This is the most idiotic advice for hiring. I have seen many successful hires who were just out of school but were brilliant and went to become very successful later on in their careers.
The Only Interview Question That Matters
71–80 of 185 posts
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#72I strongly prefer the Aaron Patzer/"Israeli Airport" technique; walk through someone's entire resume and ask detailed questions (like this one) for each job; and try to get education and non-work projects captured as well (which really should have been highlighted by the candidate, too, but aren't always). You could actually just go purely chronologically from "earliest memory", but obviously focus on the important areas, and be aware an older candidate might have changed substantially from college-age to present day.
Then, work-sample. Although in some cases (screening lots of people), a simple work-sample just as a pre-filter might make sense, particularly if you can administer it remotely/auto-grade/etc.
The hiring process has twin goals: not pissing off candidates (hired OR unhired), and hiring the best people you can. Being time-efficient for candidates as well as your own staff helps a lot. Painlessly getting people in or out of the pool before a 6h interview process = win.
Having a repeatable, quantitative process also seems very important, although the cases where I had to hire >3 people with a team of >10 all came with someone else's HR process so I couldn't implement too much of this.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…
You're missing the point entirely. It's not that first question that gives you the information. That question is just setting the stage for all of the questions that follow. The main point, which is key to hiring, is that you need to ensure that people are answering questions based on actual experiences, not hypotheticals. When you ask someone "how WOULD you handle xyz", they feel free to answer with ideal behavior.…
Agreed. In GP's scenario, telling the story of how they were able to balance working a night job with going to the public library to do their homework, say, or how they dealt with a rough situation at home, or whatever else it was, could be quite impressive.
I don't look at academic success too hard when I hire, but if someone really worked their tail off to beat obstacles and get that 4.0, I'll find those stories to be a great indicator.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#74I'm going to add a top-level reply, despite having replied to a few people's posts.
The first question is just a staging question. You are asking the candidate to think about a situation that you are proud of, one you will be happy talking about, and one that you hopefully remember in detail.
The real meat is in all of the follow-ups -- what's called "behavioral interviewing". You're asking people to tell you about how they behaved in a real situation. For example, when there was a huge disagreement on the project, how did you solve it? How did you motive the team through a low point? Tell me about big decisions that you made that worked out, and ones that didn't.
Research has shown time and time again that good behavioral interviewing is the best way to find successful employees. If it's a technical position, you clearly also need to discern their technical skills (code on the board, or submit a github resume, or the like), but these are the questions that will tell you if this is someone who will be an asset to the team in non-technical ways.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#75I think this an amazing question to ask in an interview and I have actually been asked this question in two interviews. I generally throw the interviewers off track though because I generally talk about my personal project that involves a virtual machine and a byte code compiler for the virtual machine. I actually really enjoy this part of the interview too because it gives me a chance to talk about something im passionate about while displaying my technical abilities.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#76"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.
This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…
You think Paul Graham isn't going to respond to an against- all- odds story about someone who got to college from North Lawndale?
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#77I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…
Perhaps the exact wording of the question is less important than the discussion that follows?
No, that's exactly my point: the discussion that follows looks valuable, but isn't, because it isn't rigorous.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#78"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.
This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…
The question is "what would you consider your most significant achievement?". This is an opportunity for the interviewee to tell the story of the achievement; you don't want a one-liner answer from them, you want them to explain the significance. You're not ranking the achievements but the interviewee.
Answered well, and if you listen to the answer properly, this question will tell you how someone overcomes obstacles and handles adversity.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#79I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…
So, there's a step missing here. What you need going into this interview is a solid understanding of your corporate culture -- what behaviors you value. Maybe you work for a bank, and the most important things for you are integrity and conservatism. Or, maybe you work for an early stage start-up, and calculated risk-taking and team spirit are most important. In either case, as you walk through these questions, you as…
No, asking questions in a face-to-face interview is not the best way to figure out if a person is going to do what you want them to. It is not a very effective way of doing that at all. To be meaningful at all, it requires an interviewer with many of the same skills as a psychologist, and a candidate who can represent themselves effectively in an extraordinarily hostile situation. Even if you have both, you're still not even in the vicinity of the power of a work-sample test.
Job interviews suck, and I feel like people who have been hiring in this industry for a long time recognize at some level that they're essentially random functions, made workable only by dev teams willingness to put up with employee churn and extreme inefficiency.
Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been a pro for nearly 15 years and the project that I'm most proud of was something i did as an undergrad. Now I'm sad.
Yup, me too. And it's the worst code I've ever written. Miranda IM. Millions of downloads, popular for 14 years. I got bigger than I ever imagined it could. What have I worked on since: ACDZip, ACDSee, Tracktion, EAW Resolution, SPIN Review. ACDSee was a brief success, but the rest - meh.
Knowing that would make me more likely to hire you. On the one hand, you recognize it was the worst code, and you've improved since. On the other hand, you recognize that going into an ivory tower and designing perfect code, is not necessarily required for success.
Any given project will be calibrated somewhere between the extremes of "just ship it" and "take 5 years to make a perfect 1.0". A developer who, based on experience, is flexible enough to calibrate themselves to match the project -- who can adapt to reasonable balances of "do it faster" vs. "do it better" -- is valuable.