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Interviews are Broken

erniemiller.org

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Re: Interviews are Broken

#61

Post by grammaton »

balloot wrote: post #16

This person sounds completely insufferable. He basically is declaring himself too good for interviews (except for C-level execs, whom he apparently tolerates). Heaven forbid you don't just assume Ernie Miller is god's gift to your job position, because he is Ernie Miller and he is a special unique snowflake who is not to be insulted with petty questions pertaining to his ability to do the job. Anyway, good luck with…

I think you're missing a couple of points here. First and foremost, he wouldn't mind being asked "petty questions pertaining to his ability to do the job," but by and large, he is NOT being asked those questions - that's kind of the entire point of his article. Second of all, it's not that he "tolerates" C level execs, he's just making the observation that they seem to conduct better interviews because, when it comes to the value of other people's time, they "get" it.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#63

Post by grammaton »

vytasgd wrote: post #60

I've done very few interviews (on either side of the table) but I wish I would come across one that had two main questions in the technical interview: 1. Write some piece of code that you think is cool. It doesn't have to originally be yours, and if it would take too long to recreate exactly, write it out in pseudo code and explain how it works and why you chose it. 2. (Slightly more common, and I've asked this befor…

Ugh, coming up with something "cool" under time constraints, while someone is sitting there and watching my every move, is not exactly a realistic gauge of anything. One of the reasons the hiring process is so broken for so many is that they fail to take in to account the nervousness and pressure the candidate will invariably be feeling. Speaking as someone who has done many interviews, questions like this always make me cringe. Sitting there in a suit, sweating and angling for a job, isn't really the best time for me to come up with something "cool."

Re: Interviews are Broken

#64

Post by chris_mahan »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #14
Peroni wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've done should be proof enough. It really isn't. It may be indicative of your technical ability however your past experience doesn't give me any indication if you'd be a good culture fit.

Isn't "cultural fit" another way to hide sexism, racism, and prejudice in the hiring process? I've seen it happen and it's a very good excuse to give to HR. Just like in social situations you can judge anyone pretty well in the first 5 minutes of a phone conversation, see if they will "click" with your team - hell you can almost do that just by looking at their open source (how they think/design). I don't need a high…

you forgot age discrimination.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#65

Post by rhizome »

gedrap wrote: post #20

I think that we can simply say "no one has been fired for traditional interview". Yes, it is broken, ineffective, interviewees mostly hate it, some egos get hurt while solving fizzbuzz on the whiteboard, etc. But for an interviewer, it's a safe choice. It's something he has done hundreds of times, something the interviewee expects. He might miss some really good potential employees but at the end of the day, everyone…

Mediocre processes for mediocre companies.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#66

Post by nawitus »

mmcnickle wrote: post #50
Lost_BiomedE wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I long for an interview like that. I first left the tech industry due to having to deal with HR and the hiring process. I became a chef, where the interview could be moved to having them watch me make a dish or show knife skills. Then out of interest, I went through a biomedical engineering degree and am back into the tech field. Still, due to my negative experiences with the filtering process, I have stayed in the r…

I've always thought the simple coding interview questions was like asking a chef to prepare a very simple meal; they should be able to do it without any problem. Though it's apparent that coders, like chefs, can choke on even these simple tasks. You only need to watch the "skills tests" on "Masterchef: The Professionals" to see a dozen professional cooks fail to fry schnitzel or fillet a fish. The same chefs go on th…

One additional difference is that interview coding questions don't have a realistic working environment. Programmers utilize tools like search engines, IDEs and documentation, but these may be not available in a coding interview question, which might mandate a programmer to work on a whiteboard or using unfamiliar software.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#67

Post by rlu »

I never got to interview for a startup. Is it common to have a 1:n interview? At every single big company I've interviewed with, interviews were always 1:1.

He threw out 1:n interviews being bad as if it were the norm.

I also have no idea what he meant by this:

"All of this for a position that will involve working remotely (you are working remotely, aren't you?)."

Stopped reading after that because it didn't sound like he and I were in the same industry at all.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#68

Post by vytasgd »

grammaton wrote: post #63
vytasgd wrote: post #60

I've done very few interviews (on either side of the table) but I wish I would come across one that had two main questions in the technical interview: 1. Write some piece of code that you think is cool. It doesn't have to originally be yours, and if it would take too long to recreate exactly, write it out in pseudo code and explain how it works and why you chose it. 2. (Slightly more common, and I've asked this befor…

Ugh, coming up with something "cool" under time constraints, while someone is sitting there and watching my every move, is not exactly a realistic gauge of anything. One of the reasons the hiring process is so broken for so many is that they fail to take in to account the nervousness and pressure the candidate will invariably be feeling. Speaking as someone who has done many interviews, questions like this always mak…

i meant this more in the sense of "what's a piece of code you've seen(or written) that made you excited and made you think 'wow that's really clever!'" It shouldn't necessarily be something earth shattering, could be very simple, just something you genuinely liked. I personally believe enthusiasm (including intellectual curiosity) is the most important quality somebody can have in the workplace.

If your problem with the question is trying to think of a response that the interviewer would want to hear, then you aren't approaching the question correctly and/or neither is the interviewer.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#69

Post by JackMorgan »

gedrap wrote: post #20

I think that we can simply say "no one has been fired for traditional interview". Yes, it is broken, ineffective, interviewees mostly hate it, some egos get hurt while solving fizzbuzz on the whiteboard, etc. But for an interviewer, it's a safe choice. It's something he has done hundreds of times, something the interviewee expects. He might miss some really good potential employees but at the end of the day, everyone…

>Trying something totally new requires some courage and stepping out of comfort zone, probably a lot, and that explains it

I think you are on to something here. People want to do the safe, easy, and known thing. I cannot imagine most people, when finding out a poor employee was hired would blame the interviewer or the interview system. They assume that those are fine, because "Joel, Yegge, Google... everybody does them" and so they become a mental blind spot. The focus falls on the bad employee, "wow, he seemed so good, he must be a con artist or something".

>And they still get a lot of top quality candidates, so why bother?

This, I do not believe. By definition, most developers are not "top quality", rather just fit in just well enough to stay out of the "fire zone". From what I have seen, unless by "top quality" you mean "best development value for your buck", most developers at most shops are far below "top quality". Most are either overly conservative or overly aggressive, and have skills just barely good enough to do their job, which is good, because if they were truly the "top quality" they would tire quickly of your work and leave. The only way someone gets to be even close to "top quality" is by constantly doing new things, constantly pushing themselves, constantly getting better. Those traits _sound_ good till you consider what then will happen when they master the job you want them to do and get bored. That is what I mean by "best development value for your buck". Chances are, most development shops want most developers to be just barely good enough to get the work done in an arbitrary time with an arbitrary level of quality. Like the old joke goes, anyone coding slower/poorer/less than me is "a lazy idiot!", and anyone coding faster/better than me is "an architecture astronaut stuck up jerk!". Hiring becomes, "are you within an acceptably narrow band of skill that will all share?"

So, companies get what they hire for. Chances are, they get mediocre programmers, because that is what they actually _need_. They don't need language-writing, development world colossi striding about their office, designing new paradigms for their slightly altered CRUD app. Most companies wouldn't know what to do with such developers if they had them. Heck, even Google apparently didn't know what to do with Guido. Instead most companies need someone happy sitting down to add a new field to this page, or make this checkbox work on this popup, or fix this bug that only shows up in IE7. Someone for whom that is just challenging enough to be interesting, but not impossible. Apparently, programmer quizzo is the cheapest/safest way to ascertain that.

Re: Interviews are Broken

#70

Post by JackMorgan »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #14
Peroni wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've done should be proof enough. It really isn't. It may be indicative of your technical ability however your past experience doesn't give me any indication if you'd be a good culture fit.

Isn't "cultural fit" another way to hide sexism, racism, and prejudice in the hiring process? I've seen it happen and it's a very good excuse to give to HR. Just like in social situations you can judge anyone pretty well in the first 5 minutes of a phone conversation, see if they will "click" with your team - hell you can almost do that just by looking at their open source (how they think/design). I don't need a high…

Oh man, I read this and get a sinking pit in my stomach. I don't care about a person's color, reproductive organs, creed or whatever, but I wonder if perhaps I care a little too much about their "similar thought process", "go out for a drink"-ness (gulp, and what does that say about age), and most nebulously, "comfort". I thankfully cannot think of a time when I turned away a candidate for any reason but pure technical skill, but one look around my current office shows a pretty age- and "cool"- homogeneous group.

Where is that line?

Looking at something dumb, like TDD. Is it okay to hire someone who doesn't "believe in TDD" when the rest of us practice strict TDD? Somehow, almost certainly based on nurture of past jobs/mentors/failures (we all like to think it is nature, pfft) all developers look at the same facts of TDD, and yet some are on this side, some are on that side. TDD is an arbitrary bar. May as well be favorite color. But, when the house painting team is 15 guys who like red and so we only paint red houses, but you like blue... Maybe they just are not a good "cultural fit". Shrug. Would that one blue person "poison" the team? On the one hand, that blue person might open us up to new opportunities, get us to start doing both kinds of houses. Maybe they just end up fighting with everyone all the time, "CAN'T YOU SEE RED IS THE BEST WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!" And so cultural fit seems like a way of saying, "people similar enough to our average skill to not make anyone mad, and similar enough to an average of our shared backstory so as to have basically the same conclusions about the Big Issues as we do: TDD, FP/OO, Pairing, NoSQL/SQL, IDE/Editor, languages, what goes on the Big Issues list, etc.

But in all that, aren't we really just saying, "I want to hang out with people like me"?

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