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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#91

Post by blizarre »

jb1991 wrote: post #88
blizarre wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, if I am thinking of leaving my job and I have responsibilities, I will not even entertain taking a leap of faith, resigning from my current position and grinding for 3 month in a super-competitive environment for 1/10 of a chance of getting a better job. I'll talk to recruiters and interview at other companies on my spare time, as before.

My point was that this perspective is not lost on the author of that article, as he directly addresses it.

What am I missing then, he talks about multi-days "campfires" contract work as a replacement for the interview process. Maybe I can get a week of holiday on a short notice but nobody will be able to do that 5 times in a month if they are actively looking.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#93

Post by [deleted] »

blizarre wrote: post #91
jb1991 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that this perspective is not lost on the author of that article, as he directly addresses it.

What am I missing then, he talks about multi-days "campfires" contract work as a replacement for the interview process. Maybe I can get a week of holiday on a short notice but nobody will be able to do that 5 times in a month if they are actively looking.

[deleted]

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#95

Post by thaumasiotes »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #90
thaumasiotes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I gave the feedback at one Google interview that they should send Google employees through to see how many get hired. Good to see they basically tried that. They did, but not with the intention of doing anything about the problem. This is a question of reliability , the conceptual 'correlation' of a measurement instrument with itself when measuring the same thing. Reliability is one of two major concepts in psychom…

The decisions made by individual interviewers are extremely accurate if you realize they are just saying 'YES - I want this person hired' or 'NO - I don't want this person hired'. It's entirely subjective but likely very repeatable.

It's not repeatable; that's the whole point of describing how the same person gets wildly different results when they interview on multiple occasions.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#96

Post by [deleted] »

blizarre wrote: post #80
jb1991 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is directly addressed in the article.

Not exactly, if I am thinking of leaving my job and I have responsibilities, I will not even entertain taking a leap of faith, resigning from my current position and grinding for 3 month in a super-competitive environment for 1/10 of a chance of getting a better job. I'll talk to recruiters and interview at other companies on my spare time, as before.

[deleted]

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#97

Post by ludicrousdispla »

JimmyBuckets wrote: post #84
__mharrison__ wrote: post #39

I don't understand how a failing stamp for a campfire is good for the interviewee. It signals that they weren't good enough to get hired. Why would they want to parade that around?

You dont need the failing stamps to hang around. All you need are the successful stamps. It's actually better from a human psychology perspective anyway. Less shame. Everyone will have some successful stamps, and they accrue over time giving better signal. Hiring managers can make a rational decision about what number of stamps over what period of time is sufficient to evaluate a person, trading against the risk of m…

Reading that part of the post leads me to conclude that Yegge is founding a startup called 'StampTown' or something similar as a talent incubator. Each candidate would have a digital avatar with suspenders that would display their accumulated stamps.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#98

Post by [deleted] »

chihuahua wrote: post #58

The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…

[deleted]

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#99

Post by Maro »

Maybe I'm an oddball, but I've always thought this: if a cool company wants to hire me but isn't sure, give me a 3-6 month fixed contract and LFG. There's zero doubt in my mind it would work out. And if not, so what, I'll be okay.

Today I'm 45 with family and have a fancy VP title, but I would have no problem to do this for an interesting role at a cool company.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#100

Post by LtWorf »

LPisGood wrote: post #66
LtWorf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I've had a terrible interview at Google too! They told me it was all about pseudocode and how I think in advance, then on the actual interview they were being annoying about variable names and spaces after comma, while I was supposed to come up with some clever optimisation that boiled down to: "do you know this obscure theorem already? Cool you pass"

Which theorem?

I don't even know the name. I reviewed the question with a friend of mine who has a PhD in mathematics and teaches at university and he figured it out (after a way longer time than the duration of the interview itself) :)
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