We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview • Hacker News Board

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#101

Post by Data_Junkie » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #71

segmondy wrote: post #55

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentatio…

> You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...] You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".

Thank you.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#102

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #55

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentatio…

[deleted]

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#103

Post by enraged_camel » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

taormina wrote: post #85

ken wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...] You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".

> Can this person code at all? How well? He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.

The distinction is meaningless. No company wants someone who can merely code (as determined by their ability to solve fizzbuzz-type stuff). They want someone who can code well.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#104

Post by SeanAppleby » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

apple4ever wrote: post #91

movax wrote: post #87

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate noted for his work in judgment and decision making, stated in an interview earlier this year that interviews are terrible at choosing the best candidates. Unfortunately, he didn’t articulate alternatives.

The alternative is certainly the big problem. The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.

I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole.

We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market.

Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#105

Post by glitchc » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

pytester wrote: post #69

glitchc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution. Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to bori…

>Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of med…

>In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly.

That’s total BS. Development is full of boring mediocre tasks such as fixing spelling mistakes in UI controls, updating help messages for dialog boxes, or porting the product from one build system to another. In many tasks, there’s a huge gap (a chasm sometimes) between manual intervention and complete automation. I’ve lost count of the number of times a clever programmer has tried to automate the process and completely mucked things up, forcing me to go in and fix things manually.

>Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess).

That’s exactly where a great product manager can mentor a mediocre developer in making a sensible change. It’s a great learning opportunity that we’re depriving people of because software founders want to retain all the revenue for themselves.

>It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.

Of course. It’s also vastly better that to be born rich so one doesn’t have to work at all. Ideally, all developers in the market would be great developers. But they’re not. So I ask again, what are the mediocre developers supposed to do?

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#106

Post by terryschiavo22 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

testpostpls wrote: post #92

asark wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered before how many of the "OMG tons of candidates can't fizzbuzz" anecdotes come down to messing up syntax or forgetting the name of something in the language they're using and mixing in something from another language, or making a plausible but incorrect guess. I could definitely see doing those things in an interview, and I've usually been considered the "smart one" or one to come to with weird/low-level…

It depends—when I was at one of the really visible companies, it wouldn’t have surprised me if as much as a third of the people I screened had lied on their resume. I’d ask folks to write functions to count the number of times the letter ‘a’ appears in a string, stuff like that. Did not need to compile or run. I had a person break down and confess, and we spent the rest of the interview talking about how their codeca…

That turned out surprisingly wholesome.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#107

Post by rdiddly » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

JeremyBanks wrote: post #84

gdy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism as in speaking up against reverse racism?

Unfortunately, no. Explicit racism: making negative assertions about specific races. During the interview. :|

First I was going to express disbelief that any candidate would think that was OK to do. But somebody could be a racist trying to find a racist employer that accepts that kind of talk. Weird & wrong, but rational, and probably something they do all the time in other parts of their life.

Then I had the outlandish idea that the local employment opportunity office is getting especially gung-ho and sending decoys through the pipeline. That would be a fun job. Basically getting paid to be a shock comedian who bombs every time.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#108

Post by tensor » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #52

larrik wrote: post #3

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.

If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution. Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to bori…

The truth is that everyone actually hires mediocre people, otherwise we wouldn't get so many comments about mentor people on teams and performance reviews would look very different.

That said, very few people think of themselves as average. Just looking at the comments here on hacker news, everyone feels they are the A players and if they aren't selected for something it's because management sucks or they aren't understood, or some other excuse.

We could all stand to be a hell of a lot more humble.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#109

Post by sushisource » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #55

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentatio…

I think you can filter out people who suck in 60 minutes. I think there's little chance you can differentiate between "competent" and "good+"

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#110

Post by gubbrora » Thu, May 02, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #65

skookumchuck wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewing goes both ways. The company is interviewing the candidate, and the candidate is interviewing the company.

There is an asymmetry in the reaction though - being turned down by a company is regarded as just something that happens, turning down a company once you've had an offer seems to cause genuine shock.

Wouldn't that be more because people would expect the rejection to happen pre-offer if it's about anything other than compensation(turning down for compensation is normal, e specially with multiple offers)?