111–120 of 157 posts
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Jesus christ. Inverting a binary tree is not hard. That people keep using this as a joke is more a testament to the stubbornness of people believing they shouldn't have to do no learnin' no more than it is bad interviewing practices.
I’ve never in my 10+ year career needed to invert a binary tree.
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I just came of a call with a a potential hire. I recommended her to a second round because of three things: * She would culturally fit while still bringing something new to the tam * She doesn't know Web Analytics, but has done market research, built html prototypes and has basic knowledge in JS, python, html, SPSS and some other things * She is self motivated and shows this because she actually learned all these ski…
> She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.
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Plumbers are technologists as well, really. Just a different kind of technology...
Plumbers are essential for civilization. Pretty much everyone else isn't.
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The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…
> Hiring is a Hard Problem, and there's a big gap between well-intentioned intuition and translating that into robust processes. Ultimately, hiring is INTRINSICALLY a subjective process. If it were quantifiable and one could reliably screen based on "objective" criteria, it would have been a solved problem by now and employers could hire "robustly". But it is not and it never will be that way. That said, hiring and a…
Objective doesn't mean "good/optimal/solved" and subjective doesn't mean "bad/suboptimal/unsolved". All subjective/objective refer to is how sensitive a property is to a specific context. An objective measure is not particularly context sensitive whereas a subjective measure is.
My company has both objective and subjective criteria. Competency is mostly measured objectively and represents the bulk of our hiring criteria, the subjective assessment involves things like communication, collaboration and professionalism.
Both aspects are difficult and imperfect to assess regardless of whether they are objective or subjective, but I don't think it's particularly appropriate to assess someone's competency based on a subjective measure.
If someone is a good basketball player, or a good plumber etc... they are likely good regardless of the intricacies of the individual making the assessment that day and hence it's something that is probably best measured objectively. However, whether someone will get along with the rest of the basketball team, or whether a plumber can properly communicate to a customer what the issue is and how to fix it, that may very well depend on what team that player is playing for, or the relationship between that specific plumber and the specific customer. That would be more of a subjective criteria.
There certainly are subjective aspects to competency as well as objective aspects to communication, but it's minor (perhaps a basketball player is good only on a specific team, perhaps a plumber is illiterate).
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> She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.
I agree, "cultural fit" often has biased results. But "cultural fit" is still necessary but must be defined carefully. If a company doesn't care about culture fit when hiring people, it will become a very bad place to work. Questions to address when determining cultural fit: - How does this person resolve conflict with peers? With managers? - How does this person advocate for change in the workplace? - Does this pers…
I think the reason it gets confused is because you're saying "cultural fit" but what you really mean is "is this person an asshole"
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The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…
Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature. Can you tell someone had the chops to figure things out if they came from a different cultural background than one you're familiar with? If they had a different social upbringing from yours? If they presented themselves in a way that you personally misunderstood but someone else would have been completely…
I've come to the sad conclusion that this is a fundamental tension.
Ignoring the pre-interview filtering, our industry has, on one end of the spectrum, a relatively nondiscriminatory process that assumes basically nothing and tests you on as much of the field as they can before hiring. It's nondiscriminatory in that it doesn't matter where you come from as long as you can solve the same structured problems as everyone else. This is the whiteboard interview everyone hates, and it's not all that inclusive.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the fuzzy 'does this person seem like they could become capable quickly and work well with me' process. It's inclusive in that it doesn't require you to be able to solve those stupid problems yet, just be bright enough and hard working enough to learn. But it's not at all unbiased.
So do you go for unbiased and give people the same standardized questions, or go for inclusive and have a real conversation? I've found the best people come from the latter process, but I would say that, right? I'm biased.
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> She would culturally fit What does this mean? This is a very loaded term, and without qualitative data it results in biased hiring. Usually, it means "she's young, white, and college educated, just like the rest of us". People don't need to culturally fit to excel at a role.
I agree, "cultural fit" often has biased results. But "cultural fit" is still necessary but must be defined carefully. If a company doesn't care about culture fit when hiring people, it will become a very bad place to work. Questions to address when determining cultural fit: - How does this person resolve conflict with peers? With managers? - How does this person advocate for change in the workplace? - Does this pers…
This. I would additionally also say, how does this person react when shown they misunderstood/misinterpreted something. How do they deal with being wrong about something.
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The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…
I've been responsible for hiring for most of the last 20 years. I've literally never had a false positive where I recommended someone and they performed poorly. I have had one case where I said no, was overruled, and then the person turned out to be awful. To be fair, I have no idea how many false negatives I've had where I said no but they would've been great. I'm always puzzled by people/companies who find this dif…
As an interviewer, I sometimes wonder if I made the right "No Hire" call on that person who might just have been nervous. As a candidate, I always know that when they say "NO" they're wrong :)
So... smart and gets things done. Honestly that's all I look for on a resume. You also have to talk about it in an interview. I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tel…
The trouble is, this "je ne sais quoi" that you speak of, that you "could tell he had the chops to figure things out", is unquantifiable and almost totally subjective. To be a bit blunt and cynical, this way of evaluating candidates basically boils down to, "do I like this candidate?" Your criteria for liking someone happens to be that you look for these nebulous "chops for figuring things out". What about the other…
Then one time I hired an excellent candidate, technically very strong. Then it turned out he couldn't figure things out on his own. I had a co-interviewer who also thought he was very strong. In the end we had to fire him after a month since he couldn't pick up the pace (his colleague who started at the same time is actually very good)
I was "very good at hiring", until I hired the wrong person. Even now it's hard for me to tell what actually went wrong there. It was mostly theory and understanding underlying concepts, but now I definitely mix in a lot of practical issues and examples. Sometimes I think we interviewed his twin brother who could actually program ;).
Hiring developers is indeed very difficult. You can only tell when working with them for a few weeks.
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Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature. Can you tell someone had the chops to figure things out if they came from a different cultural background than one you're familiar with? If they had a different social upbringing from yours? If they presented themselves in a way that you personally misunderstood but someone else would have been completely…
> Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature. I've come to the sad conclusion that this is a fundamental tension. Ignoring the pre-interview filtering, our industry has, on one end of the spectrum, a relatively nondiscriminatory process that assumes basically nothing and tests you on as much of the field as they can before hiring. It's nondiscrimin…
That is what I am criticizing as not being helpful. If someone has the chops and passion for a job, they have the chops and passion to learn a few data structures and algorithms before interviewing for said job. Let them know it, keep in touch with them, and have them come back after they can tackle a proper technical interview.
>I've found the best people come from the latter process, but I would say that, right? I'm biased.
Right and that's a valid observation and there's nothing wrong with that bias per say. On the other hand I've found the opposite, the best software developers I currently have the pleasure of working with know their fundamental data structures and algorithms and have no trouble explaining deeply technical topics with rigor and precision, so that's what I hire for.