Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#651

Post by dennis_jeeves » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

b0p1x wrote: post #510

yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a differe…

>I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department.

You are my hero. If you ever end up having an HR department you can put in mediocre software developers to do the menial tasks. Most mediocre software developers will out do your average HR drone. For hiring and interviewing use the very best people that you have.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#652

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

stegosaurus wrote: post #134

drakenot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think memorization tests of the sort that ask what FunctionX you should use from LibraryY for a particular situation are terrible. I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important. Simila…

Sure. I know what a list, a hash table, a tree are because I looked it up whenever I saw someone mention it, and eventually internalized it. But before that, I'd used them for 10-15 years without knowing the name because it doesn't matter. Take a hash table. Python calls it a dict. C++ calls it an (unordered) map. Java calls it.. whatever it calls it. It's nice to have that 'hash table' google term to find the thing…

> C++ calls it an (unordered) map.

Hey, whoa, stop right here. std::map and std::unordered_map are not at all the same thing, and if you're going to be using them in a manner beyond "trivial" it's important to know the difference between them.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#653

Post by p4wnc6 » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #648

p4wnc6 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've still avoided adding another potentially crappy dependency to our project. No, you've just added the crappy dependency == your off the cuff implementation (which is even more work since you have to handle issues and unit testing for it too). > What the hell sort of library would you crack out to do a breadth first search traversal? In Python I would use networkx probably, unless there was a good reason I coul…

In practice it's extremely easy to mess up gaussian elimination and get implementations that are bad or just plain wrong.

I totally agree. And no one should let hubris make them think otherwise for e.g. graph traversal algorithms.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#654

Post by ktRolster » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #357

liquidise wrote: post #233

I recently wrote a post on designing better tech interview questions. [1] But one thing i never see interviewees do is outright ask, "Wait, what does this question actually tell you about me?" I find myself asking it in nearly every interview i go to. If you ask and your interviewer gets glassy-eyed or gives you the laughably generic "it shows how well you think algorithmically" you know that you are being interviewe…

"We want to see how you think" is a hallmark of dysfunction. You cannot see how someone thinks from short interviews and coding puzzles. You just cannot. Anyone trying to is so far from doing things right that you want to run, don't walk, away from them. The only way to really see how someone thinks is to just hire them, work with them for a while, and fire them if they can't do the job. You can either pay the costs…

The only way to really see how someone thinks is to just hire them, work with them for a while, and fire them if they can't do the job.

That's the worst idea ever

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#655

Post by p4wnc6 » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:55 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #654

p4wnc6 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We want to see how you think" is a hallmark of dysfunction. You cannot see how someone thinks from short interviews and coding puzzles. You just cannot. Anyone trying to is so far from doing things right that you want to run, don't walk, away from them. The only way to really see how someone thinks is to just hire them, work with them for a while, and fire them if they can't do the job. You can either pay the costs…

The only way to really see how someone thinks is to just hire them, work with them for a while, and fire them if they can't do the job. That's the worst idea ever

It's what Netflix does, so your dismissal seems badly placed.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#656

Post by bcassedy » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 7:01 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #606

pklausler wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring does need to avoid hiring idiots, but I've found that it's more effective to ask easy questions. Seriously. People who can't program a digital computer have just as much trouble, and there's less opportunity to fake it. Easy questions produce better signals.

I was asked once during an interview to describe a specific problem that I enjoyed solving. And I was told to go in as much depth as I could during the timeslot. I thought that was a great question. It got me talking about something I cared about, knew very well, and showed my normal thought process and development process outside of an interview. It also gave the interviewer plenty of things to ask about, to "quiz"…

There are a number of problems with this approach. It's difficult to standardize so personal biases are more likely to creep in.

I've asked this question in interviews a number of times, but it's primarily to gauge communication skills rather than technical skills. The biggest problem with using it as a technical screen is that candidates are really bad at choosing a project to tell you about. I've had candidates choose as their problem building out some responsive dynamic front end and their entire solution boils down to, I picked Angular and Bootstrap.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#657

Post by ktRolster » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #655

ktRolster wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to really see how someone thinks is to just hire them, work with them for a while, and fire them if they can't do the job. That's the worst idea ever

It's what Netflix does, so your dismissal seems badly placed.

It looks like Netflix has a fairly lengthy interview process, including technical questions: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Netflix-Interview-Questi...

They fire people quickly, sure, but they don't "just hire them" either.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#658

Post by ecdavis » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 8:41 PM UTC

hunterloftis wrote: post #618

stegosaurus wrote: post #4

Is it even just hiring? Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else. A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to…

> A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. The average salary for a "software developer" job posting in my city (Charlotte, NC) is $101k. The average income in Charlotte is $53k. The median home value is $167k. 60% of the value of a home in a year is pretty good. I've also lived in Sydney, Mannheim, San Francisco, and Seattle, and I noticed similar econo…

I don't know when you lived in those cities, but things have evidently changed. I've lived in Sydney and Seattle. Median home price in Sydney is currently ~AUD$1 million and median home price in the Seattle area has reached ~USD$0.5 million. Average developer salaries in those cities are certainly not 60% of the value of a home.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/10/australias-m...

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/king-county...

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#659

Post by ktRolster » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #610

ktRolster wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or going even further, how exhausting this is for someone who's not good at it? Why not just be genuine? Yes, I do. I don't act genuine because when I'm my genuine self, I glare at everyone in the room with the rage of a thousand suns. I don't know if people can tell that I'm hiding it or not, but when I try to hide and act enthusiastic, I get the job, when I don't, I don't.

Fair enough. I'm the same way. Somewhere along the line, though, I learned to stop caring about pretending to be excited and just accept that a majority of companies won't hire me for what they perceive to be a lack of apathy. It's a pretty good filter for finding companies that I'd be happy working at, but I understand that it's not for everybody. I just hope for a much more genuine tech/otherwise community so that…

It's a pretty good filter for finding companies that I'd be happy working at

I gave up at that one. People told me, "find a job you enjoy" but I think it's a lie. No one pays you to enjoy yourself. I haven't found a job to make me happy. Maybe someone found that kind of job but I didn't.

So now I find a job, work for a couple years, then quit and take months off at a time. I use the money I earned to fund my travels, which I enjoy. And sometimes at work, I look back at something I built, and the feeling of having built something is a really great feeling (even if no one cares about that thing). Then I go back to glaring at my coworkers.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#660

Post by bpchaps » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 9:19 PM UTC

ktRolster wrote: post #659

bpchaps wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I'm the same way. Somewhere along the line, though, I learned to stop caring about pretending to be excited and just accept that a majority of companies won't hire me for what they perceive to be a lack of apathy. It's a pretty good filter for finding companies that I'd be happy working at, but I understand that it's not for everybody. I just hope for a much more genuine tech/otherwise community so that…

It's a pretty good filter for finding companies that I'd be happy working at I gave up at that one. People told me, "find a job you enjoy" but I think it's a lie. No one pays you to enjoy yourself. I haven't found a job to make me happy. Maybe someone found that kind of job but I didn't. So now I find a job, work for a couple years, then quit and take months off at a time. I use the money I earned to fund my travels,…

Funny enough, after an interview I had yesterday where it sounds like they're going to reject me for "culture fit" reasons, I kind of came to the conclusion that fulltime jobs and even direct contracting isn't for me anymore. It was for a security engineer job where my "I may have actually convinced comcast to start a bug bounty program after disclosing a major security hole over the phone." story got no reaction. Not entirely sure what I'll do, but freelancing lately has been pretty enjoyable. Then again, I don't know how long that's doable. You sound like you're going down the same route I am with work, long break, work, long break and you're right that those projects get almost no attention. That lack of attention is getting me further and further from wanting to do programming/IT for a living and to just use the knowledge as tools for other things. If you're interested in it, try doing civics work and hammer your city/state with FOIA requests to get things you're interested in. You might find that the "rabbit holes" there are surprisingly exciting.

If you're ever in Chicago, hit me up and we can grab some drinks.