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Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

erikmcclure.com

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Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#171

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

Please don't. Better, I'll remove the please and go JUST DONT FUCKING DO IT.

Hiring is broken because most people hiring aren't good at it and the people working in tech are pretty much idiots (I'm focusing more on SV-startup, 5hour discussion about aeropress, put people down because they chose vim or emacs - people kinds). From 'cultural' fit interviews (who the fuck cares if you are a sikh or an atheist, whiskey drinking or think alcohol is evil? You are hired to do a job, not much more). This 'i have my social life at work, so I want people I can hang out with' shit has got to end. I work remotely for 10+ years and I can see in interviews/meetings the people that seem to base their identity and life around work, and the ones that actually are well rounded people that don't care about which coffee grind size you use on your morning crap of joe.

I have been a professional boxer and dabbled with MMA/Grappling. I can say most things in the article can apply. So.. at the end of the interview just get them in gloves and duke a few rounds? I would be sued out of existence, but for some reason, between take home assignments, 10h whiteboard drilling and whatever the fuck is hip now (leetcode or what not), interviewing is broken because people are idiots. I have been interviewing people for the last 5 years. If in an one hour talk that is semi technical, you can't understand if the person knows what the fuck they are doing or not, then the problem is you, not the whiteboard or the take-home or the paid assignment. Just admit most people interviewing others for technical positions have not fucking clue or training, BUT, hey, they are smart people from Standford or MIT, so 'how hard can it be' and we get the clusterfuck that it is now

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#172

Post by scpedicini »

lghh wrote: post #116
kevincox wrote: post #12

I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior too effectively as these two things don't require much leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone interview questions at this point.

I doubt jobs for urban planners ask what cities you design in your free time. I doubt jobs for lawyers ask what cases you've argued in your free time. Why do we ask what software you've built in your free time for software engineering interviews?

Why not ask? Programming is a craft, and having a showcase could demonstrate initiative, capabilities, and inventiveness. They're concrete samples of your work.

Aside, there seems to be a swath of people who seem bizarrely resentful of personal projects. Yes, we get it, not EVERYONE in the universe has sufficient free time. Bla bla bla, maybe cut down on Netflix.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#173

Post by lvice »

sixothree wrote: post #131
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

This is exactly why I don't play games like factorio or tis-100. It's too much like work for me.

I honestly stopped after the winter holidays for this reason. At one point, it felt a bit too similar to actually working... but I enjoyed it very much until the "spaghetti factory point of no return" :)

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#174

Post by Filligree »

yodelshady wrote: post #148

On a related note, feature request for factorio - comments/labels/documentation. For instance, I like to group chem plants together as a block, that I can move around easily, set up remote bases, or duplicate easily. That, of course, means a common input "format". I'd love for in-game blueprints to be able to label that (or am I missing it?).

The common meta, aka. what you get on https://www.factorio.school/, is to mark inputs using constant combinators. Alternately, at larger scales a couple of chunk-sized (and absolute-tiled) railroad blocks will do nicely; the railway stations work as labels.

If you dive even slightly into the (enormous) mod ecosystem, there's one that lets you make physical labels, at one tile per letter. (Text Plates, https://mods.factorio.com/mod/textplates)

Since blueprint tiling was added, it's become absolutely obligatory to make good use of them. Almost every blueprint should have at least relative tiling enabled. Note, the tile size shouldn't necessarily be the exact size of the blueprint -- it's often convenient to have tileable blueprints overlap slightly, and it supports that just fine by making the tiles slightly smaller.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#175

Post by fghfghfghfghfgh »

goddess33 wrote: post #156

As good-intentioned as this is... it's the type of behaviour that just adds more barriers for women trying to break into tech. When hobbies like these - video games made exclusively by white men [0], played (almost) exclusively by men - are used to assess a candidate's ability as a software engineer , who do you think benefits? [0] https://factorio.com/game/about

I think it benefits people who play video games. I also think that group consist of people who are neither men nor white.

I am not impressed by this comment but in keeping with my own promise of assuming good faith, can I ask you to elaborate please?

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#176

Post by Mauricebranagh »

andyxor wrote: post #168

why there is no standardized Leetcode-style tests like SAT or GRE that can be administered once and applied to all software job applications. The current situation is like every company coming up with its own version of IQ test, the randomness factor is huge. if current employees of any company were to simply retake their own tests most will fail.

I suspect that a lot western companies don't want to go down the "chitty" route.

And those tests are gameable as are IQ tests and discriminate.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#178

Post by billfruit »

kentonv wrote: post #145
billfruit wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I get some of this sentiment, wont some sort of social deduction game like 'Throne of Lies' be better at identifying potentially good team members?.

I'm not familiar with that game, but the point of using Factorio is it is a game where you have to build complex systems and maintain them, which has many parallels with real-world software engineering. "Throne of Lies" doesn't look like that kind of game.

Throne of lies and social deduction games like them are about finding out peoples real intentions from what they say and do, also aspects like using and understanding subtle signalling to collaborate with ones team.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#179

Post by scpedicini »

zrail wrote: post #96
kevincox wrote: post #12

I seriously think that "personal projects" are very underrated when it comes to hiring. If I see that someone has a lot of personal projects and has lots of time in Factorio they probably know how to code. I'm not sure you can rank them as Junior/Senior too effectively as these two things don't require much leadership, but you can basically skip the trivial phone interview questions at this point.

Looking at personal projects biases against people who don’t want to or can’t do them, either contractually or due to time/energy constraints.

Why wouldn't I want to take every possible factor into consideration? If I have two people, one of whom has a github with lots of personal projects and the other one does not, I'm naturally going to get a better sense of the github developer in terms of their overall capabilities.

That doesn't automatically make him the better candidate but it definitely gives me more information to act on.

If people don't want to or can't work on personal projects then that's fine, but I'm not going to ignore the people who are passionate about building their own stuff.

Re: Technical interview methods pale in comparison to playing Factorio with someone

#180

Post by lvice »

SilasX wrote: post #63
lvice wrote: post #22

This winter break I spent an embarrassing amount of time on Satisfactory on Steam, which is essentially a nicer (and probably easier) modern refresh of Factorio. While I played, I came to similar conclusions to the article. Building factories in this game is very very similar conceptually to building software. I ran into exactly the same problems that I ran while I build software like: - If I don't plan ahead enough…

Disclaimer: I've only played the Factorio demo. If that's the analogy, then I don't think it captures the core difficulty of software, which is unknown unknowns. That is, you write something that depends on an external system working a certain way, you follow its spec and depend on it working that way, and then it just ... doesn't, and you have to find exactly where it deviates, possibly making up some complicated kl…

I think this part is captured by Satisfactory "Tier" system. As you progress in the game, you unlock Tiers which allow you to build new materials and structures. The issue often is that you optimize the hell out of your factories to build something that is needed at you current Tier, and when you unlock the next one, you suddenly have to refactor everything to build the new items, that require different ratio of materials and inputs.
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