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

#71

Post by ken » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #55

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentatio…

> You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...]

You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".

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

#72

Post by gdy » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

JeremyBanks wrote: post #36

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…

Heh. The last couple time I've seen a candidate rejected for "poor culture fit", it was because the candidate themselves demonstrated ageism or racism.

Racism as in speaking up against reverse racism?

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

#73

Post by mjevans » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

Maybe making the 'extended interview' process more formal would be a good thing.

Formally have an internal 'contract' worker process where anyone they might want can be hired in to a trial pool, and projects can bring in the trial worker for small things quickly (maybe writing unit tests, or a fresh set of eyes, etc).

Every month review performance, make a decision to offer job as X, keep on for another month, or let go.

As a different part of this, alternating weekends might also be a more focused part of this, let someone that ALREADY has a job have a similar trial process on just some weekends, maybe with a more remote-work focus.

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

#74

Post by nocitrek » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

I conduct the technical part of interview in my company. There are many candidates which charm our director and HR. They recite the buzzwords flawlessly and their resumes are top notch. When they come to technical part of interview, they charm us as well. Until they start coding. We ask two easy coding tasks (one programming, one data science) and so many candidates have issue with transfering algorithm they conjured on the spot into code; or are unable to solve problem on abstract level (and not hard-code the values for problem given to them). It is not uncommon that we identify sweet talkers which would have negative productivity for the company (meaning we would spend more time/money into fixing their code than they would bring value). I am firm believer that software developers must pass technical part of the interview.

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

#75

Post by lgessler » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #64

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…

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

Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.

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

#76

Post by scarmig » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #62

scarmig wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of those things, though, are inherently hard to test in a way that's fair, representative, and not easily cheated. Anyone who had a reproducible, consistent way to evaluate which candidates are good at those things would be able to make a whole lot of money.

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

#77

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by alkonaut » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

We can’t. But we also can’t interview people for weeks. So we do one hour and we go with our gut feeling. It’s a terrible way to hire, possibly the worst, except for all the other ones.

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

#79

Post by mjevans » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

pkroll wrote: post #20

rightbyte wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.

"Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.

If I want a lot of OK sushi I go to a place I trust for that. It's mediocre, but priced accordingly; and thus has good value for the money.

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

#80

Post by alias_neo » Thu, May 02, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

henryfjordan wrote: post #70

rsweeney21 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had written basically this same response fearing I was being overly judgemental before seeing your response but my gut was the same.

The posts read like sales pitches for someone solving a problem of making money for themselves by limiting their portfolio to candidates for whom $company had done the hard work of vetting by having previously hired.

Click-bait is a generous summation, I feel.