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The Only Interview Question That Matters

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Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#101

Post by pg »

dominotw wrote: post #60
pg wrote: post #20

"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.

This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…

What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college?

That is exactly the sort of achievement that impresses us, actually. For example, Qasar Younis started life in a house with dirt floors in a village in Pakistan. His family moved to the US, to Detroit, when he was 7. He appears to have worked his ass off from the moment they landed. We funded his startup, Talkbin, in Winter 2011, mainly because we were so impressed with him. Talkbin was acquired by Google soon after Demo Day, and he is now a part time partner at YC.

(Why do so many people assume that after 9 years of picking founders, we still have huge blind spots that are obvious to them but not to us?)

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#102

Post by hexagonc »

tptacek wrote: post #90
hexagonc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some r…

There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line. In our common usage, "passion" des…

But I'm not just talking about blind, unfocused and overly enthusiastic passion. I'm talking about the passion that drives people to go beyond the call of duty, not because it is part of the job but because it is what they like to do. Passion got me the job I have now. Although I was also more than merely competent, the passion drove me to achieve that competence in the first place.

Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic.

Yeah, passion is a bit of an x-factor, isn't it? By itself, it is meaningless. You may get something unexpectedly great or unexpectedly bad. But, using myself as an example again, I was able to get a project at work done well ahead of schedule because I had already been working on something related in my spare time.

Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates.

Inasmuch as someone is proud of a project they did and can talk enthusiastically about it, and that project is related to work currently going on at the company they are applying to, I think a passionate candidate can be better long term than another candidate that is initially more competent and more effective. If experience is the main reason that candidate A is more competent and effective than candidate B, then candidate B may eventually surpass candidate A as a better employee simply because passion drives candidate B to keep honing his skills in his free time. I think this is especially true for college graduates or other junior candidates who may not have anything else to go by but their projects.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#103

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #90
hexagonc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some r…

There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line. In our common usage, "passion" des…

[deleted]

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#104

Post by ath0 »

tptacek wrote: post #90
hexagonc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some r…

There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates. "Passion" doesn't matter. What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line. In our common usage, "passion" des…

It's this line -- "given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec" -- that, I would guess, separates the types of jobs I've experienced from yours. I've never been given a spec that was worth the wiki page it was written on. In most of the jobs I've experienced, "effectiveness" (get done what you're given) and "competence" (don't cause extra work for others) are barely a minimum bar to success; to be successful, colleagues also need "insight" (look past the documented requirement to the reasons behind it) and "creativity" (design a solution that solves the documented problem and three related undocumented ones).

You're right, "passion" isn't one of the things to hire for. At best, in my experience, it's highly correlated with the breadth of experience that fuels "creativity" and "effectiveness" - at least, in the sense that it causes people to be persistent against hard and unclear problems. It's fair to ask whether this should be required for teammates or just co-founders -- but even in my most enterprise-y gigs, I've rarely seen a team that could succeed without people with passion helping drive the work.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#105

Post by dominotw »

pg wrote: post #101
dominotw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…

What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college? That is exactly the sort of achievement that impresses us, actually. For example, Qasar Younis started life in a house with dirt floors in a village in Pakistan. His family moved to the US, to Detroit, when he was 7. He appears to have worked his ass off from the moment they landed. We funded his s…

I am not assuming that this is blind spot in YC selection process. After all YC is just another organization trying to reap the benefits our society's disproportionate investment in a minority of population at the top of socio economic ladder. (I might be totally off target on this but my impression of typical winning applicant was of a top 20 school graduate [1].)

I am merely suggesting( and hoping) that this not something that shouldn't be emulated by everyone.

Can we play G.H Hardy once in while and discover Ramanujams from social and economic ghettos?

1. https://www.airbnb.com/about/founders

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#106

Post by dominotw »

pg wrote: post #101
dominotw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…

What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college? That is exactly the sort of achievement that impresses us, actually. For example, Qasar Younis started life in a house with dirt floors in a village in Pakistan. His family moved to the US, to Detroit, when he was 7. He appears to have worked his ass off from the moment they landed. We funded his s…

> His family moved to the US, to Detroit, when he was 7.

This is not an example of someone who is from the third world or from a ghetto. Immigrant parents have strong work ethic which they instill in their kids ( I belong to the club, so I know).

I am talking about girls from southside Chicago whose idea of 'achievement' is not getting pregnant by 15.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#107

Post by smsm42 »

dominotw wrote: post #60
pg wrote: post #20

"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.

This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…

That's certainly not true. "Significant achievement" doesn't have to be ending war in Rwanda or discovering a new elementary particle. It has to be significant in the life of the person doing it. And it is hard to imagine for me a person that has never done anything ever that is significant to them. One would then be forced to ask - why? You don't have to be a billionaire to make something that makes sense to you.

>>> but are you in a position to rationally consider that as a 'significant achievement ' ?

That sounds pretty bad. You're basically saying "it was easy to me to have this thought right after reading about it, but for you such thought is probably out of the question". Why would you assume such thing?

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#108

Post by kalkin »

tptacek wrote: post #40

I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…

The only interview questions I've ever found at all reliable--in the sense of providing good answers to your questions about comparison & assessment--are coding problems. As in, here's a toy problem, you have 45 minutes/3 hours to write some code to solve it, on this actual computer with actual Google etc.

That actually tests a set of skills, which puts it well ahead of various interview questions which test nothing of relevance. But it's also a limited set of skills, some of which a recent graduate might reasonably lack but might be reasonably be expected to obtain quickly (if the right kind of smart, committed, a quick study etc).

The problem is I don't know really know how to test for anything but current ability to write reasonable code for a not-too-large problem. The more experience I get interviewing, the more decisions feel arbitrary to me. And I'm pretty skeptical when other people claim to have it figured out.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#109

Post by smsm42 »

tptacek wrote: post #95
bennyg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming two candidates are both qualified to perform a job, and one of them gels and converses with team (aka gets along with), then that person should get the job. The best teams get the best work done, and good teams have amazing communication - also assuming that everyone on said team can actually do the work without bring the others down. A good teammate is a multiplier on total team productivity and efficiency…

First, you're assuming that the interview process reliably distinguishes between "qualified" and "easy to talk to", but in practice not only do engineering interviews not do that, but in confounding the two they also drastically over-weigh the "easy to talk to" attribute. Second, you're assuming that the way a candidate interacts with your team in an interview is an accurate representation of how they'll gel with the…

I don't know how you get the same music and beer from that, but preferring the same technology stacks may have a value in the team. Less time spent arguing religion = more time spent doing actual work.

>>> the real argument is that it doesn't work.

It's not an argument, it's a statement. It would become argument if it would be supported with something that is not of equal weight with the contrary claim "no, it actually works quite well". Everybody has their anecdotes, do you have more than that?

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#110

Post by smsm42 »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #53

I'm 46 years old. You want me to pick one ? I mean, I get it, I use this question regularly as an interviewer, but if you have me on the other side of the table, you're giving me a lot of room to tell you exactly the story you want to hear... Especially if you pull this question out of the bag late in the process, when I you've already given me enough insight in what would impress you. Like most interview tactics, it…

"I can't pick one but here's couple of recent cases that may be interesting for you" is a perfectly valid answer, IMHO.
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