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When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

hiringengineersbook.com

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Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#201

Post by bschwindHN »

ravenstine wrote: post #190

Having spent a lot of time being interviewed recently, I've noticed a certain type of question asked in technical interviews that I think can sabotage perfectly qualified engineers. I'm not sure if my view is sound, but maybe someone can pipe in and tell me why I am wrong. Imagine being asked this question in a technical interview: > When do you decide to use frontend validation? (yes, this is based on questions I've…

> How do you know if you need frontend validation as opposed to the backend?

You _always_ need backend validation. Never trust the client. You can then layer on frontend validation where it's needed to make a better UX.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#202

Post by EpicEng »

tptacek wrote: post #72
mbell wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to every candidate who gets flustered by the questioning and seems to bow out earlier than their technical depth? I'm not sure I get this question - I'm not talking about a white-boarding exercise. I'm just talking to the candidate about a technical project they have worked on in the past, the pain points, how they resolved them, etc. If that results in the candidate being flustered it's not a good sig…

One of the very best people we ever hired was so flustered in his final interview with us (a formality, after work-sample challenges) that he was visibly shaking during it. If we had taken the "numerous axes" on which the was "not a good sign" seriously, we'd have missed that hire --- and, I think, an entire business unit in our firm wouldn't have been started. I generally think software developers (I count myself am…

Of course that happens, but you're taking a real risk in hiring someone who can't get through the interview. I'd rather miss out on a good hire than make a bad one. You only have so many ways to determine whether or not someone is competent.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#203

Post by techslave »

LaserToy wrote: post #186

Context: 15 years of experience, multiple public talks (including AWS reInvent), own chunk of infra serving hundreds millions users. Got a message from yet another self driving startup. Agreed to do a phone screen out of curiosity. Interviewer is 6 months out of school and his first question - why do you want to work for us. My answer - I actually don’t, I didn’t even know you exist and it is your job to convince me.…

ha. i would have hung up. but then i’m pretty gruff.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#205

Post by nubbins »

nicoburns wrote: post #35
notjesse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s not generally tolerated. You end up optimizing for sub-prime candidates because those are the only ones desperate enough to take 4-6 hours out of their free time for a company that hasn’t even bothered interviewing you, yet. If they want to turn the onsite into one big work sample, by all means, that sounds very effective (and something I’ve seen work well). But in my experience, you’re going to deter qualif…

The best interview I ever had was a 2-hour onsite work sample, followed by 1/2 an hour discussing what I'd come up with. I was offered the job the next day. Surely most people would prefer this to whiteboard tasks?

As a junior I’d much prefer a whiteboard where I just need strong CS fundamentals and reasoning to a work sample where there are 10+ different dimensions I could be judged on like style, maintainability, whether I used the latest language features, how I solved the problem ( use libraries or from stratch?) there are just way too may variables and potential bias in the judges VS did you correctly turn the problem in a DP algo.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#206

Post by bradleyjg »

wool_gather wrote: post #198
bradleyjg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ever see or suspect fraud in a take home? I can't imagine it doesn't happen giving that cheating is so prevalent in colleges.

To my mind, the simplest and most straightforward way to combat any fraud is also beneficial because it gives you even more information about the candidate: Talk to them about the code they wrote. Have a conversation, as if they were already your co-worker, with the exercise as the subject. Go through it, ask them -- non-adversarially -- why they did X, what they thought about requirement 2, how they could get better…

That seems like a good idea, but does somewhat detract from the notion that once a candidate does the work-sample he is done with the technical part of the process.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#207

Post by paulie_a »

BurningFrog wrote: post #112
mbell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. I don't agree with this. I think the issue here is that your interviewers aren't going deep enough in the conversation. If you ask someone to tell you about some interesting technical project they worked on and they give a…

If you've never been around real bullshit artists it's hard to imagine, but there are people who can talk the talk so well and say all the right things, and yet their actual programming is terrible. There are also the opposite. Folks who are not great at verbalizing programming principles, but do deliver solid code in reality. In summary, hiring is hell...

Bullshit artists are honestly easy to spot. They are easy to trip up because they think they are good at fooling people. If they said all the right things, the questions were probably low quality. I would throw a zinger in to see if they can react to it. I honestly expect a candidate to say, "I am not familiar" or "I'm not sure I'd have to look that up" once during an interview.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#208

Post by hellllllllooo »

Apocryphon wrote: post #191
hellllllllooo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point that is being made by the original post is that the process is bad in many companies especially when hiring senior engineers who have a proven track record and have other options. These engineers don't want to spend time and money learning how to crack the coding interview in some bootcamp. They can find work and are put off by the process some companies use and such companies are missing out on good people…

They definitely aren’t, but I wonder if their existence will force big tech employers to realize their interviewing process is being gamed and is even more of a sham.

I think it's ok for big tech companies to do this (from their point of view) because they have an endless list of candidates and don't care too much if many good people are put off or fail. They will get good people through the sheer volume of people applying and these processes do get good people if you can afford false negatives.

I think the middle and smaller companies need to change their processes more. If they just copy what the large companies do without understanding they don't have the same ability to attract candidates and pay high salaries they will just lose good people that they actually really need.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#209

Post by LaserToy »

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

I will ask you about you projects, then I drill down till I find something technically interesting and have discussion about it. I will concentrate on failures, not on successes.

Gives me better signal than solve a problem on whiteboard question.

Re: When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

#210

Post by Alex3917 »

tptacek wrote: post #3

A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But: In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough. Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it. We found this out the ha…

Was there a specific attack vector you commonly saw from candidates in interviews? It would seem pretty difficult to fake having built a real product or made significant open source contributions. In fact would probably be as difficult or more difficult than faking having written a book, and as far as I know book publishers aren't constantly trying to weed out would-be authors who have faked their previous publications.

I'm not saying you're wrong, especially since we hear about this kind of thing all the time, but I just don't see anything about coding that would seem to make it uniquely conducive to this sort of deception.

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