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This is why you never end up hiring good developers

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Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#11

Post by johan_larson »

fnbr wrote: post #9
johan_larson wrote: post #7

Hiring the right people is a hard problem. The standard approaches, hiring software developers on the basis of code scribbled on white-boards or a series of narrow technical questions, are bad. Instead, I favor three different approaches, depending on the level of the position: We should hire new grads based on internship performance. We should hire senior developers based of their records of design, implementation,…

How do you hire interns?

Code review, if possible. Students of computer science write a lot of code for assignments and projects; I want to see some of it. Obviously, it makes sense to judge the students more leniently than I would judge finished professionals. Grades in relevant courses are also a useful signal.

If a student insists that he has no code suitable for review, fall back to coding problems, since coding under unrealistic conditions is better than no coding at all. But in such cases I have to wonder what the heck the student has been submitting for assignments and projects, so that's definitely a minus.

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#12

Post by cranium »

zxcvgm wrote: post #8

If you found this article familiar, that's because the same article was posted here 3 days ago. Previous link: http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/08/26/you_suck_at_technical_int... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232746

I thought so. At least it's claimed by the same author.

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#13

Post by stillsut »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #3

Fizzbizz? Naah. What you want to do is something more like Minesweep. You go, "Mr. or Mrs. Candidate-Person, we're designing a Minesweep game. You've probably played it before. Here are the rules if you need clarifications. I'm handling the front-end, you write something for the backend." It doesn't matter the programming language they go for or the precise implementation they choose to any one of a number of issues.…

The interview's pressure makes finding these relatively easy tricks difficult. While in the flow of programming, or discussing the problem with colleagues, you'd probably knock this one out in a few seconds, the power difference in the interview does bad things to the visual reasoning part of your brain.

A good outcome I'd look for is the candidate recognizes that loop and mark will not always produce an exact number of mines.

So the ideal interview question I think gives the candidate is a simple task with lots of pitfalls that arise in the naive implementation. The goal is for the candidate to enumerate the pitfalls, and also develop an abstract representation of the problem. Leave the solution / most efficient algorithm out of it.

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#14

Post by BerislavLopac »

fnbr wrote: post #9
johan_larson wrote: post #7

Hiring the right people is a hard problem. The standard approaches, hiring software developers on the basis of code scribbled on white-boards or a series of narrow technical questions, are bad. Instead, I favor three different approaches, depending on the level of the position: We should hire new grads based on internship performance. We should hire senior developers based of their records of design, implementation,…

How do you hire interns?

By seeing how good coffee they make?

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#15

Post by forsaken »

johan_larson wrote: post #11
fnbr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you hire interns?

Code review, if possible. Students of computer science write a lot of code for assignments and projects; I want to see some of it. Obviously, it makes sense to judge the students more leniently than I would judge finished professionals. Grades in relevant courses are also a useful signal. If a student insists that he has no code suitable for review, fall back to coding problems, since coding under unrealistic conditi…

A reminder not to refer to programmers as "he" by default. A bit more here: http://alexgaynor.net/2013/nov/30/gender-neutral-language-fa...

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#19

Post by nawitus »

cranium wrote: post #12
zxcvgm wrote: post #8

If you found this article familiar, that's because the same article was posted here 3 days ago. Previous link: http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/08/26/you_suck_at_technical_int... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232746

I thought so. At least it's claimed by the same author.

I've also noticed that the title has been changed twice. First it was "You suck at technical interviews", then it was changed to "People suck at technical interviews", then to "This is why you never end up hiring good developers".

Re: This is why you never end up hiring good developers

#20

Post by nawitus »

johan_larson wrote: post #7

Hiring the right people is a hard problem. The standard approaches, hiring software developers on the basis of code scribbled on white-boards or a series of narrow technical questions, are bad. Instead, I favor three different approaches, depending on the level of the position: We should hire new grads based on internship performance. We should hire senior developers based of their records of design, implementation,…

>We should hire mid-tier developers based on code review, typically based on open-source code.

What about developers who push non-polished projects to GitHub? Can the candidate specify which project you're reviewing?

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