Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by seasoup » Fri, Aug 07, 2009, 8:46 PM UTC

pj wrote: post #84

seasoup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've gone into a company with software systems that were a complete rat's nest, learned the enviroment, accessed files and utilities needed to make changes, and implemented a significant change in 2 days. A lasting and flexible change that will enable the company to operate more cheaply and be more agile in the future. Many information systems can be implemented in a week. You could set up email, an e-commerce site,…

Ah, the area where we disagree is on the size of the company in question. I was thinking medium to large, while it looks like you are thinking more start-up. I agree that a week is much more viable to assess someone in a startup. In a large corporation, they'll be lucky to have a computer by then!

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

#112

Post by philwelch » Fri, Aug 07, 2009, 11:30 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #109

philwelch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your fibonacci algorithm is crap. You're tree-recursively calculating the exact same values over and over and over and over again. Just try running it sometime on a large n if you want to test your computer's ability to stall and ramp up the cooling fans. "do you make racing games?" That's a question to ask first, not second. Maybe he's making a "Pimp My Ride" style game where the actual driving part is less importan…

Agreed, but this is the very question I'm getting at - does Flemlord want to know the quality of algorithms someone naturally comes up with, or is this just to screen out the total BS artists? Hence my mention above of how it feels like a trick question. I really don't know whether the interviewer wants the autistic-but-informative answer or the quick of-course-I-know answer. Trying to guess what sort of answer you a…

If I was interviewing you (I've never interviewed anyone) and you gave that fibonacci algorithm, I would probably say, "Hmm, and how does that algorithm perform? Can you think of a better one?" If you said "its performance is crap, storing the previous two results and using iteration is better", I'd be happy. If you said "exponential" and "linear" instead of "crap" and "better" you'd get bonus points. Volunteering that information at the outset would get more bonus points because it shows that you really care and that you don't even feel comfortable writing down an exponential-time algorithm without loudly warning everybody they shouldn't use it.

The standard interview question is "write a function to solve this problem which has an elegant recursive solution", not "think of a recursive function". But if you do want to think of a recursive function, try factorial.

    int fctl(int n){ return ( (n = 1) ? n : n * fctl(n)); }

(Don't use that code in an interview. It's questionable style for C, and the ternary operator is scary to people.)

I was asked to write a fibonacci function once, and I actually said, "you can do this recursively but the performance is awful" and wrote an iterative solution.

The point of an interview is for you to show off. If you start going on and on and on and on about unnecessary details the interviewer might stop you, but if you launch into a talk about the space and time properties of recursion vs. iteration and show some judgment for how to use recursion and how not to use recursion, then I know how knowledgeable you are.

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

#113

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 3:26 AM UTC

vax_11 wrote: post #96

philwelch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A lot of people use languages where recursion is unusual (i.e. NOT Lisp). Even a senior developer (especially of something like PHP) might not recall this, not having actually written a recursive function for years." There are tons of languages that support recursion. Whether or not you use it is a function of the problem, not the language. (I'm not counting tail recursion since I consider tail recursion to be a fun…

> There are tons of languages that support recursion Obviously. But I don't remember ever writing a recursive function in PHP for a website.

If writing PHP for websites is the limit of your skill set, I'm worried for you. Not a personal remark, but a comment on the interviewing process.

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

#114

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 3:43 AM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #36

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…

Makes no difference: they hired me, they pay me. Doesn't matter if I create $1M in profit that first week or I sit there with my thumb up my ass. If I'm there I expect to be paid for it. Furthermore, I have no interest in reducing the risk for the employer: I expect them to do that. I reduce my own risks. If I'm the employer, then of course my perspective will shift 180deg. FFS, it's a job, not a hobby!

I think pj's suggestion is a means of reducing the risk to the employer. The way they reduce their hiring risk is to make sure you can do the job before hiring.

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

#115

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 5:21 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #112

anigbrowl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but this is the very question I'm getting at - does Flemlord want to know the quality of algorithms someone naturally comes up with, or is this just to screen out the total BS artists? Hence my mention above of how it feels like a trick question. I really don't know whether the interviewer wants the autistic-but-informative answer or the quick of-course-I-know answer. Trying to guess what sort of answer you a…

If I was interviewing you (I've never interviewed anyone) and you gave that fibonacci algorithm, I would probably say, "Hmm, and how does that algorithm perform? Can you think of a better one?" If you said "its performance is crap, storing the previous two results and using iteration is better", I'd be happy. If you said "exponential" and "linear" instead of "crap" and "better" you'd get bonus points. Volunteering th…

Dammit, I made a syntax error. The factorial function in C should be

    int fctl(int n){ return ( (n == 1) ? n : n * fctl(n)); }

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

#116

Post by nibrahim » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 6:07 AM UTC

plinkplonk wrote: post #7

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…

"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? 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…

>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.

This is I think the best solution. A friend works at a company here called Tachyon and they have this part as part of the form on their jobs site where you can apply for jobs. http://tachyon.in/jobs.html

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

#117

Post by clistctrl » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 12:01 PM UTC

gstar wrote: post #35

Not depressing at all, completely representative of the job pool. The technique you're using isn't common - a lot of traditional companies don't interview on skill and technique (like Google do). Backing up your 70% of failures, we recently hired a fashion designer at our startup (we're in an interesting market!) I decided we should use the same kind of interview we would for a developer. Everyone we interviewed was…

what is an objective interview for a fashion designer like?

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

#118

Post by HO » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 1:19 PM UTC

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.…

OK ALRIGH

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

#119

Post by Flemlord » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 2:23 PM UTC

_pius wrote: post #18

Yes, it is depressing. That said, I've had success with doing the pre-screen in a Campfire room and asking them to Pastie/Gist their code into the room. That way, you eliminate some of the weirdness associated with coding over the phone, but you maintain much of the immediacy.

That's exactly what I do. The first interview is over the phone and they type out their answers over a WebEx link.

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

#120

Post by planck » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 5:20 PM UTC

vax_11 wrote: post #93

planck wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test -- they don't use SQL, they use flat files." Well, then they likely wouldn't be a good fit for the position the OP is hiring for, since it requires using SQL, not flat files.

It would be nice to see who's upvoting this so I could add them to an IDIOTS file. Any of the above people could obviously EASILY pick up whatever SQL you happened to be using. RTM could wipe the floor with you, the OP, and everyone else on your team. If your interview process filters out people like RTM, your filtering is broken.

When you're hiring for any normal development position, ability matters more than reputation. If I was interviewing someone for a job that required writing SQL and asked them to write some SQL, and they couldn't, I wouldn't hire them. What is so hard to understand about that?

I'm sure that I could EASILY pick up the skills required to be a gardener, but would you hire me to tend your rose bushes based on that fact? No, and that's what this discussion is about.