The thing is the internship or code campfire or probation or whatever all need the hiree to stop doing what they were doing. It’s incredibly intrusive. Lots of the best candidates have jobs and families and aren’t going to give up their current job to try out for a company that’s not committing. The whole post is so biased to the hirer.
The Last Technical Interview
101–110 of 291 posts
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#102It's funny that the post states:
"None of these band-aids really help — we still all hire tons of false positives (unqualified) and turn away false negatives (actually qualified), despite every attempt to make the process perfect, or even good"
The post touches on it (regulation about firing causing legal issues) but the unfortunate truth is that turning away false negatives has little cost to a business as long as you make sure to turn away false positives. Bad hires are extremely expensive, where as the lost revenue of turning down a good hire isn't nearly as bad (it's easy to try to hire them again later).
The stamp idea is good, reputation based hiring is important, as shown by the use of referrals in hiring. I've always wondered why we don't keep track of referrals inside companies in order to figure out who is recommending their peers who legitametly are good fits, vs those who are just trying to help out friends (who might not be the best hires).
Further I think there is also the problem that anti-corruption/anti-nepotism often harms hiring. It's much easier when working in a start up to hire the most talented people you know without other people sitting in, compared to at a big company where I know people who actively know good people they want to hire, but who can't be arsed with the long interview process and high chance of rejection.
If it wasn't for the regulation around firing some sort of staking your job on the line would be effective. You can refer someone and have them skip most of the process but your job is on the line if that was a bad call.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.
That is directly addressed in the article.
Yes, it says "hope your competitors randomly decide to fire their best engineers for some reason" (worded as 'ends up between gigs')
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#104From my POV, the main thing that's really broken with interviewing right now is the filtering process, even before candidates do a take-home test.
In the last few years I was the main tech interviewer for a 300-employee fintech.
For a specific position, one recruiter got around 150 applicants, selected 5 great ones, who did take-home tests and mild-tech interviews. Offers were made to most.
For the same role/salary, but from another queue, a second recruiter got around 900 applicants, cherry-picked about around 70 of them. Out of those, only 40 completed the 1h take-home test. Only 20 delivered it, only 10 implemented the requirements. Of the 10, all were unable to answer even basic questions.
This was concurrently, so it wasn't "affected by AI".
I didn't changed my methods and in fact I didn't even got close to asking hardball questions to the second group.
The second recruiter didn't get their contract renewed and left.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#105Signals I've got from this post: - Steve's company got acquihired by Amazon, granting him a free ticket in without all the torment of the multi-stage interview pipeline. - It's a well known fact that it's easier to jump from one FAANG to another, so while interviewing at Google he had significant advantage, plus the blog gaining popularity. - All of this has caused a deep down imposter syndrome, which resulted in an…
Well, not exactly. He did say that the hiring process at Geoworks was incredibly rigorous, and that he passed that.
I know this author’s name but not his whole life story, but it reads like he got hired at Amazon before they acquired Geoworks and brought all of his former colleagues over.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a very real problem is that these take home problems are often way more than 4 hours. And to that they often add the traditional 4-6 hour interview loop. Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the pote…
Adding take-home problems to a traditional 4-6 hour interview loop is odious. But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring q…
It depends on the details of the work sample test.
If I ask you to write me a python function to convert OSGB easting/northing into WGS84 longitude/latitude the task has a very clearly defined scope. If you knock it out in a quarter of the allotted 4 hours, you've saved time. You can't use the remaining time to go further and demonstrate your mastery.
On the other hand if I ask you to write me a website for organising photos, there's no such thing as 'done' - no matter how good you are, after 4 hours you'll still be able to think of ways to make it faster, more beautiful, more featureful, more scalable, cheaper to operate, etc
Obviously, as a hiring manager I'll notice if you've spent 40 hours on the 4 hour task - but if you've spent 6 hours maybe I just think you're a fast worker with relevant experience and sharp tools. And my sense of how far you can get is calibrated by other prospective hires; if lots of people are spending 6 hours and claiming to have spent 4, my expectations will naturally be high.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point was that this perspective is not lost on the author of that article, as he directly addresses it.
What am I missing then, he talks about multi-days "campfires" contract work as a replacement for the interview process. Maybe I can get a week of holiday on a short notice but nobody will be able to do that 5 times in a month if they are actively looking.
And even if someone could get time off drive times a month to work "provisionally" at a different job, I can't imagine they'd typically be as productive hopping back and forth at either of them compared to devoting all their time to one. Sure, maybe the prospective employer would be circumspect enough to judge someone based on the correct signals of stuff like whether they're asking the right questions, showing capacity to learn and grow into the role in the long run, etc. rather than strictly judging their output, but being smarter about what you're measuring instead of blindly checking off boxes is also an option in traditional interviews, and plenty of companies still don't do that, so why would the expectation that the lazy approach of only measuring results wouldn't end to happening with this as well?
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The decisions made by individual interviewers are extremely accurate if you realize they are just saying 'YES - I want this person hired' or 'NO - I don't want this person hired'. It's entirely subjective but likely very repeatable.
It's not repeatable; that's the whole point of describing how the same person gets wildly different results when they interview on multiple occasions.
Candidates are getting different outcomes on separate paths through the process because different people are interviewing them.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#109Signals I've got from this post: - Steve's company got acquihired by Amazon, granting him a free ticket in without all the torment of the multi-stage interview pipeline. - It's a well known fact that it's easier to jump from one FAANG to another, so while interviewing at Google he had significant advantage, plus the blog gaining popularity. - All of this has caused a deep down imposter syndrome, which resulted in an…
Well, not exactly. He did say that the hiring process at Geoworks was incredibly rigorous, and that he passed that. I know this author’s name but not his whole life story, but it reads like he got hired at Amazon before they acquired Geoworks and brought all of his former colleagues over.
Yeah, if you read the older blogposts he talks about interviewing at Amazon multiple times.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#110This paper (from the same research as his book on high end culinary organizations) is worth a read https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0001839214557638 - he talks about "negotiated joining" which is a similar scheme for placements that works well with undefined job roles.