Limitations and pitfalls of the job interview

How so? The door was already open if the company decided to give you a test.

My impression is that coding tests either offer neutral or negative feedback during an interview. It's not like a candidate can manipulate linked lists in a way that shows particular brilliance.

I think there are ways for both of those things to be happening simultaneously. (Well, sort of- employers claim a talent shortage, but really it's a shortage of talent at prices they wish to pay.) The fundamental problems are that it's not possible to measure a broad swath of candidates' abilities, and that hiring an engineer is very expensive.

I interview people all the time who have job in "top" companies, who then proceed to do a pretty poorly in the interview. Now that could be the interview's fault, or my fault, bad luck/nerves, or at the very least you can say the interview may not provide an accurate depiction of the candidate's abilities. And I am sympathetic to that, I've been on the other side of that and I know what that's like. But the two fundamental problems remain.

> They are in no way the most effective means of deciding who to hire because they maximize the role of bias and minimize the role of evaluating competency.

I can believe that badly planned and executed job interviews do the above but I've overseen or been directly involved in the interviewing of hundreds of candidates over the years, for dozens of roles, and the hit rate has been pretty good. Two probation failures, and that's about it.

We're looking to assess skill and character in our interview process. We are interested in whether you can do the job, and whether you're a reasonable human being, and that's it. We have strong structures and guidelines in place in terms of questions, answers, and evaluation. And inasmuch as it's possible we strive to make our hiring process a pleasant experience, regardless of whether a candidate is successful or not (obviously there's some level of stress inherent in going through a selection process). We also give feedback that we hope will help unsuccessful candidates in future (I realise this is unusual and even frowned upon in some circles but our experience has been that most people appreciate it enough that it's worthwhile to deal with the headaches caused by the odd person who wants to argue about it).

I get it. There's a cohort of people on HN who don't like job interviews. Honestly, I'm one of them. But done well, they work well.

Our process isn't perfect, and we're always looking for ways to improve it - there was quite a lot of tweaking early on, for sure - but for us it's worked well. We've spent a lot of time on it because - although my role is as a CTO in a mid-sized firm, and this might not fit with everybody's expectations of that role - literally my most important job has been and continues to be hiring, building, and maintaining a strong, effective team.

And I am very happy with the people we've hired. Just as important, I'm also happy with the decisions we've made about people we've chosen not to hire.

1) We still have a pretty intense interview process. We largely aren't taking people from code camps, but people with programming experience in university but who may have not been CS majors.

2) To work, it is necessarily VERY labor intensive. I ask teams taking on of our early "apprentices" to expect to have a senior level person spend at least an hour a day with them for at least a month, and multiple hours a week for a year.

3) You need to have long timelines- On-boarding is hard with well trained with lots of experience. In my experience, "apprentices" often take 6 months plus to be value adding. For a project that will be over in 8 months, this can be hard to swallow. The program and adoption has to be driven at a strategic level.

4) The benefits of the apprenticeship program often do not accrue to the group doing the investment. If it takes 6 months to get someone to the point where there are adding value on average and then another 6 months to the point where they are more than covering their salary and cost, then they are a year into the position. We see a lot of our people choosing to transition at around 18 - 24 months in role. We just sunk a ton of time into people to get them competent, but the benefits of that training are going to another group or company and would have been better off hiring no one.

5) Despite all the above, many of the best people in my org have come through the program. Beyond just being good at their jobs, they bring a diversity of background and experience that really adds our ability to execute on problems.

I'm a big supporter of apprenticeship type programs and think they pay off in the end, but as I've described there are a lot of failure points along the way.