The data seems to show the opposite to me - despite scores being all over the place, the mean is very reliable. When a 2 or lower is considered a fail, those who consistently rate ~2.5 fail about half of their interviews while those who consistently rate ~3.0 fail only 10%. Of course, the probability that a candidate failed an interview approaches 1 as they are subject to more and more interviews. That the test has both false negatives and false positives does not invalidate the test. In fact, that the test is accurate despite the false positives and the false negatives ought to do the opposite. If a single bad interview invalidates a candidate for company A, that doesn't mean that the candidate won't go on to pass all of their interviews with company B.
Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
171–180 of 246 posts
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Option B is explicitly prohibited in your employment agreement for most salary workers. I would never consider working for a company that required me to violate a contract just for a chance to work there.
"Most"? Anecdotally and all that, but I never signed a contract that stated that, across ~5 jobs. One tried and I got it redlined out before I started.
Anecdote to add, I've never across 20 years experience (and many jobs) not had a moonlighting clause in my employment agreement.
As someone who hires, I'd be worried about the IP implications of even suggesting I pay them for outside work prior to them leaving their prior commitments.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, but you are being scammed. You are selecting for sales skills, not technical skills. Read what you've written. You're asking the parent commenter to set aside eight years of personal hiring experience, over which time "every person I've ever hired who has passed that part has ended up in my 'great hire' category" (assuming, that is, that you've read what he/she's written). Can a candidate lacking the technic…
> Can a candidate lacking the technical skills go deep into details the way the parent commenter describes? More often than you'd think, alas. I'm going by about fifteen years of personal hiring experience, for whatever that's worth.
I've seen this same thing frequently when evaluating security engineers. They often can talk the talk, but when given a simple task to perform more often than not will fail.
Coding exercises might not be a great measure, but as far as I have experienced, they are better than other items out there.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Option B is explicitly prohibited in your employment agreement for most salary workers. I would never consider working for a company that required me to violate a contract just for a chance to work there.
I believe those clauses are completely unethical in the first place, so I wouldn't have a problem.
But you sign them and take money from the people offering them?
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#175Take home tests FTW. The thinking goes as follows: 1. If the candidate can't be bothered to complete a 2-4 hour (depending on claimed seniority) code test in the language of their choice, we can't be bothered to talk to them. 2. If the candidate does reasonably well by completing the code test somewhat on time (with a fat margin allowed for them, well, having a life) and within parameters of the task, they're invited…
I honestly feel like take home tests are "busy work" and just as volatile as any other sort of technical interview for showing actual skills versus a real world environment. 2-4 hours is a lot of time to ask of somebody, regardless of their circumstances. Would you pay a contractor's salary rate for that work? Are these take home tests results worth $100/hour? $40? Every take home test I've encountered I've wished so…
As a huge proponent of work sample hiring, if it were at all feasible in the jurisdictions I hire in, paying someone a couple hundred dollars on completion of a take home test, I'd do it.
But the vast majority of the developers I want to hire are encumbered by moonlighting clauses that would likely cause them major personal issues if we violated them. Seems a bad way to get on the appropriate footing with a potential new hire.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's far less true than you might assume. I have seen a company pay someone 100$/hour to learn a new language as part of a 6 month contract. They were producing better code than the company's staff within 3 weeks and finished the project ahead of time. Granted, he was an EE not a software developer. But, deep knowledge of a platform is often more dangerous than helpful. The surface layer tends to be the least buggy…
I hear "Let's use reflection!" as "It's time to find something else to work on!" Outside of writing developer tools or unit test frameworks, I can't think of a worse code smell. It's a klaxons blaring, we're doomed kinda thing. Everytime I've seen it used, it turned into a quagmire of subtle regressions, strange effects at a distance and extremely brittle code. I think the best pattern there are: 1. Thou shalt never…
I hear "Let's use reflection!" as "My language's tools for code reuse are hard to use and ineffective in practice, so I'm going to put annotations everywhere and use reflection instead! It'll be ten times harder to understand the code than it would have been with a little metaprogramming!"
But then, my opinion may be unduly influenced by Java vs Ruby.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about the all day interview process some large companies are currently using? Keep in mind you probably had 1-3 phone + computer interviews before the in person interview. A take home test seems like a less time intensive process as you at least don't need to take time off from your normal job to do it.
> How do you feel about the all day interview process some large companies are currently using? I don't go for the all-day ones (I just decline; after my last Google interview I'm done putting myself through the wringer for a whateverjob), but I really do enjoy in-person interviews. Like, last time I was looking for a FT gig I did at least a phone interview at 35 places and an in-person at 20. I enjoy interacting wit…
I love interviewing. Like, I'd do it as a hobby if I could. That said, my own preferences are not likely to be salient to the greater community of potential hires. So, I have to put them aside when designing hiring pipelines.
Having given this problem a lot of thought and experimentation, I've come to realize that designing good work sample based hiring pipelines is very difficult. Designing hiring pipelines based on something else is impossible.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The single most effective way that I've found to interview for "interest" is to just get them talking about something they've done before and ask them to go deep into the details. You get everything you need from watching somebody talk, with a smile on their face, about how they solved some problem in a creative way that makes them show some pride. Sorry, but you are being scammed. You are selecting for sales skill…
> Sorry, but you are being scammed. You are selecting for sales skills, not technical skills. Read what you've written. You're asking the parent commenter to set aside eight years of personal hiring experience, over which time "every person I've ever hired who has passed that part has ended up in my 'great hire' category" (assuming, that is, that you've read what he/she's written). Can a candidate lacking the technic…
Yup. I've seen candidates talk a deep technical game and turn out unable to write long term sustainable (well-organized) code.
Here's the fundamental asymmetry: what makes a good programmer great is their ability to build a cathedral brick by brick, alongside the architect, the other builders, despite the external circumstances, accounting for complications along the way. Ignoring the connotations of waterfall design that "cathedral" might invoke.
Building a complex system with many components takes weeks, even months, whether or not you're talking about MVP's, or service oriented architectures, and whether or not you're iterating rapidly.
A weak engineer will be fine for a few weeks, but the complexity will catch up to them. A strong engineer pushes that bar much, much further out. Possibly indefinitely.
Problem is, how do you tell that you're talking to that kind of person when you have only a few hours? It's an extremely difficult task because you must evaluate a person for a > 6 month job in under 6 hours. No matter what you do, you're going to have trouble.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Most"? Anecdotally and all that, but I never signed a contract that stated that, across ~5 jobs. One tried and I got it redlined out before I started.
Anecdote to add, I've never across 20 years experience (and many jobs) not had a moonlighting clause in my employment agreement. As someone who hires, I'd be worried about the IP implications of even suggesting I pay them for outside work prior to them leaving their prior commitments.
Huh, interesting. I think I'd just walk if presented with a firm one. I constantly have other things going on, even when FT employed, and honestly no employer is going to pay me enough to constrain my options.
Re: Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdote to add, I've never across 20 years experience (and many jobs) not had a moonlighting clause in my employment agreement. As someone who hires, I'd be worried about the IP implications of even suggesting I pay them for outside work prior to them leaving their prior commitments.
Huh, interesting. I think I'd just walk if presented with a firm one. I constantly have other things going on, even when FT employed, and honestly no employer is going to pay me enough to constrain my options.
I assumed it was boilerplate. For the record I've also never had an employer have a problem when I notified them of outside work.
That might be different if the outside work in question was an interview for a new jib though...