Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#301

Post by pklausler » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

In this case, I think an argument can be made that hiring worked for the firms involved.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#302

Post by vonmoltke » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #265

swayvil wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing a lot of "reaching out" in this thread. Is this a new thing, like "passion"?

Almost anyone in any company can go to HR and say, "This person is great, we should interview them for position X" and they will go to the top of the pile. If you reach out to someone you know at a company, if they like you, and you are good, usually you can get an interview there. Contacts are also good at helping you find unposted jobs. You have to "Reach out" first. Contacts can also recommend you to a hiring mana…

> Almost anyone in any company can go to HR and say, "This person is great, we should interview them for position X" and they will go to the top of the pile. If you reach out to someone you know at a company, if they like you, and you are good, usually you can get an interview there.

I see you have never worked in the defense industry before.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#303

Post by quantum_nerd » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:32 PM UTC

reitoei wrote: post #231

aetherson wrote: post #216

I feel like it's a little weird that one of the author's big examples of a difficult algorithmic question is breadth-first search. While I agree it's not something that's very likely to come up much in real work (especially for a front-end dev!), it's also... not actually hard? You check the current node for your truth condition, you add its children to a queue, you pop the queue and do the same thing for that node.…

Everything is easy when you know how to do it.

very true...

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#304

Post by ig1 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

One of the fundamental principles that's coming out of a century of hiring research is you have to evaluate candidates on the same basis - any other approach is an invitation to bias and subjective decisions.

If you evaluate two similar candidates, candidate A on their github and candidate B on their performance on Hackerrank then it's incredibly hard to fairly compare those two candidates without adding subjective bias.

In practice what happens is the company goes "oh well the person with a github clearly has more initiative". But is initiative part of your evaluation process ? - have you ensured you've fairly allowed all candidates to demonstrate it, or have you ended up evaluating candidates unfairly on totally different metrics.

If you're hiring you can vastly improve your hiring process by doing two things: (1) Adopting a standardized structured interview where questions map directly to your needs and (2) using a work sample test (getting candidates to do a small piece of work that resembles real-world work as closely as possible).

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#305

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:33 PM UTC

theli0nheart wrote: post #270

akavi wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We recognized her skill and experience and cut to the chase So, to clarify, you're advocating that programmers be hired based on resume, references, and a conversation about prior projects? I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems you'd be selecting for ability to present yourself as a good programmer over actually being a good programmer. What is your objection to attempting to verify someone's programming skill d…

> But I really would hesitate to work at a place that just took people's word on their programming ability. This is how I've hired for every open position in my company. You'd be amazed how easy it is to weed people out based on a conversation. It's very rare that someone can talk the talk without actually knowing what they're doing. There are too many obscure concepts and it gets clear really quickly if someone is b…

…and even if you get a bad apple it is simple enough to let them go in a week or two. If you are really hiring, your recruiting process should be running continuously so the loss is not fatal.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#306

Post by koyote » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #216

I feel like it's a little weird that one of the author's big examples of a difficult algorithmic question is breadth-first search. While I agree it's not something that's very likely to come up much in real work (especially for a front-end dev!), it's also... not actually hard? You check the current node for your truth condition, you add its children to a queue, you pop the queue and do the same thing for that node.…

I think that's what he meant by "[...] if I had looked at Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm and breadth-first search one day before my interview, this would have been a trivial problem to solve [...].".

Sure, BFS is 'easy' but it's not really something that stays fresh in your memory after years of not having to use it.

I completely agree with his point that it if you have to study for an interview, the process is broken.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#307

Post by phaemon » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

tronje wrote: post #176

tachion wrote: post #170

After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…

I agree with you. The author's inability to write a breadth-first-search under stress, for example, very much highlights this, in my opinion. I sort-of agree that these specific tasks shouldn't be used as an indicator of programming skills, but a breadth-first-search is really quite simple. It's mode of operation is in the name, and even if you haven't implemented one in a while, you should be able to derive some val…

Yeah, it would be like, say, a python developer not knowing how interpreted languages worked. Or how a shebang worked. To the extent of thinking it was impossible to use an interpreted language for `init`.

Something like that, right?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#308

Post by ktRolster » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

liquidise wrote: post #233

I recently wrote a post on designing better tech interview questions. [1] But one thing i never see interviewees do is outright ask, "Wait, what does this question actually tell you about me?" I find myself asking it in nearly every interview i go to. If you ask and your interviewer gets glassy-eyed or gives you the laughably generic "it shows how well you think algorithmically" you know that you are being interviewe…

I like your post, and I was going to comment on it, but the login process is rather onerous. So.....

The first thing that jumped out was that you are trying to fit programmers into a bell curve, when they're really distributed by the power law, see: http://blog.benroux.me/4-steps-to-making-your-interview-suck... That was kind of a side piece to your blog, though.

Secondly I wanted to give you some ideas I've had on a similar topic, just to throw them out there:

Apple has a three-step interview process that I found interesting. First they ask a question about a language (your choice in language) to see that you know at least one language well. Then they ask a question about an algorithm, then they ask a design question (how would you design a chess game? What classes would you use?)

Another thing I've found is that programming skill is the low bar. It's important, but what you really want in a candidate is someone who can self-manage, who knows how to get things done. Can I assign this person a task, and they will be able to finish it on time (or let me know as soon as they realize it will be late)?

So in an interview, I ask questions to figure out if the person can get the computer to do what he wants. Then I try to figure out if he's a good self-manager. Unfortunately I haven't figured out a way to determine that in an interview, but I'm still working on it :)

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#309

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

reitoei wrote: post #230

bpchaps wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If interviews weren't scheduled at the drop of a hat and employers actually took the time to decide whether to bring someone in for an onsite interview, then this wouldn't be a problem as big as it is. Fact is, when someone needs to take a day off of work, or to do schedule gymnastics for every one of their interviews of course your attitude's going to get screwed up in the process. It's exhausting, often humiliating…

Flew to Ireland from the UK for a interview (at my own expense). Did a decent interview, never got a call/email back. People can be assholes.

Definitely should have used phone/skype/gtm for the first few interviews, until they proved their interest.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#310

Post by phn » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #284

phn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plumber, sure. What about the guys who design your water heater? Should they just google the thermodynamics as they go as well? My point being, it depends on the role, and the expectations you have for the future of a candidate in your company. Are you hiring a guy to bugfix or implement a couple of features on your web app? Or a guy to design and implement from scratch a app that should have some hope of scaling i…

>A plumber, sure. What about the guys who design your water heater? Should they just google the thermodynamics as they go as well? Honestly, regularly referring to the reference material as you need it rather than trying to remember or derive every single pressure equation off the top of your head sounds like a good idea when designing a potentially explosive boiler.

I agree, I'm simply arguing the fundamentals must be somewhat present in your head in order for your research to be productive.

Shifting to CS, how do you even know a specific algorithm/data structure might help with your problem if you don't have a rough idea of its specifics?

It's easy to dismiss an example case as solving a maze, because that's been done to infinity. But real-world problems are rarely so cleanly defined.