through occasionally, to go interview somewhere else.

Personally I have no issue with stress. It actually brings out the best in me. I do realize however this whole thing is a game. When I interview others I try to be aware of these factors and get at what I really need but I'm not 100% immune to being in a bad mood etc.

One day I should blog about how to interview. That's a fun subject to write about...

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#153

Post by georgemcbay » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:44 PM UTC

nagrom wrote: post #124

btilly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that interviews are high stress affairs. Stress produces adrenaline. One of adrenaline's known effects is to prepare us for "fight or flight", meaning that higher order logic is shut off, digestion is shut off, our senses sharpen, reactions improve. This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally…

I think that there are other problems here though; if you are going to be a part of an environment where you may experience adrenaline surges, you need to work through them. Skipping that part of an interview means that you won't be able to evaluate that response. One solution may be to include a high-stress part of the interview, but to weight it in the overall evaluation appropriately. [>>>This is great when you've…

Adult tigers rarely climb trees even when chasing prey and need a significant running start to do so at all. Though they are cats their mass is importantly very different than domestic cats.

You fail the interview for not getting the a-ha question right.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#154

Post by frozenport » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

SonicSoul wrote: post #90

this is a very good idea. i've had multiple interviews where i did well on the phone and the tech-out, only to receive a "take home exercise".. with guidelines such as "it will be graded by style and architecture in addition to correctness of function". This would mean half of my saturday in a coffee shop coding an elaborate solution using latest technology and good patterns.. with some resentment because i just wast…

Same thing.

I got an open ended problem that would take a measure of forever to solve: Specifically to write a program (in your favorite language!) that would do natural language processing and discern emotions and feelings about subjects from text. We were supposed to include our own lexical parser.

The author's strategy scales poorly with complex and interlocking problems. Where it is more important to show potential ability to solve the problem (puzzles), holistic understanding (talkin' about it), or prioir experience (specific questions about libraries).

This guy should address his core problem (stage anxiety?) instead of advocating a solution that is only tenable in a limited number of cases and represents far too much commitment from the participants.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#155

Post by hox » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #22

> I politely suggest that a short contract job might be the best option for a company to evaluate a senior developer I like the twist of doing the contract off site on the developers own time. Every time I see someone on hacker news saying, "we've solved the interview problem. We just require every new hire to give up their old job and contract with us for a week to see if they are a good fit", I often wonder about t…

If I were looking for a job, I would really only consider a 10+ hour "take-home" interview if I already had extensive dialog with the employer, met their team, and determined proper fit given my background. I also don't know if I would be willing to put in the time if I was still competing with others for the same position. I know that I would not be able to put in as much free time as others, and devoting that much time to something that might only be used as a measure for comparison is a waste of my time.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#156

Post by moubarak » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #108

moubarak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i once needed a job so bad and was asked to solve a Rails challenge. i never did Rails before but i learned it and solved the challenge in a week. i also thoroughly documented my learning process and decisions. However i was rejected for being too fresh which i understood, i learned a lot during that week and even though i didn't get the job i feel that i achieved something. so i also don't see how you can lose with…

That's great that you got something out of it, but I have to wonder why it took them until after you completed the task to figure out that you were "too fresh."

the best reason i remember was that it wasn't unanimous. my submission had to go through several people, and while the guys who i had direct contact with showed that they liked me, the decision came after their meeting with the CTO.

They also knew before hand and gave me a chance perhaps i would do something very impressive. i'm not saying my submission was perfect, i might have done a couple of things wrong, or during that period they might have found someone better, there might have been several reasons i think, but i still learned a ton about Rails.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#157

Post by jaegerpicker » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:47 PM UTC

10098 wrote: post #123

btilly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that interviews are high stress affairs. Stress produces adrenaline. One of adrenaline's known effects is to prepare us for "fight or flight", meaning that higher order logic is shut off, digestion is shut off, our senses sharpen, reactions improve. This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally…

Well, jobs are high stress affairs too. We often have to maintain production systems that fail in cryptic ways at the most inconvenient times. I postulate that such situations are more stressful than solving some binary search tree problem on a whiteboard.

Not at all. If I fix a production issue it's fixed. Either it is or it isn't. In an interview, I'm trying to impress another human. Who knows if I do a good job at that. Computers and their problems are simple in comparison. Judging a humans reaction, A LOT of developers are seriously bad at that. I'm pretty good at it myself but I hate it. I've had very few interviews that I didn't receive offers from but even I dislike the human part of interviews.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#158

Post by scdoshi » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:48 PM UTC

pdovy wrote: post #129

donretag wrote: post #25

Not quite the same, but I once had a no name company (getglue) tell me that I need to do a 3-hour programming assignment before I can interview with them. I have too much self-respect for myself to put myself through that process. I declined the "opportunity" to interview with them. The interview process is broken and many of the interviewing techniques either do not correctly judge a candidate, or place too much bur…

I'm curious, is this a money issue, i.e., you refuse because it feels like working for free? Or is it just a principal thing? I doesn't seem unreasonable to me to ask even a senior developer to do a small coding assignment as part of the interview process unless they can show a good, relevant coding sample. If we're going to agree that whiteboard coding isn't a great way to evaluate someone, and we can't ask you to d…

I think they wanted him to do a 3 hour code test before they even talked to him

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#159

Post by dsrguru » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:48 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #62

Granted, there are a lot of bad tech interviews out there (asking about algorithms that nobody ever uses) ... but I do not understand this. Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed. I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/…

> I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/specificity works. Give them an example webapp idea, and ask how they might architect it. ... None of these are gotchas.

You can do those in a half hour initial phone screen. Getting an idea of the applicant's general and/or domain-specific technical competence before you fly them out absolutely makes sense. I think what the author is criticizing, or at least the part of the author's criticism that I agree with, is the typical on-site interview that spends 3+ hours testing one's algorithmic knowledge and whiteboard coding skills. I do think that approach is vastly superior to doing nothing at all, but my personal experience suggests that testing the applicant's skills in a real life situation, after having vetted their technical knowledge/competence over the phone, seems more likely to identify strong engineers.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#160

Post by com2kid » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

jnbiche wrote: post #48

TeeWEE wrote: post #4

Well, I need to interview candidates because I need to know if they are up for the job when systems breaks. If a table query fails because it needs a btree index due to range searches, I want the candidate to know how a btree index works and why it fixes the issue. Also If somebody cant tell me the difference between http udp and tcp, its a no hire for me. So for me, I really want to interview somebody before he can…

Can you not understand that there might be people who can complete your task easily, yet who have extreme anxiety about interviews? I actually understand this issue -- I've been trying to switch careers into programming for the past year. I've know several languages well (Python, JavaScript, some C), can use git, and have a few decently impressive projects on my Github profile. I also contribute to a pretty well-know…

> Programming interviews seem incredibly confrontational compared to my current profession. Interviewers seem to be out to trick you at something, or else to prove how much smarter they are than you.

Many interviewers are poor at doing interviews. :(

I do not try to trick anyone in any interview I do. I put forth a problem and ask people to work towards a solution. If I feel the solution can be improved upon (not necessarily to get the answer "I want", but in an overall sense of software engineering) I start asking exploratory questions about why some piece of code was implemented some particular way.

I have a set of questions I ask every candidate that comes through, the questions start off easy and work their way up through a progression of difficulty. None of the questions are me thinking I know how to do best, and on 2 occasions so far I have hired people for at least in part giving better answers on the questions than the solutions I knew.

As for confrontational, I try to remember that almost everyone is below optimal during interviews! I get nervous during interviews as well, I don't expect people to be at the top of their game and nail everything, silly mistakes that normally would get filtered out before fingers hit keyboard end up being put on a white board for fear of time. I get that, I do the same damn thing when being interviewed. :)