We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview • Hacker News Board

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#61

Post by rsweeney21 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

ronilan wrote: post #49

rsweeney21 wrote: post #32

Post author here: My new company helps companies fill contract software positions. We're a lot like a recruiting or staffing agency, but trying to do it in a new, less spammy way. It's been REALLY frustrating working with hiring managers. I used to be one of these frustrating hiring managers so I guess I had it coming. I had a hiring manager tell me that he can tell in the first 15 min of an interview if someone is a…

I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but... Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag. And... I’m none of those. So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though... I think you got t…

Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers.

Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#62

Post by sanderjd » Thu, May 02, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #33

ignoramous wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview pr…

And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit. The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some fal…

If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#63

Post by bdcravens » Thu, May 02, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

The underlying assumption is that Daniel would have been a great fit. Can this be assumed? Even as a good engineer, his claim to fame is founding the Prime Air team. Would there have been a "What started as an idea over coffee with Gur..." moment at Netflix? Would he have just become a random developer instead? Worth nothing that Daniel actually went from Microsoft to Amazon after not being hired at Netflix, so perhaps he would have similarly churned at Netflix.

This really isn't your typical "but whiteboard interviews suck!" situation. (not to say that they don't ....)

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#64

Post by BinaryIdiot » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

MikeTaylor wrote: post #2

Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these. And interv…

> You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company.

> But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success.

These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse.

The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#65

Post by arethuza » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

skookumchuck wrote: post #51

walshemj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to an interview in the UK (fancy add/marketing agency) and they (the interviewer) had such a dirty messed up t shirt on, that I would not wear to dig the garden.

Interviewing goes both ways. The company is interviewing the candidate, and the candidate is interviewing the company.

There is an asymmetry in the reaction though - being turned down by a company is regarded as just something that happens, turning down a company once you've had an offer seems to cause genuine shock.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#66

Post by thtthings » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

It's more accurate to say that the current format of asking algorithm questions is not the best way to judge programmers ability. All it tests is how much has the programmer memorized for the interview and not really how he codes in the real world.

But i dont see this changing as most interviewers have been through the system and are likely average programmers themselves.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#67

Post by 0x445442 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

One of the biggest issues is the industry as a whole operates on a completely different hubris level. I don't think any of my professional references has ever been contacted with the purposes of gaining significant insight into my prior accomplishments or to get information about what it was like to work with me. Nope, all we need is some fancy data structure and algorithm knowledge and a white board to find that great candidate.

And those that do care about past accomplishments seem to be more interested in public Github repos.

However, it's my guess there's some sort of inflection point because I doubt Pike or van Rossum did any white board problems when they were hired at Google. My guess is their interviews were much closer to the way the rest of the world, the world outside software development, conducts interviews.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#68

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #61

ronilan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but... Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag. And... I’m none of those. So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though... I think you got t…

Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers. Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

But someone hiring doesn't need you to use "has worked at a FAANG or similar" as a filtering mechanism, so that's not the value you can provide. Perhaps they'd have trouble finding someone who "has worked at a FAANG or similar" for a contract job without you, and that's it.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#69

Post by pytester » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #52

larrik wrote: post #3

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.

If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution. Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to bori…

>Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint.

In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly.

>It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental,

Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess).

>Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge

It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.

Re: We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

#70

Post by henryfjordan » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #61

ronilan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but... Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag. And... I’m none of those. So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though... I think you got t…

Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers. Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

What problem did you attempt to solve? You are essentially offloading the vetting problem to all the companies who's former employees you work with. The only value I can see that you create is in liquidity in the market.

Sure, there's some benefit to solving market inefficiencies and making some money along the way, but don't pretend for a second that this isn't just another recruiting firm using pedigree as a proxy for actual skills.