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The Hiring Post

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Re: The Hiring Post

#231

Post by nvarsj »

thedufer wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had three work-sample exercises at Matasano. All told, they took candidates mid-single-digit hours to finish (many geeked out, or golfed on them; we did our best to keep this from happening --- you can read about this on our hiring page: http://www.matasano.com/careers This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did…

My concern here is that it seems to signal a lack of respect for the candidate if the company expects them to complete a task with no matching employee time. Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; a work-sample test could be given to any number of people at basically no cost. This is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that you do a phone screen with each person prior to that stage, but it st…

> Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game;

Uh, no. Have you ever been paid for your time at an interview? For most people, it costs them at least 1 day worth of pay (holiday or day rate).

Re: The Hiring Post

#232

Post by justincormack »

dougabug wrote: post #206
beefman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But why are they so choosy, and why do they complain about a lack of qualified candidates when their rejection rates are so high? I think it's the zero-sum game I mentioned. Firms are trying to outhire each other, like talent is some magic wand that can replace compelling products. There's a lot of snake oil in the industry, like SEO (now called "data science"), meant to substitute for things like vision, le…

I don't know if it's exactly a zero-sum game, but the rate at which talent is created doesn't seem to be amazingly high given that there are over 7 billion people on Earth. Certainly the talent pool seems to be a small fraction of the population. Top universities, which for the most part feed the tech industry, face a similar problem at an earlier stage in the pipeline. It's been noted that less prestigious universit…

That is because people do not nurture and train and help their talent enough, they want them to turn up exactly like some mental model they have for a mental model of a role they have. There are huge numbers of people once you stop trying to find exactly the thing in your head.

Re: The Hiring Post

#233

Post by adpirz »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #184
adpirz wrote: 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.

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?

That's when you look at other factors like past performance, including (but certainly not limited to) performance on his / her pupils' standardized tests. Like any other hiring process, it's not always perfect, but you also learn along the way which characteristics make for great teachers (responding to feedback, ability to engage with students, timeliness, etc.).

Re: The Hiring Post

#234

Post by rfrey »

Lovely read, thanks for the work.

Do you think you've learned lessons that could be applied by individual contributors in large orgs who are called on to interview? If so, it'd be great if you added that to your blog backlog. :)

Re: The Hiring Post

#235

Post by powertower »

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.

> I was horrible at interviews. I was a sport interviewer...

That's nowhere near as bad as the interviewer who has the primary goal of demonstrating how smart he is (to the person he is interviewing), with the actual hiring process being secondary.

Re: The Hiring Post

#236

Post by tptacek »

powertower wrote: post #235
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.

> I was horrible at interviews. I was a sport interviewer... That's nowhere near as bad as the interviewer who has the primary goal of demonstrating how smart he is (to the person he is interviewing), with the actual hiring process being secondary.

That is automatically what I think about anyone who says "I'm a very good interviewer".

Re: The Hiring Post

#237

Post by Jemaclus »

bduerst wrote: post #116
Jemaclus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the conclusion here is that remote tests are bad. It's also possible that your screening methods didn't do a good enough job. (As a disclaimer, I'm a terrible interviewer, but...) I believe that by the time a candidate gets into a room with me, that my team and I should have a good idea about whether this person will work out or not. If I make them take time out of their day, and I take time out of my da…

I honestly believe that the recruiting/hiring market is ripe to be flipped on it's head for these reasons. I just can't think of any way to do it that can scale though. There are the hired.com models where independent experts thoroughly vet the candidate, but that involves a lot of manual interaction.

My big problem with Hired.com and similar sites is that there's no incentive for anyone to be honest. I have no incentive to say "not interested" to anyone, and they have no incentive to back up the salary they post. It's the equivalent of the "always swipe right" strategy on Tinder -- it's in your best interest to say "maybe" or "interested" to everything, because otherwise you don't know if you're missing out on opportunities.

What I really want as a hiring manager is for someone to show up and say "Here's Candidate A. We think they're strong because X, Y, Z, and here's the proof." Someone whose mission is to honestly find me the best candidate, who isn't just trying to place someone as fast as possible so they get their commission. Most recruiters I know are interested in placing a good candidate as quickly as possible, but there are a lot of problems with this. "Good" isn't "best", and often times the recruiters don't know the difference between Java and Javascript, and I wind up with junk resumes in my inbox.

So how do we fix this? I have no idea. But there's gotta be a way. I don't think that way is going to be scalable with a simple web application. I think you have to have a secret weapon that nobody else has, and maybe that's just a group of in-industry professionals that vet candidates on your behalf, or maybe it's some incredible machine learning algorithm, or maybe it's something else entirely.

As a job seeker, I want to get the best job I can, and as a boss, I want the best employees I can get. And I don't think those things are mutually exclusive at all.

Re: The Hiring Post

#238

Post by fsk »

tptacek wrote: post #208
fsk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a reminder: work-sample testing isn't the entirety of my recommendation, or even the majority. Employers need to do more than one thing to fix the hiring process.

I'm beginning to think that one way to "fix" hiring is to do stuff that nobody else is doing.

Everyone else is screening people based on resumes? Then, you can find good candidates by ignoring resumes, so you find good people with bad experience.

Nobody else hires people older than 40? Then you target people who are older than 40 but are still good workers.

Everyone wants a programmer with X experience but there's a shortage of people with X experience? Then hire good programmers without X experience, and give them a chance to learn X on the job.

Nobody else gives a work-sample test? Then giving a work-sample test is a benefit. You find candidates who are desperate and good enough to do the work-sample test. If everyone gives a work-sample test, then you get an advantage by NOT doing a work-sample test. (For example, a company with a work-sample test is now excluding me from their candidate pool, due the the large number of bad experiences I've had with them.)

One idea that seems workable is the paid work-sample test. But then you have to do some screening before giving people the test. (I.e., hire someone for a 10-20 hour mini-project before committing to hiring them full-time.)

With 100 hours of free time, I could get a personal project done and put it on the Internet somewhere. That seems like a much better use of my time than doing 10-20 work-sample tests for companies that aren't going to give me an interview even after I do it.

Re: The Hiring Post

#239

Post by bostik »

joesmo wrote: post #164
MichaelGG wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an even worse idea than just asking for white-board coding, but it seems to come along every time. Not only are you putting the candidate under pressure, where thinking is difficult, now you expect them to walk you through their thought process and narrate what they're thinking, disrupting the thought process. I personally need to think things on my own without having the pressure of having to tell the interv…

I will have to disagree with this part:

> Not only are you putting the candidate under pressure, where thinking is difficult, now you expect them to walk you through their thought process and narrate what they're thinking, disrupting the thought process.

I expect a capable developer to be able to explain to themselves why they are choosing (or avoiding) an approach. If they cannot to that, would I trust them to be able to explain their methods or WIP problems to other developers?

When I do interviews, I care less about the solution the candidate comes up with, and a lot more how they ended up with the particular solution they used. The process of iteration and dead-end elimination is fascinating. This means that the best questions have N+1 different solutions. Some will be less optimal, but that's life. I also find discussing the effects of different solutions fruitful, on the less common occasions when the candidate ends up tossing one approach and settling on something altogether different.

And by the way, I really dislike the idea that you're supposed to do an interview in less than 1h. For anything remotely realistic, that doesn't even let you scratch the surface.

Re: The Hiring Post

#240

Post by thedufer »

nvarsj wrote: post #231
thedufer wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern here is that it seems to signal a lack of respect for the candidate if the company expects them to complete a task with no matching employee time. Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; a work-sample test could be given to any number of people at basically no cost. This is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that you do a phone screen with each person prior to that stage, but it st…

> Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; Uh, no. Have you ever been paid for your time at an interview? For most people, it costs them at least 1 day worth of pay (holiday or day rate).

It costs the company as much time as the person interviewing. At least for remote interviews, which are becoming the norm from what Ive seen.
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