Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference between a brainteaser and a problem you've already solved?
Their problems are special and important .
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One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#62The problem with this approach is that it is unnecessary time consuming on the applicants side and that the tests aren't language agnostic. The goal to reduce the in-house effort is reasonable, however it can be achieved a lot easier. You can filter the 90% of applicants that are not qualified in tests that only take a couple of minutes. In my opinion the goal of automation in the hiring process should be limited to filtering out the obvious misfits, otherwise you risk to miss hidden talents among your applicants.
In the end you rather want to hire a brilliant engineer with little experience in the desired technology stack than a mediocre developer that is able to pass your automated tests because he has worked with the technology for years.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#63There's no shared risk here, it's all on the candidate. Bad form. Only something along the commitment of the 0.5-1hr "weed out" question can/should be done remotely. If you're going to require people to do ~7 hrs of tests, that had better be at the office, pairing, with other folks (and at least give them a free breakfast/lunch/dinner!). 7 hrs while working a 40hr (or more!) week is a pretty hefty commitment, and I s…
Yeah, 8 hours of essentially uninterrupted time is a lot to ask -- in fact it would basically be a deal-breaker for anyone with full-time commitments, or who otherwise values their time.
Also, (explicitly) timed coding tests imply that you don't really trust the candidate. Of course they could be lying when you casually ask how much time it took (or whether they got any help), but the few who go that route will probably quickly test out your other filters.
The trust signal, meanwhile, takes a lot of care and consideration to cultivate -- and shouldn't be discounted lightly.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#64> The candidate will join us in the office towards the end of the day, where we’ll spend time getting to know each other over dinner or beers.
Really?
The technical portion of the interview process described here is receiving a lot of well-deserved criticism, but I feel this is worth pointing out as well because it's another example of how out-of-touch this company seems to be.
Any experienced candidate knows The Rule (don't drink during the interview process, even at a social event), so an employer that intentionally puts a prospective employee in the position where he or she is effectively asked to do so is incredibly unthoughtful. And foolish to boot, as this could very well become a legal liability.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDIT Sorry. If you can't implement linked list and think that first item is too much for an interview, HN is not the place to swing around. Keep downvoting lol. TL; DR version: It isn't fair to throw a company out of a windows because they are serious about their hiring process. It totally depends on their company's growth need! First bullet point is extremely fair but the rest aren't and I agree on that. Longer vers…
"Not the place to swing around"? Firstly, there's plenty of entrepreneurs here who don't code at all. Secondly, that's a really silly thing to say. Do you honestly think that you can't be a great Rails engineer without having fluency with linked lists off the top of your head in an interview type situation? I can think of a thousand questions that would give me a much more accurate idea of how good a candidate would…
Sorry, that's not silly at all. You are taking the wrong context and you are fooling yourself thinking it is unimportant to question abililty.
Linked list is the simplest data structure one can pick it up in 5 minutes in using languages like Ruby and Python.
Do you honestly think any serious entrepreneurs would want a company growing hire someone who can't even tell you the basic of a linked list (can you imagine one cannot even tell you what a linked list is and the time complexity?)
You didn't even read my comment at all. A lot of things can be done by integrating with the ecosystem out there; but many of the libraries out there are horribly written and there are things you just can't build out of these libraries you find on PyPI.
People who build successful products cannot rely on an ecosystem forever. There are crucial components must be built by engineers using data structures and algorithms we know from textbook and then write custom algorithms that work for the use case.
Too bad. Some people just want to get away with ecosystem all the time; truth is you just cannot.
If a candidate never heard of linked list, wtf does that say about this candidate? Why would I want to hire him if he didn't even attempt to study a few one? I don't expect anyone to write a damn red-black tree algorithm; I can't and I doubt few people is capable of writing that algorithm from scratch (or even remember half of the properties).
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#66The biggest waste of time is that candidates have to demonstrate general competency to every company he or she is considering. It's a waste of engineering resources checking every candidate and a waste of time for the candidates. Is there a way to unify that across companies (other than by creating a certification scheme)? Is there a way to standardize the code sample procedure?
Most, if not all, of these companies do not articulate what "the bar" is that candidates have to meet, or at least do not do so publicly or as part of the job req, so no, I don't think there is currently a way to unify that across companies. "The bar" is largely a euphemism for an information asymmetry in a company's hiring.
Basically "the bar" stands more as an internal psychological mechanism than for any set of objective criteria. More about providing frustrated to feel good about themselves -- "we're soooo selective, that's why we can't find engineers that don't suck" -- rather than actually sit down and think about what what they might be doing wrong in their hiring process... or (probing further) why their company may not be doing anything all that interest in the first place.
As if, you know, the candidates don't also have a "bar" that companies have to muster up to. Yet if a candidate where to write a blog post musing that "only 1 in 100 qualified meet my bar", you probably wouldn't want to work with them.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#67I wish more places had a policy of giving detailed feedback... it's bad enough getting rejected, but the stone-faced manner in which most places seem to do it makes it even worse.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a reason why we have this thing called "time". You don't suddenly apply for a job do you? If you were senior, 10+ years why would you be interview at this company? I supposed there are better positions out there for you. Doesn't make sense with time. I didn't remember how to implement linked list after my class but I picked it up again over the summer as hobby to learn basic algorithm again.
I don't understand the point you are trying to make. You're saying implementing linked lists are good only if you are trying to hire recent college graduates who will prepare for an interview?
I never said that. I said if people think the first bullet point is too much to handle, that's blatantly stupid. It isn't like the company is asking you to implement a red-black tree. I am not a fan of puzzle solver so I hate that kind of interview. But linked list? Come on.
it's like asking someone "Well, explain how list is implemented in Python" when you claim you have been programming with Python years. Well, if you can't even answer that question with a good estimate (it has a double space every time you create a list for example) then you probably shouldn't call yourself a Python guru.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The challenges are all real projects that we've already built (and thus have a baseline for). We don't agree with brainteaser interviews. Having someone build a made up project would be just as bad as a brainteaser. We wouldn't do that to a candidate.
What's the difference between a brainteaser and a problem you've already solved?
That's a good question. I hope this example gives some clarity to what I meant:
* Worthless Brainteaser: How many golfballs will fit in this Ford?
* Real-world Problem: Let's do cohort analysis on our users and see how our business is doing.
Part of the goal is also a consistent rubric for evaluating candidates.
In the past, we've tried giving every candidate a new problem to solve. It's not fair to them. When each problem is a brand new project it's difficult to evaluate a candidate objectively and consistently.
Re: One Hour Hire - Hacking Engineer Interviews
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Not the place to swing around"? Firstly, there's plenty of entrepreneurs here who don't code at all. Secondly, that's a really silly thing to say. Do you honestly think that you can't be a great Rails engineer without having fluency with linked lists off the top of your head in an interview type situation? I can think of a thousand questions that would give me a much more accurate idea of how good a candidate would…
Sorry, that's not silly at all. You are taking the wrong context and you are fooling yourself thinking it is unimportant to question abililty. Linked list is the simplest data structure one can pick it up in 5 minutes in using languages like Ruby and Python. Do you honestly think any serious entrepreneurs would want a company growing hire someone who can't even tell you the basic of a linked list (can you imagine one…
Please describe a use-case for linked lists in Ruby and/or Rails where Array would not suffice.