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The Terrible Technical Interview

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Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#81

Post by simoncion »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #53
fsk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If not, What is the correct answer that will prevent me from getting COMPLETELY EXPOSED (in your words) if you ask me this MVC question in an interview? Every interviewer has their own pet question that the candidate is COMPLETELY UNQUALIFIED if they don't know. My short answer to "What is MVC?" is that it's a popular web development trend, but without much substance to back it up. Every MVC project that I've been s…

Funny thing... MVC is a pattern for GUIs (Windows and Mac desktop applications). It was simulated for the web, and none of those that you mention with the possible exception of Angular allow a real MVC pattern in a web application. The point of it is two-fold: separation of concerns, and DRY. But the reason it so ugly on the web when it produced elegant code for GUIs is the reason that web controller schemes are not…

> Funny thing... MVC is a pattern for GUIs (Windows and Mac desktop applications).

Errm, it's a pattern often used for UI (CLI and GUI) programming that was first commercially introduced in Smalltalk-76 (in 1976). [This predates Windows and Mac by many years.]

MVC can be done -with varying degrees of difficulty- in any computer language. You don't even need a web development framework to implement it! ;-)

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#82

Post by monksy »

> This is why personal references and recommendations remain everyone’s favorite hiring technique… > …which in turn is a major reason why the tech industry’s diversity numbers are so disastrous.

I'm not buying that argument. I would however agree that recommendations and references create a lack of diverse ideas/approaches. Lack of racial/gender diversity: That would indicate that the people in the minority just aren't reaching out or participating in the community.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#83

Post by waterlesscloud »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #73
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…

Why is Atlanta not attractive to tech workers? Georgia Tech has a phenomenal CS program, and we've got a pretty large and diverse startup population. I'm not sure if what you're saying isn't true, or if I'm just biased and not able to see Atlanta from an outsider's perspective.

Atlanta is a pleasant enough city. I'm from there originally, though I moved to L.A. about 15 years ago.

I left because I wanted to live in a big city, not in suburbia. Atlanta has some of the plusses of a city, but they're relatively limited compared to LA, SF, NY, DC. It's more a collection of suburbs than a city.

If suburban life is what you want, Atlanta is fine for that. Honestly, most of Silicon Valley is suburbs, outside of SF itself. And they aren't as appealing as Atlanta suburbs, with many more trees and a lot more space. If that's what someone wants, Atlanta is a better choice than pretty much anywhere in California.

One of the best things about California, particularly in LA and the Bay Area, is that there are more people living their lives according to their own unique desires than anywhere else I've ever been. Having "odd" choices about your lifestyle or having crazy dreams and aspirations is the norm here, and that's something I want around me. It's a plus for me to be surrounded by that kind of thing. There's some of that in Atlanta, but it's more localized to certain areas. Here it's everywhere, just how things are.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#84

Post by StevePerkins »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #73
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…

Why is Atlanta not attractive to tech workers? Georgia Tech has a phenomenal CS program, and we've got a pretty large and diverse startup population. I'm not sure if what you're saying isn't true, or if I'm just biased and not able to see Atlanta from an outsider's perspective.

Heh, I kinda let that dig slide, because the rest of the comment was very well thought out and on-point. However, of course I disagreed.

Atlanta is by far the technology hub of the southeastern United States. It has no competition to the west until you reach Houston (and even that is mostly specific to the energy industry). It faces only mild competition from the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and beyond that it's a technology DMZ all the way to Chicago or the northeast.

It's home to Georgia Tech, perennially one of the top 5 engineering schools in the nation, and pumps out thousands of new programmers per year in addition to the thousands who migrate here. It has a highly diverse business base, not tied to any one predominant industry, and its Buckhead and Midtown districts have one of the most thriving startup scenes that you'll find outside of SV or NY.

Of course, if a Georgia Tech grad is in the uppermost percentiles, then odds are he or she would be enticed by Google, or a west coast startup. I'm certainly not saying that Atlanta is in the same league as San Francisco, or even New York (at least not its finance/quant opportunities). But my earlier point was that these environments are extreme outliers, and virtually no other city is comparable to that either.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#85

Post by fsk »

frostmatthew wrote: post #71
fsk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it happens as long as your "stricter hiring practices" increase your false negative percentage by a lot more than they decrease your false positive percentage. Try it out with some numbers. 10100 candidates, 100 are "good". Suppose you have 2% false positives and 1% false negatives. You hire 99 good candidates and 200 bad candidates. Suppose now you have 0.5% false positives and 90% false negatives. (You de…

> Try it out with some numbers. 10100 candidates, 100 are "good". What you're attempting to do works well for hypothetical drug testing[1] or terrorists but not for hiring developers (or anyone else). With the numbers you used you're proposing that less than 1% of all candidates are "good" - nobody would reasonably set the "good" threshold to include only the top 1% of developers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba…

Even if you set the "good" percentage to 10%, too high a false positive rate will still ruin your results.

Based on the people I've worked with over the years, I say that the actual skill distribution is:

5% toxic - These are the people who will ruin your business while deflecting blame to other people.

25% subtractors - These are the people who need more attention and help than the amount of work they get done. In the right environment, they can be useful. (Also, this is mostly independent of experience level. I know some really experienced people who were subtractors.)

60% average - These people are competent but not brilliant. These are solid performers.

9% above average - They can get 2x-5x the work done of someone average.

1% brilliant - These are the mythical 10x-100x programmers. These are the people who can write your MVP by themselves in 1-3 months and it'll be amazing.

You first have to decide if you're targeting brilliant, above average, or average. For most businesses, average is good enough.

If you incorrectly weed out the rare brilliant person, you might wind up instead with someone average, above average, or (even worse) toxic.

Actually, when my employer was interviewing, I was surprised that the candidates were so strong. There was one brilliant guy and one above-average guy (My coworkers didn't like them; they failed the technical screening, which makes me distrust technical screening even more now). They wound up hiring one of the weakest candidates, a subtractor, and having worked with him for a couple of months my analysis of him hasn't changed.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#86

Post by skybrian »

fsk wrote: post #40
geebee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arg! I'm on my phone and I meant to upvote! Apologies, this was a very insightful comment. I had never thought of it this way before but this is an instance of Bayes's rule. If the false negative rate goes too high and the percentage of good programmers is small then yes, the process could actually increase the odds of a bad hire.

Actually, it happens as long as your "stricter hiring practices" increase your false negative percentage by a lot more than they decrease your false positive percentage. Try it out with some numbers. 10100 candidates, 100 are "good". Suppose you have 2% false positives and 1% false negatives. You hire 99 good candidates and 200 bad candidates. Suppose now you have 0.5% false positives and 90% false negatives. (You de…

This is reasoning from something that's harder to estimate (how good is the hiring pool and your interview process) to something you know more about (how good are the company's employees). It seems like you should be working backwards instead?

For example, if you assume that 90% of your employees are "good" and 1% are "toxic", what does that tell you about the candidate pool and/or your interview process?

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#87

Post by StevePerkins »

tptacek wrote: post #79
StevePerkins wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an actual interview, I would only pull out that specific example for a candidate who's worked with CVS and Subversion almost exclusively. The actual question is also a bit more verbose: Have you worked for a company that strives to do as much development as possible in 'trunk', creating a release branch near deployment time for production bugfixes? Have you worked for a company that preferred to branch at the outs…

Exactly why is it that you would making a screening decision based on version control practices? Of the many things you'll need to ramp candidates up on, this seems like one of the very easiest. Not only that, but because most firms do release management a little differently from each other, there's some VC ramp-up effort you'll need even with people who have mastered your VC tool. I feel like dev interviews are full…

I'm not sure that you fully read the parent comment. I could care less about their Subversion expertise. My company doesn't even use Subversion anywhere.

However, if you list "10 years experience with " on your resume, then you should absolutely be prepared to discuss your experience with at a high level. Not anal minutia or contrived trick questions, but certainly you should be able to respond to an open-ended question about the basics with enough context to show that you weren't lying to pad your resume.

More importantly, as I explained in the parent comment, I am interested to see if their response reflects experience with multiple teams working on parallel over overlapping efforts within the same codebase simultaneously. Everyone says that they have experience like that, but if you poke a bit deeper you find that half the time it's exaggerated. They may have worked in a context with multiple teams, but affecting the same area of the application or system. If you have had legit experience of this kind, or at least show a high level of insight in talking through the issues that can arise, then you might be considered for a team lead role sooner than you otherwise might have been. As I said earlier, it's not a "right or wrong" question that can disqualify you from being a capable programmer... it's a "level setting" question that helps gauge which level of responsibility you might start out with.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#88

Post by buchweizen2 »

tptacek wrote: post #52

Requiring a side project from candidates would have cost us most of our best hires.

I was a bit surprised that the article first talks about how bad it is to pass on good candidates that don't interview well on whiteboards and then suggests to pass on candidates that don't have side projects. Are all candidates without side projects not good?

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#89

Post by fsk »

pmiller2 wrote: post #66
fsk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was polite and stayed until the end. It was through a headhunter, so I decided to be polite. I knew that was a no-go interview after 1 minute, when I saw that everyone working there was Indian.

Re: The Terrible Technical Interview

#90

Post by fsk »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #69
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…

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.…

I'm still not sure how giving employees a book to read and then testing them on it is a good process. If I'm going to spend a couple months of free time learning something, I'd pick something like Python or Android development or HTML5 app development, rather than learning a skill that will only be useful for 1-3 employers.

How can I know if an employer is worth 1-3 months of my free time until I meet my potential future coworkers? Demanding a candidate invest 1-3 months of free time before you meet them seems like an insult to me.

If your job uses a niche skill, why demand candidates be an expert already before you hire them?

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