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Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

fagnerbrack.com

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Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#101

Post by stormking »

dzonga wrote: post #43

let's say you make a saas for automatic birdfeeders. if you can scope out your problem to a simplified version & have a pen & paper / whiteboard discussion with a candidate. the candidate starts from a blank slate. they create their own constraints, validate their own assumptions etc. if they can't design something that works - u can prove this since you already have a working product in production. that way intervie…

Someone else here already pointed out the problem with that approach: After the second or third candidate, the interviewer is very familiar with the problem and may become unfairly judgemental with later candidates if they don't immediately see "the obvious". Which wasn't obvious at all to him as well, two weeks ago.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#102

Post by bradlys »

zipy124 wrote: post #45
bradlys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are these jobs paying $500k/yr that I can skip these interviews? I haven’t seen them yet. I hear about jobs paying below $100k/yr that do this but that’s not getting us anywhere in SF.

I mean we know the answer to this. As you go up the seniority ladder interviews become less and less onerous and at some tipping point are not required. Aqui-hires such as Alexandr Wang at Meta for example. Non aqui-hire we have for instance when Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. I somehow doubt they went through as many round as those below them. Apart from that when lower down in seniority generally start-ups. Ther…

I don't think your examples are even remotely scalable nor do they pay well. Joining a startup at an early stage where you know a founder and can bypass interview steps is notoriously low compensation.

Acquisition based hiring isn't a real methodology. That's being a founder of a very successful startup and getting acquired. That's like saying "want a new job? Get your company acquired by a new one."

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#103

Post by Insimwytim »

dkarl wrote: post #18

This article repeats what we've long known about how technical interviews aren't great at evaluating technical skills and inadvertently filter for things that aren't important. But it doesn't offer a better way of evaluating technical skills. It talks about how to evaluate other things that do matter but aren't substitutes or proxies for technical skills. Also, this argument is some grade school smarty pants "I'm too…

> toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars

This is your framing, which is openly hostile to people, that you chose as your enemies. And that framing itself is a great demonstration of toxicity.

The whole narrative is just an attack on engineers, who do the job, coming from the side of the so-called "communicators".

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#104

Post by FireBeyond »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #93
FireBeyond wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree with your assessment, on both parts, but I think it could survive with minor tweaking. "We are going to push on the technical details, both those we agree with and disagree with. This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, how does it stand up to scrutiny and challenge. In the end, while there may not be perfect alignment, we're looking to see how your ideas go through the process of…

I'm not sure what exactly that's meant to do other than using more words to say the same thing only this time with hackneyed cliches. IME it's best to avoid empty metaphor that does little more than occupy space. Like... > This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, ... Was this written by AI? It's so bad, lol.

Hah, it is, in hindsight, and I agree (and bleh, last thing I want to sound like is AI!). But I think my point is more - if it had been framed as something like "defending your thesis/dissertation", seeing if your choices stand up to scrutiny, versus the somewhat snooty down-the-nose feeling of "We are judging you. Speak now." then it is better - and real: your architecture and code decisions should stand up to review/critique, after all.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#105

Post by fagnerbrack »

techblueberry wrote: post #2

> The deeper issue is tacit knowledge. Most of what a skilled engineer knows is not something they can articulate on demand. Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutio…

Tacit knowledge is not soft skill, there's quite a comprehensive field of neuroscience research around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#106

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

FireBeyond wrote: post #104
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what exactly that's meant to do other than using more words to say the same thing only this time with hackneyed cliches. IME it's best to avoid empty metaphor that does little more than occupy space. Like... > This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, ... Was this written by AI? It's so bad, lol.

Hah, it is, in hindsight, and I agree (and bleh, last thing I want to sound like is AI!). But I think my point is more - if it had been framed as something like "defending your thesis/dissertation", seeing if your choices stand up to scrutiny, versus the somewhat snooty down-the-nose feeling of "We are judging you. Speak now." then it is better - and real: your architecture and code decisions should stand up to revie…

Framing something as "defending" against "critique" creates an interaction that is immediately adversarial, which is not so far distant from judging down-the-nose, IMO. They are words of combat and criticism, and I think we get better outcomes when we find ways to ask a candidate to "discuss strengths and compromises" without that. I don't want any of my candidates to feel like they are on defense against me in a scenario where they know that there is a catastrophic power imbalance and I am able to use literally any reason I want to kick them to the street. People don't think well in that kind of situation.

> last thing I want to sound like is AI!

My suggestion of it signaling AI was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Humans have been writing inexpertly and injecting cliched fluff since the invention of writing. Communicating with precision is one of the most difficult things that any of us ever do.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#107

Post by jjav »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #4
techblueberry wrote: post #2

> The deeper issue is tacit knowledge. Most of what a skilled engineer knows is not something they can articulate on demand. Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutio…

Articulation is not the issue; the reasoning and consideration process is. If you step back a bit from the words on that page and squint, what you might see is something like "Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious." The discovery of the right path forward for the goals of the organization comes after that and takes time and planning.

> "Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious."

This is a great way of putting it, love it.

At the end of the day, that's it. A lot of people are very good at executing the tasks, delivering what needs to be delivered.

But the special people are the ones who maintain a constant sense of awareness of what might be off and digging deep into it.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#108

Post by jjav »

watwut wrote: post #32
techblueberry wrote: post #2

> The deeper issue is tacit knowledge. Most of what a skilled engineer knows is not something they can articulate on demand. Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutio…

It totally is the job. What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think? First you think, then you think about how to say it, then you talk with others. Then you think again and maybe talk again. But, it is not like we were designing everything in quick on the spot debates without research.

> What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think?

AI is making this much worse. Executives expect you to be managing a herd of AI agents working on a dozen things at once, 24/7.

Good luck trying to find time to think. This will backfire.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#109

Post by zipy124 »

bradlys wrote: post #102
zipy124 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we know the answer to this. As you go up the seniority ladder interviews become less and less onerous and at some tipping point are not required. Aqui-hires such as Alexandr Wang at Meta for example. Non aqui-hire we have for instance when Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. I somehow doubt they went through as many round as those below them. Apart from that when lower down in seniority generally start-ups. Ther…

I don't think your examples are even remotely scalable nor do they pay well. Joining a startup at an early stage where you know a founder and can bypass interview steps is notoriously low compensation. Acquisition based hiring isn't a real methodology. That's being a founder of a very successful startup and getting acquired. That's like saying "want a new job? Get your company acquired by a new one."

Start-ups can pay very well, I'm not sure why you would think otherwise? Given a series A can be around the ten million mark, there is more than enough capital to pay competitive rates and still be small enough to have the flexibility to hire out of their network.

Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

#110

Post by gilbetron »

tptacek wrote: post #87
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's a risk, but that's part of the purpose of an interview - both to discover what they claim to have done, and to assess how accurate that is. This is the purpose of asking about decision making processes, alternatives, architectural summaries and deep dives, etc - if they really did everything they claimed then all relevant details should come rapidly and fluently. The problems with the alternative - inter…

I have zero confidence in the ability of interviewers to reliably and repeatable parse out subtle characterological details in candidates. Like I said, the interviews you're talking about are essentially random functions. Google has notoriously one of the worst hiring processes in the entire tech industry.

Many people's understanding of "Google's hiring processes" is from a few articles over a decade ago. They had done numerous studies, switched things up, and now have a pretty solid approach to interviewing. This is one of the articles that was going around back then, and most of the conclusions are how Google still interviews: https://www.workforce.com/news/laszlo-bock-just-google-him

I work with many ex-Googlers that did a lot of interviewing and they process has been pretty consistent for many years now, and seen largely successful.

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