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People suck at technical interviews

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Re: People suck at technical interviews

#71

Post by x0x0 »

darklajid wrote: post #56

The other side to that story: I'm scared like shit whenever (and that's often enough) I consider applying for a new thing. And back out, don't even try. Most of the reasons are listed in the article, but let's be honest: I'd face most of these things.. So the pipe dream atm is to find some time for personal projects, foss contributions and .. use that to get to more reasonable opportunities. Reaching ten years with t…

If it helps: when I interview, I really really want the candidate to succeed because he or she is solving a problem for me. I need more competent hands. I don't know if this helps, but it's true.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#72

Post by walshemj »

bmj wrote: post #48
applecore wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You aren't interviewing people to determine how good they are at interviewing, because interviewing doesn't generate money for your company. Depends. At most companies, how you handle a simple interview is still relevant if it's for a revenue generating or client facing role (e.g., sales, marketing, and project management). Granted, most technical roles aren't generating revenue or in contact with clients, so this…

most technical roles aren't generating revenue Wait, what? The products I build don't generate revenue for my employer?

mm so that billing system I worked on for BT didn't bring in revenue or the fix I and the company accountant did to fix the broken BACS feed

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#73

Post by jbogp »

Having just had a 3h long technical interview for Google Deepmind, I cannot agree more with a lot of points raised in this post.

Deepmind being a machine learning/statistics/maths/computer science fuelled company, it made sense for the interview process to follow this simple organisation.

I was however very disappointed by the questions asked for each part. Not a single one of the ~100 questions asked during these 3h of my life demanded some "problem solving" skills, only encyclopaedic knowledge (describe this algorithm, what is a Jaccobian matrix, define what an artificial neural network is, what is polymorphism, give examples of classifiers, what are the conditions to apply a t-test...)

So what if someone doesn't remember every definition of the stats/ML/CS/Maths respective bibles as long as they're clever enough to look it up and understand quickly what's needed?

I mean, I get it these are very basic questions but as a highly qualified interviewee who necessarily has other offers given this set of skills, this fastidious, back to school, time wasting process does not reflect well on the company and makes me consider my other options even more seriously.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#74

Post by notahacker »

applecore wrote: post #44
tptacek wrote: post #20

This is a really excellent post. It talks about a bunch of things that are hobby-horses of mine (I help run recruiting for a large software security firm), and I find myself agreeing with more of it than I disagree with. I would go a little further than Laurie does. I think several of the goals he sets up for his process are not in reality achievable in an interview process. Starting axiom: job interviews are among t…

> You aren't interviewing people to determine how good they are at interviewing, because interviewing doesn't generate money for your company. Depends. At most companies, how you handle a simple interview is still relevant if it's for a revenue generating or client facing role (e.g., sales, marketing, and project management). Granted, most technical roles aren't generating revenue or in contact with clients, so this…

I've often wondered whether for technical roles involving little or no client interaction[1], negatively-weighting skill at answering very pat interview questions (like where they want to be in five years, what they liked most about their degree course or why they're passionate about writing server side code for an ad platform) relative to their overall performance might actually be a useful, if very counter-intuitive heuristic?

Someone who gives halting, but reasonably acceptable answers throughout an entire interview might be better at understanding technical problems than giving verbal answers in a pressured situation, and find the latter aspect far more difficult than the actual problem-set covered in the technical questions.

On the other hand, someone who confidently, thoroughly and unhesitatingly reels off answers to all manner of non-technical questions should, at least theoretically, be similarly comfortable talking about technical problems they don't find especially hard... And if they're excelling in the pat interview questions because they've done far more interviews than average than may also be a negative mark

[1]many of which, as others have pointed out, bring in a lot of revenue

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#75

Post by x0x0 »

pastProlog wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #20

This is a really excellent post. It talks about a bunch of things that are hobby-horses of mine (I help run recruiting for a large software security firm), and I find myself agreeing with more of it than I disagree with. I would go a little further than Laurie does. I think several of the goals he sets up for his process are not in reality achievable in an interview process. Starting axiom: job interviews are among t…

> job interviews are among the most hostile experiences professionals endure in our industry I don't find being questioned during an interview hostile, although I do feel I need to be prepared to be tested. The most bothersome part for me is companies asking for me to list several references, often specifically asking for previous managers. I am usually given a standard application form to write their names, phone nu…

I just don't fill in questions on the application form I don't want to answer. Particularly references. They are unavailable -- since I can only impose upon them so often -- until after all interviews and a salary discussion and a serious decision that I want the job, etc.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#76

Post by walshemj »

cjslep wrote: post #47

For my first job out of uni, I was asked to write pseudocode on a whiteboard to solve a simple scripting problem (call an executable repeatedly, changing the command line args). My background is nuclear engineering, and I was interviewing at a cloud/networking business, so I was already slightly outside my experience comfort zone[0]. I was explaining my thought process while writing on the whiteboard, trying my best…

That person should never have been allowed to interview anyone in the first place.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#77

Post by VLM »

yardie wrote: post #4

My first technical interview they asked me to write a constructor and I completely panicked. It still haunts me to this day that I think the guys in the room thought I was some sort of idiot.

I suspect this is the origin of most of the "can't code fizzbuzz" stories. More accurately "can't code fizzbuzz when terrified".

When I was younger I had my best luck at interviews when I didn't give a F and felt I was just showing up for practice because I had a perfectly good job, but this new one looked mildly interesting. I'm not sure reaction to interview stress correlates positively with dedication to your new feudal overlord.

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#78

Post by adricnet »

One of the things done right at one place where I did a great many interviews for technical candidates was at a late phase to break out the technical interview and the management interview.

This allowed a group of potential peers to have a friendly discussion of varying depths about not only the recent work and advertised skills of the candidate but about current events and community engagement.

We became adept at evaluating candidates based on how they answered problems we presented, whether we believed they actually had the skills and experience on their CV, and how committed and engaged they were to the profession.

This is especially important for security related careers because community engagement is vital, most people can't talk in detail about previous work and may not have been able to publish public material, and work is highly specialized. It is tough to evaluate someone on skills and knowledge they have and you don't, but we got good at it.

And then the managers could talk to the candidate in a separate panel and ask ... well I have no idea to this day, actually :)

I say more about all of this a presentation I did in February, Breaking Into Security: some InfoSec Career tips, presented at DC404, slides here: http://www.atlbbs.com/sharkin/breakin-dc404.pdf

Re: People suck at technical interviews

#80

Post by walshemj »

greyskull wrote: post #51
lostcolony wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite interview, ever, was a phone screen. Untimed. They gave me a weekend to solve two not really difficult problems, with well defined interfaces. The catch was to write it in a production ready style. That is, do everything I would do for actual production code. Documentation, test suites, write the code to be as elegant as possible, while failing as cleanly as possible if invariants failed. I have no idea t…

I'd probably fail that from lack of experience, but it does seem to be a great approach for someone a bit more seasoned. That shows a lot more about someone's software engineering capabilities than short tricky problems.

Some one more seasoned would not work for free at a weekend.
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