23 ms·

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to recollect breadth-first search flawlessly, on demand, onto a whiteboard. But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution. That's fundamentally what programmers do. You should have the chops to think in this way, and you should be eager to try. Emoting "what the fuck?!" and claiming you can't, or won't, because you're not a recent graduate is an excuse and a cop-out. A few popular open-source projects don't necessarily speak to your talent as a programmer. A 960 day GitHub streak is trivia, not a signal of anything useful. (If anything, it marks you as a target for burnout!) A few Hackathon wins and a couple hundred GH stars are the artifacts of a successful hobbyist, not a proxy for professional ability, or a gateway to employment.

bcook 11y ago
Additionally, a good programmer (or worker in general) should be good at much more than programming; like being able to collaborate & socialize with other team members & management without immediately resorting to "Fuck you, I quit". The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder...
- tobz 11y ago
  Just out of curiosity: how many bad interviews, or interviews with a rejection at the end, have you had in a row? Or total?
  - bcook 11y ago
    Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.
    - tobz 11y ago
      Sure, but what I was trying to get at is: if you had a string of interviews that felt "bad", and/or rejections, that you would probably be a little sour, and that's what I get from the article. It doesn't strike me that the author is particularly socially inept. As someone who watched previous coworkers, who are older, go through the interview ringer, I can sympathize with the author on the pigeonhole one can get stuck in due to seemingly trivial reasons: I don't have a classic CS background, people think I'm past my prime, etc. These aren't imaginary problems, and I struggle to believe that I would be all "go-getter" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" after continually being rejected, too.
      - bcook 11y ago
        I guess my confusion stems from the article's lack of a conclusion. Yes, _blank_ is sub-optimal, but how did you overcome the obstacle?
    - wott 11y ago
      And what are your social skills? You, who can't even see that the "fuck you, I quit" attitude does not come up first out of nothing but after a series of rejection and nonsensical situations, i.e. that it is a consequence of successive experiences and not the reason of these experiences. You, who decide unilaterally from your failure to understand the logic of events in a blog post, that the blogger is once and for all "socially inept". Great social skills without a bit of understanding and empathy, no doubt. Gee, I am also very tired of people for which stuff went well, and think it is be the same for others. Can't you even imagine there is a variety of situations out there? Can't you imagine it may happen to you one day? Do you think people who encounter this kind of problems never had a shiny position earlier, and their "social skills" were considered perfect before some conceited internet stranger decided they were "socially inept"? And you dare to talk about "experience", seriously?
      - bcook 11y ago
        You started your post with a veiled ad hominem attack, which instantly sets an illogical, angry tone... :( Yeah, I have no social skills, so what? I may also have a below average mind, so what? I did not call the author "socially inept"; that sentence was a hypothetical example of how an individual's incredible technical skills can be overshadowed by other problems. I am sorry if I offended you. I thought my posts were critical but logical...
emerongi 11y ago
I don't think many software engineers deal with "computer science problems" in their everyday jobs. GitHub stars are worth much more IMO. It shows that other developers value your work. That says a lot. In the end, we have to realize that most developers are just average. Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  Most developers are average and most jobs are average. How many people really get to think about breadth first or binary trees daily? Most of us spend their days wondering why Chrome doesn't render a div in the expected way or why some API doesn't do what it should and finding workarounds.
- unoti 11y ago
  > Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly? Never underestimate the value of hard work, preparation, and a can-do attitude. It eclipses natural talent every time.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    The hardest workers with the most successful can-do attitudes will simply reject your company if you ask them to do bullshit like algorithm trivia or HackerRank tests. Such trivia is the opposite of useful hard work; preparation for it truly wastes time that could be better spent on other things; a can-do attitude would imply rejecting or ignoring requests to do such things. As a result, the people who actually do take the time to complete it will not be completing it because of a good attitude or work ethic, yet you will mistakenly believe they are.
    - serge2k 11y ago
akadien 11y ago
> A few popular open-source projects don't necessarily speak to your talent as a programmer. If having source code and demonstrated traction for a few open source projects to review don't speak to one's talent as a programmer, then what does?
- cmdkeen 11y ago
  "The first round had four interviewers in the room. It was an open-ended discussion about me, my accomplishments, my projects. To be honest, I was not prepared for this interview format, so my presentation was probably all over the place" A professional programmer, the one hired by a company to work alongside other professionals - as opposed to one working by themselves on small projects - is capable of presenting previous experiences and applying them to new problems. Unless you want to be put in the basement and handed small chunks of work to solve. It's about how you mentor juniors, resolve disagreements on how to proceed, deal with set backs and changing requirements. Given the whole post is about how terrible the interviewing process is the above quote is the most telling, and backs up the GPs point - not being prepared to have a conversation about your previous experience when interviewing for a job is pretty bad.
robbiemitchell 11y ago
What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?
- mkozlows 11y ago
  Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they can tweak CSS until it works right-ish, or know the particular arcane implementation details of installing some WordPress module, they can do the job. But there are a lot more positions where you want someone who can solve the problems that need solving, pick up new technologies as needed, and just generally be a flexible and productive contributor in a way that doesn't relate to the fiddly details of one particular technology.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    > they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out If you have the "mental dexterity" to coming up with your own solution which is identical to Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithms in terms of complexity within an hour interview, you are a god among mortals. And that's what they expect - a solution to a problem that is equal to the best minds of our field. I say this from experience: I was expected to do exactly that, and criticized when I came up with a O(n^3) instead of O(n^2).
    - SamReidHughes 11y ago
      Solving a maze isn't identical to Dijkstra's algorithm. And Dijkstra's algorithm was specifically chosen to be an easy problem with an understandable answer, to show off a new computer. It was never some grand unsolved problem. Yes, it's reasonable to expect somebody with a modern data structures education who mysteriously hadn't heard of it to be able to invent it. Or to reinvent it, having forgotten it, because it's your basic breadth first search with care taken not to get "lost in the woods."
yownie 11y ago
Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scenario when you respond like this.
- Scea91 11y ago
  Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it. Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals. If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are
    - Scea91 11y ago
      None of the employees I would consider working for gives fk about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
      - 11y ago
ts330 11y ago
And this is why there is an impedance mismatch... these people are interviewing for a "computer science" role they're filling when really they want a programmer. The two are different.
- _lce0 11y ago
  As an Information Engineer, you're totally right. Almost in any interview I had, I been asked about CS stuff. Never anything related to my field. I don't blame them. They ask about what they know and what they think it's important, even if it's not relevant to the position.
  - ionforce 11y ago
    > Information Engineer What's this?
sickbeard 11y ago
I think hiring is really steered to avoid hiring idiots. After all it's the interviewer that will have to answer if they hire someone who can't do the job. So all questions are very technical/random and difficult. Most of these people just lookup stuff from textbooks and fling them at interviewees. It eliminates the top and bottom contenders while catching mostly people who just came out of school (or ridicilously smart).
- pklausler 11y ago
  Hiring does need to avoid hiring idiots, but I've found that it's more effective to ask easy questions. Seriously. People who can't program a digital computer have just as much trouble, and there's less opportunity to fake it. Easy questions produce better signals.
  - LordHumungous 10y ago
    I think the best questions are those that have an easy initial answer, but which can be expanded upon into a harder and harder direction. This way you are able to measure candidates in a repeatable way based on how far they get.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I was asked once during an interview to describe a specific problem that I enjoyed solving. And I was told to go in as much depth as I could during the timeslot. I thought that was a great question. It got me talking about something I cared about, knew very well, and showed my normal thought process and development process outside of an interview. It also gave the interviewer plenty of things to ask about, to "quiz" me on if they wanted, or to just make sure I could actually code. If I'm ever in a position to interview someone one-on-one, that's most likely going to be my main question.
    - hunterloftis 11y ago
      I've been asked a similar question which would have been perfect for this author. I had recently published a (terrible, but also terribly fun to write) JavaScript physics engine, which the interviewer saw on GitHub. He began with, "how does it work?" and then continued with probing questions, getting deeper and deeper into the various problems I solved while developing the library, especially focusing on tradeoffs between various choices. By opening the discussion on "my turf," he put me at ease in the conversation, but by driving the interview with very technical questions, he also got the answers he needed about my technical ability.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
simula67 11y ago
I don't interview well. Technology for me is exciting because of its potential to bring happiness to people. If someone tells me that the product I am working on has a security issue because it does not follow some the security portions of the RFC correctly, I will be delighted to read it carefully, study arcane encoding algorthms etc and implement code that brings up the compliance to an acceptable level. If you ask me to devise an algorithm to find the longest increasing subsequence in an array of numbers without any context I won't do so well. Maybe I am conceited, but I can't convince myself I am an inferior programmer because of it. I can make money for your company. I can work well with a diverse of group of people. I take pains to conduct myself with integrity. Shouldn't all that be the central measure of how people are hired ?
- cousin_it 11y ago
  For what it's worth, if you were interviewing for a security job and couldn't solve the longest increasing subsequence problem within a minute, I would probably say "no hire". All security folks I know can solve such problems in their sleep, and it seems really important for the job. Or at least you'd have to show your algorithmic skills in some other way, without relying on "business" rhetoric. Does that sound reasonable?
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    This is a false correlation. What is it about longest increasing subsequence that is relevant to security? If you can't explain, then it has no relevance and means nothing.
    - SamReidHughes 11y ago
      Being intelligent enough to solve the problem is what's relevant.
- Faint 11y ago
  Yeah, but how do you measure it objectively?
pklausler 11y ago
In this case, I think an argument can be made that hiring worked for the firms involved.
- 1stranger 11y ago
  Because of or in spite of?
mankash666 11y ago
The hubris in this response is unbelievably high! Have you ever considered that YOU can also be systemically decimated in an interview designed around your weaknesses? Heck, what if I picked 5 problems from a national level math-Olympiad. You've surey studied high school math right? Should be able to solve them in the 5 hour interview I invite you to!
dclowd9901 11y ago
"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution." In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someone's luck for having been exposed to the problem before or 2) their ability to remember things they don't use day to day. Congratulations, you're hiring lucky people or idiot savants.
- sagichmal 10y ago
  > In under 45 minutes? Yes, absolutely.
- aagha 11y ago
  My friend recently got a job at a fund when her now boss asked her, "what are some of the more recent innovations in the Haswell chip set that might be advantageous to a fund". She had literally just read an article about this--out of pure coincidence--the day before, and she was able to recall it when the question was asked. She was offered the job on the spot.
akhilcacharya 11y ago
> No reasonable interviewer expects you to recollect breadth-first search flawlessly, on demand, onto a whiteboard. Wait, really? I've had to do more than that just for internships, the bar for perfection at many companies is just that high or higher. I agree with the rest of what you're saying.
ljw1001 11y ago
Hiring is broken if it weeds out people who don't interview well, rather than people who don't code well.
- sarchila 11y ago
  It's also broken if it simply selects for people who can only code well - with little-to-no insight into how well they collaborate and work with a team.
bogomipz 11y ago
Hiring IS in fact broken, dude. Did you read his whole piece? Its not just pulling questions off of hacker rank or writing full data structure implementation from scratch at a white board while being time or whatever. The author also mentions the culture of unprofessional recruiters and interviewers who show no interest in the candidate or selling him on the job(yes It's a two way street.) If someone takes time out of their day to talk to you or come to your office, you owe them a little professional courtesy and respect. I think lots of these companies have no idea how poorly some people are representing them and their company during the interview/recruiting process. And these aren't just early stage startups that might not know any better, many of these are Twitters, Netflex et al as well. So yeah its broken. How do you know his skills aren't useful to the market? That seems like a terrible thing to say.
aagha 11y ago
Are you frickin' kidding me? If you think that AT LEAST one part of the hiring "process" isn't broken, you're living in lala land. Lets just pick one: recruiters. You're telling me that every single tech recruiter you've come across is excellent at what they do, an amazing and decent human being and has amazing communication skills?! (Generally/Most of the time) Recruiters don't--and yes, they should--care about candidates. They're interested in pocketing their cut of the candidates salary, so as soon as the company says they're not interested in the candidate, the recruiter is done. Most people don't get call-backs even informing them that they're out of the running, much less a reason as to why they weren't deemed qualified. Recruiters--especially tech recruiters are NOTORIOUS for being bottom-dwelling scum. I actually know a few good recruiters, but they are--by far--in the minority. The fact that you don't recognize this indicates that you've either had extraordinary/atypical results, or aren't very familiar with the "process". Dude. Edit: spelling, puncturation
matzipan 11y ago
The 960 day github streak is an illustration of his passion to code, of the fact that he is doing it for the pleasure of coding. He said it himself that it's not there to show any skill.

bcook 11y ago

Additionally, a good programmer (or worker in general) should be good at much more than programming; like being able to collaborate & socialize with other team members & management without immediately resorting to "Fuck you, I quit". The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder...

tobz 11y ago
Just out of curiosity: how many bad interviews, or interviews with a rejection at the end, have you had in a row? Or total?
- bcook 11y ago
  Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.
  - tobz 11y ago
    Sure, but what I was trying to get at is: if you had a string of interviews that felt "bad", and/or rejections, that you would probably be a little sour, and that's what I get from the article. It doesn't strike me that the author is particularly socially inept. As someone who watched previous coworkers, who are older, go through the interview ringer, I can sympathize with the author on the pigeonhole one can get stuck in due to seemingly trivial reasons: I don't have a classic CS background, people think I'm past my prime, etc. These aren't imaginary problems, and I struggle to believe that I would be all "go-getter" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" after continually being rejected, too.
    - bcook 11y ago
      I guess my confusion stems from the article's lack of a conclusion. Yes, _blank_ is sub-optimal, but how did you overcome the obstacle?
  - wott 11y ago
    And what are your social skills? You, who can't even see that the "fuck you, I quit" attitude does not come up first out of nothing but after a series of rejection and nonsensical situations, i.e. that it is a consequence of successive experiences and not the reason of these experiences. You, who decide unilaterally from your failure to understand the logic of events in a blog post, that the blogger is once and for all "socially inept". Great social skills without a bit of understanding and empathy, no doubt. Gee, I am also very tired of people for which stuff went well, and think it is be the same for others. Can't you even imagine there is a variety of situations out there? Can't you imagine it may happen to you one day? Do you think people who encounter this kind of problems never had a shiny position earlier, and their "social skills" were considered perfect before some conceited internet stranger decided they were "socially inept"? And you dare to talk about "experience", seriously?
    - bcook 11y ago
      You started your post with a veiled ad hominem attack, which instantly sets an illogical, angry tone... :( Yeah, I have no social skills, so what? I may also have a below average mind, so what? I did not call the author "socially inept"; that sentence was a hypothetical example of how an individual's incredible technical skills can be overshadowed by other problems. I am sorry if I offended you. I thought my posts were critical but logical...

emerongi 11y ago

I don't think many software engineers deal with "computer science problems" in their everyday jobs. GitHub stars are worth much more IMO. It shows that other developers value your work. That says a lot. In the end, we have to realize that most developers are just average. Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
maxxxxx 11y ago
Most developers are average and most jobs are average. How many people really get to think about breadth first or binary trees daily? Most of us spend their days wondering why Chrome doesn't render a div in the expected way or why some API doesn't do what it should and finding workarounds.
unoti 11y ago
> Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly? Never underestimate the value of hard work, preparation, and a can-do attitude. It eclipses natural talent every time.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  The hardest workers with the most successful can-do attitudes will simply reject your company if you ask them to do bullshit like algorithm trivia or HackerRank tests. Such trivia is the opposite of useful hard work; preparation for it truly wastes time that could be better spent on other things; a can-do attitude would imply rejecting or ignoring requests to do such things. As a result, the people who actually do take the time to complete it will not be completing it because of a good attitude or work ethic, yet you will mistakenly believe they are.
  - serge2k 11y ago

akadien 11y ago

> A few popular open-source projects don't necessarily speak to your talent as a programmer. If having source code and demonstrated traction for a few open source projects to review don't speak to one's talent as a programmer, then what does?

cmdkeen 11y ago
"The first round had four interviewers in the room. It was an open-ended discussion about me, my accomplishments, my projects. To be honest, I was not prepared for this interview format, so my presentation was probably all over the place" A professional programmer, the one hired by a company to work alongside other professionals - as opposed to one working by themselves on small projects - is capable of presenting previous experiences and applying them to new problems. Unless you want to be put in the basement and handed small chunks of work to solve. It's about how you mentor juniors, resolve disagreements on how to proceed, deal with set backs and changing requirements. Given the whole post is about how terrible the interviewing process is the above quote is the most telling, and backs up the GPs point - not being prepared to have a conversation about your previous experience when interviewing for a job is pretty bad.

robbiemitchell 11y ago

What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?

mkozlows 11y ago
Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they can tweak CSS until it works right-ish, or know the particular arcane implementation details of installing some WordPress module, they can do the job. But there are a lot more positions where you want someone who can solve the problems that need solving, pick up new technologies as needed, and just generally be a flexible and productive contributor in a way that doesn't relate to the fiddly details of one particular technology.
- falcolas 11y ago
  > they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out If you have the "mental dexterity" to coming up with your own solution which is identical to Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithms in terms of complexity within an hour interview, you are a god among mortals. And that's what they expect - a solution to a problem that is equal to the best minds of our field. I say this from experience: I was expected to do exactly that, and criticized when I came up with a O(n^3) instead of O(n^2).
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    Solving a maze isn't identical to Dijkstra's algorithm. And Dijkstra's algorithm was specifically chosen to be an easy problem with an understandable answer, to show off a new computer. It was never some grand unsolved problem. Yes, it's reasonable to expect somebody with a modern data structures education who mysteriously hadn't heard of it to be able to invent it. Or to reinvent it, having forgotten it, because it's your basic breadth first search with care taken not to get "lost in the woods."

yownie 11y ago

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scenario when you respond like this.

Scea91 11y ago
Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
- unprepare 11y ago
  IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it. Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals. If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are
  - Scea91 11y ago
    None of the employees I would consider working for gives fk about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
    - 11y ago

ts330 11y ago

And this is why there is an impedance mismatch... these people are interviewing for a "computer science" role they're filling when really they want a programmer. The two are different.

_lce0 11y ago
As an Information Engineer, you're totally right. Almost in any interview I had, I been asked about CS stuff. Never anything related to my field. I don't blame them. They ask about what they know and what they think it's important, even if it's not relevant to the position.
- ionforce 11y ago
  > Information Engineer What's this?

sickbeard 11y ago

I think hiring is really steered to avoid hiring idiots. After all it's the interviewer that will have to answer if they hire someone who can't do the job. So all questions are very technical/random and difficult. Most of these people just lookup stuff from textbooks and fling them at interviewees. It eliminates the top and bottom contenders while catching mostly people who just came out of school (or ridicilously smart).

pklausler 11y ago
Hiring does need to avoid hiring idiots, but I've found that it's more effective to ask easy questions. Seriously. People who can't program a digital computer have just as much trouble, and there's less opportunity to fake it. Easy questions produce better signals.
- LordHumungous 10y ago
  I think the best questions are those that have an easy initial answer, but which can be expanded upon into a harder and harder direction. This way you are able to measure candidates in a repeatable way based on how far they get.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I was asked once during an interview to describe a specific problem that I enjoyed solving. And I was told to go in as much depth as I could during the timeslot. I thought that was a great question. It got me talking about something I cared about, knew very well, and showed my normal thought process and development process outside of an interview. It also gave the interviewer plenty of things to ask about, to "quiz" me on if they wanted, or to just make sure I could actually code. If I'm ever in a position to interview someone one-on-one, that's most likely going to be my main question.
  - hunterloftis 11y ago
    I've been asked a similar question which would have been perfect for this author. I had recently published a (terrible, but also terribly fun to write) JavaScript physics engine, which the interviewer saw on GitHub. He began with, "how does it work?" and then continued with probing questions, getting deeper and deeper into the various problems I solved while developing the library, especially focusing on tradeoffs between various choices. By opening the discussion on "my turf," he put me at ease in the conversation, but by driving the interview with very technical questions, he also got the answers he needed about my technical ability.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

simula67 11y ago

I don't interview well. Technology for me is exciting because of its potential to bring happiness to people. If someone tells me that the product I am working on has a security issue because it does not follow some the security portions of the RFC correctly, I will be delighted to read it carefully, study arcane encoding algorthms etc and implement code that brings up the compliance to an acceptable level. If you ask me to devise an algorithm to find the longest increasing subsequence in an array of numbers without any context I won't do so well. Maybe I am conceited, but I can't convince myself I am an inferior programmer because of it. I can make money for your company. I can work well with a diverse of group of people. I take pains to conduct myself with integrity. Shouldn't all that be the central measure of how people are hired ?

cousin_it 11y ago
For what it's worth, if you were interviewing for a security job and couldn't solve the longest increasing subsequence problem within a minute, I would probably say "no hire". All security folks I know can solve such problems in their sleep, and it seems really important for the job. Or at least you'd have to show your algorithmic skills in some other way, without relying on "business" rhetoric. Does that sound reasonable?
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  This is a false correlation. What is it about longest increasing subsequence that is relevant to security? If you can't explain, then it has no relevance and means nothing.
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    Being intelligent enough to solve the problem is what's relevant.
Faint 11y ago
Yeah, but how do you measure it objectively?

pklausler 11y ago

In this case, I think an argument can be made that hiring worked for the firms involved.

1stranger 11y ago
Because of or in spite of?

mankash666 11y ago

The hubris in this response is unbelievably high! Have you ever considered that YOU can also be systemically decimated in an interview designed around your weaknesses? Heck, what if I picked 5 problems from a national level math-Olympiad. You've surey studied high school math right? Should be able to solve them in the 5 hour interview I invite you to!

dclowd9901 11y ago

"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution." In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someone's luck for having been exposed to the problem before or 2) their ability to remember things they don't use day to day. Congratulations, you're hiring lucky people or idiot savants.

sagichmal 10y ago
> In under 45 minutes? Yes, absolutely.
aagha 11y ago
My friend recently got a job at a fund when her now boss asked her, "what are some of the more recent innovations in the Haswell chip set that might be advantageous to a fund". She had literally just read an article about this--out of pure coincidence--the day before, and she was able to recall it when the question was asked. She was offered the job on the spot.

akhilcacharya 11y ago

> No reasonable interviewer expects you to recollect breadth-first search flawlessly, on demand, onto a whiteboard. Wait, really? I've had to do more than that just for internships, the bar for perfection at many companies is just that high or higher. I agree with the rest of what you're saying.

ljw1001 11y ago

Hiring is broken if it weeds out people who don't interview well, rather than people who don't code well.

sarchila 11y ago
It's also broken if it simply selects for people who can only code well - with little-to-no insight into how well they collaborate and work with a team.

bogomipz 11y ago

Hiring IS in fact broken, dude. Did you read his whole piece? Its not just pulling questions off of hacker rank or writing full data structure implementation from scratch at a white board while being time or whatever. The author also mentions the culture of unprofessional recruiters and interviewers who show no interest in the candidate or selling him on the job(yes It's a two way street.) If someone takes time out of their day to talk to you or come to your office, you owe them a little professional courtesy and respect. I think lots of these companies have no idea how poorly some people are representing them and their company during the interview/recruiting process. And these aren't just early stage startups that might not know any better, many of these are Twitters, Netflex et al as well. So yeah its broken. How do you know his skills aren't useful to the market? That seems like a terrible thing to say.

aagha 11y ago

Are you frickin' kidding me? If you think that AT LEAST one part of the hiring "process" isn't broken, you're living in lala land. Lets just pick one: recruiters. You're telling me that every single tech recruiter you've come across is excellent at what they do, an amazing and decent human being and has amazing communication skills?! (Generally/Most of the time) Recruiters don't--and yes, they should--care about candidates. They're interested in pocketing their cut of the candidates salary, so as soon as the company says they're not interested in the candidate, the recruiter is done. Most people don't get call-backs even informing them that they're out of the running, much less a reason as to why they weren't deemed qualified. Recruiters--especially tech recruiters are NOTORIOUS for being bottom-dwelling scum. I actually know a few good recruiters, but they are--by far--in the minority. The fact that you don't recognize this indicates that you've either had extraordinary/atypical results, or aren't very familiar with the "process". Dude. Edit: spelling, puncturation

matzipan 11y ago

The 960 day github streak is an illustration of his passion to code, of the fact that he is doing it for the pleasure of coding. He said it himself that it's not there to show any skill.