Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#311

Post by jph » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 1:49 AM UTC

tylerkahn wrote: post #25

jph wrote: post #9

> Breadth-first search from both ends. I believe this is deeply valuable. For some roles, I would much prefer to hire someone who can quickly see the value of breadth-first search from both ends. If he/she doesn't happen to know the syntax of Ruby, or Java, etc. it's less important to me.

I mean this as a genuine question: http://sixarm.com/ This is your company, correct? (I stalked your Github profile) Seems like the types of problems you're solving are exactly those which require far more domain experience with Ruby/HTML5/Javascript/whatever than the ability to see the value of various graph-searching techniques. Would you hire this guy even though he's said quite plainly that he lacks the experienc…

TLDR: Yes, for some roles.

Some of our projects have us on site, side-by-side with a client's staff programmers. These projects involve millions of dollars, hundreds of stakeholders, and years of existing code. The programmers have a wide range of skill levels.

The work in these projects involves figuring out the project's objectives, goal decomposition, some agile/lean PoCs, then developing the BDD, MVC, DCI, API, CQRS, SQA, etc. Much of this can happen in pseudocode.

We also do pair programming, code reviews, brown bag demos, cross-training, and the like. I believe all these can help with developers getting up to speed with language syntax.

That said, choose the right person for the job. YMMV.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#312

Post by Guvante » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 1:57 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #295

NAFV_P wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"filter out (gently fire) the ones that aren't as good." If the employee finds out you "hire more than you need of the top performers", you end up with a potential court case. If I found this out about a former employer, I would have pursued them to the end of hell.

Isn't this what the up-or-out policy at major consulting firms and investment banks is all about? I mean, it's not identical, but it's a similar idea. I assume that if sure that if firms like McKinsey are hiring/firing like this, it's not illegal.

Depends on timelines. The big places will keep you on for at least a year, possibly forever. Most small places can't afford to do more than a month on someone they don't like.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#313

Post by dusklight » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 2:18 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #276

at-fates-hands wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This true - but without the opcode cache the slowdown would be minimal since all the comments are ignored. Plus, the comments are there for future developers to use as a reference. Nothing worse than having something break, cracking open a file and have to spend hours having to untie someone else's code. I'd rather have copious amounts of comments, then a minimal speed gain due to not having them at all.

Amen, brother. As Martin Fowler writes, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." If Mr. not-Einstein had actually measured some production issue that could be traced back to commenting, he could always have written a filter that stripped them before production. My guess, though, is even he didn't believe this excuse; it was just a glib thing to…

Since you bring up Fowler, in his book Refactoring he gives specific examples to show why you should AVOID comments. In most situations you should try to write code that is so clear no comments are needed. That's what the above code is really about.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#314

Post by Daniel_Newby » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 2:48 AM UTC

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #299

tokenadult wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just say that education requirements are legally risky? Yes, I did say that. I was surprised to find, upon a close reading of the Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case,[1] that the Supreme Court held in that case that not only was an IQ test an illegal hiring requirement, in the circumstances of that case, but so was a high school diploma requirement. The usual headline description of that case menti…

The Duke Power decision was unconstitutional, and it involved total racial segregation and galling defiance of the courts. It has very little applicability to highly-educated employees, if for no other reason than there are virtually no Africans capable of doing the jobs.

Uh, why the downvotes? There are virtually no such Africans. It's an established fact, you just go around and take a census. Plenty of farm boys from Idaho, Japanese, girl engineers from rural China, guys from India with accents thick enough to stop bullets, you name it. All are welcome in the universities, all succeed and prosper. Just no Africans. You don't have to worry about illegally performance testing them during a job interview, because it is a fact that there are virtually none.

And if you still disagree, don't downvote to express your mindless politics. Simply give me the names of the vast horde of African engineers and scientists waiting for a chance. I will hire them and become the world's first trillionaire.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#315

Post by betterunix » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 2:56 AM UTC

smm2000 wrote: post #310

betterunix wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read more than half of one sentence that I wrote? The poor are at a disadvantage when it comes to escaping their position in life ; if you need this spelled out for you, the poor are disadvantaged when it comes to making decisions about saving money that could help them improve their financial situation . Wealthy people are better able to make rational decisions about their money, which helps in retaining wea…

If you are hiring for start up, you do not care why they are dumb. Potentially you can save money by hiring non traditional candidates and paying them less, but any advantage you get this way will be short lived. Unfortunately diamonds in a rough are rare and finding them cost more than their value.

I was originally replying to a comment that claimed that people became wealthy because of their intelligence. My point does not have much to do with the issue of startup hiring (admittedly making the thread a bit off-topic for the article).

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#316

Post by logicallee » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 3:09 AM UTC

nether wrote: post #266

mattjaynes wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm this works in my own experience of trial-and-error interviewing over 2000 applicants and hiring over 200 for my clients and myself (since ~2006). Nearly 100% of the applicants were remote, so I think that helped me from falling into traps of poor "traditional" hiring practices. The point of hiring these remote folks was to help accelerate whatever team I was on. It can be a great way to scale your exist…

> - filter out (gently fire) the ones that aren't as good God I would hate this. I'd rather be told that my work sucks, and shown examples of better work, so that I could actually improve and not just wonder if I was let go for some arbitrary reason. If I disagree with you BFD, life goes on, but I'd at least like to know if it was related to my output or not.

"Your work is great - top 10%. However going forward we will be keeping the top 9% of our performers."

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#317

Post by dinkumthinkum » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 3:57 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #6

rdtsc wrote: post #2

Two possible reasons: 1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people. Because they expect the new person to eventually wear many hats. Objective-C, Java, Android, CSS, server side concurrency, monitoring. An we've all seen Hunter and Schmidt reference that tokenadult usually posts when talk about interviewing comes around and it does seem that a general mental ability test (like an IQ test) combined with a…

I think (1) is probably the primary reason, along with the fun factor I mentioned above. But honestly, why can't we just start giving IQ tests? Or at least asking for SAT scores? We shouldn't have to run through training puzzles just to prove we're smart enough to build a site.

In what way will an IQ or SAT test give you an indication if the applicant even knows what a compiler is? Your comment is cute but I'm not sure how useful it is ... :(

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#318

Post by czarpino » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

While I agree that puzzles and mind games are silly ways to appraise coding skills, they do give an insight about a person's raw intelligence, or knowledge, or potential. As CS is an application of math and programming is an application of CS, being good in math does not necessarily mean proficiency in it's application; same goes for CS. IMO, a good programmer must, at least, have:

+ knowledge - generally mastery of math/CS concepts and can be thought of as the potential

+ application skills - modeling a real world problem into a theoretical, computable, and (ultimately) programmable form

+ execution skills - implementation (coding) of a solution including the ability to utilize requisite tools/technologies such programming languages, DBs, OS, and so on

That said, hiring process should cover each of these areas and programmers should work on all these as well.

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#319

Post by Xixi » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 4:15 AM UTC

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #314

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Duke Power decision was unconstitutional, and it involved total racial segregation and galling defiance of the courts. It has very little applicability to highly-educated employees, if for no other reason than there are virtually no Africans capable of doing the jobs.

Uh, why the downvotes? There are virtually no such Africans. It's an established fact, you just go around and take a census. Plenty of farm boys from Idaho, Japanese, girl engineers from rural China, guys from India with accents thick enough to stop bullets, you name it. All are welcome in the universities, all succeed and prosper. Just no Africans. You don't have to worry about illegally performance testing them dur…

I don't even know why I'm replying...

But anyway back when I was living in France I've had the chance of studying and then working with a lot of great engineers (electrical engineers mostly) coming from Africa: Marocco, Tunisia, Togo, Cameroon, Rwanda, etc.

This is neither a rare nor surprising occurrence: engineers coming from african countries are plentiful and very competent. Maybe you didn't find them because they are not waiting for you to give them a chance: turns out they are as hard and expensive to hire as anyone else...

Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code

#320

Post by andrewflnr » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 4:37 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #150

There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. Company hiring procedures and their effectiveness is a heavily researched topic, but most hiring managers and most job applicants haven't looked up much of the research. After reading the blog post kindly submitted here and some of its comments, and then reading most of the comments here on HN that came in while I was asleep in my time zone, it lo…

Where is the line between a coding test and a "work-sample" test? Does a coding test become a work-sample test just by virtue of resembling a task you would do on the job? Is it a function of scale of the task?