The Only Interview Question That Matters • Hacker News Board

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#81

Post by tptacek » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52

tptacek wrote: post #40

I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…

I'd also argue that my answer to this question won't actually help you hire me. My biggest accomplishment: I opened the door for [list of people] who then walked through it. It's useless information if you want to hire me - I'm a statistician ("data scientist"), not a guidance counselor. (Of course, in a real interview I'd have a good answer for what you wanted to hear. I'm just saying that an honest answer would be…

Yes. This is what I'm trying to say about the difference between a candidate's narrative and a candidate's capabilities.

When you think about it, the fact that we almost universally hire candidates based on their narratives sounds fucking insane.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#82

Post by dominotw » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 6:37 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #78

dominotw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is problematic and discriminatory. I hope this doesn't become a trend. What if you are interviewing a kid from south-side Chicago or kid from third world who against all odds went to college. Is smart and motivated and could be a great asset to your company but never had the exposure to great ideas. You can argue that she can just say 'Going to college was my most significant achievement' but are you in a positi…

The question is "what would you consider your most significant achievement?". This is an opportunity for the interviewee to tell the story of the achievement; you don't want a one-liner answer from them, you want them to explain the significance. You're not ranking the achievements but the interviewee. Answered well, and if you listen to the answer properly, this question will tell you how someone overcomes obstacles…

This is the problem I am trying to address. The culture of achievement is a privilege reserved for upper strata of society.

This question belongs on a country club application not on tech job application. Tech industry is one of last few places in america where one can hope to turn things around in life. Become great by getting exposure to new ideas and new memes.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#83

Post by nawitus » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 6:38 PM UTC

300bps wrote: post #23

nawitus wrote: post #8

So what should software engineers who are "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications respond? It's not like programmers can pick and choose difficult projects.

I think you have hit the nail on the head regarding the purpose of the question. The question is used to find stars. That is, someone who is 50x more productive than programmers: "merely" doing solid and great programming on "average" and typical applications

The article didn't say it's only used to find stars.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#84

Post by overgard » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 6:52 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #20

"What single project or task would you consider your most significant accomplishment in your career to date?" If this is the best question you can ask people, we got really lucky, because this is the essential question on all YC's application forms for events (e.g. Startup School) and has been one of the core questions on the YC application since the beginning.

I think this is incidentally how other hackers socially establish each other's credibility just in general. During my first week of college, almost every conversation with new CS people broke down to "so what have you made?" instead of the more standard social questions like "so what do you like to do?"

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#85

Post by hexagonc » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #40

I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way.

I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some research that he did with a professor that got published, or even a class project that got him interested in the current position he is applying to. I mean, John Resig would talk about the projects he did as an undergraduate that lead to jQuery[1].

If you dig into the details of a candidate's answers to this question, you can find skills that they might have forgotten to put on their resume. Such as the fact that they know git or Matlab. You can ask them whether they used design patterns in their project and use that as a launching point for a short quiz on design patterns.

You do lose a bit of control of the interview process when you ask an open-ended question like this. A candidate can go off on a tangent about something irrelevant to the job. That is a risk. But it could turn out that you learn more about the candidate from his answers to this question than the puzzle problems that you might have planned to give him.

[1]http://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=1836557

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#86

Post by yason » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

Despite what people say, I think that any interviewing comes down to your gut feeling if you're any good at interviewing at all. There's no single set of questions that you can use to filter in the best or filter out the worst, except maybe the fizzbuzz like things in case you have to filter out people who actually can't code. So this question presents a nice background for talking about something that allows you to ask endless questions about it and go deeper and deeper as long as you have time.

I generally like this sort of approach as people will "fold" eventually if pressed hard enough, i.e. they have to admit that they don't know something or they'll try to act like they do. And the goal of an interview is not just reach to point where people "fold" but the path travelled before reaching that point.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#87

Post by lyndonh » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:20 PM UTC

Jare wrote: post #41

How about: "Let me tell you about a few of my accomplishments and then I'd love to hear which one you think is most significant for the kind of work I'd do in your organization" Interviews go both ways.

Absolutely.

These articles are always aimed at the candidate. Where are the articles about "The most important question the interviewer has to be able to answer" ?

e.g. How are (you/the guy who's going to manage me) going to enable me to do great things here ?

What's the most (important project/major change), that was proposed by someone in this kind of position, that has gone into production ?

If I do this job well, where do you expect me to be in 5 years time ?

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#88

Post by tejay » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #82

pjc50 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is "what would you consider your most significant achievement?". This is an opportunity for the interviewee to tell the story of the achievement; you don't want a one-liner answer from them, you want them to explain the significance. You're not ranking the achievements but the interviewee. Answered well, and if you listen to the answer properly, this question will tell you how someone overcomes obstacles…

This is the problem I am trying to address. The culture of achievement is a privilege reserved for upper strata of society. This question belongs on a country club application not on tech job application. Tech industry is one of last few places in america where one can hope to turn things around in life. Become great by getting exposure to new ideas and new memes.

i think the problem you've raised is that 'most significant accomplishment in your career' is too narrow, and i agree.

'what is your most significant accomplishment to date' is much more telling.

pg is not hiring for a role, tho. he is trying to assess determination for a particularly difficult lifestyle choice - starting a company

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#89

Post by hippee-lee » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #77

hippee-lee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the exact wording of the question is less important than the discussion that follows?

No, that's exactly my point: the discussion that follows looks valuable, but isn't, because it isn't rigorous.

So what is valuable? I ding candidates when they can't carry a conversation in an interview setting, technical discussion or otherwise.

Re: The Only Interview Question That Matters

#90

Post by tptacek » Sat, Feb 01, 2014, 7:32 PM UTC

hexagonc wrote: post #85

tptacek wrote: post #40

I see how this one interview question is expansive and sets up a line of followup questions. I don't see why it's a good question. Presume you get an good answer to the question and every followup question. Now tell me this: how much more do you know about how capable the candidate is of doing the job you're hiring for? And, were these questions the fastest, most accurate way of learning that? I submit: no. "What wer…

Oh, and good luck hiring anyone right out of college this way. I think it is a fantastic question to ask someone out of college. It shows those people who are passionate about something and went beyond the minimal requirements for their degree to achieve it. A passionate student could answer this question in a number of ways; he could point out an open source project that he published on Github that has users, some r…

There might be nothing in the industry that gets under my skin quite as effectively as engineers making hiring decisions based on the perceived "passion" of candidates.

"Passion" doesn't matter.

What matters in a job is effectiveness and competence. Effectiveness gets things done. Competence ensures that what's getting done isn't going to backfire and create more work down the line.

In our common usage, "passion" describes the coder who stays until 9:00PM on a Friday hacking on things. But that property doesn't tell a team anything about whether that coder is the most effective use of headcount dollars. Passionate coders stay late working on compilers for obscure languages, or rewriting ugly but working code into trendy new languages and frameworks. Even if they're building important capabilities for a team's core product, they're doing it in a way that is basically impossible to schedule, on timelines that are impossible to reason about, because "passion" is idiosyncratic.

Passion (about what? quality? new technology? learning? building things? these are all different things) doesn't hurt anything. It's not a bad thing. It might even be a good thing. But it is not a crucial attribute of a new hire on most teams. If you need passion, consider whether you're hiring cofounders, not teammates.

This is to say nothing of my total lack of faith in the ability of engineers to assess "passion". For any given engineer, candidates that happen to do things in their spare time that the interviewing engineer happens to enjoy or appreciate are "passionate". Meanwhile, a supremely competent professional who, given a spec, can reliably estimate the time to execute that spec and then actually nail that schedule, that person is a 9-5er, because they don't have strong opinions about Node.js.

•Shudder•.

Almost every idea that engineers have about hiring is broken.