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The Hiring Post

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Re: The Hiring Post

#81

Post by rdtsc »

tptacek wrote: post #57
rdtsc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good post. Thank you for sharing it. I've been interviewing applicants quite a bit lately, so have been thinking about these issues. Two questions for you. What is your experience hiring fresh college grads? Is the process different? Since one of goals of the process seems to not arbitrarily adjust it for every candidate, but rather stay consistent, do you think it makes sense to adjust it for someone who just g…

Everyone has exactly the same process, with the exception of interns. Interns have an abbreviated interview (shorthand: we switch from assessing aptitude to assessing enthusiasm ), and any time one came back looking for a full time job, they got fast-tracked. I'm not saying that was the best policy (it did keep us from collecting some extra data), but by the end of an internship you had a really good idea that you wa…

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

Re: The Hiring Post

#82

Post by tptacek »

rdtsc wrote: post #81
tptacek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has exactly the same process, with the exception of interns. Interns have an abbreviated interview (shorthand: we switch from assessing aptitude to assessing enthusiasm ), and any time one came back looking for a full time job, they got fast-tracked. I'm not saying that was the best policy (it did keep us from collecting some extra data), but by the end of an internship you had a really good idea that you wa…

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

Thank you for asking interesting questions!

Re: The Hiring Post

#83

Post by Buge »

steakejjs wrote: post #4

Great post. I hate interviewing. I think a lot about it since I'm the type of person who performs horribly in an interview call when some person I've never met is asking me trivia questions on speaker phone... One thing I wonder. Why are people being interviewed for technical positions in a google doc or whatever fake coding environment? Servers are cheap. If you have to go the way of the technical phone interview, d…

I think google's reasoning for using google docs is that they would rather use whiteboards but can't for phone calls. Google docs are similar to whiteboards in that they provide no highlighting or code completion.

Re: The Hiring Post

#84

Post by chloridite »

tptacek wrote: post #27

Author. I can talk in a pretty good amount of detail about how exactly our process worked, if anyone has any questions. And, to head off a concern a reviewer gave me: from 1997-2005, I was a full-time software developer; I shipped shrink-wrap boxed software on Windows and Unix in the 1990s, then appliances deployed at tier 1 ISPs. I'm a "software person" more than a "security person".

How often is it that a candidate shows positive on work-sample tests but then shows negative after a face-to-face interview? Should you explain negative outcomes to the rest of the company or to the candidate?

Re: The Hiring Post

#85

Post by maxerickson »

baddox wrote: post #12

> The majority of people who can code can’t do it well in an interview. Major citation needed. I don't have any real data either way, but I find this extremely hard to believe.

Do you think any majority of people are good at interviews?

I don't have a strong or well informed opinion about it, but I would not be shocked if the answer is no.

Re: The Hiring Post

#86

Post by spacemaus »

fitzwatermellow wrote: post #55

So, who feels like building a cloud based "work-sample tests" platform with me?

Funny, last week I wrote some notes about doing just this :). It would be hard to build a general purpose platform, but I think if it focused on just replacing the initial technical phone screen, it could be both reliable and useful.

There's a common set of skills that most any software engineer should have. I think those skills can probably be checked via a web tool, and in higher fidelity than you can get over the phone.

As a candidate applying to N jobs, I'd much rather take a web screen once instead of doing N technical phone interviews. And as an interviewer, I'd much rather not have to ask FizzBuzz again.

Re: The Hiring Post

#87

Post by AceJohnny2 »

cyounkins wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, recruiting is two problems: outreach and qualification. You're asking about outreach. How we did outreach is a whole 'nother blog post, and one I'm bound to write soon. What surprised me about recruiting was how much more important qualification is than outreach. Without good qualification, it almost doesn't matter how good your outreach is, because you're filtering for the same highly visible easily accessibl…

Maybe I wasn't clear with my question. Say the company indicates it is hiring and gets 100 interested people. How do you filter them down to serious applicants without looking at resumes? I would argue that isn't so much outreach as it is qualification, as the people are already interested. Maybe my premise of 100 candidates is incorrect based on how you did outreach?

tptacek mentioned in some other comments that Matasano runs ongoing "Capture-the-flag" contests/games (such as [1]) that basically self-selects interested and interesting candidates for them.

[1] https://microcorruption.com/login

Re: The Hiring Post

#88

Post by pcthrowaway »

tptacek wrote: post #49
nissimk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, because to change it, you have to admit that the way you were doing it before is not effective. I've come across many people who admit that they are bad at being interviewed, but very few people I meet have admitted to being bad at interviewing others. It's incongruous with the results, because these are the same people that have hired folks that we all agree are not exhibiting the level and characteristi…

I was horrible at interviews. I was a sport interviewer. I had favorite tricky questions. "Design the fastest possible traceroute" was one for a long time. "Describe the most important feature of TCP NO WRONG, IT'S CONGESTION CONTROL NITWIT". I trust my own interviewing ability least of all, which is why I sink so much time into avoiding them.

Why do you feel that congestion control is so much more important than guaranteed delivery? Guaranteed delivery would have been my first thought.

Re: The Hiring Post

#89

Post by bsdpython »

My biggest issue with the work sample tests is the companies that waste your time with them. I've had 3 cases over the years where I was asked to work on something, I did it quickly, with quality and exceeded the specs and I was still turned down at that point (I confirmed that the code was good in at least 2 of the cases). As a senior technical person at this point in my career I simply have very little stomach for wasting time. Have at it young'ins.

Re: The Hiring Post

#90

Post by tptacek »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #88
tptacek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was horrible at interviews. I was a sport interviewer. I had favorite tricky questions. "Design the fastest possible traceroute" was one for a long time. "Describe the most important feature of TCP NO WRONG, IT'S CONGESTION CONTROL NITWIT". I trust my own interviewing ability least of all, which is why I sink so much time into avoiding them.

Why do you feel that congestion control is so much more important than guaranteed delivery? Guaranteed delivery would have been my first thought.

Guaranteed delivery is extremely easy to provide. TFTP manages it. But think about a bunch of ethernet-connected browsers sharing a 1mb/s link; that's kind of a miracle.
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