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Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidat
by grappler 11y ago
Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidates as if they had awesome powers of judgement, my approach has evolved into:
Pick an LSAT-style logic problem. First just give the candidate the problem, and see if they can work it out. No programming, just simple logical thinking skills. Then get into writing some code (or even pseudocode) that can solve some version of this problem.
There will be some conversation after that, maybe about how you'd scale the code, and then branching off into other things. But mainly I just see if a) they could solve the logic problem and b) they could translate that solution into some reasonable code. I try to apply this consistently across candidates.
I was unemployed once, and I knew that I know how to do this stuff. It was incredibly frustrating to me that the people interviewing me were holding me up to unreasonable and irrelevant standards. I keep that in mind and try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
- pfarnsworth 11y agoBack when the web was still young and I had less than 1 year experience, I interviewed at IBM for a web developer position. They gave me an aptitude test, which they said I scored amongst the highest they had ever seen. This got me through several rounds of interviews but at the very end, I was rejected. When I asked for feedback, the hiring manager said that I didn't have enough experience. It felt like a complete waste of time, because they KNEW I didn't have enough experience from the beginning, so the entire process was really offputting.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoI'm not one to believe the official explanations given. It is too easy to lie than to give the truth, even when that truth isn't bad. So I wouldn't put too much work into you being inexperienced. Instead, I would say that they had a different reason for not choosing you but that was the simplest lie they could come up with on the spot by looking over your resume.
- bryanrasmussen 11y agoso, basically what you just said here is you would try to hire people that were like you, by giving them tests that you know you would do well on. I mean I would do well at this particular set of tests so fine by me in that regard.
- grappler 11y agoFeel free to propose a better approach...
- bryanrasmussen 11y agoyeah I'm pretty sure that any approach I proposed, on a spur of the moment answer on an HN thread, without spending years of research and data analysis with a team of diverse experts in the field, would end up being a method to hire people who were more like me.
- grappler 11y agoNot as if I had time to do that kind of research either :) That'd probably always hold for some definition of "like me". However, my approach has resulted in thumbs ups for people different than me in ethnicity, age, gender, and career background, which should count for something I think.