10 ms·

How We Designed Our Interview Process

144 points by gkoberger 10y ago

runcougar 10y ago
have you gotten any feedback from new hires on this process?
- gkoberger 10y ago
  It's a self-selecting group, of course... but we're all happy with it! We've also gotten a lot of good feedback from people we've interviewed, since it's not often interviews feel encouraging rather than adversarial.
rer 10y ago
> First impressions are everything. They're not.
- magic_beans 10y ago
  They are when you're interviewing for jobs. I don't know about you, but my first impression of a company strongly informs my decision to work there if an offer is extended (because, you know, generally you only around 1 or 2 shots actually interviewing at the company before you are expected to make a decision about taking an offer)
- netule 10y ago
  Yes, they absolutely are. The one thing I look for the most in a potential new role is cultural fit; pretty much if I think the team will gel with me. Much of this becomes apparent through the interview process: the type of questions asked, the level of exhaustion shown, and how interested the interviewers seem in their own jobs. These things are as important to me as the type of company and the offer they extend since this is the place where I will spend a great deal of my time and effort. I'd rather not spend a significant part of my day with people that I don't like in a place that I can't stand.
  - cema 10y ago
    Very true. And, of course, it is important to remember that interviews are in many ways two-way streets: the candidate interviews the company just as the company interviews the candidate.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "> First impressions are everything. They're not." They definitely are - it's part of human psychology, and it happens to those of us even aware of the fact. We start making judgements quickly. It's the way we work. It takes a lot of self-awareness, and usually methodology to overcome it.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  For the candidate, or the company?
clifanatic 10y ago
That strikes me as being highly optimized for people who are one or two years out of college.
- 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  True, but to be fair the entire "startup" industry is highly optimized for people who are just out of college.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  In what way?
  - IANAD 10y ago
    Possibly because it is handholding them through the process. A more mature candidate would not need such direction, and might see it as not a good match for them. Also, not to pick, but the owl character that might seem like a good idea to younger candidates, that might respect it for the good design and soft psychological impact, might scare off the mature employees that are there to get the job done and are there to engineer solutions. Despite these things, I think it looks professional, and the fact is that if you're a startup, you're most likely looking for a younger candidate, because they are cheaper, can be more motivated, and are definitely easier to mold. And yes, if you discriminate, that is illegal in the U.S., at least. However, at some point, you need to hire more experienced candidates, and this process will need to change to reflect that. I'm a more mature person myself, and would not seek to fill a development team with juniors. I've seen what that can do. It's fine to have interns and juniors, but that shouldn't be the primary talent pool, or you'll end up with serious design problems and lots of poor code. But that can happen with more experienced candidates also- that is why you want good, more experienced candidates to create an environment that fosters growth of incredibly smart juniors.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      However, at some point, you need to hire more experienced candidates, and this process will need to change to reflect that. It looks fine as-is to me, and within my domain of expertise I'm about as senior a person as is temporally possible to be (I'm pretty sure I know everyone who's more senior than I am). But maybe it's just seeing how this goes out of its way to fix the problems in hiring processes that I've been seeing, and ranting about, for quite a while now.
jacques_chester 10y ago
I kinda like this one. The "what to expect" is really well done. I also like the do-a-real-thing step. We do something similar at Pivotal. Once you pass the basic tech screen, we invite you to work with us for a day. We pair program, so this is easy to do: take the candidate, drop them (usually) into a real project with a real engineer working on a real problem. Then they work together on the real problem. That's it. Assuming nothing goes drastically wrong: One project in the morning, then lunch, then a different project in the afternoon. If we agree that you know what you're doing and that we want to work with you, you're hired. Every engineer at Pivotal has passed the test of "do you want to work with this person?" In the quest to work out "can this person do the job?", I personally continue to be amazed at the gymnastics companies will engage in to avoid just ... trying folk on the job.
- praneshp 10y ago
  I hope I was the only person to have had a bad experience with Pivotal ever. Their recruiter straight up lied to me (told me on the phone that they'd schedule a phone screen, went on radio silence, and claimed they had emailed me about moving on). From my personal experience, I don't think Pivotal belongs in a thread discussing great hiring practices.
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    I'm sorry. We had a period where we had many candidates and not enough recruiters (hiring good recruiters is actually really hard). Some of the recruiters would get stressed out and quit. Some would, as you say, simply drop candidates on the floor without telling them. We also had a lot of trouble with our previous candidate management software. We switched to Greenhouse 2 months ago, it seems (touch wood) to be doing much better. If you like, you can contact me by email and I'll follow up for you. This offer extends to anyone else.
- sethammons 10y ago
  Hi Jacques! One thing I can't wrap my head around: how do you compare candidates when you have them working on different projects? How do you protect against Candidate A finding themselves pairing on a relatively easier project than Candidate B? How do you deal with pairing on things that are complex and require time to spin up to understand the system architecture, the code base, and the problem at hand? If you only expose smaller problems to candidates, how do you ensure that on any given day there will be an appropriate problem to pair with a candidate? Thanks!
simplehuman 10y ago
I am quiet impressed that there is even a niche market for people who want to host docs. It really just takes 15 minutes to setup a gulp/grunt script to build and push to cloudfront. After all, we need those scripts for local development anyways.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  There's a huge market for good developer experiences :) More and more people are becoming "developers" every day: computer-literate people who want to build something. It's easy to push something. It's a lot harder to build something good. Our goal is to get away from static docs, and show each developer exactly what they need.
  - deckeraga 10y ago
    Documentation is great and all but I think the real huge market here is in merchandising that mascot of yours.
    - gkoberger 10y ago
      Email me (greg@readme.io), and I can send you some Owlbert swag :)
      - jtfairbank 10y ago
        Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Same thoughts here. Since I need to document my APIs anyway it seems to make the most sense to add comments in code, run a build script and have it pushed up somewhere. Heck you could even check it in if you're so inclined and services like GitHub provide much of the community aspect that I need. Their stuff does look pretty though.
- wwalser 10y ago
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Love the idea of giving the person an idea as to what to expect though this is a pretty general outline; I've gotten the same (although I'll admit far less pretty) when I've interviewed at Amazon, Apple, etc. The idea of letting someone actually work on a problem is far better than generic algorithm or data structure questions. Two things though... > As soon as we schedule the interview, applicants receive a link taking them to this welcome page. Love the page but the content is all static. This should be in an email. If it's in an email, especially in invite form, I have access to the content at all times on my phone and can even accept an invite. Putting it in the browser means I have to find the email and open the browser (alternatively bookmark or keep the site open). But the content is static so it should be in an email. In my opinion anyway. > After that is the main part of the technical interview: we ask interviewees to work on their own project, using whatever resources they deem necessary (and yes, that includes Google). We want resourceful developers who can problem solve, not people with an encyclopedic memory. We use this as an opportunity to learn what our candidates are passionate about. This helps us understand whether ReadMe is a place where they can pursue their long-term goals. Hmm. So many projects I want to work on, especially for an hour or two session, may not necessarily reflect my long term goals but be more oriented towards completing something that either myself or I perceive my interviewers being interested in. Yeah I get the whole "work on what you want" thing but in such a short timeframe to show off what I can do is absolutely not indicative of my long term goals.
- jghn 10y ago
  On the last bit, perhaps these people are just better developers than me or perhaps it's an artifact of the sort of things they work on vs what I work on but I can't think of a single thing I could complete in a couple of hours which I'd be proud enough of to show as an accomplishment. I see a lot of these interview discussions talking about having candidates bang out real features in a couple of hours and I just don't understand how that's possible.
codecamper 10y ago
Great attitude. readme.io might consider getting into the tech hiring business. Spread these ideas around & make some money too.
jcbeard 10y ago
"we want the interviewee to succeed" This should always freaking be the case. You, the interviewer, are there to decide if you want to work with this person in the future. You're not going to learn that by making an adversary. You're not going to learn that by making it super easy either. If you're worth your salt (as an interviewer, and you should be given that you're now part of the hiring process), you should be able to go through an open ended problem (it's what I do). This open ended problem should have increasingly difficult sub-tasks and of course be related to what you intend the person your interviewing to do. One of my worst experiences interviewing was with a company that clearly didn't give a rats rear end (at one location). Interviewers were constantly late, didn't know what I'd applied for, or even at times my name. Same company, different location...totally different story. Your most valuable resource as a company is your people, treat them as such from start to finish. Needless to say, I chose where I'm at because of the people. I'm glad to see others sharing this attitude as well.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- newscracker 10y ago
  I've been on both sides in worse situations. The resumé is printed out and handed to the interviewers at the last minute or someone is asked to interview a candidate who has showed up and the resumé is handed at that moment. It makes up for a poor experience where the first question is "describe your experience and what you've worked on", most of which is usually present in the detailed (and long) resumé.
  - jcbeard 10y ago
    Me to, in which case I explain the situation...I apologize to the candidate, and we move on. Last minute scheduling accidents happen, it's how you recover from them that counts. Openness seems to improve the impression of the company. Trying to hide the truth from the candidate signals an issue, if you're a candidate...run away.
wwalser 10y ago
I think about hiring a lot and I see a lot of companies doing things that I think are completely opposed to their own goals. Specifically around technical talent where, given the current market, the goal is almost always to out-compete other companies by finding good candidates that others would have turned away because of cargo-cult awful interview processes and standards. This looks great from what's printed on the page. The question that jumps out at me from reading the interview prep screenshot is: How often does a candidate fail the "work on your own project" part simply because the people watching them have no interest in the problem space or worse, no idea what's going on? I just don't see how that type of interview could be scored equitably across a range of candidates. Is that considered a failure on culture grounds? I'm highly suspect of basically all culture related hiring standards.
caffed 10y ago
It's really good to hear that some tech companies are being mature about the process. I've been in almost all positions of a hiring team: phone screen, white boarding, Q&A, etc.; and in the end I want to hear what this person can bring to the company and see if they're a good fit or vice versa. I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. Also, in Techlandia, I feel there is too much of a male machismo that permeates through and there are many people that treat the interview as a chance to demonstrate ability to the interviewee and/or trick them - to the point of intimidation.
- justicezyx 10y ago
  > I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. Take a SWE job for example, what is the most effective, efficient, and fair approach to evaluate a candidate? Can anyone name an approach that is, in general, better than the main-stream technical interview. Factors to consider: 1. Technical competence 2. Culture fit 3. Interviewer/interviewee/scheduling etc time cost 4. Logistic cost
- flukus 10y ago
  > I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. I don't disagree, but personally I would rather work with a competent (or brilliant) asshole than an incompetent nice person.
  - sgift 10y ago
    Given these two extremes .. maybe. But more common seems to be "a brilliant asshole" vs "a competent nice person" and then I would never take the brilliant one. I have seen the effect of just one toxic person on a team and it wasn't pretty. Such people can quickly demoralize everyone around them and bring product development in (small) companies to a halt.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Sample-of-size-1 statistics time (from which nothing can be learned, just for fun)? I (freelancer) once had a software-making client that employed me for a month do contribute a special component to their big project. When I arrived the big boss himself received me and showed me around - and when it came to showing me where and with whom I actually worked he apologized profusely before he even started. Apparently I had to work with the one (and only) guy who sat alone in his office. But he was the guy who had written the specs that I had to write the code for, and he had room since all offices were designed for at least 2 people. The apologies were because that was the most difficult person in the entire company to work with, by a margin, but he was too good so they just kept him in his cell... Well, I wasn't daunted at all actually. Turned out that yes, he was difficult socially. For example, there was a woman who came in to ask him something (it was rare anyone talked to him while I was there), and in an audibly annoyed tone he pointed out that he had already sent her that exact information 5 days earlier in document XYZ on page N, headline "3.2 foobar" (yes, to that detail, without looking anything up). He also was really, rally good. The specs he had written, several hundred pages in three documents, were near perfect. I didn't have to ask a single question at any time, he had thought of every detail. I myself also had no trouble talking to him, I had fun with the other people that I visited in their offices (who repeatedly told me pitied me for having to share an office with that guy), but also with my room mate. Because of the surrounding highly unusual circumstances this still is one of my most memorable (and completely positive) freelancer jobs.
seanwilson 10y ago
Sounds interesting but what if the candidate doesn't have a personal project or one they're willing to show you the code for as they're working on it? Also, seems like you could game this by rehearsing what you'd be developing before the interview (same way you can game questions about binary trees etc). I think someone having a personal project is a strong indicator that they're passionate about the trade though which is a great thing.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  That hasn't been a problem so far. A lot of candidates start new projects, and that's fine too. If you can't think of anything you would want to work on, that's a pretty bad sign for us.
  - seanwilson 10y ago
    What happened in the worst case scenarios? Did anyone turn up with no project or fumbled at adding a feature to their project?
pzaich 10y ago
The presence of an itinerary for the interviewee should be a requirement. Sadly it's not. I've taken two interviews in the past week where I was in the dark as to what my visit would look like.
mwfunk 10y ago
Lots of people here are describing interviews (from the perspective of the interviewee) as being an adversarial process, where people have bad experiences because the interviewer is more interested in being intimidating or showing up the interviewee, but I wonder how much of that is just the process itself being intimidating. For me, job interviews were always incredibly nerve wracking. It feels like you're being judged, but of course you are being judged- the whole point of the interview is to judge your suitability for a position. It's also nerve wracking because I was always interviewing for something I wanted really badly, that was a step up from whatever I was doing at the time. So, I was always interviewing from a position of weakness, and it made me feel even more self-conscious. At this point in my career I've probably been the interviewer >= 20x as often as I've been the interviewee. Some were phone screens, the rest were in person, and about half the time I was one of two interviewers (some companies do one-on-one interviews, some do two-on-one, and supposedly some do many-on-one interviews but I've never experienced that (but it sounds terrible)). In all of that, I don't think I've ever been malicious or tried to show off or make someone feel bad, and I don't think I've ever witnessed or even heard of a colleague doing it either. Maybe I'm just lucky, and got all my jobs at companies that had a less horrible interview process, but I wonder. Job interviews at companies I really want to work for have been intimidating because it is intimidating. I wanted to move up in the world, take the next step, and so it always felt like the people interviewing me were implicitly people I wanted to emulate. That's so awkward- it feels like approaching pseudorandom strangers and asking, "I want to be like you, am I cool enough for you to give me a job here so I can be like you?" You're being measured against a yardstick, and it feels like the yardstick is the person interviewing you, because they've already got a job at the company you want to work at. So I would have to fight against being intimidated by the people who were interviewing me, but what I didn't realize was that although I felt intimidated, they (probably) weren't being intimidating. I was just projecting what I was feeling onto them, they were just being their normal selves and sucking at interviewing because everybody sucks at interviewing. There's no reason for anyone to be a jerk to an interviewee, the interviewers want to have successful interviews just as much as the candidate. Nobody wants to drive away a potentially good hire just to act superior for a few minutes in front of a job seeker that they will never see again for the rest of their life. So I would like to think that all of the horror stories about terrible interviewers come from interviewees projecting their (totally natural) stress onto other people, but who knows. People can be irrational jerks too unfortunately. :( I'm also curious if the bad interviewer behavior was exclusively in one-on-one interviews. Those seem more likely to go off the rails, since there's no other interviewer to counteract someone who is an especially bad interviewer to begin with.
suyash 10y ago
JavaScript exercises, might as well give them an exam? It's not different than puzzles at other companies.
alphabravodelta 10y ago
Great post and it's awesome to see many companies try to make interview process better but my happiness didn't last long. They require[1]: 'Your GitHub is full of everything from embarrassing hacks to impressive Open Source contributions' I understand some reasons behind seeing Github profile of candidate but requiring it is too much. But this is still better then company i saw the other day which was requiring Github project with X000 stargazers. I think we have to choose between bad and worse. [1] https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs-developer https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs-developer
- mintplant 10y ago
  Plus, what about contributions to projects that aren't on GitHub? I have commits in Firefox but you wouldn't know it from my GH profile.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Well you can tell them this, right? The essential part is having some code out there in the open. I imagine if you host your projects on bit bucket it's OK too. Though I agree that a lot of skilled people don't have the will/feel the need to build a public profile of their work.
    - genofon 10y ago
      even more, some companies might claim the rights on their work, depending on the country and company. In my experience (UK) there are a few like this.
  - jghn 10y ago
    IMO this is a growing issue with the ubiquity of Github. Github is increasingly becoming a de facto resume, which is a problem for people who contribute to things that aren't on Github. This is also a problem for would-be Github contributors. As an example, Gitlab looks interesting, but I'd be concerned that potential employers would never spot my work there.
EliRivers 10y ago
The candidate has to bring their own laptop to work on during the interview, at their place of business? I know lots of people have a laptop already, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't (I just can't work on one; I get frustrated). Or is that part of the selection process; they don't want the kind of person who doesn't own a laptop, or doesn't bring it with them to interviews.
- ddorian43 10y ago
  Or maybe you're more comfortable on your laptop compared to a random pc ?
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    On a personal note, I'm far more comfortable with a proper keyboard and a big monitor (or two), and frankly, so long as the OS has a couple of standard editors and the standard build tools, surely everyone can start working pretty much instantly? How long does it take to find the terminal and start typing? If a candidate's laptop is some kind of security blanket, or they can't do anything without exactly their particular micro-choice of environment, that's not a good thing. Provide a desktop for the candidate to use. Make sure it's got vim, emacs, gedit, and whatever the cool kids use now (sublime?). Make sure it's got a recent set of tools for the technology at hand. GCC and build tools or the equivalent standard. Job done.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - kaishiro 10y ago
      ...or just let them bring in their own laptop. Obviously making it a mandatory function of the interview isn't a good idea, but you can learn a lot from someone by seeing how they've setup their tooling.
    - dkersten 10y ago
      "On a personal note, I'm far more comfortable with a proper keyboard and a big monitor (or two)" This is how I used my laptop for years (I still use big monitors, but I don't usually use an external keyboard now, although I'm thinking getting another cherry mx blue keyboard). When I'm working, I use the external monitors as the primary and the laptop screen for slack/documentation (since its not at nice eye-height). It works very well. I even know people who leave their laptops closed when they work, using purely external monitor and external keyboard/mouse. A laptop is just a portable desktop. But for programming, I'm much more comfortable in my environment using my tools and configuration (for example, I'm a colemak typist, vim is my preferred editor, etc). I mean, I think a machine should be provided in case the candidate doesn't bring one (or doesn't want to; or like you, prefers to use desktops), but allowing the candidate the option of using their own helps set them up for success as they can use their own familiar environment, while forcing people to use something unfamiliar may be setting them up for failure.
scandox 10y ago
Owlbert? "It twit looks to like whoo you're twit writing a to letter whoo..."
Ntrails 10y ago
I don't own a laptop, so I guess that's the defining part of the article for me. Does not meet minimum requirements. ^_^
- gkoberger 10y ago
  That page is dynamic, so everyone sees something different. By the time a candidate gets that page, they've already talked to 1-2 members of the team. Of course there's no "own a laptop" requirement.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
How are different engineering disciplines interviewed? For instance, take a mechanical engineer, are they going to sit down with a stack of tooth picks and be asked to design a bridge with a Pratt truss? Are they asked to show their designs on Github? I seriously think there's an underlying pissing contest that has permeated the software development culture. If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers?
- DanBC 10y ago
  > If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers? Other engineers have professional registration and thus some form of regulation. In some countries you're not allowed to cal yourself an engineer unless you have some particular qualification and the registration.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Then maybe we need to push for that. I'm just tired of the way we do things currently.

144 points by gkoberger 10y ago

runcougar 10y ago

have you gotten any feedback from new hires on this process?

gkoberger 10y ago
It's a self-selecting group, of course... but we're all happy with it! We've also gotten a lot of good feedback from people we've interviewed, since it's not often interviews feel encouraging rather than adversarial.

rer 10y ago

> First impressions are everything. They're not.

magic_beans 10y ago
They are when you're interviewing for jobs. I don't know about you, but my first impression of a company strongly informs my decision to work there if an offer is extended (because, you know, generally you only around 1 or 2 shots actually interviewing at the company before you are expected to make a decision about taking an offer)
netule 10y ago
Yes, they absolutely are. The one thing I look for the most in a potential new role is cultural fit; pretty much if I think the team will gel with me. Much of this becomes apparent through the interview process: the type of questions asked, the level of exhaustion shown, and how interested the interviewers seem in their own jobs. These things are as important to me as the type of company and the offer they extend since this is the place where I will spend a great deal of my time and effort. I'd rather not spend a significant part of my day with people that I don't like in a place that I can't stand.
- cema 10y ago
  Very true. And, of course, it is important to remember that interviews are in many ways two-way streets: the candidate interviews the company just as the company interviews the candidate.
jomamaxx 10y ago
"> First impressions are everything. They're not." They definitely are - it's part of human psychology, and it happens to those of us even aware of the fact. We start making judgements quickly. It's the way we work. It takes a lot of self-awareness, and usually methodology to overcome it.
justinlardinois 10y ago
For the candidate, or the company?

clifanatic 10y ago

That strikes me as being highly optimized for people who are one or two years out of college.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
True, but to be fair the entire "startup" industry is highly optimized for people who are just out of college.
pmiller2 10y ago
In what way?
- IANAD 10y ago
  Possibly because it is handholding them through the process. A more mature candidate would not need such direction, and might see it as not a good match for them. Also, not to pick, but the owl character that might seem like a good idea to younger candidates, that might respect it for the good design and soft psychological impact, might scare off the mature employees that are there to get the job done and are there to engineer solutions. Despite these things, I think it looks professional, and the fact is that if you're a startup, you're most likely looking for a younger candidate, because they are cheaper, can be more motivated, and are definitely easier to mold. And yes, if you discriminate, that is illegal in the U.S., at least. However, at some point, you need to hire more experienced candidates, and this process will need to change to reflect that. I'm a more mature person myself, and would not seek to fill a development team with juniors. I've seen what that can do. It's fine to have interns and juniors, but that shouldn't be the primary talent pool, or you'll end up with serious design problems and lots of poor code. But that can happen with more experienced candidates also- that is why you want good, more experienced candidates to create an environment that fosters growth of incredibly smart juniors.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    However, at some point, you need to hire more experienced candidates, and this process will need to change to reflect that. It looks fine as-is to me, and within my domain of expertise I'm about as senior a person as is temporally possible to be (I'm pretty sure I know everyone who's more senior than I am). But maybe it's just seeing how this goes out of its way to fix the problems in hiring processes that I've been seeing, and ranting about, for quite a while now.

jacques_chester 10y ago

I kinda like this one. The "what to expect" is really well done. I also like the do-a-real-thing step. We do something similar at Pivotal. Once you pass the basic tech screen, we invite you to work with us for a day. We pair program, so this is easy to do: take the candidate, drop them (usually) into a real project with a real engineer working on a real problem. Then they work together on the real problem. That's it. Assuming nothing goes drastically wrong: One project in the morning, then lunch, then a different project in the afternoon. If we agree that you know what you're doing and that we want to work with you, you're hired. Every engineer at Pivotal has passed the test of "do you want to work with this person?" In the quest to work out "can this person do the job?", I personally continue to be amazed at the gymnastics companies will engage in to avoid just ... trying folk on the job.

praneshp 10y ago
I hope I was the only person to have had a bad experience with Pivotal ever. Their recruiter straight up lied to me (told me on the phone that they'd schedule a phone screen, went on radio silence, and claimed they had emailed me about moving on). From my personal experience, I don't think Pivotal belongs in a thread discussing great hiring practices.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  I'm sorry. We had a period where we had many candidates and not enough recruiters (hiring good recruiters is actually really hard). Some of the recruiters would get stressed out and quit. Some would, as you say, simply drop candidates on the floor without telling them. We also had a lot of trouble with our previous candidate management software. We switched to Greenhouse 2 months ago, it seems (touch wood) to be doing much better. If you like, you can contact me by email and I'll follow up for you. This offer extends to anyone else.
sethammons 10y ago
Hi Jacques! One thing I can't wrap my head around: how do you compare candidates when you have them working on different projects? How do you protect against Candidate A finding themselves pairing on a relatively easier project than Candidate B? How do you deal with pairing on things that are complex and require time to spin up to understand the system architecture, the code base, and the problem at hand? If you only expose smaller problems to candidates, how do you ensure that on any given day there will be an appropriate problem to pair with a candidate? Thanks!

simplehuman 10y ago

I am quiet impressed that there is even a niche market for people who want to host docs. It really just takes 15 minutes to setup a gulp/grunt script to build and push to cloudfront. After all, we need those scripts for local development anyways.

gkoberger 10y ago
There's a huge market for good developer experiences :) More and more people are becoming "developers" every day: computer-literate people who want to build something. It's easy to push something. It's a lot harder to build something good. Our goal is to get away from static docs, and show each developer exactly what they need.
- deckeraga 10y ago
  Documentation is great and all but I think the real huge market here is in merchandising that mascot of yours.
  - gkoberger 10y ago
    Email me (greg@readme.io), and I can send you some Owlbert swag :)
    - jtfairbank 10y ago
      Bro, send me some too. :D Email is in my profile.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Same thoughts here. Since I need to document my APIs anyway it seems to make the most sense to add comments in code, run a build script and have it pushed up somewhere. Heck you could even check it in if you're so inclined and services like GitHub provide much of the community aspect that I need. Their stuff does look pretty though.
wwalser 10y ago

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

Love the idea of giving the person an idea as to what to expect though this is a pretty general outline; I've gotten the same (although I'll admit far less pretty) when I've interviewed at Amazon, Apple, etc. The idea of letting someone actually work on a problem is far better than generic algorithm or data structure questions. Two things though... > As soon as we schedule the interview, applicants receive a link taking them to this welcome page. Love the page but the content is all static. This should be in an email. If it's in an email, especially in invite form, I have access to the content at all times on my phone and can even accept an invite. Putting it in the browser means I have to find the email and open the browser (alternatively bookmark or keep the site open). But the content is static so it should be in an email. In my opinion anyway. > After that is the main part of the technical interview: we ask interviewees to work on their own project, using whatever resources they deem necessary (and yes, that includes Google). We want resourceful developers who can problem solve, not people with an encyclopedic memory. We use this as an opportunity to learn what our candidates are passionate about. This helps us understand whether ReadMe is a place where they can pursue their long-term goals. Hmm. So many projects I want to work on, especially for an hour or two session, may not necessarily reflect my long term goals but be more oriented towards completing something that either myself or I perceive my interviewers being interested in. Yeah I get the whole "work on what you want" thing but in such a short timeframe to show off what I can do is absolutely not indicative of my long term goals.

jghn 10y ago
On the last bit, perhaps these people are just better developers than me or perhaps it's an artifact of the sort of things they work on vs what I work on but I can't think of a single thing I could complete in a couple of hours which I'd be proud enough of to show as an accomplishment. I see a lot of these interview discussions talking about having candidates bang out real features in a couple of hours and I just don't understand how that's possible.

codecamper 10y ago

Great attitude. readme.io might consider getting into the tech hiring business. Spread these ideas around & make some money too.

jcbeard 10y ago

"we want the interviewee to succeed" This should always freaking be the case. You, the interviewer, are there to decide if you want to work with this person in the future. You're not going to learn that by making an adversary. You're not going to learn that by making it super easy either. If you're worth your salt (as an interviewer, and you should be given that you're now part of the hiring process), you should be able to go through an open ended problem (it's what I do). This open ended problem should have increasingly difficult sub-tasks and of course be related to what you intend the person your interviewing to do. One of my worst experiences interviewing was with a company that clearly didn't give a rats rear end (at one location). Interviewers were constantly late, didn't know what I'd applied for, or even at times my name. Same company, different location...totally different story. Your most valuable resource as a company is your people, treat them as such from start to finish. Needless to say, I chose where I'm at because of the people. I'm glad to see others sharing this attitude as well.

deleted 10y ago
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newscracker 10y ago
I've been on both sides in worse situations. The resumé is printed out and handed to the interviewers at the last minute or someone is asked to interview a candidate who has showed up and the resumé is handed at that moment. It makes up for a poor experience where the first question is "describe your experience and what you've worked on", most of which is usually present in the detailed (and long) resumé.
- jcbeard 10y ago
  Me to, in which case I explain the situation...I apologize to the candidate, and we move on. Last minute scheduling accidents happen, it's how you recover from them that counts. Openness seems to improve the impression of the company. Trying to hide the truth from the candidate signals an issue, if you're a candidate...run away.

wwalser 10y ago

I think about hiring a lot and I see a lot of companies doing things that I think are completely opposed to their own goals. Specifically around technical talent where, given the current market, the goal is almost always to out-compete other companies by finding good candidates that others would have turned away because of cargo-cult awful interview processes and standards. This looks great from what's printed on the page. The question that jumps out at me from reading the interview prep screenshot is: How often does a candidate fail the "work on your own project" part simply because the people watching them have no interest in the problem space or worse, no idea what's going on? I just don't see how that type of interview could be scored equitably across a range of candidates. Is that considered a failure on culture grounds? I'm highly suspect of basically all culture related hiring standards.

caffed 10y ago

It's really good to hear that some tech companies are being mature about the process. I've been in almost all positions of a hiring team: phone screen, white boarding, Q&A, etc.; and in the end I want to hear what this person can bring to the company and see if they're a good fit or vice versa. I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. Also, in Techlandia, I feel there is too much of a male machismo that permeates through and there are many people that treat the interview as a chance to demonstrate ability to the interviewee and/or trick them - to the point of intimidation.

justicezyx 10y ago
> I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. Take a SWE job for example, what is the most effective, efficient, and fair approach to evaluate a candidate? Can anyone name an approach that is, in general, better than the main-stream technical interview. Factors to consider: 1. Technical competence 2. Culture fit 3. Interviewer/interviewee/scheduling etc time cost 4. Logistic cost
flukus 10y ago
> I feel like so many places put emphasis on abstract knowledge and technical ability and leave out so many other traits that are good. I don't disagree, but personally I would rather work with a competent (or brilliant) asshole than an incompetent nice person.
- sgift 10y ago
  Given these two extremes .. maybe. But more common seems to be "a brilliant asshole" vs "a competent nice person" and then I would never take the brilliant one. I have seen the effect of just one toxic person on a team and it wasn't pretty. Such people can quickly demoralize everyone around them and bring product development in (small) companies to a halt.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Sample-of-size-1 statistics time (from which nothing can be learned, just for fun)? I (freelancer) once had a software-making client that employed me for a month do contribute a special component to their big project. When I arrived the big boss himself received me and showed me around - and when it came to showing me where and with whom I actually worked he apologized profusely before he even started. Apparently I had to work with the one (and only) guy who sat alone in his office. But he was the guy who had written the specs that I had to write the code for, and he had room since all offices were designed for at least 2 people. The apologies were because that was the most difficult person in the entire company to work with, by a margin, but he was too good so they just kept him in his cell... Well, I wasn't daunted at all actually. Turned out that yes, he was difficult socially. For example, there was a woman who came in to ask him something (it was rare anyone talked to him while I was there), and in an audibly annoyed tone he pointed out that he had already sent her that exact information 5 days earlier in document XYZ on page N, headline "3.2 foobar" (yes, to that detail, without looking anything up). He also was really, rally good. The specs he had written, several hundred pages in three documents, were near perfect. I didn't have to ask a single question at any time, he had thought of every detail. I myself also had no trouble talking to him, I had fun with the other people that I visited in their offices (who repeatedly told me pitied me for having to share an office with that guy), but also with my room mate. Because of the surrounding highly unusual circumstances this still is one of my most memorable (and completely positive) freelancer jobs.

seanwilson 10y ago

Sounds interesting but what if the candidate doesn't have a personal project or one they're willing to show you the code for as they're working on it? Also, seems like you could game this by rehearsing what you'd be developing before the interview (same way you can game questions about binary trees etc). I think someone having a personal project is a strong indicator that they're passionate about the trade though which is a great thing.

gkoberger 10y ago
That hasn't been a problem so far. A lot of candidates start new projects, and that's fine too. If you can't think of anything you would want to work on, that's a pretty bad sign for us.
- seanwilson 10y ago
  What happened in the worst case scenarios? Did anyone turn up with no project or fumbled at adding a feature to their project?

pzaich 10y ago

The presence of an itinerary for the interviewee should be a requirement. Sadly it's not. I've taken two interviews in the past week where I was in the dark as to what my visit would look like.

mwfunk 10y ago

Lots of people here are describing interviews (from the perspective of the interviewee) as being an adversarial process, where people have bad experiences because the interviewer is more interested in being intimidating or showing up the interviewee, but I wonder how much of that is just the process itself being intimidating. For me, job interviews were always incredibly nerve wracking. It feels like you're being judged, but of course you are being judged- the whole point of the interview is to judge your suitability for a position. It's also nerve wracking because I was always interviewing for something I wanted really badly, that was a step up from whatever I was doing at the time. So, I was always interviewing from a position of weakness, and it made me feel even more self-conscious. At this point in my career I've probably been the interviewer >= 20x as often as I've been the interviewee. Some were phone screens, the rest were in person, and about half the time I was one of two interviewers (some companies do one-on-one interviews, some do two-on-one, and supposedly some do many-on-one interviews but I've never experienced that (but it sounds terrible)). In all of that, I don't think I've ever been malicious or tried to show off or make someone feel bad, and I don't think I've ever witnessed or even heard of a colleague doing it either. Maybe I'm just lucky, and got all my jobs at companies that had a less horrible interview process, but I wonder. Job interviews at companies I really want to work for have been intimidating because it is intimidating. I wanted to move up in the world, take the next step, and so it always felt like the people interviewing me were implicitly people I wanted to emulate. That's so awkward- it feels like approaching pseudorandom strangers and asking, "I want to be like you, am I cool enough for you to give me a job here so I can be like you?" You're being measured against a yardstick, and it feels like the yardstick is the person interviewing you, because they've already got a job at the company you want to work at. So I would have to fight against being intimidated by the people who were interviewing me, but what I didn't realize was that although I felt intimidated, they (probably) weren't being intimidating. I was just projecting what I was feeling onto them, they were just being their normal selves and sucking at interviewing because everybody sucks at interviewing. There's no reason for anyone to be a jerk to an interviewee, the interviewers want to have successful interviews just as much as the candidate. Nobody wants to drive away a potentially good hire just to act superior for a few minutes in front of a job seeker that they will never see again for the rest of their life. So I would like to think that all of the horror stories about terrible interviewers come from interviewees projecting their (totally natural) stress onto other people, but who knows. People can be irrational jerks too unfortunately. :( I'm also curious if the bad interviewer behavior was exclusively in one-on-one interviews. Those seem more likely to go off the rails, since there's no other interviewer to counteract someone who is an especially bad interviewer to begin with.

suyash 10y ago

JavaScript exercises, might as well give them an exam? It's not different than puzzles at other companies.

alphabravodelta 10y ago

Great post and it's awesome to see many companies try to make interview process better but my happiness didn't last long. They require[1]: 'Your GitHub is full of everything from embarrassing hacks to impressive Open Source contributions' I understand some reasons behind seeing Github profile of candidate but requiring it is too much. But this is still better then company i saw the other day which was requiring Github project with X000 stargazers. I think we have to choose between bad and worse. [1] https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs-developer https://readme.io/careers/#job-full-stack-nodejs-developer

mintplant 10y ago
Plus, what about contributions to projects that aren't on GitHub? I have commits in Firefox but you wouldn't know it from my GH profile.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Well you can tell them this, right? The essential part is having some code out there in the open. I imagine if you host your projects on bit bucket it's OK too. Though I agree that a lot of skilled people don't have the will/feel the need to build a public profile of their work.
  - genofon 10y ago
    even more, some companies might claim the rights on their work, depending on the country and company. In my experience (UK) there are a few like this.
- jghn 10y ago
  IMO this is a growing issue with the ubiquity of Github. Github is increasingly becoming a de facto resume, which is a problem for people who contribute to things that aren't on Github. This is also a problem for would-be Github contributors. As an example, Gitlab looks interesting, but I'd be concerned that potential employers would never spot my work there.

EliRivers 10y ago

The candidate has to bring their own laptop to work on during the interview, at their place of business? I know lots of people have a laptop already, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't (I just can't work on one; I get frustrated). Or is that part of the selection process; they don't want the kind of person who doesn't own a laptop, or doesn't bring it with them to interviews.

ddorian43 10y ago
Or maybe you're more comfortable on your laptop compared to a random pc ?
- EliRivers 10y ago
  On a personal note, I'm far more comfortable with a proper keyboard and a big monitor (or two), and frankly, so long as the OS has a couple of standard editors and the standard build tools, surely everyone can start working pretty much instantly? How long does it take to find the terminal and start typing? If a candidate's laptop is some kind of security blanket, or they can't do anything without exactly their particular micro-choice of environment, that's not a good thing. Provide a desktop for the candidate to use. Make sure it's got vim, emacs, gedit, and whatever the cool kids use now (sublime?). Make sure it's got a recent set of tools for the technology at hand. GCC and build tools or the equivalent standard. Job done.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kaishiro 10y ago
    ...or just let them bring in their own laptop. Obviously making it a mandatory function of the interview isn't a good idea, but you can learn a lot from someone by seeing how they've setup their tooling.
  - dkersten 10y ago
    "On a personal note, I'm far more comfortable with a proper keyboard and a big monitor (or two)" This is how I used my laptop for years (I still use big monitors, but I don't usually use an external keyboard now, although I'm thinking getting another cherry mx blue keyboard). When I'm working, I use the external monitors as the primary and the laptop screen for slack/documentation (since its not at nice eye-height). It works very well. I even know people who leave their laptops closed when they work, using purely external monitor and external keyboard/mouse. A laptop is just a portable desktop. But for programming, I'm much more comfortable in my environment using my tools and configuration (for example, I'm a colemak typist, vim is my preferred editor, etc). I mean, I think a machine should be provided in case the candidate doesn't bring one (or doesn't want to; or like you, prefers to use desktops), but allowing the candidate the option of using their own helps set them up for success as they can use their own familiar environment, while forcing people to use something unfamiliar may be setting them up for failure.

scandox 10y ago

Owlbert? "It twit looks to like whoo you're twit writing a to letter whoo..."

Ntrails 10y ago

I don't own a laptop, so I guess that's the defining part of the article for me. Does not meet minimum requirements. ^_^

gkoberger 10y ago
That page is dynamic, so everyone sees something different. By the time a candidate gets that page, they've already talked to 1-2 members of the team. Of course there's no "own a laptop" requirement.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

How are different engineering disciplines interviewed? For instance, take a mechanical engineer, are they going to sit down with a stack of tooth picks and be asked to design a bridge with a Pratt truss? Are they asked to show their designs on Github? I seriously think there's an underlying pissing contest that has permeated the software development culture. If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers?

DanBC 10y ago
> If other engineering disciplines can be hired by talking intelligently and answering questions related to their field, why can't software engineers? Other engineers have professional registration and thus some form of regulation. In some countries you're not allowed to cal yourself an engineer unless you have some particular qualification and the registration.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Then maybe we need to push for that. I'm just tired of the way we do things currently.