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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#41

Post by zeafoamrun »

akurilin wrote: post #32

> 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 inter…

I was going to scoff at the amount of interview prep you said is required but then I remembered I read the book written by the founders of my current company before the interview.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#42

Post by dpark »

enraged_camel wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #13

The gold standard in hiring qualification is work-sample testing. It works fine. You do not need to "make hiring a profit center" or "provisionally hire" or do internships. Work samples done correctly demand less time from candidates than interviews and scale better than interviews. They are standardizable and iterable. What I feel like I'm reading here is someone who has been poisoned by FAANG hiring practices --- a…

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…

I think a very real problem is that these take home problems are often way more than 4 hours. And to that they often add the traditional 4-6 hour interview loop.

Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the potential employment pool are not willing to quit their current job to accept a “maybe” job from another company.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#43

Post by tptacek »

dpark wrote: post #42
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…

I think a very real problem is that these take home problems are often way more than 4 hours. And to that they often add the traditional 4-6 hour interview loop. Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the pote…

Adding take-home problems to a traditional 4-6 hour interview loop is odious.

But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring qualification.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#44

Post by enraged_camel »

tptacek wrote: post #36
enraged_camel wrote: post #35

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. 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 .

>> Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm.

It works. I’ve seen it in two different places.

At the second one, the fundamental realization I came to was that it is virtually no different than “regular” employment, where the new employee can get fired for not meeting expectations within an arbitrary time period after being hired. This can be months, or even weeks. From the perspective of the candidate, regular employment and provisional employment have roughly the same level of risk: in both cases they take a job where they might be let go at some point. The benefit of provisional employment is that they know how long they will be evaluated for and against whom. It turns out a lot of candidates do in fact like the all-cards-on-the-table approach and enjoy being given the opportunity to prove themselves on the job.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#46

Post by tptacek »

enraged_camel wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

>> Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm. It works. I’ve seen it in two different places. At the second one, the fundamental realization I came to was that it is virtually no different than “regular” employment, where the new employee can get fired for not meeting expectations within an arbitrary time period afte…

Everything will "work" in the sense of you'll eventually get somebody in the job. To me, it's self-evident that a process that disqualifies everybody unwilling to work for weeks speculatively isn't actually working, at a minimum because it DQs most (probably all) competitive candidates. But yes, your mileage may vary.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#48

Post by dpark »

tptacek wrote: post #43
dpark wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a very real problem is that these take home problems are often way more than 4 hours. And to that they often add the traditional 4-6 hour interview loop. Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the pote…

Adding take-home problems to a traditional 4-6 hour interview loop is odious. But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring q…

This is theoretically true but it’s also rife with misaligned priorities. The people putting together these take home assignments have little incentive to ensure that they can be completed by a competent engineer in the allotted time. The engineers completing these assignments are definitely incentivized to underreport how long they spent on the assignment.

With AI coding this is also largely useless. These “build this thing in 4 hours” assignments come with a literal prepared prompt so that they can be churned out in 10 minutes.

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