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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#31

Post by SoftTalker »

randomdev123 wrote: post #24

I think interview is part of tech life where I feel very, very bitter at. Warning, sad boi rant ahead. I was from a programming bootcamp. I entered the tech because I was the only person in my bigger family members who have the skills/education/chance to earn a big salary. I still remember, I paid $12k back then, and it was me and my mom's only savings. I started tech in my 30s, and mostly worked physical labor work…

Honestly, it was probably just your age. Being in your 30s, an entry-level coding job at Google or other big tech company just isn't going to happen. Those companies all have a lot of ageism especially in the coding ranks.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#32

Post by akurilin »

> Another reason is that on the supply side, nobody wants to sign up to do a bunch of free work just to be rejected. If you just put up work, the candidates incur all the risk, meaning they walk away with nothing if you don’t hire them.

It's true, but prepping for a typical senior+ onsite loop in big tech still requires weeks of grinding leetcode, re-learning the latest system interview questions and the system interview answer framework, refreshing and rehearsing STAR stories, studying the company and its unique quirks that you're expected to know to pass the culture filter, remembering how to do all of this speedrun-style since you only get 40ish minutes per session, etc.

While that knowledge is more reusable across onsites, it's likely even more work than doing real or pretend-work for the company for a couple of days.

> When candidates get to walk away with something of lasting value that they can keep forever

I'm curious why them getting rejected from the position, even with the work sample they can carry away with them, wouldn't be still interpreted as a negative from future employers. "The other co passed on them, am I the fool for thinking they're good?" type of herd mentality which is often unavoidable.

Won't that "work sample guest book" be treated as the list of all companies that rejected you, a net negative for your personal brand you're projecting?

> (Me paraphrasing what Steve was implying) Take-homes are impacted by AI one-shotting them for candidates

I've been pleasantly surprised by how much you can glean from having the candidate upload their conversation log with the coding agent for whatever take-home you give them.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#33

Post by analog31 »

The paradox that strikes me is that "hiring is broken" yet these companies are beyond successful. So there's still yet another layer of something in between observing that employees are capable / incapable, and the company successful / unsuccessful.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#34

Post by littlexsparkee »

tptacek wrote: post #23
enraged_camel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room. The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

I feel like you could get around the AI bit by asking about components and what they do, rationale for decisions, etc. If someone can't speak to it, it should be a clear tell.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#35

Post by enraged_camel »

tptacek wrote: post #23
enraged_camel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room. The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

>> A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.

Yes, standard interview loops also discriminate, and the more time they take, the more discriminatory they are. Any on-site requirements compound the issues.

Like Yegge says: provisional employment/internships solve all of these issues. You get the best of all worlds: stable employment for the candidate where they get paid a regular wage and aren't under a stressful interview setting, and lots and lots of work samples for you, the employer. It's not perfect. For example, it can be difficult to entrust the provisional employee/intern with anything impactful if you don't know whether they'll be employed at the end. But it is significantly better than the alternatives in most contexts.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#36

Post by tptacek »

enraged_camel wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room. The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

>> A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room. Yes, standard interview loops also discriminate, and the more time they take, the more discriminatory the…

Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm. I concede that provisional hires are higher-signal than work sample testing (or rather: that they're the platonic ideal of work sample testing), but the entire problem of hiring qualification is to make decisions in the context of a candidate doing a job search.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#37

Post by tptacek »

littlexsparkee wrote: post #34
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room. The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

I feel like you could get around the AI bit by asking about components and what they do, rationale for decisions, etc. If someone can't speak to it, it should be a clear tell.

We hire entirely based on work sample testing, and there's a lot of stuff you can do to make it work in with AI-equipped candidates; I'm not prepared to write it up at the moment, but you start by recognizing that everybody is going to be using AI and designing the tests accordingly, and by relying on unassisted interactive challenges as a component of the process.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#38

Post by akurilin »

martythemaniak wrote: post #9

The most talent dense place I've worked had a dead simple process - two one hour chats, one with your potential manager/team and one with the CTO or CEO. If things didn't work out, well you got sent away, probably happened twice per month. There was a particular meeting the CTO/CEO used and if you saw someone meeting with them there on a Friday afternoon, you would not see that person on Monday. The place was not big…

Curious what those two hours would entail!

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#40

Post by zeafoamrun »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #39

I don't understand how a failing stamp for a campfire is good for the interviewee. It signals that they weren't good enough to get hired. Why would they want to parade that around?

I had the same thought. "I didn't get hired at X! I didn't get hired at Y!" It's like how people write ex-Google, ex-Amazon in their headlines but worse: failed-OpenAI, couldn't-get-in-to-Anthropic. Let's all get around the campfire and sing kumbaya
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