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The Terrible Technical Interview

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Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#61

Post by tptacek »

skwirl wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having performed a thousand interviews by now, I am awestruck by how poor the software development talent pool is. My experience: exactly the opposite .

Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is not a super attractive city for tech workers. Your experience comes from matasano, a company where people get paid to be hack, a dream job for many techies, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. Is it surprising that your experience is exactly…

I would believe that if (a) the kinds of people we're looking for weren't so generally hard to find in the market and (b) we were tending to hire people with some kind of professional track record. Neither were true. If my pipeline of candidates was "people who would otherwise have gone to work for Dropbox", there'd be something more to this argument.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#62

Post by StevePerkins »

skwirl wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having performed a thousand interviews by now, I am awestruck by how poor the software development talent pool is. My experience: exactly the opposite .

Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is not a super attractive city for tech workers. Your experience comes from matasano, a company where people get paid to be hack, a dream job for many techies, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. Is it surprising that your experience is exactly…

I seldom post lengthy comments on HN, and when doing so I tend to include qualifiers such as, "I know that the Bay Area is overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on a perspective from elsewhere." ... "I know that 20-somethings are overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on an older perspective." Etc.

Invariably, one of the top replies boils down to, "Hey! I'm a 20-something in the valley, and I see it completely different!".

Well, yeah.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#63

Post by tptacek »

StevePerkins wrote: post #62
skwirl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is not a super attractive city for tech workers. Your experience comes from matasano, a company where people get paid to be hack, a dream job for many techies, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. Is it surprising that your experience is exactly…

I seldom post lengthy comments on HN, and when doing so I tend to include qualifiers such as, " I know that the Bay Area is overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on a perspective from elsewhere." ... "I know that 20-somethings are overrepresented among HN readers, and the preceding opinion is based on an older perspective." Etc. Invariably, one of the top replies boils down to, " Hey! I…

I'm neither a 20-something nor in the valley. I'm (I think) older than you are, and in Chicago, which is even less of a technical hub than Atlanta.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#64

Post by BSousa »

SilasX wrote: post #35
StevePerkins wrote: post #6

I do almost all of the technical phone screens for my company. The process starts with a "where-do-you-see-yourself-in-5-years" personality screen, with an H.R. drone or outside recruiter. It moves on me, and then on to a brief "homework" coding exercise that we ask people to write and submit. If we like their code sample, then they come in for the panel of "whiteboard-exercise" people who conduct the face to face ro…

With respect, I think you might just be making (what we should now call) the "Fizzbuzz fallacy": "99% of applicants can't answer basic questions, therefore the talent pool is poor". Really, it's more like "99% of the people still searching, who don't have a documented contribution history, and don't have a network that lets them find good jobs in a heartbeat, who must resort to this to find a job[1], can't answer bas…

If you are outside any big tech hub, most jobs and candidates will be filled by recruiters or normal job posts. I've been developing professionally for about 15 years, changed jobs a lot of times, and never was through a referral/network. Most of the people I know are the same. And yes, also having done interviews and sorted through thousands of resumes, there is so much out of touch folks out there that I wouldn't hire anyone nowadays without at least 1-2 small tests to validate their knowledge.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#65

Post by ridiculous_fish »

parennoob wrote: post #15
StevePerkins wrote: post #6

I do almost all of the technical phone screens for my company. The process starts with a "where-do-you-see-yourself-in-5-years" personality screen, with an H.R. drone or outside recruiter. It moves on me, and then on to a brief "homework" coding exercise that we ask people to write and submit. If we like their code sample, then they come in for the panel of "whiteboard-exercise" people who conduct the face to face ro…

As a self-taught person beginning to write software who is not in SF, your description of someone who cannot explain the advantages of the MVC pattern makes me incredibly nervous. I don't really know the MVC pattern in detail, or what its advantages are. I do know about Big O complexity, data structures, loops, registers, as well as logic gates, and the basic structure of computer processors. I can code small program…

Once you get beyond small programs, you run into software architecture questions, which touch issues of maintainability and complexity. One of the techniques we have to manage this complexity is to break the program into components, smaller pieces that couple to each other loosely. This limits the impact of a change, since a change in one component is less likely to require changes in other components. At least that's the hope.

There's lots of ways to decompose a program, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. MVC is a particular decomposition that is useful for interactive applications. The components are named Model, View, and Controller. An example of an advantage of this decomposition is that you can apply a different user interface (e.g. a command line one) by exchanging the View, without needing to change the Model.

Other answers here have focused on MVC as it applies to web development. But MVC is from the 70s, predating the web by many years! If you look beyond the trend, you see ideas rooted in an effort to architect software well, and see MVC as just one design, one particular decomposition. The key idea is not MVC itself, but the principles behind it. Being able to place ideas into larger contexts shows mastery, in my view.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#66

Post by pmiller2 »

fsk wrote: post #59
lukeschlather wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding out how someone reacts to being told they are wrong when they know that they are right is a totally valid interview technique. Furthermore, I think past basic fizzbuzz questions, complex interview questions are good, but someone failing to get an objectively correct solution to an objectively difficult problem is just one signal among many. The goal of asking the questions should be to gather lots of other si…

If someone was playing emotional tricks on me during an interview, such as telling me I'm wrong when I'm right, I'd lose interest in the opportunity. One interviewer tried yelling at me for no reason, just to see if I would react or flinch.

Seriously? People do that? I hope you walked out.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#67

Post by bshimmin »

msoad wrote: post #23

I live in Silicon Valley so I have tons of Software Engineer friends. I also have a friend who's a heart surgery researcher at Stanford. When we talk about our hiring process he just laughs and thinks its impossible to do something remotely close what we do in Software in their field. It seems Software is the only field that people have to do some serious work for the interviews.

I guess you find out pretty quickly whether someone's a competent heart surgeon.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#68

Post by simoncion »

mtviewdave wrote: post #33
StevePerkins wrote: post #6

I do almost all of the technical phone screens for my company. The process starts with a "where-do-you-see-yourself-in-5-years" personality screen, with an H.R. drone or outside recruiter. It moves on me, and then on to a brief "homework" coding exercise that we ask people to write and submit. If we like their code sample, then they come in for the panel of "whiteboard-exercise" people who conduct the face to face ro…

> "I see that you've spent X years using Subversion for source control. What are your opinions on trunk-first development vs. branch-first development?" Actually, this demonstrates a problem right here. It's not clear to me what you mean by these terms. A quick Google search ("trunk-first vs branch-first svn") suggests that you're not using common terminology. After thinking about it for a minute or two, what I _thin…

> Actually, this demonstrates a problem right here. It's not clear to me what you mean by these terms.

I'm not trying to get in an ego stroking contest here, I'm just providing anecdata.

I worked with SVN for ~4 years and git for ~4 more. What StevePerkins was asking was perfectly clear to me after about three seconds of thinking. Of course, in an interview, I would be sure to parrot back my understanding of the question. :)

FWIW, you and I understood his question to mean the same thing.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#69

Post by waterlesscloud »

skwirl wrote: post #58
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having performed a thousand interviews by now, I am awestruck by how poor the software development talent pool is. My experience: exactly the opposite .

Steve works for a relatively unknown company making products for businesses, mostly using Java/C#, whose technical staff seems to be based in Atlanta, which is not a super attractive city for tech workers. Your experience comes from matasano, a company where people get paid to be hack, a dream job for many techies, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. Is it surprising that your experience is exactly…

There's another big factor at work.

If you read Thomas's recent post on Matasano's hiring process [1], they were looking to funnel people in. Steve's process seems pretty clearly designed to filter people out.

Compare the idea of sending would-be candidates books to study and the idea of an interview process that COMPLETELY EXPOSES candidates. One is trying to bring people in, the other is trying to drive them out.

Somehow tech hiring has often become an adversarial process. It shouldn't be shocking to us that approach makes it hard to find good people.

[1] http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#70

Post by ams6110 »

BSousa wrote: post #64
SilasX wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, I think you might just be making (what we should now call) the "Fizzbuzz fallacy": "99% of applicants can't answer basic questions, therefore the talent pool is poor". Really, it's more like "99% of the people still searching, who don't have a documented contribution history, and don't have a network that lets them find good jobs in a heartbeat, who must resort to this to find a job[1], can't answer bas…

If you are outside any big tech hub, most jobs and candidates will be filled by recruiters or normal job posts. I've been developing professionally for about 15 years, changed jobs a lot of times, and never was through a referral/network. Most of the people I know are the same. And yes, also having done interviews and sorted through thousands of resumes, there is so much out of touch folks out there that I wouldn't h…

Yes. Living in the midwest, I've done software development for nearly 30 years. I've had more than half a dozen employers and I have never been given any kind of "technical test" in an interview, such as writing code on the spot, diagramming an algorithm, or solving a puzzle. I don't know where this happens, but it's not everywhere.
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