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People suck at technical interviews

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Re: People suck at technical interviews

#131

Post by vonmoltke »

Matt_Mickiewicz wrote: post #106
ionwake wrote: post #45

This is the most god damn cathartic thread I have read on this site after taking 1.5 years out to work on my own stuff and having failed 4 interviews getting back into the workforce, with the most random god damn shit technical tests.

I see this all the time... people who have CS Degrees, worked as programmers for 5, 6 or 7 years and then they go and start interviewing and flunk over and over again. Unfortunately, almost everybody feels overconfident and ignores our advice to prepare and practice for tech interviews: http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-prepare-for-a-sof...

I know I have a minority opinion here, but I fell that if a technical interview is such an exceptional event that I have to put that much preparation into it, there is something wrong with the interview process.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#132

Post by walshemj »

seanflyon wrote: post #111
lostcolony wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some one more seasoned would not work for free during a weekday. See, I can play that game too. Besides, this was a contrived problem. If you want to say "I refuse to solve any coding problems while interviewing for a software position", then fair enough. Good luck finding one. I think this was a total of perhaps 3 hours of my time, and was good enough to get an onsite? And it was time I -enjoyed-. Unlike most phone…

I think the grandparent is reacting to "Untimed. They gave me a weekend" which made it sound as if the interview took all weekend which a more seasoned programmer would be less likely to do.

And in a lot of cases in Anglo Saxon employment law working for some one else with out authorisation is a breech of employment law.

It was the they wanted production ready code that set alarm bells ringing.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#133

Post by wwweston »

bmj wrote: post #48
applecore wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You aren't interviewing people to determine how good they are at interviewing, because interviewing doesn't generate money for your company. Depends. At most companies, how you handle a simple interview is still relevant if it's for a revenue generating or client facing role (e.g., sales, marketing, and project management). Granted, most technical roles aren't generating revenue or in contact with clients, so this…

most technical roles aren't generating revenue Wait, what? The products I build don't generate revenue for my employer?

Your employers -- or, usually, your employer's bean counters -- may be like many humans in that it's easy to see cash flows and harder to see where value is produced.

This is one of the reasons sales and marketing often have a lot of power in modern business organizations (at least, as long as sales are good).

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#134

Post by walshemj »

VLM wrote: post #84
walshemj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outwith very senior C level roles you should need no more than 2 interviews to decide which candidate to make an offer to. Spending an entire day with 5 or 6 different interviews is just a waste of the candidates and the company's time.

"just a waste of the ... company's time." If the wrong guy gets hired and everyone is to blame, then no one is to blame. Especially if one of the 8 interviewers has moved on since the hiring, and can be blamed completely, at least on the paperwork. CYA is very popular. There's also a little manufacturing consent going on. I've been to interviews knowing the guy is already hired because he golfs with my VP, but we'll…

cuts both ways with 5 or 6 or more untrained interviewers the chance of some one making a legally "naughty" statement and causing problems increases.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#135

Post by dllthomas »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #43
fnbr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a junior developer, I find myself confused by your comment. It seems as if a large proportion of the posts on HN claim that, when looking to hire someone, they focus on problem solving abilities and and culture fit. However, in May when I was interviewing with companies (including YC backed startups), almost every company focused on quizzing me about trivia [1]. I was actually given a paper quiz by one of the comp…

I was treated with respect throughout the whole process, and the interview was very well done, with challenging questions that forced me to think, and didn't rely on language trivia. I would recommend the company to any of my friends, whereas I can't say that about almost any other company I interviewed with. This is a really important point to remember for interviewers. The interview process isn't just to help you f…

"And it can help to add a reason why you are declining a candidate too, since it can help them improve and perhaps return for another interview in the future (I've hired a few people that I originally passed on too)."

I've always tremendously valued the rare feedback I've gotten, but my understanding is this is not the same advice a lawyer would give (and that makes me a little sad).

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#136

Post by Jemaclus »

tptacek wrote: post #110
Jemaclus wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In no other common situation does a tech worker find themselves interrogated by a panel of strangers whose implicit goal is to knock them out of contention. I take the opposite approach. I want you to succeed. I want you to be the best candidate I've seen so far. I want you to be awesome. In fact, I want to hire you right now and never have to do another interview again. I'm in your corner, and I'm rooting for you…

If rejection wasn't such a powerfully negative psychological force, if loss aversion wasn't such a fundamental part of our psyche, we'd all be successful startup CEOs, because sales would be no problem. But in reality, very few of us have the stomach for sales.

True. Just words of encouragement. Even with all my experience, I'm still terrified of rejection. :)

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#137

Post by koof »

jbogp wrote: post #130
koof wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think mathematicians start over from learning how to count everytime they encounter a new problem? That's different from looking up the 10th digit of pi: that's encyclopedic. Knowing what a classifier is is simply more than encyclopedic knowledge that you should probably know before joining an AI company.

As I said before, yes these are very basic questions... and I'm not complaining that the questions were too hard or anything, I'm saying that finding someone who will be able to answer 100% of these "definition" questions will not tell you anything about how competent that person is... Making them face a simple stats/CS/maths/ML problem and see if he/she is able to come up with the relevant concepts is far more inter…

Ah, I see. Personally I think I could have taken the "give an example of a classifier" question into a deep dive of their competency (talk about how one would build that classifier, etc.) but they might get so many completely unqualified candidates that don't know those things that they need to have those sorts of hurdles before they start really evaluating you for more holistic problem solving traits.

But if you don't think they did that at all then I guess that's bad!

I generally am for the "look things up" argument, but so many people in tech take that to an extreme of "I can fully understand an entire discipline by looking at the Wikipedia page for 5 minutes".

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#138

Post by arenaninja »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #11

My go-to question for technical interviews is "how would you write Scrabble?". It's very open-ended. I expect them to ask me questions like "what do you mean, write Scrabble?", to draw out some class diagrams, and to implement some scoring. It shows how self-directed they are and how much they trust themselves to develop architecture. I hate questions about bit-twiddling and sorting algorithms. I wouldn't remember th…

I would fail this. I know of Scrabble, but I have not played it. On top of that, from having had to build scoring for things previously, I would say that it's non-trivial, which would compound the fact that I don't know what goes on on a scrabble board

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#139

Post by electronvolt »

pitt1980 wrote: post #127
electronvolt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that falling into the trap of treating social skills and technical ability as a trade-off is a mistake. It's a hackneyed stereotype that I don't think has ever been true--but I'd imagine it has sometimes led to people expressly trying to seem socially abnormal in order to fit the idea of someone technically adept. I recall an anecdote about how a younger mathematician at a top research institution took up run…

I think he might be on to something not be people with crap social skills are better than people with good social skill but rather, people with crap social skills are easier for your competors to miss good tech skill + good social skill = good and expensive good tech skill + poor social skill = (I'll let everyone make up their own mind about how good they'll fit) definately less expensive though any trait you overfit…

I think that you're right about this. People with poor social skills are going to be worse at negotiating pay and in much lower demand, overall. On the other hand, I'd assert that they're going to be harder to manage and lead to more interpersonal issues (almost by definition).

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#140

Post by jbogp »

koof wrote: post #137
jbogp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said before, yes these are very basic questions... and I'm not complaining that the questions were too hard or anything, I'm saying that finding someone who will be able to answer 100% of these "definition" questions will not tell you anything about how competent that person is... Making them face a simple stats/CS/maths/ML problem and see if he/she is able to come up with the relevant concepts is far more inter…

Ah, I see. Personally I think I could have taken the "give an example of a classifier" question into a deep dive of their competency (talk about how one would build that classifier, etc.) but they might get so many completely unqualified candidates that don't know those things that they need to have those sorts of hurdles before they start really evaluating you for more holistic problem solving traits. But if you don…

I completely agree with you. Also to be fair towards Deepmind I should mention that this was the first round of interview. Hopefully the following steps will prove more stimulating, in which case 3h for the first step was maybe slightly too much.
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