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Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

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Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#71

Post by sokoloff »

pj wrote: post #20
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to immediately discount any advice or proposals that suggest I work for free.

I would actually enjoy a one week type engagement to get a good fit for a company. It works both ways. You are selling your time. They are selling their environment. The problem is that the employer is accepting a lot more risk than the employee. Do you like paying for something you can't return and you can't get your money back for if it is crap? This is the situation a lot of companies are in. They hire someone, th…

Set aside the whether or not you get paid for the week's trial period for a minute.

How the hell does someone with a job arrange to take a week off to do this trial period for another company? Maybe it works for entry-level or the unemployed, but I don't think you'll find a lot of good senior developers who would be able to make this arrangement work. I've taken jobs entirely based on their interview process. "If I made it through that, and everyone else I'll be working with also did, I'm pumped to work with these people!" Same benefit would apply to the week long trial, but making it work logistically is difficult.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#72

Post by shiranaihito »

pj wrote: post #28
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would actually enjoy a one week type engagement to get a good fit for a company So would I. But since I'm WORKING for that one week, I expect to be paid for it. I really don't think anyone should be surprised by that!

Hmm... I see your point. Perhaps we disagree on the word "work." When I think of "work" I think of moving a company in a desired direction. A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube." The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?" Maybe what you think you are doing when you are working is actually causing more problems and moving the c…

The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?"

Well, the candidate would be giving away a week of his time, which can be a bit problematic. How would you arrange this if the candiate was already employed?

He'd take a week of unpaid vacation from his current workplace, and give it away on a chance he might want to switch jobs and be accepted? Besides, 1/4 of your monthly salary is definitely a noticeable loss.

What if this was a common practise? "Oh well, this didn't work out. I'll take another week of unpaid vacation to try out for that other company then"..

A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube."

Working for some place means exchanging your time for money. Whether that time is spent coding with a burning passion, moving a company in a desired direction, or looking at lolcats is another matter.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#73

Post by vax_11 »

mquander wrote: post #53
vax_11 wrote: post #31

Part of it may be your questions, and part may be HOW you're asking (e.g. over the phone, or putting someone on the spot). 2) Not a lot of people write SQL by hand anymore. I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join. Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything. I've written far, fa…

Well, if you're using ORMs to handle all your SQL needs (and they literally must be handling all your needs if you're never writing anything with a join) then I don't think that you actually have a working knowledge of SQL in any sense. There are certainly plenty of jobs which require that knowledge, and I'm not sure an employer would want someone who didn't have direct SQL language experience. To be honest, I don't…

> then I don't think that you actually have a working knowledge of SQL in any sense.

Of course I have working knowledge of SQL, that's how I used MySQL back when we had to write things by hand. I just don't have a working knowledge of JOINs. I could look up the syntax if I needed to use it. [Looks it up] Looks easy enough.

There are numerous SQL commands most users of SQL would probably need to look up.

Arbitrarily deciding that having not-used X means you don't have a working knowledge is a fallacy. Someone else could arbitrarily decide the litmus test is stored procedures. MySQL didn't have those, so instead of using them we had to code at the application layer, and just happened to use application logic in places of JOINs as well.

I don't even remember if MySQL had joins, or non-buggy joins, a dozen years ago. Other people would say, "it doesn't have transactions, so it's not a real database", et cetera, et cetera. You work around limitations and get used to doing things a certain way.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#74

Post by jasonkester »

plinkplonk wrote: post #48
vax_11 wrote: post #31

Part of it may be your questions, and part may be HOW you're asking (e.g. over the phone, or putting someone on the spot). 2) Not a lot of people write SQL by hand anymore. I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join. Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything. I've written far, fa…

"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join." Scary! I wonder about your definition of "used", if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app "for years" and never wrote a join! The database design must be very ... unusual :-). And this was in the days before ORMs :-D. " Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. " I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app w…

"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join."

Wow.

Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

And really, you can get pretty much any piece of information out of a database using just four keywords. It's the least memorization of any language in history. SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and for extra credit, LIKE. That's it. That'll get you any non-aggregate dataset you could want, joined or otherwise.

Learn IN and GROUP BY and you've got everything else you'll ever need for reporting. It's just the simplest language ever.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#75

Post by kleevr »

seasoup wrote: post #40
pj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... I see your point. Perhaps we disagree on the word "work." When I think of "work" I think of moving a company in a desired direction. A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube." The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?" Maybe what you think you are doing when you are working is actually causing more problems and moving the c…

What are you going to do in one week at a place? It could easily take that long and much longer to ramp up and even understand a part of the existing code base.

Agreed. I don't respect a company that won't give a person two weeks to get the feet wet... i.e. set up dev station, learn the network topology, and bone up on the development stack.

By not letting someone acclimate to your tech environment, your potentially shoving them off on the wrong foot (not to mention stressing them the fuck out,,,which WILL kill their productivity). A mistake that could cost you months of 50% productivity because you didn't (as a company) empower your developers to do their best work.

When I see managers pulling some "whip them harder" management styles, I can't help but be left with the want to remind them about the french revolution. Pointy-haired bosses will soon figure these things when "their" work force becomes a bit too empowered.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#76

Post by philwelch »

tocomment wrote: post #3

Just out of personal curiosity, you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up? 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 commo…

I got asked to write a fibonacci function in an interview once, but they were kind enough to say "go sit at your text editor and write it and then read it to us". I was still flustered a little (since I wasn't sure whether to just talk through it or actually say "int fibs open-parent int n close-paren open-brace...") but apparently I passed the phone screen. I did remark that the naive recursive approach was a terrible algorithm, which may have helped.

Of course, I failed their day-long battery of on-site interviews later. But I did get interviewed by the entire development team, plus the CEO. That was kind of fun.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#77

Post by kscaldef »

tocomment wrote: post #23
_pius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like I mentioned, I just get flustered when people are watching me, or want me to speak my though process aloud. Those skills, (being able to code complex problems when people are watching) have never been a requirement of any job I've seen so I've come out of many interviews feeling that they got an inaccurate picture of my skills.

Really? You never get together in a room with other devs to talk through & pseudocode a solution to a tough problem?

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#78

Post by kmano8 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #51

Speaking of someone who's basically right out of school, I can tell you that I probably wouldn't hire most of my classmates. It _was_ depressing.

In reference to the post I made directly above yours, a classmate of mine got an interview with my employer about 3 months after I started. The HR guy approached me after his interview, and told me he left the entire linked list question blank.. no pseudo code.. nothing. I was embarrassed.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#79

Post by adam_feldman »

tocomment wrote: post #3

Just out of personal curiosity, you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up? 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 commo…

Companies could always do the interview on a tool such as etherpad.com so they could watch the interviewee write.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#80

Post by bittersweet »

pj wrote: post #42
lutorm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Case appealed. There are definitely people who are capable of solving problems but whose performance drops appreciably under pressure. Now, you may not want to hire those people, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with external motivation or making excuses, and you can keep your contempt for yourself.

As an employer, I want employees who can solve problems whether they are under pressure or not. You really want an employee working for you, or even a team member in your group who can't work under pressure when your site is down and they are the only one who can fix it? If you can't work under pressure, you can't work. Or maybe you can work, but I'd rather work with someone who can work under pressure or who can't.…

I don't think it is only about pressure. I can think up a solution to a problem in my head, but to really work it out I have to be behind my computer and start typing. I almost never get something right in 1 try.

I think my style is more trial and error, I make something and see if it works, if not I continue. So of course, a lot of great programmers actually are able to do that, but I think there are also a lot of people who work like I do.

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