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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#61

Post by LtWorf »

kudokatz wrote: post #20
nitwit005 wrote: post #7

I gave the feedback at one Google interview that they should send Google employees through to see how many get hired. Good to see they basically tried that. The conclusion at the end that bringing someone on board is the ideal method is true I'm sure, but even that runs into the issue that employee evaluation is an even worse situation than the interview process. You can openly see some managers panic when they reali…

2 anecdotes ... 1) The worst interview I ever had (BY FAR) was at Google--disrespectful people, no respect for time, I could go on and on. And I went back to try again to get that money showered on me. Worth it in the long run. 2) Their new system for "performance management" is a hoax. Just like at all other places, it "documents" what you should do so they can fire you more easily with unspoken rules and all sorts…

Oh I've had a terrible interview at Google too!

They told me it was all about pseudocode and how I think in advance, then on the actual interview they were being annoying about variable names and spaces after comma, while I was supposed to come up with some clever optimisation that boiled down to: "do you know this obscure theorem already? Cool you pass"

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#62

Post by shoopadoop »

chihuahua wrote: post #58

The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…

It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#63

Post by bg24 »

Very well thought and written. Provisional employee or intern. Or having the candidate to come and do real work for a couple of days. The challenge imo is the big company culture vs startups. Do the things move at the pace in big companies where the teams have the ability to evaluate? Startups are a different beast however.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#64

Post by socratic_weeb »

The industry should get down from its egocentric ivory tower and start hiring like other industries. You are not special, tech. Just have a sort of bar exam you have to take every x amount of years. The actual interview should just be an in-person behavioral one, with your future boss. Period. Don't get enough signal from that? Sorry, that's life, taking risks. Imagine trying to open a business without taking risks, and only kickstart it once you are a 100% sure it will work. No other industry is as delusional. Here is a reality pill: what you are asking, a 100% safe investment, is impossible, as any economist will tell you. "Campfire", give me a break, grown up adults with families don't have time for that Silicon Valley wankery, and you have no evidence that the results will be as good and unbiased as you think they'll be...thanks for bringing attention to the subject though, and in passsing also confirming how garbage the Google (and FAANG, in general) hiring process really is.

Just one more thing: the industry should really put a bit more weight on measuring people's potential and the concept of long-term growing and learning on the job. Just saying. You know, like every other industry on this planet.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#65

Post by laserlight »

bitwize wrote: post #29
roxolotl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an old Malcom Gladwell podcast episode, I think the show was Revisionist History, where he says he’s an interview nihilist. As long as the person seems reasonably capable, and can probably do a bit of what you need, hire them. Interviews are so hard to get right that what you’re saying ends up being most effective. Edit: Didn’t link it initially because I thought it would be hard to find. Turns out it’s not.…

Unfortunately from an organizational perspective, a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice, that making no hire the default unless they're a perfect cinnamon roll of a fit, is actually a good strategy.

> a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice

The fact that an organization cannot deal with such a case is a bigger problem in the first place. Eliminating incompetence and malice is among the basic skills of an organization.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#66

Post by LPisGood »

LtWorf wrote: post #61
kudokatz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 anecdotes ... 1) The worst interview I ever had (BY FAR) was at Google--disrespectful people, no respect for time, I could go on and on. And I went back to try again to get that money showered on me. Worth it in the long run. 2) Their new system for "performance management" is a hoax. Just like at all other places, it "documents" what you should do so they can fire you more easily with unspoken rules and all sorts…

Oh I've had a terrible interview at Google too! They told me it was all about pseudocode and how I think in advance, then on the actual interview they were being annoying about variable names and spaces after comma, while I was supposed to come up with some clever optimisation that boiled down to: "do you know this obscure theorem already? Cool you pass"

Which theorem?

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#68

Post by jaggederest »

tptacek wrote: post #51
dpark wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

We don't ask or check how long candidates take. You're a professional, we give you a challenge, you can decide (up front, 30 minutes in, whatever) whether you're likely to be able to finish in the budgeted time. Maybe you can't because you've got a lunch date and don't have the contiguous block, and want to do it in chunks. Fine by us. Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the…

Just anecdotally, I can confirm that this method works great - it screened me out by showing me exactly what day to day work was like at your company, and that I was not nearly nerdy enough about specifically containerization to want to do it all day.

So you saved yourself/the team several possible hours of interviewing, and me quite a few hours - I think it took me about 10 to 15 minutes to see what you wanted in an engineer and that I was not it, and a total of 1 email which felt quite automated (whether it was or not) so there was a very low social cost as well.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#69

Post by choppaface »

commandersaki wrote: post #67

Everyone is annoyed when Google or whatever has a gruelling high bar to get in, but nobody bats a lid when say Jane Street does it. Both wildly successful.

Because Jane Street is unabashed about greed, and yet they do not let that greed lead them into attempting to pollute and derive us of our attention every day.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#70

Post by throwburn202605 »

tptacek wrote: post #23
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…

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. The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.

The question is whether companies would tolerate their own process if their employees did that recruiting process at a different company. They obviously do to some extent via plausible deniability; I have a 1 hour "doctors" appointment this afternoon, or I'm taking leave on Monday. Using it as cover to attend an interview.

Would this company permit an employee taking 3 months unpaid leave to provisional hire somewhere else and have free choice whether they stay or go at the end of it.

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