Hiring without whiteboards • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#331

Post by dmitrygr » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:27 PM UTC

kelvin0 wrote: post #318

dmitrygr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…

I also was in charge of hiring programmers at some point in my career. I made it a point to give programmers a simple project to take home and get back when they where ready (at most a week). The project was very close to what the hired candidate would be doing if we chose them. I told the candidates that they did not necessarily needed to show me a working application (although that would have been great!), but simp…

And how do you know that they did not farm it out to rentacoder.com?

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#332

Post by dmitrygr » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:30 PM UTC

strictnein wrote: post #312

dmitrygr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…

> "Turns out that the only sure way to tell if you can do X, is to make you do X and watch you yourself actually do it, in person" I don't write code on whiteboards for a living, nor am I applying for a job that will have me coding on whiteboards, so watching me do that will tell you almost nothing about the job you're actually hiring me for.

I agree it is not ideal, but the counterexamples I provided do explain why other suggested methods are too simple to fool.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#333

Post by dmitrygr » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:33 PM UTC

KamBha wrote: post #317

dmitrygr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate: How else will you prove that YOU shipped those things over that period? * Github account? Ha, my code is on github in many places, mostly without attribution, none of them uploaded by me. * Recommendations? Ha. Unless the person recommending you already works at the company, their trustworthiness is zero - they could be a paid accomplice. * Resume? Unless you were the sole employee, there is no way…

"Tell me about that one time you solved an interesting problem?" I agree if that was the only thing you asked, you wouldn't get a good answer. However, if you then dug into their answer you can probably tell if it is BS or not. I remember having this exact experience with a junior dev who claimed to worked on some interesting projects at Uni, but when you dug deeper, you realised he knew very little about the technol…

Worked with a guy once who was a pro at this. Every day he did nothing, but when higher ups asked the team what was done and how, he managed to take credit and explain how things worked well enough to convince them that he had done it all. The rest of the team was not amused. Just listening in on a team (while adding nothing to the code or discussion) might be enough to go into great depth in such a discussion.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#334

Post by lovich » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:39 PM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #272

lovich wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last paragraph here implies that a developers work is either A) able to be shared and not owned by their employer, or B) they spend their free time coding after doing it at work all day, instead of having other hobbies. If thats the bar an employer wants to set, thats perfectly reasonable. They shouldn't ever complain about not being able to find employees however, if they are going to artificially limit their p…

Two things. . . 1 - I've been active in sports my whole life. I work 40 hours a week, play in several competitive hockey leagues and still have time to tinker and build stuff in my own time. I'm also studying to get my commercial drone license, and have a host of other hobbies that keep me busy outside of coding. 2 - The only way I feel like a developer can possibly stay in tune with how fast our industry is changing…

I say this from the position of someone who has side projects on their own.

The general feeling that an engineer can't be any good without working unpaid outside of their job seems like a self inflicted and unnecessary cultural norm we've adopted as an industry. I can't think of any other industry where someone who goes home and doesn't practice their craft after hours is looked down upon as much as it is in software.

I don't have the label for it. It's similar to how employers want to hire developers for junior pay but don't want to provide any training and expect them to have taught themselves on various tools while lamenting the lack of skilled developers. Someone else in this thread mentioned the view of software engineers being viewed as artists who have to have a burning passion for their craft and I think that's bullshit.

Yea there are always guys who actually have that passion and enjoy programming as a hobby, but they are the minority like any other profession. It's become some sort of virtue signaling. I've talked to a number of devs who go through the effort of having publicly available work to show off who have confided to me that they do it just so that prospective employers feel that they are passionate

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#335

Post by kelvin0 » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:50 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #331

kelvin0 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also was in charge of hiring programmers at some point in my career. I made it a point to give programmers a simple project to take home and get back when they where ready (at most a week). The project was very close to what the hired candidate would be doing if we chose them. I told the candidates that they did not necessarily needed to show me a working application (although that would have been great!), but simp…

And how do you know that they did not farm it out to rentacoder.com?

Remember, I did not ask for an implementation. Only a document with their thought process on implementing it. Also, they can use whatever means they like, if we hire them we will quickly find out if they are incompetent. No interview system is fool proof, of course.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#336

Post by dmitrygr » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:54 PM UTC

kelvin0 wrote: post #335

dmitrygr wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you know that they did not farm it out to rentacoder.com?

Remember, I did not ask for an implementation. Only a document with their thought process on implementing it. Also, they can use whatever means they like, if we hire them we will quickly find out if they are incompetent. No interview system is fool proof, of course.

How fast could you then fire them? How much money wasted on that and onboarding? Compared to the risk of missing out on that one person who cannot whiteboard but is otherwise brilliant? Quite a gamble.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#337

Post by george_ciobanu » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 8:59 PM UTC

NTDF9 wrote: post #327

george_ciobanu wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but in no way do I represent my employer's views. These are all my personal opinions. I interned successfully at FB, Microsoft and Google as a SWE in 2008-2010 and interviewed with a lot of other tech companies (not always but often successfully). Like you, I tend to freeze up in a whiteboard situation, and have most of my life, going back to college and prior (I studied in Romania where…

>> Am I missing any other ways to assess candidates? Yes. You are completely glossing over the fact that the candidate might be bringing something special to the table. You have literally not left any room for the candidate to showcase what they've learned (again, not minutia of algorithms but something completely different..like the candidate could be a specialist in how compilers do register allocation) How about t…

Of course computer architecture, compiler knowledge etc is valuable and part of the interview process. I was referring to the general process of evaluating- - thus the question was focused on methods not content.

Additionally, explaining how a system works is valuable, and I captured it when mentioned communication abilities.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#338

Post by AgentIcarus » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:04 PM UTC

cmollis wrote: post #103

jonasvp wrote: post #25

I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done. That said, I'm always surprised how many candidat…

So true.. and this is a great interviewing technique. I basically ask one question during an interview: what was the hardest problem you ever had to solve? It may sound stupid at first glance, but it gives you insight into not only the breadth of their technical knowledge (since that problem may not be germane to the position you're hiring for), but also the depth of their abilities. The way they answer this question…

I'm not a huge fan of this question. I've been programming for 20 years (professionally for 13). Is the hardest problem some noddy maths i worked out at 15 to convert real coordinates to screen coordinates? Is it the first app i wrote out of college when i learned that servlets aren't thread safe? Is it what i worked on last year to design my current company's authentication/authorization system?

I find it very hard to interpolate between these examples. And none of them are "hard"! I haven't written an OS or a more efficient linked list. All I've done is plugged away at something until it works.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#339

Post by speby » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:06 PM UTC

udev wrote: post #284

kelvin0 wrote: post #269

Imagine this. You are interviewing for a job, you walk in a room with 2 people who hand you over a sheet with a few problems. They ask you to write the solutions on the whiteboard, while they wait for you to complete. Not a word is said, they are clicking at their laptops, and staring at the whiteboard, as waiting for the genie to pop out of a bottle. All the while your mind is frozen and stuck in a bad loop. This la…

It is also a cultural thing. I observe that anglo-saxon peoples teach their kids to voice their concerns, needs, wants, and opinions, and to expect (!) results from this. (Compare how american kids behave at airports, train station, and public places with kids from other countries, e.g. french speaking countries). This helps them approach situations in life with a healthy dose of self-worth and the baseline state of…

Have you ever really asked them what their line of thinking is? You are like to get many different answers.

I sought help from my professors and teaching assistants in college not because I felt it "wasn't my fault" or even that "it is his job to teach me" or that "I pay for tuition after all" but rather my thinking was, quite simply, "I need to learn this and I'm finding challenges with the current approach I am taking... maybe there is another way" where "another way" just so happens to include pursuing some direct face-to-face help from someone else. The line of thinking was outcome-oriented (I need to learn this/accomplish X) and I'd do whatever it took to make that happen.

Re: Hiring without whiteboards

#340

Post by tchaffee » Wed, Mar 15, 2017, 9:13 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #240

toast0 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental part of the job being reading your mind? For every interviewer who asks how to find if a number is in both arrays and is expecting a detailed discussion of he to do a nicer job by not actually having arrays, there's another interviewer who just wanted to see if the candidate can write two loops, leave the loops early when the value is found, and not run the second loop if the first one doesn't have th…

The fundamental part of the job being reading your mind? The fundamental part of the job being that writing code without having a good understanding of the problem is a waste of time and often leads to throwing things away. If an interviewer was annoyed that I asked for more information about a problem before writing any code I'd take that as a sign I wouldn't really fit in at the company. I was a cofounder at a star…

> This might go some way to explain my attitude about this

Yep. You're giving bad interviews because you're expecting someone to have the same previous recent bad experiences as you. I would never ask about the context of the problem you gave because it is so obviously just a quick coding test. You want questions about the requirements, you need to ask a question that feels like a real world problem.