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The Hiring Post

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Re: The Hiring Post

#191
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".

Let me first start by saying that I, too, dislike the prevailing interview process for software development jobs.

While I agreed with many of your points, I could not stop thinking what a huge time burden of implementing something like what you propose, at scale. For a growing company with several work streams and projects hungry for talent, the interview approach you posit would never work.

Another thing that came to mind is the fact that educators and cognitive scientists have been working for decades in what constitutes a good and effective test. Here you seem to claim that somehow you and your folks have "cracked" the system and have come up with a test process that's guaranteed to yield good long-term and performant workers?

Finally, I feel this approach while intended to alleviate some of the most common pain points of the interview process, it tries to reduce it to a number. While it would seem a number is plain and objective, much like a test score, it neglects to "tell the story" and unless all you want are gifted and highly skilled human automatons, you need a way to gauge "soft skills", which one would argue are as important as their core technical competency.

Re: The Hiring Post

#192
post #161

I think this method is good in theory but fails in practice. Recently, I applied to three different companies that asked me to do a code sample that took from about two to eight hours each. I generally don't work for free, but I had some spare time and decided why not? I did all three and turned them in. Out of three, one company liked my sample but in the interview that followed, decided that what I was asking was t…

I've recently had a very similar experience with work sample/coding tests and I completely agree. It strikes me that most people setting these tasks are pretty clueless about how difficult the task is and haven't tested them out on non-candidates.

How they're implemented has varied wildly between companies, but most of them were used as an initial screener rather than a major deciding factor, despite being one of the most time consuming parts of the process for the candidate.

Like you I was able to go through with most of them, but I felt like they were a massive waste of my free time and companies were often very slow to follow up in it. I think a lot of the time it just isn't worth jumping through these hoops for a company I don't know anything about.

My best test I took was around an hour and involved building a really basic CRUD app in Django as part of a larger face to face interview, followed by a short discussion. It worked well because they set up an environment for me, the data model was fixed, and there was a list of short requirements I could complete in order, so I was able to just dive into the work, and spend time on the kind of things that were relevant.

Another one basically asked me to take a large dataset, build a web application around it, and deploy it, which would probably have taken me a week to complete but "should" have taken around 3 hours. They tried to present it a really interesting problem I would enjoy working on and then asked me to keep all my work confidential.

Most of the tests I've done are still closer to general problem solving/comp sci tests, which is still pretty far removed from the actual work, but at least they're not a huge time sink when implemented properly.

Re: The Hiring Post

#193
post #181
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

If Google doesn't take you, there's always Facebook.

Re: The Hiring Post

#194
post #183

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!

Because being passive-agressive is a great way to get the job?

Re: The Hiring Post

#195
post #82
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

Thank you for asking interesting questions!

Such asshole. I can totally see why you wouldn't get hired at Matasano. /s

Re: The Hiring Post

#196
post #177
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a work sample test to me. Great!

Except that it's the kind of work-sample test that you can't do in the evening, and is hard to complete if you already have a full-time job (except if only other teachers are the audience).

Re: The Hiring Post

#197
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".

Hi Thomas. Great post!

I was wondering if you could share some info on the salaries. Did you offer every candidate the same salary or adjust it (based on resume/previous salary/age/experience/...)? You mentioned 100% retention - so I assume no candidate ever left for another position with a higher salary?

Being a specialised consulting firm, I imagine Matasano could offer highly diverse, very interesting work long-term (because consulting), and higher-than-average salaries (because specialised), so maybe it wasn't a problem for you to offer higher salaries than the competition, or to retain candidates at equivalent salaries.

Re: The Hiring Post

#198
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".

So what was the paper? De Mulder et al. 2013[1]? (Sorry not my field; just a guess!)

[1] http://mhutter.org/papers/Mulder2014UsingBleichenbachersSolu...

Re: The Hiring Post

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asking how do you judge if someone performs under time pressure? If so, my first answer is don't. If that is a serious part of your real world work, you are doing it wrong. The less flippant answer is, you give them a deadline but it is both A) flexible in the face of their "real life" (ie if they tell you they are going on vacation next week deal with it) and B) it deals with realistic time horizons (ie a we…

Sorry my post was not complete enough - what I meant was that if you have two equally good candidates, but one happens to have experience in Rails, that person is going to perform the coding test more quickly than the other candidate i.e. get a more complete / correct solution in a given amount of time. So I hope in this situation there are no time limits?

I never want to have time limits in these tests. Generally I prefer to tell the candidate "This isn't timed and we don't care how long it takes you. It tends to take x hours (where x better be less than 4) and most candidates get back to us in a week or so. If you can't do that, its completely fine, let us know when you anticipate having it done. This is just so we can judge where you are in the pipeline."

Re: The Hiring Post

#200

Thank you, tptacek, for writing this post. You have identified several important problems with interviewing and laid out the fundamentals for a reasonable alternative to the standard software interview. It makes me sad that I will probably never see a single one of your suggestions implemented by any potential employer that might want to hire me, specifically. This is because there is one more major problem that you…

[edit] This seemed inappropriate so I changed it

The only reason I ever designed a hiring pipeline is because I was asked to be one of the people in the interview pool. Me (and others in the pool) decided we were doing a bad job and started iterating on the problem (much like we would for software). Management was thrilled with both the initiative and the results.

That was years ago and working on hiring pipelines has become something I just do. I've never had an employer push back or make that hard. Quite the opposite, they are usually happy to have help.

Try fixing the problem in your current job and see. You might be surprised.

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