Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People suck at technical interviews

seldo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 177 posts

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#141

Post by mahyarm »

bcantrill wrote: post #66
hackinthebochs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homework is great, but only if a job offer is guaranteed if submitting a sufficient project. It is hubris to think someone will care enough about your company to spend 8 hours of their time for the small chance to be hired. Presumably you are giving the same assignment to a handful of other candidates. You are simply outsourcing much of the investment of hiring to the candidates. This is simply unethical (one of many…

It's not a small chance at all -- and it only comes after a conversation where I have done basic vetting and where I have explained why the problems that we're solving are exciting to me. (That is, if you're not ginned up to do the homework, I haven't done my job -- or it's not a fit.) And as an aside, your test for ethics is entirely asinine, as it renders anything of sub-infinite scale unethical. (Among its more ob…

Homework is going to put a bunch of candidates off unless its a short amount of time (~5 hrs) and as an alternative to taking time off of work to go do an in person interview.

I know one guy who did 30 hours total of interview investment, where a bunch of it was homework and was eventually not hired because he wasn't 'passionate' enough about payroll software! You don't want to waste your time doing such shit so you quickly start refusing long homework projects. Your in demand and you have better things to do with your time.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#142

Post by notahacker »

electronvolt wrote: post #118
notahacker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered whether for technical roles involving little or no client interaction[1], negatively-weighting skill at answering very pat interview questions (like where they want to be in five years, what they liked most about their degree course or why they're passionate about writing server side code for an ad platform) relative to their overall performance might actually be a useful, if very counter-intuitiv…

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…

It's less to do with social skills (agreed, there's no trade-off) and more to do with the probability that people scoring 6 out of 10 for their ability to discuss technical problems whilst getting 10 out of 10 for their ability to answer general interview questions are good interviewers with a weakness for understanding technical problems, whereas those scoring 6 out 10 for technical problems questions but 5 out of 10 for generic interview questions are likely underrepresenting their technical understanding due to the awkwardness of the interview situation. I'm also assuming that some common non-technical questions (like biggest weaknesses, and what they actually did in their last job) usually elicit useful information as opposed to answers synthesised from the job spec.

Since I've introduced arbitrary numerical scoring, I guess by "negatively weighting" I actually mean doing something equivalent to mutiplying their overall performance by 1 + scalefactor*(technical answers score - generic interview answers score) , but I'm assuming in practice most interviewers use their intuition rather than subjectively scoring every answer.

I'm assuming your amazingly productive friend aces the technical questions at least as impressively as the "convince me you'll have grown with the company after 5 years, even if you actually only see this as the bottom rung of the ladder" ones.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#143

Post by dllthomas »

electronvolt wrote: post #118
notahacker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered whether for technical roles involving little or no client interaction[1], negatively-weighting skill at answering very pat interview questions (like where they want to be in five years, what they liked most about their degree course or why they're passionate about writing server side code for an ad platform) relative to their overall performance might actually be a useful, if very counter-intuitiv…

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 you miss the point. It's not that people with social skills are likely to be worse technically, it's that social skills help you even on the technical questions in a setting where you are basically trying to sell yourself and being judged socially. Weighting the purely-social questions negatively might serve as a control.

A reasonable theory; I'm skeptical as to whether it would turn into better performance in hired candidates.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#144

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

arenaninja wrote: post #138
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

If you didn't know Scrabble I'd ask you to code another game. The fact that it's non-trivial is kind of the point; you have to ask questions (gather requirements) to do it.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#145

Post by mwcampbell »

tptacek wrote: post #24
darkstar999 wrote: post #17

> I used to ask people to write code in interviews. This is terrible. Bull! Last time I interviewed someone, they looked good on paper and decent on the phone. When it got down to solving a _simple_ problem on the whiteboard, he totally flopped. This is a totally realistic situation; we get together at least weekly and hammer out a solution on the whiteboard. Nerves could be an issue, but a good candidate should be a…

He didn't say coding was bad. He said coding on a whiteboard is bad. And, if you evaluated 100 strong developers by comparing their performance at a terminal and a whiteboard, my guess is that you'd quickly see that he's absolutely right about that --- not only would everyone outperform the whiteboard with a terminal, but that the whiteboard deficit would be highly irregular, defying any attempt to "handicap" for it.

Coding on a whiteboard is also impossible or infeasible for candidates with some kinds of disabilities (e.g. blind). Sure, you can make an exception for those few candidates, but I suppose the fact that you even have to make an exception to your normal process for a particular candidate might bias you against that candidate.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#146

Post by dllthomas »

spdy wrote: post #42
buckbova wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather hire the strong developer that can code without autocomplete and write without spellcheck.

Why? Because he is good at memorizing things? That does not make the strongest developer.

Being able to memorize things is valuable to a developer. I'm with you that other things are more valuable, but you don't always have to make a trade-off.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#147

Post by hawkice »

vonmoltke wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why it saddens me that the majority of the advice given in places like /r/cscareerquestions boils down to, "Get good at sales"

I'm not sure why it makes you sad. On a germane-to-the-parent-comment sense, that's pretty much exactly what tptacek said. But on a wider scale, if you are trying to help someone, wouldn't you want to give them advice that truly helps them in a big and cross-task way? Much better than "get good at Rails", which is useful only for a subset of engineering roles (albeit a subset I may enjoy). In terms of time investment... you can get pretty okay at sales in the time it takes you to be as expert as is potentially relevant in Rails. So why not choose sales?

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#148

Post by benaston »

jdmichal wrote: post #129
benaston wrote: post #109

Oh how I agree with this post. And I've been the asshole on the hiring end before - but I (hope) have learned my lesson. I recently interviewed with a consultancy (role was UK-based) that is desperate (quite literally) to hire experienced developers in the technical area I have experience in. I came highly recommended by a recent senior hire of theirs (he had been my manager). The technical filter question in the fac…

> A recursive solution springs to mind, but I can recall implementing recursive solutions in production code only a few tens of times over a ten year career. If you are not comfortable with recursion, just remember: Recursion is really just a free stack. To use your example: Whenever you see an opening brace, push onto the stack. (Or, make a recursive call, which goes onto the call stack...) Whenever you see a closin…

Thank you for the helpful comment. I can't help but feel you miss the point of my post though. I can solve the problem. Verbally, (but admittedly less eloquently and less complete) I approximately gave your answer in the interview. Give me a quiet Monday morning, a pair of headphones and a compiler/interpreter and I can solve it well.

It's the fact that it is being used as a filter when the person filtering doesn't know what is being filtered in and out.

All in all, it's a spectacular waste of time and money.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#149

Post by vosper »

tokenadult wrote: post #12

I read the comments already posted in this thread before I read the fine blog post. Almost everybody sucks at interviewing. Research shows that even though job applicants think that an interview is one of the more fair procedures for hiring a new worker for almost any kind of a job, it is one of the least effective. There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. Company hiring procedures and t…

Thanks for posting this - some real food for thought here. Can you explain exactly what you mean by a "work-sample test", in particular how that might differ from a pair programming or take-home coding exercise?

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#150

Post by jarek »

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...

If you're not the next Google, I'm not going to cram things for an interview with you. Sorry.

"Competitive programming"... if I get hired, am I going to be evaluated through "competitive employment"?

Post reply on HN