Hiring Without Whiteboards • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#281

Post by VonGallifrey » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

usgroup wrote: post #252

It’s a funny cultural thing. Here is a caricature: Hiring managers have a real problem to solve: “how do I hire?”. They don’t have the time to conduct actual experiments and work out what actually relates to better hiring. So they trivialise the solution into some assumption about how the information captured in an interview generalises to overall suitability. They then proceed to defend the process and it’s results…

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation of the total output and the teams impressions in the probationary period ...

That might work if you have 110 people applying for 100 positions. Just hire everyone and then fire 10 people. Over hiring 10 people probably isn't that much of a problem.

However that does not work if you have 100 people applying for 5 positions. This is the situation we found ourselves in and we had to filter somehow. We chose to do a very simple code challenge which ended up being a very effective filter.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#282

Post by joaomagalhaes » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 10:58 AM UTC

We use a simple 2 step process that allows both the company and the candidate to have more certainty about the opportunity. This only applies to technical jobs.

1 - First interview. Does the candidate know about the company? Does he know anything about the business domain? Conversation about problems he has encountered in his past experiences. it works like a knowledge sharing conversation, you really get to know how well things have been thought of.

2 - Freelancing period of about 3 weeks, 20h/week - You get to know the technical skills, cultural fit, communication skills and all other aspects that you only arrive to practicing it.

So far it has worked pretty well for us - we've hired about 11 developers and refused/have been refused by 5. It's an empirical process that works for both parties.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#283

Post by estomagordo » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:00 AM UTC

Agentlien wrote: post #215

I live in Sweden and we seem to have a very different interview culture. I've never heard of whiteboards or trivia questions, here. I've only gone to four interviews (across eight years), and been lucky to get an offer each time (three of which I've accepted). They have all been primarily discussions about personal experience, hobby projects, personal interests, would-be responsibilities, benefits, and company cultur…

I saw both sides in Sweden. Including being the interviewer who discovered that senior applicants with over 15 years of experience could not for the life of them figure out how to reverse a string. Not something that I could have found out during our casual conversation about past experiences, of course.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#284

Post by estomagordo » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

C1sc0cat wrote: post #270

crsv wrote: post #38

Here we go again perpetuating the stereotype of the whiney privileged engineer put in a position of mild discomfort by the villainous abusive white board interview boogeyman. I don’t mind whiteboard interview exercises. They’re not great, but they often give a very good and reasonable signal that often has a high corollary to work performance. I think there’s bigger fish to fry in refining fair and objective intervie…

I think its writing exact code down instead of good enough pseudo code - that people hate. WB interviews should be about problem solving not regurgitation of rote learned algorithms

I strongly believe there is some signal to shoving enough familiarity with at least one language to come up with mostly correct syntax.

I won't ever fault a candidate for failing to close a paren or being unsure of whether the size of a container is .length() or .size(), but if virtually every line a candidate writes is of questionable value, I'd say that means something.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#285

Post by estomagordo » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

bit_logic wrote: post #81

Another tech interview thread. For the side that supports these types of interviews, I've never gotten a good answer to a simple question: in the year 2020, why are we expecting people to write compilable code on a whiteboard? It's just stupid at this point. Even a laptop that boots into some micro linux distro and has nothing but nano open would be better. Or just a fresh install windows laptop with nothing but note…

Yeah. From the interviewer's standpoint, there is no added benefit of having the candidate write code on a whiteboard, as opposed to a computer.

However, a whiteboard certainly can be easier to write anything that is not code on. Like for instance if the candidate chooses to walk the interviewer through a high-level approach, including a graph topology, before actually starting to code.

I know Google started letting candidates choose between laptop and whiteboard a few years back. I suspect others alos have.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#286

Post by learc83 » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

autarch wrote: post #157

nickwalton00 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had companies straight up pay me for doing a take home project as part of an interview. I think that's the ideal way as it gets rid of the potential for exploitation/excessive burden that can come from take home projects.

This can add a lot of overhead, and some candidates may have jobs that forbid them from accepting outside work. A good middle ground would be to have the company make a donation to the candidate's choice of nonprofit.

>This can add a lot of overhead, and some candidates may have jobs that forbid them from accepting outside work

How is this enforceable? Even in the case that someone finds out about it, what’s the company going to do? Sue the interviewing company for the rights to a few hours of work?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#287

Post by usgroup » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

VonGallifrey wrote: post #281

usgroup wrote: post #252

It’s a funny cultural thing. Here is a caricature: Hiring managers have a real problem to solve: “how do I hire?”. They don’t have the time to conduct actual experiments and work out what actually relates to better hiring. So they trivialise the solution into some assumption about how the information captured in an interview generalises to overall suitability. They then proceed to defend the process and it’s results…

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation of the total output and the teams impressions in the probationary period ... That might work if you have 110 people applying for 100 positions. Just hire everyone and then fire 10 people. Over hiring 10 people probably isn't that much of a problem. However that does not work if you have 100 people applying for 5 positions. This is the sit…

Sure but you’re bound to say that ... Find me a hiring manager than publicly says anything else. That’s kind of part of the point.

I roughly recall google touting ~50% hiring success rate and that’s with a 4 interviewer, 10-15 man interview process, and undoubtedly a massive false negative rejection rate.

I think some undesirable attributes are observable in fairly short screeners ; sure screen away . But I bet you that you’d do at least as well if not better by just selecting at random past that point.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#288

Post by genezeta » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:30 AM UTC

VonGallifrey wrote: post #275

genezeta wrote: post #226

One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. Unfortunately, most companies fail to honestly estimate the cost of the tasks they assign for these processes. Many of them because they just don't take into account numerous small tasks that the candidate will n…

> One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated. When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs…

Good for you; not everybody does that :)

If you don't mind me asking, how big were those tasks?

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#289

Post by gjm11 » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:36 AM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #169

We use a 3 step process, sans whiteboard: 1. First interview, the candidate interviews us. What market we serve, what our development processes are, what our technology stack is. If they express interest by being prepared and asking good questions, we send them home with 2. a programming task. Choose 1 of 5 tasks. The tasks are not abstract problems or puzzles, but come out of the designs we've implemented. We ask fo…

Something seems badly off to me with the phrase "candidates who stumped 40 year veterans with elegant code".

I don't want code that stumps anyone. I want code that delights 40-year veterans, for sure. But the signal of genuine elegance is "oh, that's a lovely way to do it" much more often than it's "how the hell does this work?".

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#290

Post by VonGallifrey » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 11:48 AM UTC

usgroup wrote: post #287

VonGallifrey wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation of the total output and the teams impressions in the probationary period ... That might work if you have 110 people applying for 100 positions. Just hire everyone and then fire 10 people. Over hiring 10 people probably isn't that much of a problem. However that does not work if you have 100 people applying for 5 positions. This is the sit…

Sure but you’re bound to say that ... Find me a hiring manager than publicly says anything else. That’s kind of part of the point. I roughly recall google touting ~50% hiring success rate and that’s with a 4 interviewer, 10-15 man interview process, and undoubtedly a massive false negative rejection rate. I think some undesirable attributes are observable in fairly short screeners ; sure screen away . But I bet you t…

The reason why I say that it was an effective filter was that the majority of people flat out FAILED the coding challenge. We only send out the coding challenge to people who where successful in the first interview and still most people failed the coding challenge.

I am very sure that a random selection, even after the first interview, would have been disastrous.

Result is that we have not fired anyone for performance reasons since we established this hiring process. Which I would say is a success.

Here is the thing: We cant just over hire like you suggested. That would just waste money and as a startup we don't have much of that to waste. Also I think it would be incredibly shitty for us to over hire just to fire people a short time later. The majority of people would have to leave jobs and/or immigrate to this country. Hiring such a person when you are not 100% sure you want to work with them is fairly immoral.