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Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

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Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did recruiting for Full Stack developers for a number of years. I only gave two programming problems, one to be completed before an initial phone screen and one to be completed in the first part of the interview. Myself and another team member worked on the questions, and we gave them to the team. Everyone was able to complete the exercises in a reasonable period of time, so we knew they weren't going to be too cha…

Looks like I'd fail your pre-screen test. What's the "mathematical" solution if you're not allowed to convert strings to ints? Ascii math?

Not quite sure, and I'm not quite sure I care either. ;-)

However for any multiple of 9, the digits will add up to a multiple of 9. So you're looking for numbers in [ (n+2)*9 + 1 for n in range(9) ]

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#132
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview. CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best o…

The problems are (non-exhaustively): - Many interview coding problems are very unlike what we have had to do in our daily tasks, and very unlike what will be required if we get the job. - If the company is trying to avoid that problem by making the coding part of the interview working on actual problems they're having, then that means the interviewee is giving the company work for free. (Unless the company pays for i…

The first two items there contradict each other. What’s an employer to do? This list of problems only reflects the point of view of a relatively inexperienced candidate who doesn’t like interviews, it’s not a list of problems that companies have, or that people with strong skills and experience have.

It’s an assumption to expect interviews need to reflect the work on the job or match daily tasks. Interviews are the employer trying to select the best candidate for an uncertain future, not mimic the drudgery of a day in the life at work. If I’m interviewing, I don’t want to know if you can code a specific task today, I want to know how well you can adapt to changing roles, whether you’re more extroverted lead material, or introverted and wicked smart or prolific, whether you’re ambitious or happy laying low. I’m much more interested in broad potential more than ability to perform technical tasks.

Isn’t the last item on your list a good reason to do some due diligence by checking whether people can code in practice before going through the expensive process of hiring them and having them fail and then having to try again with someone else? I haven’t seen a lot of outright lying on resumes, but I’ve seen a ton of overconfidence in one’s relative skill, I’ve seen people who are great on paper but duds in practice, but more than those I’ve see a lot of people who don’t communicate well, don’t get along well on a team, have bad attitudes, cover up mistakes instead of learning or admitting skill gaps, etc.

I don’t know what it means to claim most jobs don’t require proving skills. Most jobs are entry-level minimum-wage jobs. Anyone in the arts is used to constantly proving their skills via auditions, critiques, performances, etc. Doctors have it way worse with low paid grueling residency. We’re talking about high paid programmers where hiring the wrong person is an expensive mistake and can damage team productivity.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#133
post #114
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview. CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best o…

I think the most common complaint is that the interviews don't test technical skills, they test things that look like they're adjacent to technical skills but aren't the kind of work that you'd actually be doing.

Coding a fizz-buzz may be super boring, but pre-ChatGPT, it was an efficient way to rule out incompetents.

This way you could focus on a quality interview with people with actual programming experience.

And for somebody who is a senior dev, it's a 2 minutes job anyway.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#134
post #78
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)

If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview. CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best o…

The answer to almost every technical question are "it depends" and "let me look that up for you."

> Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right?

For the "best" candidates they need a way of deciding which interviewers are worth their time to speak to, and overhead of the hiring process is a fantastic filter.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#135
post #22

For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. Lucky I'd done a few before so knew the tricks. Now I work there the job is basic crud style work, nothing fancy required. Employer also hires grads almost exclusively from Ivy League universities and they mostly suck. Makes me look good. :)

The funny thing I joined a company where we building a database from the ground up. Regularly implementing algorithms and data structures from white papers. So it is as far from the crud style work as possible. The interview was just talking to different engineers about interesting problems, like you would do at a conference or at a meetup. No leetcode, no whiteboard, no take home or resembling a technical interview. But somehow they managed to build a top notch team, one of the best I ever worked with.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#136

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a div…

OK, I'll bite as a former CTO and hiring manager.

A lot of the advice is bad because many companies have terrible hiring processes and candidates have to work around that. Questions irrelevant to the actual job are a bad sign, unless they are asked early as part of the screening process or to assess the level of seniority and experience of the developer.

Ultimately you should treat the interviewer as you would a customer, try to understand quickly what they are looking for without asking too many questions, and demonstrate those qualities, assuming you are interested in doing so, of course.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#137
post #54

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a div…

And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)

People can and do lie about their experience and skills on their resumes.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People being bad at at hiring is really orthogonal to whether people want someone who just does what they're told, or who also partially controls the direction of their work. You're making the assumption that it's some idiot owner hiring people, when it could just as easily been that the owner has hired someone with a particular vision to run their company, and that person needs you not for your creativity, but your…

Any place I work would offer more autonomy than being cog in the company. Somewhat more like as an interior designer than as a painter. It's hard to imagine a painter as executing a vision. I certainly agree that the degree varies by level of role.

You probably meant a house painter, as opposed to an artist..

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wants to be right. A job interview is not like an exam, it's like dating. An opportunity for two parties to decide if they can work together. Hiding who you really are to 'pass' is a bad foundation. That's why I don't like the conclusion of the article. Anand didn't fail the interview because the criteria were wrong - the interviewer failed because they suck at being an engineering manager.

It’s nothing like dating. Employees need a paycheck. It’s an asymmetric relationship. This becomes very apparent during economic downturns! There’s really no use searching for the perfect job when the market is flooded with candidates and you have young children and mortgage payments due, yet you have to act like every job you’re applying to is some gift you’ve been searching for your entire life!

Not in this job market, certainly, but that article was from 2019, where market dynamics were very different.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#140

Interviewing practices are little better than folklore. Has anyone figured out how to do this? Like reproducible experiments, formalisms, checklists...? Last time I got good, actionable advice was from Journey of the Software Professional by Luke Hohmann. Covered stuff like self-selecting teams, assemblying a team with complimentary skills, and so on. Or maybe there's some secret manual for interviewing as hazing and…

Google used to be notorious for hiring only based on the prestige of the candidate's alma mater and gotcha interviews with Fermi questions or the kind where the interviewer is trying to show his superiority, like an adolescent pissing match. But they invested in researching the factors that best predict success and ended up with two: IQ tests and highly structured interviews. Everything else was worse than useless.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/manageme...

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