Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

That sounds nicer than what 95% of programming interviewers actually do, which is something rather different.

Almost all are simply playing "programming trivia." They name an algorithm or a data structure, and then evaluate whether you can recite it from memory. That's it. There is no problem-solving element involved. It is purely a test of whether you can memorize and recite.

This requires a lot less effort on the part of the interviewer than the style you describe, and also bolsters their ego and makes them feel clever when they find a candidate who can't recite properly.

You have to be very careful with that attitude.

When I interview candidates, I state up-front that I care less about the solutions than the steps taken to reach one. It's okay to ask for help or hints when confronted with a previously unfamiliar problem. But if I need to provide too much help, teach the use of basic tools (whether they are logical patterns or universal utilities), and even then getting to A solution requires excessive hand-holding, I will hold that against you.

Also, I will happily invert a question if needed. Showing one way to solve a given problem, I would expect a qualified candidate to be able to point out where it could be done differently.

>> Also your flippant, dismissive attitude on quite important CS concepts wouldn't take you far.

Please try to avoid this. We can discuss without resorting to attacks.

>> "There's no point in testing for X or Y because ... e.g. we won't need X or Y to perform the job we are being tested for"

That's what most people are arguing for I think, so I agree with you there.

>> not being able to recognize what BFS even stands for in the first place is enough to raise a red flag anywhere.

By doing this you are throwing away developers that have made their respective companies millions in revenue. It's not hypothetical. One day, a non-CS trained developer will come across a tree and use it. And then they'll learn.

This is funny... Facebook and Google obviously have been around for a while, but before a year or two ago, I had never even heard of Vimeo. Now they're a "super fancy" company? I guess I haven't been paying attention.

Yeah, it's broken.

Google studied their own interview process, according to Lazlo Bock, examining tens of thousands of hiring decisions. The study concluded that their process was no better than random chance at finding good candidates. They continue with that process nevertheless.

I have a rich network of Silicon Valley connections, built over 29 years of working for Valley companies. What I hear time and again is that many highly-qualified and productive people have a terrible time finding work.

Simultaneously, Silicon Valley companies testify before congress and complain to the press that there is a serious shortage of technical hires.

If companies can't find enough good candidates, and good candidates can't find enough offers, and one of the most prosperous companies in technology, with the most famously rigorous hiring process in the industry says that their own process is bullshit, then yeah, I'd say that hiring is broken.

Of course, if you happen to be prospering, then it doesn't look broken to you. You're prospering, after all.

And of course, if some joker comes along and says that the process that hired you is broken and gives results no better than random chance, of course you aren't likely to agree. After all, if it was luck that gave you your prosperity, then luck could just as easily take it away again.

The story we like to tell is that the technical interview screens out bad candidates. It's just a story, though. Google's research says it doesn't.

Is that such a big surprise, though? How many times in my three decades in software has a product launch depended on someone being able to solve a brain teaser in front of a critical stranger? Zero. How many times has a company's success depended on someone writing the right code on a whiteboard? Zero. How many times has the bottom line depended on someone coming up with the right algorithm or data structure off the top of their head in a conversation? Zero.

Technical interviews, if they measure anything at all, measure things that don't have much to do with technical jobs. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that they don't do better than chance at predicting someone's performance.

If technical interviews don't work, why do we still use them? Why does Google still use a hiring process that its own research says is bullshit?

Maybe it's because we don't have anything better.

I think it's because on some level we realize that we don't actually know how to distinguish good candidates from bad ones, but we don't want to admit it to ourselves. We want to think that we can pick the right candidate, because it can be so costly if we don't.

So we ritualize the process. We rely on a bullshit hazing ritual. We wave a dead chicken over it and tell ourselves that we are screening out bad candidates and hiring only the best.

Only we're not. If we were, then maybe companies would still have a hard time finding enough candidates, or maybe good candidates would still have a hard time finding jobs, but not both at the same time. And the company with the most 'rigorous' hiring process in the industry wouldn't be concluding that their own process is nonsense.

Yeah. It's broken.