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I will not do a tech interview

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Re: I will not do a tech interview

#251

Post by dragonwriter »

RyanZAG wrote: post #242
dragonwriter wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Woah hold on - you're firing people for getting things wrong in meetings? Wrong outcomes for meetings have business consequences, which can include people losing their jobs. That's not necessarily "people getting fired for getting things wrong in meetings" -- indeed it generally shouldn't be that except in rather extreme cases of "getting things wrong" -- but it still means that people's jobs are on the line in the…

Ah okay, good, that's a more reasonable discussion then. So you're basically saying that a meeting could fail to create value because an employee made mistakes in the meeting as he could not handle the stress. The correct way to solve this for everyone involved is to reduce the amount of stress everyone is under in a meeting and to create an environment conducive to problem solving. This isn't really that hard, a wel…

> The correct way to solve this for everyone involved is to reduce the amount of stress everyone is under in a meeting and to create an environment conducive to problem solving.

Sure, you can mitigate this to some extent, but you can't reliably avoid having high-stakes situations which you need a meetings which are inevitably going to be high-stakes to address, or that senior developers won't be to a certain degree on the spot in those meetings.

> The solution of hiring only people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings is not a solution that will create value over the long term.

I haven't been arguing anything like that; particularly, I'll note that there is a big excluded middle between people who tend to freeze up in high-stress situations and "people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings".

> EDIT: You also shouldn't be making snap judgements in a meeting that will affect the future of the company in the market. If there is a lot of tension in the meeting and the outcome is unclear, postpone the issue a short while until people can work out the issues better.

Postponing action can be a decision that will affect the future of the company in the market. You don't always have the luxury of making decisions in the way you'd prefer without paying a cost.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#252

Post by chetanahuja »

Technical job interviews as traditionally run in silicon valley culture are completely bogus. Many different better ways exist, one of which is the short-term contract work (with an eye towards full time hire). For my company, pretty early in my first conversation with a potential hire, I tell them that the hiring process will never involve having to write code on a whiteboard. I intend to keep it that way whether I'm the CEO of my startup or just a lowly interviewer drone in a big corp from now on.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#253

Post by mikevm »

mattmaroon wrote: post #113
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/…

The freezing up is a factor of anxiety, and anxiety can have any combination of triggers. What usually happens in an instance like this (I'm assuming it's similar to test anxiety) is that somewhere along the way, they froze during an interview, and the memory of that compounded the problem for the next interview, and so on and so forth. So the anxiety could be tied solely to tech interviews. There are plenty of stude…

I also get very anxious during exams and always make silly mistakes. It saddens me to see some some interviewers on this thread that naively believe that the kind of stress a person feels during an exam (especially one where the tester is sitting in front of you and watching your every move) is the same kind of stress you might experience while trying to fix some problem in front of your computer.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#254

Post by kenster07 »

The reason the san fran interview tends to focus on theoretical cs more so than other regions is because the plethora of berkeley and stanford grads in the area, who subconsciously prop the entirety of their ego on their college educations, and thus use it as a measuring stick for others, sometimes at the cost of a good, practical hire. I've seen job descriptions for FRONT END positions which list a cs degree as a 'must,' which is just absurd in today's day and age.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#255

Post by pdovy »

300bps wrote: post #135
pdovy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm curious, is this a money issue, i.e., you refuse because it feels like working for free? Not OP, but it doesn't "feel" like working for free. It is working for free. Having someone perform work for you without paying them is illegal in the United States (see minimum wage laws). There's a simple solution; pay them $x per hour to do your 3 hours of work. Even if you pay them $100 per hour that's a cheap way of filt…

Hm, I guess I didn't think about it that way since we wouldn't actually ever give out "real" work, we give out the same problem (which is an extremely scaled down version of a real application) to most everybody who passes a phone screen.

I think paying them is perfectly reasonable, but I'll also note anecdotally that having done this for many candidates for years, I think very few people have ever declined.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#256

Post by walshemj »

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.

Interviews are not the same as celebrating your first 5 million dollar month and your CTO nudging you and saying this had be right or we are both looking for a new month

(I was in charge of running the system that produced the bills and I think the CTO might have reported to Vint at one point )

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#257

Post by nappy-doo »

Counterpoint:

This is a recipe for only finding unemployed people, and in my opinion, the best people already have jobs.

I have been offered to interview with YC startups that wanted me to fly out, spend a week writing code with them, and _then_ they'd offer me a job. I'm already employed, by an employer that legally owns all my code. I can't take a week off, write your code, and then _possibly_ get an offer. I don't have time for that.

Technical interviews can go afoul, yes. But, IMHO, they are the best we've got. They show respect for the interviewees time, and decisions should be made quickly. Will you occasionally miss a good candidate, yes. Will a bad one get through, less likely. That's about the best one can hope for.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#258

Post by nkuttler »

j_baker wrote: post #250
nkuttler wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very bizarre that anybody would say something like this. Are you afraid of people who are more confident than you? Would that deter you even if they demonstrate superior technical skills?

I find it very bizarre that you don't see a need to keep out people who are overconfident. Are you afraid of people less confident than you? Would that deter you even if they demonstrate "superior technical skills" (whatever that means)? Confidence gives you the strength to get up and go to the interview. It tells you you're competent enough to get the job even if you freeze a couple of times. Overconfidence tells yo…

Oh well, if you think that everybody who doesn't freeze up in a job interview is automatically overconfident this discussion can't go anywhere.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#259

Post by BrandonM »

scrabble wrote: post #148
jlees wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen companies do a "challenge" style interview, where it's less of a contract and more of a "take this problem home, code something up to solve it, push to github and let us know when you're done". Then the interview portion is discussing the solution. It means you can calibrate across candidates better, but I think the advantage of an onsite contract job is the two-way feedback, especially in a smaller company…

This is the way the company I work for currently does it. They provide the candidate with a piece of terrible code, ask for a code review of as many issues as the candidate can find, and also for a refactored copy of the code. Both of which are completed remotely on the dev's own time. This is before even meeting the candidate in person. Once we meet in person for the first time, another terrible piece of code is pro…

I think that a lot of companies forget that they are also being interviewed during their interviews. Were I to interview at your company, I would think that your employees spend most of their time performing code review. I would probably walk out, too.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#260

Post by zerr »

geebee wrote: post #189
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…

Good decision. I regret very much that I didn't make the same decision you did. I did a 5-7 hour programming homework assignment, didn't hear back for weeks, and then it was just from a recruiter (sorry, we've decided not to continue the process). I won't do it again, ever. It's not the wasted time that I regret so much. I do agree with you that there is a self-respect element to this.

Same here, in my case that was AppNexus.

The recruiter was very unresponsive at every step. My code passed all the tests, and had the required time complexity, but after begging for feedback, one month later I just received: "We aren't moving with your candidature" single liner...

EDIT: My comment is marked as [dead], not sure why...

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