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Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
91–100 of 111 posts
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't work when there are terrible devs somehow stealing paychecks from big companies for years, not even mentioning interview fraud. I've interviewed credentialed people who can't write fizzbuzz. Until tenure and credentials indicate skill, they can't be used! Some companies I think do indicate skill, like a L5 at Google can do fizzbuzz I'm sure, but somewhere like Cisco or random small startup might as well…
This is such a tired canard. Do these people exist? Yes. Assuming you can hold an in depth, detailed technical conversation with them I'd contend the percentage of these people is astonishingly low. We spend way too much mental energy defending against them. The real problem is not enough interviewers can discuss in depth technical bits themselves, and thus they can't get signal when talking to a candidate.
You can contend whatever you want, but I interview people all the time who have passed a phone screen, and your contention is wrong.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we care about x, y and z. you have forty five minutes to convince us that you will meaningful help us achieve our goals. we then will take 30 minutes to push on technical details This part is good. > as we see fit. you will be judged based on technical content, choices, taste and your overall approach and strategy for moving us forward and convincing us that you're the right person to do it. good luck! This part is…
I do agree with your assessment, on both parts, but I think it could survive with minor tweaking. "We are going to push on the technical details, both those we agree with and disagree with. This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, how does it stand up to scrutiny and challenge. In the end, while there may not be perfect alignment, we're looking to see how your ideas go through the process of…
I'm not sure what exactly that's meant to do other than using more words to say the same thing only this time with hackneyed cliches. IME it's best to avoid empty metaphor that does little more than occupy space.
Like...
> This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, ...
Was this written by AI? It's so bad, lol.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear this a lot, but man, I just really don't think so. First of all, 1-year stints come off very poorly in this kind of discussion. (I would say that a bias against people with a bunch of short stints would be a failure mode of "experience-based interviews" rather than the failure mode you're describing.) But also, I have had these discussions with (in my judgement) both "failed up" candidates and "tons of valuabl…
First, they're not "1 year stints". It takes about a year to manage someone out of a role once you've decided you need to do that. Nobody makes that decision on day 1 of a report's tenure. Second, how well the "stint" comes across in the interview is a question of how skilled the candidate is at talking. You can make anything sound like anything in an interview. The interviewer has no reliable way of checking.
If someone has a multi-year stint where the last year was spent managing them out, I am not convinced that this demonstrates that they are an incompetent bullshit artist. Not every employee is valuable to every company forever.
I've written a bunch of words in this thread about how I'm skeptical of your second paragraph. I recognize that you and many people I know and have discussed this with are adamant about this being true, and yet I remain unconvinced. I have interviewed many people, some of whom attempted to talk up their previous experience unconvincingly, and some of whom were impressive but nevertheless unsuccessful after being hired, for various reasons. I still haven't come across this person who can go into depth about their previous projects, while being a total incompetent bullshitter. I'm certain such people exist. I'm unconvinced that they are as pervasive as all the discourse on this would have me believe.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah this is my "natural" interviewing style. Like, I have a resume, I'm talking to a person, my natural curiosity about the person and their work leads me to exactly the kind of conversation you're describing. Then my hire / no-hire intuition is basically "am I impressed with them after that conversation?". But then I've also read a huge amount about interviewing "correctly" over the years, probably starting with th…
This is still my preferred method. The one counterargument that I accept as valid is that this method struggles with equity and bias. It's impossible to have a conversational interview style and ensure everyone is getting equal treatment. And it's impossible to rule out subconscious biases as a factor while you're having that conversation. While giving people cookie cutter panels doesn't completely remove those issue…
Yes. Agreed.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm certain that this is true. It certainly sounds true. But honestly, does anyone here have experience with doing this kind of interviewing at scale, for experienced software engineering roles? I've been in the industry for coming up on a couple decades, and I have been involved in doing lots of interviews at times, and in that whole period of time, at every company where I've worked, we did the standard multi-round…
Yep. When the money was raining from the sky and compensation bands were going up and you could land some job with, like, free food and microkitchens and massage points and whatever... Then fine. I guess it's worth the drama in the interview. Those places had potential boatloads of false positives and could afford all the false negatives from potentially bogus interview processes. I trained to do interviews at Google…
Yep, it was totally worth it for me to subject myself to the big tech hiring process. I have no student loan debt and own a nice house now because I did that. (And I learned a lot and met a lot of great and unbelievably smart and talented people during my years at that job also.) But the day I did the interview panel was still one of the worst most stressful days of my life. And it gave no signal on how well I was going to do in that job. It gave a lot of signal on how well I could manage subjecting myself to a miserable ritual, which is not nothing, but it sure ain't much.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a tired canard. Do these people exist? Yes. Assuming you can hold an in depth, detailed technical conversation with them I'd contend the percentage of these people is astonishingly low. We spend way too much mental energy defending against them. The real problem is not enough interviewers can discuss in depth technical bits themselves, and thus they can't get signal when talking to a candidate.
You can contend whatever you want, but I interview people all the time who have passed a phone screen , and your contention is wrong.
Phone screens are a low grade filter to remove pure riff riff. Not some impenetrable fortress. This isn't what I'm talking about at all.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or there's potentially this: that the skills we think are universal and transferable ... are not. That our industry is so bespoke and different and non-standard around tech stack organization and work culture between shops that in fact someone could have been performing top tier at their previous jobs and just completely not function in your workplace. And because we have a recency and confirmation bias around your o…
We see this occasionally in consulting: a strong performer will sometimes land in a gig that turns out to just not be a good fit for them. We know it happens, we make a point of watching out for it, and we can correct for it when it occurs - but we can't reliably predict who it'll happen to, and in what circumstances. Mostly, they simply move off to another gig where they return to their previous strong performance.…
Yeah. This is why I really wish the job market were optimized to lower switching costs, rather than seemingly the exact opposite.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that's a risk, but that's part of the purpose of an interview - both to discover what they claim to have done, and to assess how accurate that is. This is the purpose of asking about decision making processes, alternatives, architectural summaries and deep dives, etc - if they really did everything they claimed then all relevant details should come rapidly and fluently. The problems with the alternative - inter…
I have zero confidence in the ability of interviewers to reliably and repeatable parse out subtle characterological details in candidates. Like I said, the interviews you're talking about are essentially random functions. Google has notoriously one of the worst hiring processes in the entire tech industry.
What companies hire differently than them? Everyone seems to do the exact same thing.
Re: Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers
#100The main goal of hiring someone should be to assess how well they can do the job you are hiring for, and for anyone with job experience (i.e. not fresh out of college) the best indicator of that is what have they previously achieved (especially in more recent years). How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges. Of co…
> Of course the difficulty is how to you assess what the candidate has honestly achieved in prior jobs - what was there personal contribution, > What was their role, what were their contributions I got a hard reality check on this when my company was getting close to hiring someone I worked with at a previous company. Their resume claimed a lot of achievements that other teams had handled. Their work was always a pro…
I definitely think checking references should be more core to the process. I don't really understand why it isn't. Legal concerns? Or just because it takes a lot of time?
I would personally feel way better about interviewing for jobs if it was like peer reviews during a performance review cycle.