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The Hiring Post

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Re: The Hiring Post

#181

Post by msoad »

eru wrote: post #131
bootload wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... I already worked myself half to death in my twenties for two startups, I'm not going to study for a test as a second job for a year just to get a job at Google, although I still think it'd be fun and clearly challenging. ..." What's "good for google" right? @cableshaft how would you rate @tptacek s observations on hiring with what you observed at google?

Google still does interviews. They try to do them better --- eg separating the hire / no hire decision maker from the face to face interviewer. But I'd like to see them try out more work samples. I'm going through interviewer training at Google at the moment. (There's a few courses they like you to take before letting you loose on candidates.)

This is second time I'm interviewing Google and I felt the difference. They asked me questions more related to my work and less from "Cracking the coding interview" book. Hopefully it would be the same on-site. I'm confident that I'm good at what I'm doing and if Google really wants me to work on things that I'm interested, I would be a good employee. I have zero days of no-commits in my Github strike. I have more open source projects than many 500+ employees companies.

With all of that "Cracking the coding interview" book in my hand anyway! :D

We'll see what happens!

Re: The Hiring Post

#182

Post by tempestn »

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?

One possibility is to make a very simple but non-standard request in the posting - for example, to submit the answer to an extremely straightforward coding question or some such in their cover letter. That would filter out a lot of the 'shotgun approach' applicants immediately.

Re: The Hiring Post

#183

Post by alxndr »

egonschiele wrote: post #79

I have had my share of bad interview questions too. The worst part is when the interviewer starts working on their laptop, like they are so bored of this question they can't think about it any longer. Yet it is now a part of my life for 45 minutes. At the end of every trivia question I'm tempted to ask: so is this typical of what I will be doing here? Will I be implementing rand(7) given rand(5) once a week? I've als…

> "At the end of every trivia question I'm tempted to ask: so is this typical of what I will be doing here? Will I be implementing rand(7) given rand(5) once a week?"

That sounds like a great question to ask!

Re: The Hiring Post

#184

Post by yummyfajitas »

adpirz wrote: post #7
SamReidHughes wrote: post #3

As somebody who agrees in theory with tptacek's posts and now this blog post, what I find very funny is how I perceive typical technical hiring, with the interview gauntlet, to still be way better than what some other industries must do. How the hell does anybody hire a teacher?

Teacher here. Good schools will ask you to teach a sample lesson on a particular subject and prep your own materials. Principals and other teachers will observe and give feedback. It's what I did to work at my current school, and we're one of the top performing schools in our state.

How would principals/teachers know if and how much the sample lesson transfers knowledge to students? It seems like this would filter out disasters, but can it do more than that?

Re: The Hiring Post

#185

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelGG wrote: post #139
dropit_sphere wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you actually know what a linked list is, this should be simple for you to derive relatively quickly (not Googling for a day). Actually I think this is the worst kind of question to ask, because it measures: can the candidate code under pressure? Not "we need to get this done by launch/before client meeting" pressure, but right now pressure. If a company wants literal coding ninjas who can reason about comput…

OK, so make it a conversation. Have them draw on paper, or talk it out. I'm probably on the wrong side of reality since plenty of people make lots of usable stuff while using vastly suboptimal approaches. OTOH if someone doesn't known very basic stuff, it seems unlikely they're gonna Google stuff and become wise. We're not talking about anything advanced; these are basic algorithms and data structures. Some people ju…

[deleted]

Re: The Hiring Post

#186

Post by Offler »

fsk wrote: post #157
zodiac wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention that every serious applicant gets a 30-minute "first call" - what percentage of applicants get this call? How do you decide which candidates get this call? Also, what percentage of people who complete the work-sample task get an onsite interview? I'm asking these questions because I think most software companies who filter out people based on resumes and phone screens do it mainly because there are too ma…

As a candidate, I've soured on work-sample tests. Too many times, I've done the assignment, and not even gotten an interview (and I know I submitted a correct answer). As someone who already has a job, committing a large number of hours for the chance of an interview seems like a waste of time. If every employer demands a 5-10 hour work sample test before they even talk to you, that really isn't a scalable solution f…

They can be enjoyable tests. I have learnt new things while doing some.

Re: The Hiring Post

#187

Post by geobmx540 »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #175

> Because here is the thing about interviews: they are incredibly hostile experiences for candidates. Minor nitpick from a grad student here: interviews are nowhere near as hostile as academic peer reviews for papers. In an interview, the interviewers aren't actively trying to find any holes in your logic (no matter how small). To me, technical interviews are a walk in the park compared to conference submissions.

Er, I sure as hell am looking for flaws in your logic / code. I feel like I'm pretty nice about it. I don't use it to put people down. It allows me to ask follow up and leading questions to see if they too might spot it after a bit more thought.

Re: The Hiring Post

#188

Post by thewarrior »

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".

Thank you for this article. I found it motivational in a way. Especially when many of us think there is not much more room to grow and we feel terrified of whiteboard interviews at the bigger cos.

Re: The Hiring Post

#189

Post by sgift »

jowiar wrote: post #18

This article seems to put forward a good theory on interviewing someone who you want to lock in room with a problem and have code come out the other end. Unfortunately, most of us work in the real world, where that's a very limited portion of the engineering job. When the author says selecting for: "people who have the social skills to actively listen to someone else’s technical points, to guide a discussion with que…

The idea that someone has no social skills because he doesn't ace in a highly contrived situation which has no correlation to the way he will communicate in his job later is pretty weird (Do you hire engineers/developers or high-stake, high-pressure negotiators, e.g. diplomats?). As is the idea that you should optimize your hiring process for what people do "most of the time". You want to optimize for what is MOST IMPORTANT about their job. If I need someone who goes to customers I wouldn't select for people that can drive Formula 1 cars efficient, even if it happens to be the case that they are driving most of their work time.

Re: The Hiring Post

#190

Post by __mp »

eps wrote: post #43

We went through the phase when we gave candidates a problem and let them work on it remotely. It was in an embedded C shop that did a lot of kernel work. Basically, we'd give a short programming task (say, to write an intrusive AVL tree container in C) and 24 hours. Guess what? HALF of candidates cheated. Meaning that when the got called for an in-person interview, they stumbled to explain how "their" code worked. To…

Embedded C and AVL trees? Really? Could you explain how an AVL tree would be used in an embedded context?
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