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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#111

Post by danaris »

friedman23 wrote: post #93
selcuka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.

You venn diagram of engineering talent has good engineers in the side that don't understand the value proposition I posted above? It feels silly saying this but the idea that people working at these tech companies are shitty programmers that only know competitive programming is wrong.

Engineering skill is orthogonal to willingness to put oneself through meaningless bullshit to get a job.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#112

Post by edanm »

chrisaycock wrote: post #109
edanm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once would've completely agreed with your point idea. But since then, I've had multiple experiences of talking with someone who made a great impression, super knowledgeable, but couldn't actually write any code in a real-world setting. This approach simply doesn't always work. Some people are amazing-sounding but terrible in practice. The reverse is also true - some people are terrible at talking about their work,…

I agree that the interview can't be just war stories. There has to be code in there somewhere, like whiteboard sketches of an algorithm the candidate has implemented. On the other hand, leet code questions definitely don't show that the candidate can actually write maintainable, well-documented code with test suites and easy-to-use APIs.

Yes, luckily those aren't the only two options :)

Though I will say that having some kind of fizz-buzz style phone screen is still, in my mind, a good idea. It saves a lot of time if it turns out that your candidate can't even write a simple for loop (and so many can't, to my great dismay).

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#113

Post by jasonpeacock »

wildrhythms wrote: post #42
friedman23 wrote: post #22

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if pr…

What a strangely adversarial comment. In my experience, I can gather more information about a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes talking 1 on 1 with them rather than hours of Leetcode busywork. Funneling candidates through an annoying, needlessly rigid, and blatantly time consuming process is not a good thing, and probably leads to perfectly qualified people being denied; a system that optimizes for 'signals' tha…

I've done over 800 interviews, and I call bullshit on this.

I've spent 30min talking to candidates about their projects, experience, tech they used, choices made, etc. and been super excited and positive about them.

Then I ask them to find the intersection of two lists in better than O(n^2) and they completely fail to write functional code in their preferred language in the next 30 minutes. This isn't even "leetcode" level of challenge.

If I'm hiring you to be a professional software engineer for 6 figures income to spend 8-10 hours a day designing, writing, and debugging code, you need to be able to write code.

The disparity between the conversation and the coding performance can be significant, and both need to be evaluated.

If there's a better way to evaluate if someone can write code, I'm open to try it. But take home tests, portfolios, pair-programming, "a day in the life", etc. all have their problems and disadvantage different groups.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#114

Post by anduru_h »

Nextgrid wrote: post #104
anduru_h wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that real world programming careers are affected by someone's ability to remember information and put in effort, and that's demonstrated by the time spent to study for the little tricks and algorithms that go into passing an interview. I think it makes things a lot less subjective - you put in the time, you win.

I don't think that expecting prospective developers to spend lots of unpaid time on a skill that's ultimately not going to be useful to the vast majority of them should be normalized. Do you expect medical doctors to do an unpaid "trial" surgery as part of their interview? Do you expect lawyers to litigate a case for free before they'll be considered for a job? As far as I know software engineering is the only field…

Yes...but the bar to entry here is also a major factor. Doctors and lawyers in part have already been vetted by lots of crap before even qualifying for an interview.

How much of the content on the MCAT is "useful" for a doctor's daily work? I would argue that the majority of it is moot. In the same vein, the LSAT has a lot of "useless" logic puzzles that aren't applicable to their daily work as a lawyer. Fact of the matter is, we're lucky in tech to have this system that ANYONE can study for "useless" shit, doesn't matter your background, what college you went to, etc. If you get the interview and nail it, you're in.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#115

Post by kra34 »

This would basically preclude anybody from interviewing at the FANGs. I believe they have all adopted the Google style leetcode college level trivia questions, completely divorced from the realities of the job. Their processes are so tightly controlled and the duties of the job so far removed from the interview process that I can't imagine what would happen even if you successfully navigated to a job offer.

"Oh congratulations, you made it! You won't see any of the people you interviewed with ever again. You'll be placed on 1 of 3 teams that do things we've never spoken to you about. I'm sure you are going to love it here!"

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#116

Post by hervature »

usrbinbash wrote: post #90
hervature wrote: post #3

While I agree in principle, the average developer is not going to have released and maintained an open source project. Let alone one that is used. Let alone one that is widely used. People in your position should rightfully do that, you have all the leverage. Other people not so much, especially new graduates. I agree that having tasks that simulate the real environment is the goal but we also work in an industry tha…

Not every developer has the time and resources to dedicate to FOSS. Some of us spend most of their working time writing software for, well, the company we work for, which won't suddenly open source their IP. Making commits to FOSS a general requirement in interviews would exclude a whole lot of highly skilled and experienced engineers, limit the chances of beginners, and lead to loads and loads of BS open source proj…

First, 10 commits to an open source project is not "dedication". It feels like table stakes if we want a meritocratic process. Second, where do people get the time to work on leetcode problems? Replace that with open source contributions and/or open blog posts. I do agree that it would probably lead to a glut but that makes the interviewer's job incredibly easy if a commit is BS or not.

It seems you are asking for a miracle: an interview that properly assesses the candidate's job readiness without time involvement. How much time do people spend preparing for interviews and then have to do it again the next time they want to interview? At least with this system, you have a history that is reusable.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#117

Post by cbgonz »

majormajor wrote: post #2

So what do you propose as a replacement? In your case, they should've certainly dug into your open source, at least if it was directly in their line of business. I certainly love it when I ask a candidate "tell me about a project you found interesting" and they can go into details, talk about tradeoffs, etc. Sadly, most candidates can't . They can't come up with anything better than "well I rewrote the thing, and it…

And, maybe, c) not many people have both strong verbal skills and strong technical skills?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#118

Post by jrs235 »

wildrhythms wrote: post #42
friedman23 wrote: post #22

> Stop accepting shitty interviews Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if pr…

What a strangely adversarial comment. In my experience, I can gather more information about a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes talking 1 on 1 with them rather than hours of Leetcode busywork. Funneling candidates through an annoying, needlessly rigid, and blatantly time consuming process is not a good thing, and probably leads to perfectly qualified people being denied; a system that optimizes for 'signals' tha…

Aren't these shitty interview processes just gates and proxies for commitment and a dark pattern per se? If someone is willing to do the work and endure the shitty process to get the job then they must be committed to get the job and will likely be committed to keep the job.

That commitment can be exploited.

It's like Nigerian Prince scams, those willing to jump through the hoops are more easily to convince and get jumping through future hoops.

It's also likely they will rationalize that their job is great because they had to do all this shit to get it. The employer could think "if we can get their foot in the door and convince them to fully enter the room even though we make it difficult to fully open the door, they're less likely to leave and more likely to fight to stay in the room." It keeps uncommitted folks out, but doesn't necessarily filter for competent people, just committed people.

Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#120

Post by novok »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #88
koonsolo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't give you enough upvotes. I also do a lot of interviews and hire people, and it's just very hard. Plus, you only know the false positives, but never the false negatives. And I also think that a lot of people who never interview candidates don't realize how many of them can't even code the most basic stuff.

So, the answer is to ask easier leetcodes. I unironically only ask fizzbuzz and then domain specific questions (in my case it's ML/NLP). You can even design domain specific "leetcode like" questions for your domain. In my case, it could be to come up with a very simple implementation of K-NN. I accept psudocode and leave the editor, compiler (err, run button...) And Google open as resources that they can use during t…

Google is pretty bad in general with their 5 leetcode policy :p

But that is what hacker rank and automated interviewing is supposed to be usually, an automated leetcode easy.

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