9 ms·

Hiring Is Broken and Isn’t Worth Fixing

90 points by daigoba66 10y ago

sharemywin 10y ago
I don't think I have a problem with organizations like google that need to filter candidates. For all I care roll dice. It's companies that have positions open for 6 months waiting on the "one." Great advice for hiring the first 50-100 hires after that your hurting your self. You just need meat that point. What do you think of our trash guy he has 4 phds and we pay him 400k a year.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  I bet he's got a lot to say about the organization's waste management practices.
draw_down 10y ago
The point about turning the tables in a bad interview is an interesting one, but this is mostly "Stop wanting to work for Google ya dummies!" OK, but the problem isn't just how Google hires.
beat 10y ago
Reminds me of something a former co-worker told an incoming revolving-door CTO. He said there are only three things an employer can offer to recruit great technical talent - a great work environment, really interesting work, or lots of money. (Our former employer had a crap environment and dull work) If you need to recruit, you need to offer at least one, preferably all three.
ryandrake 10y ago
> Start by telling recruiters, up front, that you don’t do trivia interviews and the like. Be firm and explicit about this, as in, “if they start asking me to describe merge sort, I’m going to thank them for their time and tell them I need to go.” Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot? >“Hmm… you know what? I’m really sorry, but I think maybe we got our wires crossed somewhere here. I’ve had experience on the hiring side of this sort of interview style in the past, and I’ve seen it result in some really sub-optimal matches, so I’ve adopted a policy of having certain deal breaker cues in the interviewing process. So at this point I can safely say I’d be unlikely to accept an offer, and I really wouldn’t want to waste any more of your time." Expected response: "Well........ Bye." I appreciate the effort put into wording that nicely, but really all you're saying is, "Company, you need me more than I need you, and I expect YOU to jump through MY hoops." This is only true when you're a one-in-a-million talent. It's not going to work for the other 999,999 people.
- pkaye 10y ago
  I agree with everything you said. In my last company, someone was hired into the software team with such a "my way or the highway" type of personality and despite being technically strong, caused so much damage to the rest of the team structure that the net was a negative gain.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot. The thing is, not all companies do this. And there a LOT of other companies besides Google and The Usual Suspects. Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers. And they are probably less likely to do the whole "grill you on Data Structures 101" thing than Google. It's something to consider...
  - 20years 10y ago
    "Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers." Exactly this! IMO these are some of the best types of jobs too. You generally have real problems to solve and can see the impact you are making in the business.
    - Terr_ 10y ago
      That's if the business lets you make an impact, since you'll probably be in a "cost center" etc...
      - busterarm 10y ago
        Very much disagree. I'm in one of these kind of businesses and I pretty much work directly with the COO and have a lot of say in how we get things done. Get in, figure out how things work and how you can be useful and then build a reputation of getting things done.
nostrademons 10y ago
"Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?" So...make tech even more of an old-boys club than it already is? Because that's what people will be complaining about if the only way to get a job is to know someone or be known. Really, there isn't a solution here. Any system you use to allocate desirable jobs to an oversupply of applicants will result in folks who believe they were unjustly excluded. What would fix the problem is for people to define "desirable" in different ways, with a bias toward "the place that I actually ended up at". Love what you do, don't do what you love.
- mazelife 10y ago
  I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your operations would be getting to know college kids." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it? When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      Also, some companies do do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else. Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through other markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are other people, they cry foul. (Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)
askyourmother 10y ago
This actually does work. If you do a little homework, there are employers who eschew the googly-algo-cs-wanna-job bullshit, they talk to you as a person, want to know about your experience, drives, values, and they are usually great places to work. The last two jobs I took were with companies that treat people with respect, and I would now never go back to a big American megacorps HR drone hiring tech test filter rubbish again.
- mazelife 10y ago
  Second this. I'm in my 30s now, and I've realized that companies that treat people with respect don't hire this way and that's the kind of place I'm happy at. If that limits me to work for companies under a certain size, I'm OK with that.
cjcenizal 10y ago
The message I get out of this post is: "Know what you want, and be uncompromising in your search for it." If a company is interviewing you wrong, then the company is disqualified from your list of places you'd like to work. You can draw up a similar list of criteria (e.g. has an open source presence, has a remote-first culture, uses JIRA, doesn't use JIRA, has low technical debt, has high unit test coverage) with which you can assess culture/role fit. If you find the companies you're interviewing with consistently fail your test, then bring your pattern-identifying skills to bear and figure out why. Maybe all of the companies you're interviewing at have something in common (they're all startups, they're all Fortune 500s, the CEO isn't technical, the roles are too senior/junior). In which case you should break the pattern and apply for work at different types of companies. Or possibly the pattern lies within yourself. Do you consistently fail the same kind of technical tests? Does your answer to a specific question ("Can you show us a large codebase you've worked on? Oh, you can't?") tend to elicit the same negative answer? Then maybe you should focus on strengthening those weaknesses.
brianbarker 10y ago
Like standardized testing, interviewing is a bullshit measure of what you really know. Like standardized testing, the way to win is to get good at taking the tests. Even if you disapprove, this is how you get a job. I've accepted this.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I think it's worth noting that the reason you have the degree isn't to show knowledge, it's to show you're willing to complete a process that's out of your control, but you do it anyway because that's what is expected. The ideals are always nice to have, but if I have to fight with a new hire over every built-in process because he doesn't immediately see the value in it, I'm going to get irritated at him.
  - alanwatts 10y ago
    What if that built-in process is counter productive, obsolete, or doesn't have the value you really thought it did anymore, like that of many college degrees? Mindless adherence to group think and legacy processes in the long run is a recipe for disaster.
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      True, in the long run. But what usually happens is that the new hire takes a week or a month to decide that a process is stupid and wasteful, and shoots his/her mouth off about what a stupid process it is, and burns a bunch of bridges. Maybe this should be a rule of thumb: Don't criticize anything during your first six months. If it's your first job out of school, don't criticize anything during your first year. Learn what's really going on, and why things are the way they are. Then you can criticize.
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      I'm all for constructive criticism, and if a process is burning more money than it is generating I'd speak my mind too. But many of our new fish (at least around here) don't like how much of a stickler I can be for proper documentation, good naming conventions, using the bug tracking system etc. They see it as pointless bureaucracy because they don't report to our boss, who when he asks "how are things going" likes to hear and see more than me just saying "good." While there are plenty of processes out there that likely don't need to be, there are I'd venture a lot more where the value generated isn't necessarily obvious to the guys in the trenches. I'm happy to explain this to anyone who asks (and have) and we occasionally even have an issue crop up where hey, look how useful this "busywork" you did earlier is right now, but the point is to a certain degree you should expect to simply obey the stated rules even if you don't IMMEDIATELY see their value. It's just respectful. I'd also say it's far too easy to conflate "mindless obedience" and "respectful behavior" these days.
emeraldd 10y ago
The problem I see with his solution is on the other side. Alot of very good/creative developers and technical people tend to be of a non-social sort. As a result, restricting yourself to known people will inherently miss the people who don't move into the "scene" (whatever that happens to be). This just leads to a different set of problems and ultimately results in a "broken" process as well, just a different kind of broken.
ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
Looking at a github profile would take about the same amount of time as walking to the conference room to conduct the interview. So I'm not buying the "you're wasting interviewers time with that stuff" line. Can also serve as a good source of questions - can the candidate answer questions about his/her own code? Much more meaningful then some riddles or BST traversal.
- askyourmother 10y ago
  It cuts two ways - if the hiring company expects me to waste, sorry, invest, my time reading their corp pages to make sure I have learnt all about them pre-interview, they can damn well take the time to read my profile and code snippets.
skybrian 10y ago
Maybe filtering out people who won't play the game is better for both sides. After all, the company will be asking you to do other things you disagree with. Getting things done often means compromising on stuff that doesn't matter in order to do the stuff that does. It's an important job skill. This is a clearer signal than "cultural fit" (whatever that means).
known 10y ago
Why interviewers are NOT formally trained to conduct interviews?
rm999 10y ago
The current state of hiring reflects two facts: 1. A single bad hire can do immense damage to a team and organization. I never fully appreciated this until I saw the consequences of bad hires, and as a hiring manager it's one of my biggest fears. 2. Labor laws and HR exist. You can't just willy-nilly fire people, there's a process in any well-functioning company to protect employees from management and vise versa. As a hiring manager this will generally reflect poorly on you. This has caused interviewers, who are in the position of power, to make the process thorough and straining to protect themselves. In many ways my philosophy has been shifting to the article's, which is to grow much more slowly and carefully. I don't think this scales well, but it leads to a personal process I can feel good about. I've been networking to meet people within the community, and I hope my future hires either come through personal knowledge of them or vetted referrals. Google is actually capable of this kind of interview, but it's rare. I was referred to a manager a few years ago by an ex-coworker, and the whole process was great. I met the whole team, I went to lunch with the manager, he told me I could contact him if I had any questions, etc. I didn't end up joining, but I left with a very positive opinion of the manager and team.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Some percentage of bad hires are inevitable. I think a better solution is to fire them quickly rather than torture all candidates. Most dev jobs are at-will, no?
  - btilly 10y ago
    The problem is that pissed off ex-employees are able to file lawsuits claiming that they were fired for any of a number of reasons that you can't fire them for. (Race, gender, religion, ...) Defending these lawsuits, even when they are without merit, is an expensive PITA. And the process can turn up all sorts of stuff in public that is a PR disaster. This happens sufficiently often that HR has responded with policies to carefully document exactly why people are being fired. Furthermore they often try to get fired employees to sign contracts saying that they won't sue. These policies make it considerably more difficult to fire people.
golergka 10y ago
The funny thing is, when people say things like "hiring is broken", they usually mean different things. Hiring is very different in different markets and parts of the world. I'm desperately looking for competent developers right now. I don't ask HR for help, and I don't really filter by CV: anyone who considers himself a "senior" is going to get a skype call from me. But the first thing I give them is an assignment, 4-8 hours of work for a candidate of desired skill level. I tell candidates this estimate right away, and after sending it out several dozens times already I haven't met a single one who would say "sorry, I'm to busy to work on that for free". Before starting this process, I was sure this will going to be a problem, and I was sincerely surprised that it didn't happen once.
- nat 10y ago
  That's because pushing back against a potential employer like that is the HN version of Internet Toughguy Syndrome. You might also be surprised how few people respond to a mugging attempt with a well-placed roundhouse kick.
dominotw 10y ago
Hiring is broken because people follow what google does. Once google stops asking whiteboard, big o questions hiring will be "fixed". As simple as that. This is the only to fix it, we don't need endless discussions every week about this.
- askyourmother 10y ago
  A thought experiment, how quickly would goog react if every potential hire walked away, emailed old Laszlo and told him to stick his tests. Might push forward the seed change in hiring the industry needs...
- yolesaber 10y ago
  That will never happen. Google is obsessed with their academic, whiteboard coding procedure to a scary degree. It's a point of pride for recruiters to mention how intense it is. I'm going onsite to interview with them next week and they bombard you with training brochures, invitation to live interview training exercises, links to books etc. It's part of their brand now. Anecdata, but all the people I know who work at Google tell me the interview is the hardest part. One of them spends their time fixing low-hanging bugs in Python
  - dominotw 10y ago
    >That will never happen. Interviews will never be fixed. case closed.
emodendroket 10y ago
> Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities? Excellent. As we all know, the tech industry's biggest problem is a lack of insularity and out-of-control diversity and this strategy is sure to help.
db1024 10y ago
I recently interviewed at Google and one coding interview had the most adversarial interviewer that I've ever encountered. It started with the interviewer complaining that he was busy. Everything from the language I chose to each line I wrote received complaints. By time we got past the first question, I thought maybe this was actually a behavioral interview in disguise to see how I'd deal with adversarial coworkers. I got an offer from them, but I declined without hesitation. I interviewed at Facebook and that process was great. At least one of my coding interviewers did read/skim my github code beforehand. Woo, keep it up!
- Benjammer 10y ago
  A big part of dealing with adversarial co-workers is team structure and managerial support, how does a 1 on 1 conversation with someone you've never met even really test your ability to work with "difficult" people? It seems more like seeing how much bullshit you can put up with at that point (this is NOT the same to me as "dealing with an adversarial co-worker"). There's already a baseline of bullshit to deal with everywhere anyway, it's part of almost any job. If a company thinks there's so much bullshit and/or difficult people to deal with that they need to screen for it during interviews, that seems like a HUGE turnoff to me wanting to work there.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    It's the same as companies that purposely make interviews more stressful than they need to be "to see how you work under pressure". They fail to realize that not all stress is the same and that interview stress is different, in some cases very different, from on-the-job stress.
    - bluetomcat 10y ago
      I am very fed up with the whole "ability to work under pressure" expectation. Companies that emphasize this almost always have a totally broken work organization process. At the end of the day, programmers are not emergency workers and need some rest and calmness to do their work efficiently.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
Spot on, I've independently decided that I won't submit to brain-teasers and white-board coding (diagramming yes) any longer. A company can look at my online work, read my written communication, have a nice chat on the phone, and then perhaps can hire me for a short contract to write a component to see how things work out. If they don't they don't have to pay. I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also, and will experiment with that. For the last five years I haven't gotten any work from startups (even though I specialize in python and javascript) and wonder if it is due to the fact that I don't dress like a lumberjack and am not as young as I used to be.
- robodale 10y ago
  I agree with what you said 100%.
- BookmarkSaver 10y ago
  >I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also I've never considered live video of me a requirement in any professional or technical context a requirement unless I was actually doing something visual that explicitly requires it. When on the job I've never even bothered asking if it was ok to not have my camera on, and in interviews I've never thought twice about letting the interviewer know that I won't have a video stream up. Sometimes its because I genuinely can't (either poor internet or the fact that I don't have a webcam for my desktop) or I just don't feel like it. It's not about some high-minded principle regarding discrimination or a tactical decision or anything, I just don't think that video conferences add anything to audio in any situation except visual presentations or personal/emotional contacts (GF or family). I've been in a LOT of live calls in a lot of contexts and I've never noticed the other party having any issue with this, no interviewer has detectably taken it negatively. I'd also like to add that I don't always have my camera off, just that I don't feel any pressure to justify myself when it is turned off, which is most of the time.
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    On about 75% of my recent Skype sessions the interviewers turned on their cameras immediately and requested that I do the same. Thought nothing of it until reading claims of ageism here, only noting that I have personally received zero offers from those companies. I'm not out-of-shape or unprofessional-looking either if it matters. Coincidence? I don't know.
programLyrique 10y ago
If you have no time, automate it. If reading/skimming github repositories is too long, maybe developing visualisation tools, machine learning tools would help for that. I wonder why Google has not already done that, although they are known to automate their system administration heavily, for instance.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
Ugh, just let people choose their tech interview. - If they have public code, talk about that. Maybe ask them to add a feature onto THEIR code. - If they have no code, give them the option of take-home work or a whiteboard test or a live coding session. - If they have no code and don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and you are both senior level, then just talk about work. It should be pretty clear whether they'll be a fit. - If they have no code, don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and are NOT senior level, you should probably pass. People will probably feel better and do better in the interview when they feel they can have a choice in how they are examined because they can plan to show their strengths. The only downside is that with this is it becomes a bit more difficult to track how well your interviews go with a grading rubric or something.
- k__ 10y ago
  Often I ask myself, why do employers set up the interview? I mean, both parties want something. The best interviews I had (now I'm freelancing so I don't have to do them anymore) were when the employer had no idea how to interview. They asked me what I did and what they do and told me what they want from me. I asked them how they work and what they have to offer. The moment they tried to set up some interviewing process, with special questions asked by people with no technical skills and strange tests, everything went downhill...
  - bluetomcat 10y ago
    I've been to some of the most honest interviews when a small tech team needs a new member with a slightly different expertise to theirs. Like, "we implemented a major part of our system, but we need someone to help us in this or that regard". It makes a ton of a difference in terms of mutual respect and friendliness.
- vitd 10y ago
  Yeah, I concur. There are a million other ways to test someone's knowledge. Rather than having them write a merge sort (for example), giving them one that either doesn't work or is suboptimal is a much better way to assess their abilities. (Or maybe pick something more real-world than a merge sort since nobody writes their own sorts anymore.) But you get to see how they deal with existing code, how good they are at debugging, and things like that. Those skills are probably going to be used more than writing new stuff from scratch anyway.
pklausler 10y ago
So many "hiring is broken" stories lately. I sympathize. Interviewing is typically not fun. However, I'd like y'all to consider the problem from the other side of the table. I conduct a lot of technical interviews. I desperately want to avoid bad hires. How do I avoid the bad hires? It's a really hard problem and there are consequences from both false positive and false negative signals. Google asks "big-O" type questions not because they're shibboleths or useless trivia. It's practical knowledge in an environment where things often have to scale up to absurd degrees. Most candidates haven't had experience in that kind of environment, so interviewers are looking for signs of aptitude. Knowing which kinds of algorithms can scale up is a sign of that aptitude for those kinds of problems. Lately, I've been asking more questions from the domain of what I call "programming in the small" -- the kinds of things that crop up when actually writing or reviewing or debugging code. I do this because I've learned that the ability to construct an airtight Boolean predicate expression to test for a well-defined condition is a survival skill for good programmers. If you're a good candidate, then I'm sincerely sorry that I waste some time (for both of us!) talking with you about some basic stuff rather than having a more interesting technical conversation.
- bluetomcat 10y ago
  Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless. If I have provided a GitHub account with some interesting code, then sure as hell I have demonstrated that I am able to compose "airtight" boolean expressions. Just like I have to be informed about your company before interviewing, take your time to inform yourself about me.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless. The amusing thing about this is, from what I can tell, Google actually only needs a small number of people with the deep knowledge. Much of the work there still involves things like "developing CRUD apps", just on top of the platforms and infrastructure the smaller group developed for it. Which led to a characterization I once heard from an ex-Googler of the company as a place where "they hire top CS Ph.Ds to do incredibly boring code-monkey work".
geebee 10y ago
This was a good article. I do think that the data structures and algorithms whiteboard exams amount to more than "trivia" and I do think there is value in them (my problem with them as I've posted on this board, is that because our industry lacks a proper exam respected widely by our peers, we have to re-take this exam over and over. It would be like an actuary having to demonstrate a knowledge of calculus and linear algebra on the whiteboard over and over, throughout a career - no wonder developers are eventually fatigued by it and stop wanting to play the game). That said, I like his solution. Just don't do it. I'll still take the algorithm exam, but I won't do take-homes anymore, and I may have missed out on some good opportunities because of it. I just won't do this, largely because it's too large a time investment on my part without a comparable investment from the company in evaluating my application. Here's the problem - we don't work in a free labor market. I've done my 12 rounds on HN with people about this, but here it is again - we work in a field where silicon valley employers have convinced congress that there is a "shortage" of programmers. This has led to legislation that allows employers to bestow the right to live and work in the US on employees, and the employer retains that right for the duration of the employee's tenure. It is possible to move from one job to another under limited circumstances, but by and large, the visa terms don't really allow the worker to change fields, quit and start a company, or pursue a different career path entirely. Because it is generally difficult to immigrate to the US without family reunification or a few other insider tracks, tech visas provide one path to do this. As a result, high tech employers are in a position of amazing power over their workforce. They really can say "we will allow you into the US if you study what we say you should study, interview how we say you should interview, work on the projects we say you should work on, live where we say you should live, and accept the salary we say you should receive". Yes, there are a few requirements on salary, but without the right to quit and leave (including with no job lined up), the employee's bargaining power is greatly reduced. Now, some of us are indeed free agents as individuals, but until all of are free to choose our own path in life, as long as substantial numbers of us are not allowed to do this by law, employers will not have to make the adjustments the market demands when all workers are free. This is why I support general skilled immigration, but I oppose putting corporations in control over a worker's right live in the US, including determining the circumstances under which the worker is allowed to arrive initially. Nobody owes me a job under my conditions, and I accept that when I refuse to participate in certain types of interview processes. But nobody owes a corporation a worker under their conditions, and they really seem to be having trouble with this idea.
loserpenguin15 10y ago
One thing that I think is commonly missing from these discussions about hiring is the fact that most hiring processes (especially at these large companies) are not designed around letting all qualified applicants in. They are designed to ensure that unqualified applicants don't get in, even at the cost of passing up good candidates. The negative cost associated with one bad hire can often outway the gain from one great higher. So if a company has to pass up on some great candidates in order to maintain quality they are going to do it. Are there better ways than trivia questions and whiteboard coding to prevent bad hires? Of Course. One of my co-workers brings up the hiring practice at his old job. They would fly all potential candidates out to their office and have them work (paid) with the team for one day. From there, they would take their top picks and have them work (paid) for a week. From that group they would choose who to hire. My co-worker always remarks about how great of a process it was. However they were also only ever hiring for one or two positions a year. When you're trying to hire as many qualified applicants as possible, these kinds of in depth interviews just aren't efficient enough. So the negative cost of hiring a bad applicant, in addition to the problem of trying to hire as many people as possible with minimal cost leaves us with interview techniques that don't cater to everyone. But they do do a good job of weeding out bad applicants, even if that does mean passing on good applicants. Now I'm not saying this is the right way to interview, I just think this aspect is commonly left out of these discussions.

90 points by daigoba66 10y ago

I don't think I have a problem with organizations like google that need to filter candidates. For all I care roll dice. It's companies that have positions open for 6 months waiting on the "one." Great advice for hiring the first 50-100 hires after that your hurting your self. You just need meat that point. What do you think of our trash guy he has 4 phds and we pay him 400k a year.

jschwartzi 10y ago
I bet he's got a lot to say about the organization's waste management practices.

draw_down 10y ago

The point about turning the tables in a bad interview is an interesting one, but this is mostly "Stop wanting to work for Google ya dummies!" OK, but the problem isn't just how Google hires.

beat 10y ago

Reminds me of something a former co-worker told an incoming revolving-door CTO. He said there are only three things an employer can offer to recruit great technical talent - a great work environment, really interesting work, or lots of money. (Our former employer had a crap environment and dull work) If you need to recruit, you need to offer at least one, preferably all three.

ryandrake 10y ago

> Start by telling recruiters, up front, that you don’t do trivia interviews and the like. Be firm and explicit about this, as in, “if they start asking me to describe merge sort, I’m going to thank them for their time and tell them I need to go.” Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot? >“Hmm… you know what? I’m really sorry, but I think maybe we got our wires crossed somewhere here. I’ve had experience on the hiring side of this sort of interview style in the past, and I’ve seen it result in some really sub-optimal matches, so I’ve adopted a policy of having certain deal breaker cues in the interviewing process. So at this point I can safely say I’d be unlikely to accept an offer, and I really wouldn’t want to waste any more of your time." Expected response: "Well........ Bye." I appreciate the effort put into wording that nicely, but really all you're saying is, "Company, you need me more than I need you, and I expect YOU to jump through MY hoops." This is only true when you're a one-in-a-million talent. It's not going to work for the other 999,999 people.

pkaye 10y ago
I agree with everything you said. In my last company, someone was hired into the software team with such a "my way or the highway" type of personality and despite being technically strong, caused so much damage to the rest of the team structure that the net was a negative gain.
mindcrime 10y ago
Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job, or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a shot. The thing is, not all companies do this. And there a LOT of other companies besides Google and The Usual Suspects. Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers. And they are probably less likely to do the whole "grill you on Data Structures 101" thing than Google. It's something to consider...
- 20years 10y ago
  "Heck, there are a lot of companies that aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers." Exactly this! IMO these are some of the best types of jobs too. You generally have real problems to solve and can see the impact you are making in the business.
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    That's if the business lets you make an impact, since you'll probably be in a "cost center" etc...
    - busterarm 10y ago
      Very much disagree. I'm in one of these kind of businesses and I pretty much work directly with the COO and have a lot of say in how we get things done. Get in, figure out how things work and how you can be useful and then build a reputation of getting things done.

nostrademons 10y ago

"Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?" So...make tech even more of an old-boys club than it already is? Because that's what people will be complaining about if the only way to get a job is to know someone or be known. Really, there isn't a solution here. Any system you use to allocate desirable jobs to an oversupply of applicants will result in folks who believe they were unjustly excluded. What would fix the problem is for people to define "desirable" in different ways, with a bias toward "the place that I actually ended up at". Love what you do, don't do what you love.

mazelife 10y ago
I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe part of your operations would be getting to know college kids." (Emphasis mine.) What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form relationships with the people who build and maintain it? When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable' in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Also, some companies do do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25% student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street; if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else. Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent is. They usually do so through other markers of status (where you went to school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that those beautiful unique snowflakes are other people, they cry foul. (Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly, while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes - like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them fairly" approach tends to work better.)

askyourmother 10y ago

This actually does work. If you do a little homework, there are employers who eschew the googly-algo-cs-wanna-job bullshit, they talk to you as a person, want to know about your experience, drives, values, and they are usually great places to work. The last two jobs I took were with companies that treat people with respect, and I would now never go back to a big American megacorps HR drone hiring tech test filter rubbish again.

mazelife 10y ago
Second this. I'm in my 30s now, and I've realized that companies that treat people with respect don't hire this way and that's the kind of place I'm happy at. If that limits me to work for companies under a certain size, I'm OK with that.

cjcenizal 10y ago

The message I get out of this post is: "Know what you want, and be uncompromising in your search for it." If a company is interviewing you wrong, then the company is disqualified from your list of places you'd like to work. You can draw up a similar list of criteria (e.g. has an open source presence, has a remote-first culture, uses JIRA, doesn't use JIRA, has low technical debt, has high unit test coverage) with which you can assess culture/role fit. If you find the companies you're interviewing with consistently fail your test, then bring your pattern-identifying skills to bear and figure out why. Maybe all of the companies you're interviewing at have something in common (they're all startups, they're all Fortune 500s, the CEO isn't technical, the roles are too senior/junior). In which case you should break the pattern and apply for work at different types of companies. Or possibly the pattern lies within yourself. Do you consistently fail the same kind of technical tests? Does your answer to a specific question ("Can you show us a large codebase you've worked on? Oh, you can't?") tend to elicit the same negative answer? Then maybe you should focus on strengthening those weaknesses.

brianbarker 10y ago

Like standardized testing, interviewing is a bullshit measure of what you really know. Like standardized testing, the way to win is to get good at taking the tests. Even if you disapprove, this is how you get a job. I've accepted this.

FussyZeus 10y ago
I think it's worth noting that the reason you have the degree isn't to show knowledge, it's to show you're willing to complete a process that's out of your control, but you do it anyway because that's what is expected. The ideals are always nice to have, but if I have to fight with a new hire over every built-in process because he doesn't immediately see the value in it, I'm going to get irritated at him.
- alanwatts 10y ago
  What if that built-in process is counter productive, obsolete, or doesn't have the value you really thought it did anymore, like that of many college degrees? Mindless adherence to group think and legacy processes in the long run is a recipe for disaster.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    True, in the long run. But what usually happens is that the new hire takes a week or a month to decide that a process is stupid and wasteful, and shoots his/her mouth off about what a stupid process it is, and burns a bunch of bridges. Maybe this should be a rule of thumb: Don't criticize anything during your first six months. If it's your first job out of school, don't criticize anything during your first year. Learn what's really going on, and why things are the way they are. Then you can criticize.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    I'm all for constructive criticism, and if a process is burning more money than it is generating I'd speak my mind too. But many of our new fish (at least around here) don't like how much of a stickler I can be for proper documentation, good naming conventions, using the bug tracking system etc. They see it as pointless bureaucracy because they don't report to our boss, who when he asks "how are things going" likes to hear and see more than me just saying "good." While there are plenty of processes out there that likely don't need to be, there are I'd venture a lot more where the value generated isn't necessarily obvious to the guys in the trenches. I'm happy to explain this to anyone who asks (and have) and we occasionally even have an issue crop up where hey, look how useful this "busywork" you did earlier is right now, but the point is to a certain degree you should expect to simply obey the stated rules even if you don't IMMEDIATELY see their value. It's just respectful. I'd also say it's far too easy to conflate "mindless obedience" and "respectful behavior" these days.

emeraldd 10y ago

The problem I see with his solution is on the other side. Alot of very good/creative developers and technical people tend to be of a non-social sort. As a result, restricting yourself to known people will inherently miss the people who don't move into the "scene" (whatever that happens to be). This just leads to a different set of problems and ultimately results in a "broken" process as well, just a different kind of broken.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago

Looking at a github profile would take about the same amount of time as walking to the conference room to conduct the interview. So I'm not buying the "you're wasting interviewers time with that stuff" line. Can also serve as a good source of questions - can the candidate answer questions about his/her own code? Much more meaningful then some riddles or BST traversal.

askyourmother 10y ago
It cuts two ways - if the hiring company expects me to waste, sorry, invest, my time reading their corp pages to make sure I have learnt all about them pre-interview, they can damn well take the time to read my profile and code snippets.

skybrian 10y ago

Maybe filtering out people who won't play the game is better for both sides. After all, the company will be asking you to do other things you disagree with. Getting things done often means compromising on stuff that doesn't matter in order to do the stuff that does. It's an important job skill. This is a clearer signal than "cultural fit" (whatever that means).

known 10y ago

Why interviewers are NOT formally trained to conduct interviews?

rm999 10y ago

The current state of hiring reflects two facts: 1. A single bad hire can do immense damage to a team and organization. I never fully appreciated this until I saw the consequences of bad hires, and as a hiring manager it's one of my biggest fears. 2. Labor laws and HR exist. You can't just willy-nilly fire people, there's a process in any well-functioning company to protect employees from management and vise versa. As a hiring manager this will generally reflect poorly on you. This has caused interviewers, who are in the position of power, to make the process thorough and straining to protect themselves. In many ways my philosophy has been shifting to the article's, which is to grow much more slowly and carefully. I don't think this scales well, but it leads to a personal process I can feel good about. I've been networking to meet people within the community, and I hope my future hires either come through personal knowledge of them or vetted referrals. Google is actually capable of this kind of interview, but it's rare. I was referred to a manager a few years ago by an ex-coworker, and the whole process was great. I met the whole team, I went to lunch with the manager, he told me I could contact him if I had any questions, etc. I didn't end up joining, but I left with a very positive opinion of the manager and team.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
Some percentage of bad hires are inevitable. I think a better solution is to fire them quickly rather than torture all candidates. Most dev jobs are at-will, no?
- btilly 10y ago
  The problem is that pissed off ex-employees are able to file lawsuits claiming that they were fired for any of a number of reasons that you can't fire them for. (Race, gender, religion, ...) Defending these lawsuits, even when they are without merit, is an expensive PITA. And the process can turn up all sorts of stuff in public that is a PR disaster. This happens sufficiently often that HR has responded with policies to carefully document exactly why people are being fired. Furthermore they often try to get fired employees to sign contracts saying that they won't sue. These policies make it considerably more difficult to fire people.

golergka 10y ago

The funny thing is, when people say things like "hiring is broken", they usually mean different things. Hiring is very different in different markets and parts of the world. I'm desperately looking for competent developers right now. I don't ask HR for help, and I don't really filter by CV: anyone who considers himself a "senior" is going to get a skype call from me. But the first thing I give them is an assignment, 4-8 hours of work for a candidate of desired skill level. I tell candidates this estimate right away, and after sending it out several dozens times already I haven't met a single one who would say "sorry, I'm to busy to work on that for free". Before starting this process, I was sure this will going to be a problem, and I was sincerely surprised that it didn't happen once.

nat 10y ago
That's because pushing back against a potential employer like that is the HN version of Internet Toughguy Syndrome. You might also be surprised how few people respond to a mugging attempt with a well-placed roundhouse kick.

dominotw 10y ago

Hiring is broken because people follow what google does. Once google stops asking whiteboard, big o questions hiring will be "fixed". As simple as that. This is the only to fix it, we don't need endless discussions every week about this.

askyourmother 10y ago
A thought experiment, how quickly would goog react if every potential hire walked away, emailed old Laszlo and told him to stick his tests. Might push forward the seed change in hiring the industry needs...
yolesaber 10y ago
That will never happen. Google is obsessed with their academic, whiteboard coding procedure to a scary degree. It's a point of pride for recruiters to mention how intense it is. I'm going onsite to interview with them next week and they bombard you with training brochures, invitation to live interview training exercises, links to books etc. It's part of their brand now. Anecdata, but all the people I know who work at Google tell me the interview is the hardest part. One of them spends their time fixing low-hanging bugs in Python
- dominotw 10y ago
  >That will never happen. Interviews will never be fixed. case closed.

emodendroket 10y ago

> Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities? Excellent. As we all know, the tech industry's biggest problem is a lack of insularity and out-of-control diversity and this strategy is sure to help.

db1024 10y ago

I recently interviewed at Google and one coding interview had the most adversarial interviewer that I've ever encountered. It started with the interviewer complaining that he was busy. Everything from the language I chose to each line I wrote received complaints. By time we got past the first question, I thought maybe this was actually a behavioral interview in disguise to see how I'd deal with adversarial coworkers. I got an offer from them, but I declined without hesitation. I interviewed at Facebook and that process was great. At least one of my coding interviewers did read/skim my github code beforehand. Woo, keep it up!

Benjammer 10y ago
A big part of dealing with adversarial co-workers is team structure and managerial support, how does a 1 on 1 conversation with someone you've never met even really test your ability to work with "difficult" people? It seems more like seeing how much bullshit you can put up with at that point (this is NOT the same to me as "dealing with an adversarial co-worker"). There's already a baseline of bullshit to deal with everywhere anyway, it's part of almost any job. If a company thinks there's so much bullshit and/or difficult people to deal with that they need to screen for it during interviews, that seems like a HUGE turnoff to me wanting to work there.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  It's the same as companies that purposely make interviews more stressful than they need to be "to see how you work under pressure". They fail to realize that not all stress is the same and that interview stress is different, in some cases very different, from on-the-job stress.
  - bluetomcat 10y ago
    I am very fed up with the whole "ability to work under pressure" expectation. Companies that emphasize this almost always have a totally broken work organization process. At the end of the day, programmers are not emergency workers and need some rest and calmness to do their work efficiently.

mixmastamyk 10y ago

Spot on, I've independently decided that I won't submit to brain-teasers and white-board coding (diagramming yes) any longer. A company can look at my online work, read my written communication, have a nice chat on the phone, and then perhaps can hire me for a short contract to write a component to see how things work out. If they don't they don't have to pay. I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also, and will experiment with that. For the last five years I haven't gotten any work from startups (even though I specialize in python and javascript) and wonder if it is due to the fact that I don't dress like a lumberjack and am not as young as I used to be.

robodale 10y ago
I agree with what you said 100%.
BookmarkSaver 10y ago
>I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also I've never considered live video of me a requirement in any professional or technical context a requirement unless I was actually doing something visual that explicitly requires it. When on the job I've never even bothered asking if it was ok to not have my camera on, and in interviews I've never thought twice about letting the interviewer know that I won't have a video stream up. Sometimes its because I genuinely can't (either poor internet or the fact that I don't have a webcam for my desktop) or I just don't feel like it. It's not about some high-minded principle regarding discrimination or a tactical decision or anything, I just don't think that video conferences add anything to audio in any situation except visual presentations or personal/emotional contacts (GF or family). I've been in a LOT of live calls in a lot of contexts and I've never noticed the other party having any issue with this, no interviewer has detectably taken it negatively. I'd also like to add that I don't always have my camera off, just that I don't feel any pressure to justify myself when it is turned off, which is most of the time.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  On about 75% of my recent Skype sessions the interviewers turned on their cameras immediately and requested that I do the same. Thought nothing of it until reading claims of ageism here, only noting that I have personally received zero offers from those companies. I'm not out-of-shape or unprofessional-looking either if it matters. Coincidence? I don't know.

programLyrique 10y ago

If you have no time, automate it. If reading/skimming github repositories is too long, maybe developing visualisation tools, machine learning tools would help for that. I wonder why Google has not already done that, although they are known to automate their system administration heavily, for instance.

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

Ugh, just let people choose their tech interview. - If they have public code, talk about that. Maybe ask them to add a feature onto THEIR code. - If they have no code, give them the option of take-home work or a whiteboard test or a live coding session. - If they have no code and don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and you are both senior level, then just talk about work. It should be pretty clear whether they'll be a fit. - If they have no code, don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live coding session, and are NOT senior level, you should probably pass. People will probably feel better and do better in the interview when they feel they can have a choice in how they are examined because they can plan to show their strengths. The only downside is that with this is it becomes a bit more difficult to track how well your interviews go with a grading rubric or something.

k__ 10y ago
Often I ask myself, why do employers set up the interview? I mean, both parties want something. The best interviews I had (now I'm freelancing so I don't have to do them anymore) were when the employer had no idea how to interview. They asked me what I did and what they do and told me what they want from me. I asked them how they work and what they have to offer. The moment they tried to set up some interviewing process, with special questions asked by people with no technical skills and strange tests, everything went downhill...
- bluetomcat 10y ago
  I've been to some of the most honest interviews when a small tech team needs a new member with a slightly different expertise to theirs. Like, "we implemented a major part of our system, but we need someone to help us in this or that regard". It makes a ton of a difference in terms of mutual respect and friendliness.
vitd 10y ago
Yeah, I concur. There are a million other ways to test someone's knowledge. Rather than having them write a merge sort (for example), giving them one that either doesn't work or is suboptimal is a much better way to assess their abilities. (Or maybe pick something more real-world than a merge sort since nobody writes their own sorts anymore.) But you get to see how they deal with existing code, how good they are at debugging, and things like that. Those skills are probably going to be used more than writing new stuff from scratch anyway.

pklausler 10y ago

So many "hiring is broken" stories lately. I sympathize. Interviewing is typically not fun. However, I'd like y'all to consider the problem from the other side of the table. I conduct a lot of technical interviews. I desperately want to avoid bad hires. How do I avoid the bad hires? It's a really hard problem and there are consequences from both false positive and false negative signals. Google asks "big-O" type questions not because they're shibboleths or useless trivia. It's practical knowledge in an environment where things often have to scale up to absurd degrees. Most candidates haven't had experience in that kind of environment, so interviewers are looking for signs of aptitude. Knowing which kinds of algorithms can scale up is a sign of that aptitude for those kinds of problems. Lately, I've been asking more questions from the domain of what I call "programming in the small" -- the kinds of things that crop up when actually writing or reviewing or debugging code. I do this because I've learned that the ability to construct an airtight Boolean predicate expression to test for a well-defined condition is a survival skill for good programmers. If you're a good candidate, then I'm sincerely sorry that I waste some time (for both of us!) talking with you about some basic stuff rather than having a more interesting technical conversation.

bluetomcat 10y ago
Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless. If I have provided a GitHub account with some interesting code, then sure as hell I have demonstrated that I am able to compose "airtight" boolean expressions. Just like I have to be informed about your company before interviewing, take your time to inform yourself about me.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless. The amusing thing about this is, from what I can tell, Google actually only needs a small number of people with the deep knowledge. Much of the work there still involves things like "developing CRUD apps", just on top of the platforms and infrastructure the smaller group developed for it. Which led to a characterization I once heard from an ex-Googler of the company as a place where "they hire top CS Ph.Ds to do incredibly boring code-monkey work".

geebee 10y ago

This was a good article. I do think that the data structures and algorithms whiteboard exams amount to more than "trivia" and I do think there is value in them (my problem with them as I've posted on this board, is that because our industry lacks a proper exam respected widely by our peers, we have to re-take this exam over and over. It would be like an actuary having to demonstrate a knowledge of calculus and linear algebra on the whiteboard over and over, throughout a career - no wonder developers are eventually fatigued by it and stop wanting to play the game). That said, I like his solution. Just don't do it. I'll still take the algorithm exam, but I won't do take-homes anymore, and I may have missed out on some good opportunities because of it. I just won't do this, largely because it's too large a time investment on my part without a comparable investment from the company in evaluating my application. Here's the problem - we don't work in a free labor market. I've done my 12 rounds on HN with people about this, but here it is again - we work in a field where silicon valley employers have convinced congress that there is a "shortage" of programmers. This has led to legislation that allows employers to bestow the right to live and work in the US on employees, and the employer retains that right for the duration of the employee's tenure. It is possible to move from one job to another under limited circumstances, but by and large, the visa terms don't really allow the worker to change fields, quit and start a company, or pursue a different career path entirely. Because it is generally difficult to immigrate to the US without family reunification or a few other insider tracks, tech visas provide one path to do this. As a result, high tech employers are in a position of amazing power over their workforce. They really can say "we will allow you into the US if you study what we say you should study, interview how we say you should interview, work on the projects we say you should work on, live where we say you should live, and accept the salary we say you should receive". Yes, there are a few requirements on salary, but without the right to quit and leave (including with no job lined up), the employee's bargaining power is greatly reduced. Now, some of us are indeed free agents as individuals, but until all of are free to choose our own path in life, as long as substantial numbers of us are not allowed to do this by law, employers will not have to make the adjustments the market demands when all workers are free. This is why I support general skilled immigration, but I oppose putting corporations in control over a worker's right live in the US, including determining the circumstances under which the worker is allowed to arrive initially. Nobody owes me a job under my conditions, and I accept that when I refuse to participate in certain types of interview processes. But nobody owes a corporation a worker under their conditions, and they really seem to be having trouble with this idea.

loserpenguin15 10y ago

One thing that I think is commonly missing from these discussions about hiring is the fact that most hiring processes (especially at these large companies) are not designed around letting all qualified applicants in. They are designed to ensure that unqualified applicants don't get in, even at the cost of passing up good candidates. The negative cost associated with one bad hire can often outway the gain from one great higher. So if a company has to pass up on some great candidates in order to maintain quality they are going to do it. Are there better ways than trivia questions and whiteboard coding to prevent bad hires? Of Course. One of my co-workers brings up the hiring practice at his old job. They would fly all potential candidates out to their office and have them work (paid) with the team for one day. From there, they would take their top picks and have them work (paid) for a week. From that group they would choose who to hire. My co-worker always remarks about how great of a process it was. However they were also only ever hiring for one or two positions a year. When you're trying to hire as many qualified applicants as possible, these kinds of in depth interviews just aren't efficient enough. So the negative cost of hiring a bad applicant, in addition to the problem of trying to hire as many people as possible with minimal cost leaves us with interview techniques that don't cater to everyone. But they do do a good job of weeding out bad applicants, even if that does mean passing on good applicants. Now I'm not saying this is the right way to interview, I just think this aspect is commonly left out of these discussions.