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Interviewing candidates

ericlippert.com

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Re: Interviewing candidates

#71

Post by tptacek »

richmarr wrote: post #62
tptacek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on the assumption that it's reasonably possible to put a candidate so at ease that they can solve interesting programming problems in front of an interviewer. But in-person interviews are inherently hostile, if for no other reason that they're timed and adversarial. It's better that we jettison the entire notion that they can be a venue for demonstrating programming ability. I'm not opposed to interviews.…

Huge fan of that hiring post, by the way. I'm currently working with a roomful of cognitive scientists on ways to unpick some of the bias from recruitment. Be good to have a chat at some point if you're interested.

I'm easy to get ahold of. :)

Re: Interviewing candidates

#72

Post by smikhanov »

dvt wrote: post #17

I don't really get it. This is sounds like a very pretty typical software engineer interview process. The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death. Unless you're Google (or Facebook), you are not getting thousands of applications a day. You don't need to emulate their hiring process. They do it for a reason (practical…

Oh wow: now this is a solid example of HN fandom. Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Square, PayPal and countless others are hiring their engineers using some variation of whiteboard coding. Engineers in those companies built literally 99% of the technology the author of the comment above uses every bloody day. From the browser he used to leave his comment, to operating system to run the said browser and the phone in his pocket to notify him of new entries on HN to open with that browser.

For some, this is not good enough proof though. A local star running an obscure company is certainly more enlightened -- because, you know, he wrote a blog post on hiring.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#73

Post by smikhanov »

tptacek wrote: post #38
nmrm2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not looking for a job, but I want to do the work-sample part of your hiring process after reading this post. Sounds like a fun time.

Then you will like the thingy we're about to launch a lot.

Don't forget to update us on the progress and the results after launch.

It would seriously change my worldview if it will turn out that Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Square, PayPal and countless others firms that hire their engineers using some variation of whiteboard coding would be proven wrong in their practices by one person.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#74

Post by AtmaScout »

ximeng wrote: post #59
ericlippert wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my intention was not to sound pompous, but writing is hard, you know? Thanks for your cogent critique of my tone.

Regardless of whether you or tptacek has the better method for hiring coders, I have much more problem with dvt's tone in his post than yours in the article. Hope this kind of response won't discourage you from posting more, as I've had a lot of value from your writing in the past and found this article interesting as well.

I second this. I've read a lot of your writings and have even watched your episode of 'Checking in with Erik Meijer', both of are very informative. Thanks for writing this article.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#75

Post by tptacek »

smikhanov wrote: post #73
tptacek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you will like the thingy we're about to launch a lot.

Don't forget to update us on the progress and the results after launch. It would seriously change my worldview if it will turn out that Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Square, PayPal and countless others firms that hire their engineers using some variation of whiteboard coding would be proven wrong in their practices by one person.

I don't know how to respond to this. I was simply telling the parent commenter, if the work-sample stuff we did at Matasano sounded fun, the thing we're doing now basically extracts and amplifies all the fun we think was in that process and opens it to the public.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#76

Post by lukasm »

civilian wrote: post #22
lukasm wrote: post #20

Why not do 2 phone screens to filter out completely incompetent people and then let them choose: - paid work for a week - writing patch for a project or making simple tool(proxy of the job) and invite them to talk about it.

Because candidates have lives outside of code. They probably already have a job, so taking a week off for "vacation" which will actually be a "paid interview" sounds like a crummy deal. Writing a patch-- similarly, it's eating into their own time. You're going to lower your hire rate from that.

but it's paid so you can take a week off between jobs. As I said, give them an option. Interview can take a whole day, doing a project pretty much the same, but you can split it into a few day or do it over the weekend.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#77

Post by ksk »

dvt wrote: post #17

I don't really get it. This is sounds like a very pretty typical software engineer interview process. The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death. Unless you're Google (or Facebook), you are not getting thousands of applications a day. You don't need to emulate their hiring process. They do it for a reason (practical…

> The fact that these kinds of interviews suck, don't produce good hires, and yield a ridiculous amount of false negatives has been beaten to death.

It has been beaten to death, but it is nowhere near to being established as "fact".

Re: Interviewing candidates

#78

Post by ksk »

I agree with what was said in the article. I'd say one half of programming in general is objective in the sense that either the program works or doesn't. The other half is completely opinion based - be it a design philosophy, choosing algorithms, future proofing APIs, hardening code against malicious actors, etc. This half is very fuzzy because there are no right/wrong answers as it goes more towards taste. IMHO you should try to evaluate the following - "What has the candidate done that makes their opinion worth something". If you can't come up with a very strong reason to give any kind of weight to their opinion, then I'd say do not hire them.

Re: Interviewing candidates

#79

Post by epsylon »

ericlippert wrote: post #5
tptacek wrote: post #3

I feel like this is how everyone thinks they interview candidates, and that it doesn't really work. I wrote about this at length, specifically so I wouldn't write the same long HN comment every time this comes up. :) http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

Thanks for writing that up; really interesting stuff. I agree with many of the critiques you make. I suspect that it may be easier to get the sort of standard process you describe implemented in a relatively small organization that has a relatively consistent set of products and commensurate challenges than in a large, diverse organization like Microsoft, where I learned to interview. The Microsoft interviewer has th…

But Microsoft is a large organization, with deep pockets! Is time spent crafting meaningful challenges for each team really that much more than, say, the man-hours that each team will have to spend to interview candidates?

Re: Interviewing candidates

#80

Post by [deleted] »

dagw wrote: post #68
m3talridl3y wrote: post #48

Here's how you hire a candidate, in two steps: 1) If they provide a github/bitbucket/sourceforge link, look at what's there. Skip step 2. 2) Literally anything else. It won't work anyway.

Assuming you just need a candidate to do grunt level coding.

[deleted]
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