Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

~70% of the "senior developer" applicants fail

We're extremely happy with our process--this is only step 1--and it's been amazing at yielding a great set of candidates for each hire, but two weeks of administering the tech screen to applicants leaves me a bit depressed. (sigh)

For example I consider myself a reasonable programmer, I can certainly do any project put in front of me. But I failed a YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings.

I learned the following issues completely stop me from being able to program:

1. Someone waiting on an immediate answer.

2. Someone watching/listening to my though process.

3. Not being able to experiment with the code on a computer.

That didn't cut it for them because apparently at YouTube a lot of your programming is done over the phone (sarcasm).

I guess my point is, try to think of the exact tasks this hire would be doing, and ask them to do that. Will they really be writing recursive functions often? Also if possible give them a take home project, so they can work in a more natural environment.

i'm perfectly willing to write code as part of a job interview. just not on a whiteboard or over the phone.

hard to think of a halfway competent developer failing to answer

"where I ask them to implement a simple function, implement a recursive function, write a simple SQL select (join across two tables), and create a simple object model (how would you represent a car as an object)."

in about a minute or so all told, even verbally, over the phone.

"YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings."

This is (ever so slightly) different from OP's ultra simple questions above , but otoh , YouTube has a lot of tough algorithmic problems to solve. I am not sure what position you interviewed for, but the question itself sounds decent for a position that could involve algorithms and searching and so on. Now if the interview were for a job involving "code up a basic enterprise app" I can see how it could be inappropriate.

All that said, I am not a fan of extended phone interviews , but asking very basic questions (as the OP seems to have done) eliminates a surprisingly large number of looks-good-on-paper-but-can't-code-for-nuts type "programmers".

The key to not getting depressed is not to waste any time on people who can't answer ultra basic questions. If in 30 seconds you feel someone is too incompetent, shut the conversation down politely. Spending long periods of time with incompetents is depressing.

One solution is to send a (moderately complex) programming problem by email and ask them to send code back. This will weed out a lot of people without wasting your time.