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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#201

Post by tcdent »

1123581321 wrote: post #165
chihuahua wrote: post #58

The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…

I’ve run a program like this. My answers to your objections are: You don’t run it for everyone, just people who seem good enough and are willing to do it. A resume filter and a 30-minute conversation are usually enough. You stop as soon as you’ve got your hire. If you’re bad at picking people for the screen, you learn the signals quickly because of your level of investment. It does replace a longer traditional interv…

This is my preferred proposal to new contacts as well (I set it up as a contract so there's a little less red tape, but even people that pursue me for traditional employment afterword usually land on an extended contract).

Two things it solves: You get to evaluate me, my ability to deliver, and how I interact with your team and I either bring real value within two weeks, or I don't. I can tell you verbally I am an indispensable asset or I can show you; other people have ruined the verbal trust layer which is why this whole debacle exists in the first place btw.

And more importantly, but less communicated, I get to evaluate you. How your team works, the level of talent present, management's ability to keep direction, and wether I genuinely enjoy what you have for me to work on.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#202

Post by tcdent »

musicale wrote: post #193
chihuahua wrote: post #58

The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…

> You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Sample size of 100 seems like overkill for finding a 6-month contract employee. How about starting with a sample size of 1: Sort the applicants (ether randomly or by criteria of your choice, pre-filtering as desired) and hire the first one who meets the minimum qualifications, based on a streamlined interview process of your choice. You co…

Losing two weeks while you try out a candidates fit has way less cost than bringing the wrong person on formally and spending the next year debating wether they were the right choice or not with all of the associated "soft" overhead.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#203

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

enraged_camel wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #13

The gold standard in hiring qualification is work-sample testing. It works fine. You do not need to "make hiring a profit center" or "provisionally hire" or do internships. Work samples done correctly demand less time from candidates than interviews and scale better than interviews. They are standardizable and iterable. What I feel like I'm reading here is someone who has been poisoned by FAANG hiring practices --- a…

The problem with work-sample testing (which is commonly administered as a take-home problem for the developer candidate to solve) is two-fold: a) it discriminates against people who cannot spare 4+ hours of focused time on evenings/weekends to work on the problem. People with multiple jobs, single parents, etc. b) in the age of AI it is no longer a reliable measure of someone's skill, for obvious reasons Unlike Yegge…

>The candidate gets 3-6 months of stable employment

To me, "stable" implies I don't even worry about having a full-time job for the next 3-5 years. Anything less isn't stable, unless this would be my second job immediately after the McDonald's burgerflipper one where I was scheduled for random 4 hour shifts seemingly designed to maximize personal inconvenience.

If I knew that my job would only last 6 months, I would have to immediately begin conducting a job search and prepping for it. I put my odds at finding another job before the 6 months is up at less than 60%. Even that number seems naively optimistic now that I've typed it out. Offering me 3-6 months of employment only sounds like a deal if I'm currently unemployed and rent was due yesterday.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#204

Post by dilyevsky »

tptacek wrote: post #180
esafak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you are talking to them face to face; over the phone they will use AI with speech recognition and parrot its response, erasing all signal. Then the interview becomes all about AI detection.

I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer. It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talke…

Ive had people show up at onsites that were clearly not the same person I screened over the phone earlier as far back as 2013 at google. It’s real. Just ask any recruiters from well known companies and they’ll tell you. It’s happening to more and more startups too now because it’s gotten easier

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#205

Post by rustystump »

mooreds wrote: post #197
jagged-chisel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mess to fire someone? Every state except Montana lets employers fire without giving a reason.

From the article: > In the U.S. you generally can’t just up and fire someone, even if they are underperforming, even if it’s at-will employment, without risking a lawsuit and some sort of cash outlay. This is what makes hiring decisions so high-stakes. I've been part of a few situations where someone had to be let go in the USA, and I can tell you it wasn't a trivial decision. There were legal aspects, sure, but ther…

This is why severance even 2 weeks of it is common. To get it, gotta sign that giving up legal action for the money.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#206

Post by tptacek »

dilyevsky wrote: post #204
tptacek wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer. It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talke…

Ive had people show up at onsites that were clearly not the same person I screened over the phone earlier as far back as 2013 at google. It’s real. Just ask any recruiters from well known companies and they’ll tell you. It’s happening to more and more startups too now because it’s gotten easier

I believe you, but again: I haven't experienced anything like this, ever. One of the clearest results we got at Matasano adopting this approach was a drastic reduction in turnover, which is exactly the opposite of what you expect to see if people are scamming their way into jobs they can't do. That's held up (I don't have the before/after comparison, but I do have the industry-wide comparison) over the years afterwards. We hire these people, then we work with them, and they're amazing.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#207

Post by yawnxyz »

mooreds wrote: post #197
jagged-chisel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mess to fire someone? Every state except Montana lets employers fire without giving a reason.

From the article: > In the U.S. you generally can’t just up and fire someone, even if they are underperforming, even if it’s at-will employment, without risking a lawsuit and some sort of cash outlay. This is what makes hiring decisions so high-stakes. I've been part of a few situations where someone had to be let go in the USA, and I can tell you it wasn't a trivial decision. There were legal aspects, sure, but ther…

in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory, you CAN fire anyone for any reason

the article is wrong here

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#208

Post by tptacek »

dilyevsky wrote: post #195
tptacek wrote: post #13

The gold standard in hiring qualification is work-sample testing. It works fine. You do not need to "make hiring a profit center" or "provisionally hire" or do internships. Work samples done correctly demand less time from candidates than interviews and scale better than interviews. They are standardizable and iterable. What I feel like I'm reading here is someone who has been poisoned by FAANG hiring practices --- a…

Ime take-homes was a good way to purge all the good candidates with options from your pipeline as they would simply not turn anything in and go with someone else. Maybe with AI and so many layoffs it’s better now I haven’t tried in last couple of years though i doubt it

People have been telling me that for 18 years and (a) we've hired our fair share of candidates with gold-plated resumes (and stopped hiring candidates that only had gold-plated resumes, acquired from failing up) and (b) the nontraditional background candidates we've hired have generally been our top performers.

Hiring in most of the tech industry is gatekept, and like every protectionist scheme, it isn't organized for productivity.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#209

Post by mooreds »

yawnxyz wrote: post #207
mooreds wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > In the U.S. you generally can’t just up and fire someone, even if they are underperforming, even if it’s at-will employment, without risking a lawsuit and some sort of cash outlay. This is what makes hiring decisions so high-stakes. I've been part of a few situations where someone had to be let go in the USA, and I can tell you it wasn't a trivial decision. There were legal aspects, sure, but ther…

in most states, as long as it's not discriminatory, you CAN fire anyone for any reason the article is wrong here

There's the legal world and then there's the world of custom and ethics. They don't always diverge, but in my experience they do.

At least over the last 25 years in the tech spaces I've been part of, I rarely hear of people being dismissed/let go quickly. #anecdata

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#210

Post by tptacek »

mplanchard wrote: post #194
kevin_nisbet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little bit more on the fence with the work sample interviews having designed them and also interviewed through them. I've also done my fair share of "traditional" tech interviews, all at startups, never FAANG. As an interviewer, I much prefer the signals generated through a work-sample interview. I'm much more confident in the hiring recommendation than I get from a 1 hour zoom session. However, if I look at te…

Going through the interview process now for the first time in half a decade, and while I already would have said five years ago that I preferred work samples, that opinion is only growing stronger as I go through the process again. Leetcode style interviews feel so stupid and divorced from the reality of the job, especially the “one weird trick” kind where you’re expected to discern the best possible solution to a pr…

I shouldn't keep leaving this comment because it's not that useful but: AI-era work samples are a fun problem (you definitely can't just use your pre-agent default work samples!), and we've come up with a couple useful solutions.

If you're in an environment that is open to agents to begin with, one simple thing to do is just tell people to use agents, and ask for the prompts. Prompts are a high-signal artifact, and you can construct rubrics to evaluate them objectively.

I'll get around to writing a piece about this within the next couple months.

Ultimately work samples aren't a technology technique; they're a longstanding concept in management science. Long before the first coding take home was ever given, firms were using work samples to qualify salespeople, support professionals, factory workers, whatever. AI agents are a part of what the work of software development involves, and there's obviously no fundamental reason why you can't work sample them like anything else.

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