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People suck at technical interviews

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Re: People suck at technical interviews

#151

Post by vonmoltke »

hawkice wrote: post #147
vonmoltke wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, for the current state of the industry it is good advice. That is the part that saddens me, that "get good at sales" in order to get a job that has nothing to do with sales is sound, even the best, advice.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#152

Post by tokenadult »

vosper wrote: post #149
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?

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?

This HN search for comments by Thomas Ptacek on the topic of work-sample tests

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Atptacek+work-sample#!/comment...

will lead to better descriptions of work-sample tests useful in a Hacker News context than anything I have yet written on the topic. I'm grateful to him for contextualizing that issue for this community.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#153

Post by SnacksOnAPlane »

jbogp wrote: post #73

Having just had a 3h long technical interview for Google Deepmind, I cannot agree more with a lot of points raised in this post. Deepmind being a machine learning/statistics/maths/computer science fuelled company, it made sense for the interview process to follow this simple organisation. I was however very disappointed by the questions asked for each part. Not a single one of the ~100 questions asked during these 3h…

Did you happen to take improv classes in Boston?

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#155

Post by dang »

kybernetikos wrote: post #154
dang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone can suggest a non-baity title, we'll happily change it beyond s/you/people/.

Actually I would have preferred the original title because then I would have known that I didn't want to click the link.

That's a pretty good argument that I don't think I've heard before.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#156

Post by michaelt »

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…

  And as an aside, your test for ethics is entirely asinine
To me, "if everyone did X, would the scenario be tenable" sounds like a less fancy way of saying "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."

That is to say, Kant's Categorical Imperative [1].

If you consider it asinine, I could introduce you to a lot of intelligent people you would think were asinine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#157

Post by jbogp »

SnacksOnAPlane wrote: post #153
jbogp wrote: post #73

Having just had a 3h long technical interview for Google Deepmind, I cannot agree more with a lot of points raised in this post. Deepmind being a machine learning/statistics/maths/computer science fuelled company, it made sense for the interview process to follow this simple organisation. I was however very disappointed by the questions asked for each part. Not a single one of the ~100 questions asked during these 3h…

Did you happen to take improv classes in Boston?

I'm afraid you have me confused with someone else, sorry.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#158

Post by fnbr »

x0x0 wrote: post #124
scarmig wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all off base. Which is the reason I would be deeply annoyed by the 4 == '4' question. The technical answer is it evaluates to true, but the real answer is "any code that requires all readers to have intimate knowledge of Javascript type conversion rules to read and understand is horrific code."

I'm with @lostcolony: if I were interviewing and a candidate said "don't do that, it's unpredictable, do this instead" it's a great answer.

At the same time though, as someone looking for their first dev job, I'm not going to tell the interviewer "don't do that." Given the people I've met in industry, I can't see that ending well- I would expect some variation of "who does this kid think he is!?"

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#159

Post by SilasX »

fnbr wrote: post #158
x0x0 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with @lostcolony: if I were interviewing and a candidate said "don't do that, it's unpredictable, do this instead" it's a great answer.

At the same time though, as someone looking for their first dev job, I'm not going to tell the interviewer "don't do that." Given the people I've met in industry, I can't see that ending well- I would expect some variation of "who does this kid think he is!?"

True, but one time I was asked about the difference between "foo = bar" and "var foo = bar", and my answer was, "Don't do the first."

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#160

Post by SilasX »

allensb wrote: post #62
lnanek2 wrote: post #55

> The famous fizzbuzz test simply asks "are you aware of the modulo operator? No it doesn't. It could be implemented with counters you reset when needed. Didn't really read any further, I don't think this person should really be giving technical interviews anyway.

Yeah, but not knowing the mod operator would get you dinged.

Only if you have no workaround or ability to implement modulo operations. If you were really a capable coder, but didn't know of %, you would just say, "I don't know of a library function for finding the remainder, so I'll just plug in remainder(x, 3) here." Then later, if such completeness is desired, implement that function.
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