People suck at technical interviews (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#281

Post by biztos » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #193

biztos wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely, and this resonates with me particularly because I'm one of the many programmers also serious about other creative endeavors (in my case, the visual arts). But it's worth considering that in larger companies, management is often terrified of the creative aspect of programming, because it messes with their primary goal of predictability. Thus they seek, many of them openly and explicitly, to make al…

> it's not an irrational position for them to take. It's about as rational as decreeing that it must not rain on Fridays, and then proceeding to fire the nearest person every time it does. They do have some very good and rational reasons why they wish programming was not a creative job. When they assume they can change reality by wishing it, they completely destroy their people's (outsourced or not) productivity, thr…

I think the key -- the point at which the position becomes (to me) rational -- is to knowingly accept lower quality, less innovation, etc. in order to achieve predictability.

It's a continuum, so of course nobody ever gets 100% predictability with software. But most of us, if we really needed to, could ratched down our productivity to a level where we almost always delivered exactly what we said we would in each sprint or other schedule unit.

And I think that is the crux. Most people who write software don't want to live like that, but there are a whole lot of managers dreaming of a shop floor full of "individual contributors" who are not very individual, and plenty of CEO's who will happily take that over cat-herding their way to the next iPhone.

That should give a big advantage to any company capable of embracing a little chaos and giving a happy home to talented and creative programmers.

But when I look around and see even, say, Facebook -- a company that needs to innovate and seems to know that -- building developer-hostile open-plan offices, it makes me think we may all be doomed.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#282

Post by overcast » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #279

overcast wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the end, I didn’t get a single offer through a raw application. Every single offer came through a referral of some kind. (This I did not expect, and strongly influences the advice I’d give to a job-seeker.)" " Haseeb Qureshi says: 04/23/2016 at 9:53 am I’ll be writing more about this in my subsequent blog post. But if you have no connections at all in SV, then I might say that if you’re set on SV as a place to wo…

Ah, right, I forgot about that part. Even so, the point remains that it isn't only about who you know, because he had those connections and leads still went stale, until he gamed the system. But I would agree that it reveals how confused and manipulation-prone the hiring process is; if they're hiring someone for critical, technical C++ work after only two years experience on mostly-Rails, they really don't know what…

Seriously, something is suspicious here. These companies aren't stupid.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#283

Post by seldo » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:45 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #194

seldo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing what you're doing will probably work, in that you'll get decent candidates. But this approach only works for one kind of good developer -- the kind who can survive this kind of interview. Silicon Valley's diversity problem is made worse by interview styles that give false negatives for excellent candidates who lack confidence or just don't think the same way. My thesis is that this test, by giving frequent fals…

What would you suggest instead that would decrease the false negatives without allowing the false positives to explode? The parent poster named a couple of different things s/he tried that didn't work. Sometimes the best available option is mediocre. ("It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")

You make a good point. In practice, we've not found a reliable way to weed out the false positives that result (I would not characterize it as an "explosion", but there are definitely some). However, we've stuck with this process because we firmly believe that the benefits of having the excellent people we've hired who would not have passed a standard interview outweigh the costs of getting rid of the others.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#284

Post by bbcbasic » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:55 PM UTC

MrLeftHand wrote: post #85

bbcbasic wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewing is about putting on the dance. Juggle some balls on a unicycle etc. It's a rite of passage to what may be a cool job but you have to jump through the hoops like a dolphin.

That sounds pretty cool. I hope at the end they wont try to feed me with raw fish. And there is the part 'may be a cool job'. Sometimes that part is a lie. Yes come to us and you will be working with the newest tech and learn new things... Oh did we forgot to mention we use CVS, Java 1.6 and Expoler 8? You want to use something else? No can't do sweety.

I am over using the newest tech. Just want to work on interesting problems. JS fatigue etc. I'm glad I don't do web dev anymore!

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#285

Post by bobwaycott » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

gregmac wrote: post #144

PuffinBlue wrote: post #26

There needs to be a bit of a shift in understanding what 'category' of worker a programmer 'is', both by companies and more importantly by (some) individuals themselves. Programming is both technical and artistic. It's a creative endeavour that relies on technical skill to complete. The best analogy to another profession would be to those in the 'technical arts', those like photography, joinery, painting, sculpture,…

Except that the vast majority of programmers essentially say "I'm very good at taking pictures, but I can't actually show you any of them because they're all property of my previous employers, and I never take pictures just for myself". > I think programmers should create their portfolios of personal or paid for projects that showcase their technical and artistic skill and companies should take those seriously. 100%…

I imagine the vast majority of employers would be pretty pissed if the vast majority of programmers shared their private code, and some might even wish to take legal action. As an employer interviewing and hiring candidates, one should respect and expect this confidentiality to be exhibited and adhered to.

For example, I build things for clients that are proprietary to their businesses. Some things are publicly accessible, like marketing pages, but the real stuff is locked behind employee-only auth. Other things run entirely on internal networks, and can't be accessed from the web. They would be rightly upset if they discovered I shared their code with a third party, or placed it on Github.

Moreover, just because Github exists, doesn't mean programmers should feel obligated to "participate". Outside of developers who maintain or participate in truly used projects, it's mostly noise. The only exception I can agree on is looking at issues a candidate has reported to gauge their depth of understanding, clarity of communication, offering of solutions, and other such valuable insights.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#286

Post by hanginghyena » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

scottlamb wrote: post #260

MrLeftHand wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potential Employee Perspective: they can't be serious!!! A lot of times a job spec contains a minimum of 10-15 skill you need to know. And that's just the modest one. Maybe employers should stop trying to find the non-existing 'developer rock-star' and people would stop lying. The funny thing is that even the developers themselves start to behave like that when they are on the other end of the hiring (Been there, don…

> A lot of times a job spec contains a minimum of 10-15 skill you need to know. And that's just the modest one. Most job listings I've seen don't really have that many hard requirements. They may mention technologies you'll be working with or things they'd like to see, but that shouldn't stop you from applying if you don't know them all. Take this with a grain of salt because I've never done resume filtering, but whe…

There's actually significant learning value in time spent figuring out legacy systems and linking them together. Doing ad-hoc reporting is the IT equivalent of being a short order cook.

Do it long enough, and you learn how to make almost anything from nothing.

And that should be considered an employable skill....

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#287

Post by jogjayr » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

gregmac wrote: post #144

PuffinBlue wrote: post #26

There needs to be a bit of a shift in understanding what 'category' of worker a programmer 'is', both by companies and more importantly by (some) individuals themselves. Programming is both technical and artistic. It's a creative endeavour that relies on technical skill to complete. The best analogy to another profession would be to those in the 'technical arts', those like photography, joinery, painting, sculpture,…

Except that the vast majority of programmers essentially say "I'm very good at taking pictures, but I can't actually show you any of them because they're all property of my previous employers, and I never take pictures just for myself". > I think programmers should create their portfolios of personal or paid for projects that showcase their technical and artistic skill and companies should take those seriously. 100%…

Many companies don't bother looking at things like that. Even if you have a Github account with some amount of non-trivial, original code on it, they'll put you through a "phone screen" and have you do a longest increasing subsequence/subset sum/longest palindrome substring problem for a front end position. And yeah I'm talking about Silicon Valley/SF City/YC type startups here, not BigCorp Inc.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#288

Post by manufacturious » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:40 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #131

ktRolster wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* It's a great predictor for "can this person actually program, well, at all?".* How do you know, have you hired many who had trouble with the Fizzbuzz? Or are you just guessing? (I don't know either; there's a lot of missing data in interviews)

It's genuinely surprising what people don't know. "If I roll this d6, what will the average be over time?" I've asked this to loads of supposed graduates, and apart from the odd one who made the "WTF are these monkeys hiring me for" face, a lot of people can't figure it out from first principles. But a lot of people choke on it. Also I've had people choke on very basic general knowledge like "think of a large emergin…

I suffer, on occasion, from depression and anxiety. When I'm having an episode, my brain doesn't function.

I don't mean that I can't solve problems. I mean I can't hold a conversation.

I wonder if the reason so many people fail is because we've essentially put them in an artificial situation that shuts their brain down.

(I have also been dumbfounded by the inability of recent CS graduates to do FizzBizz... I feel like it's not certain our candidates are frequently flawed. Maybe it's our environment.)

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#289

Post by jogjayr » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

PJDK wrote: post #183

skrebbel wrote: post #2

In all honesty, I'm not sure the author did a lot of interviewing. For example, > The famous fizzbuzz test simply asks "are you aware of the modulo operator?" Wait, what? No, it asks "can you write a for loop without breaking a sweat?". There's a rightfully vivid debate going on about the virtue of asking algorithmic questions in interviews, but fizzbuzz is hardly algorithmic. I'd wager that virtually all programmers…

I had a pretty interesting experience with this. We were doing a bunch of interviews and decided to try out FizzBuzz. I wasn't doing this round of interviews, but things ended up a bit confused with timings and I had a 30-40 minute very casual chat with each candidate prior to the actual interview. In each of those I ended up probing a bit on technical stuff and everyone seemed to have a decent base level of competen…

I can confirm. I went to pieces once when asked to do FizzBuzz when I wasn't expecting to code in a phone interview. I'm not a "rock star" programmer but in the absence of pressure I can knock out a FizzBuzz in < 2 minutes. And I have written real software used by real users that made money for my employers.

Re: People suck at technical interviews (2014)

#290

Post by golergka » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

bobwaycott wrote: post #256

golergka wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "never mind 5 years of claimed SQL experience at a big company" - you can easily have that without touching JOIN. Most of my experience with SQL comes from being a game designer with access to analytics database - so, not exactly a lot. But how the hell would you not touch join even a single time while working with SQL for 5 years?!

Two ways I can think of off the top of my head: 1. Total reliance on ORMs, and never actually touching SQL (or not in 5 years since you started using ORMs) 2. Not building complex relational schemas with related items that you use SQL to pull in results of combined data that follows those relationships. I'd wager #1 is the more common case.

But in #1 you're not working with SQL, you're working with a layer above it.

And wouldn't even the most basic data, properly normalized, require joins? I mean - learning about database normalization is one of the first things you're supposed to do when you work with relational databases, right?