9 ms·

> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. To b

by rb2k_ 10y ago

> they found a 20+ years experienced engineering manager holding patents on computer networking under-qualified for an ordinary site maintenance position. To be fair, I've interviewed people at previous companies that had patents and 15 years at IBM on their CV and completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. (fizzbuzz style). There are a lot of people that read great on the CV but then it turns out that they mostly kept a chair warm and organized meetings over the last decade without actually retaining any technical knowledge. Not saying that was the case here, but it happens and it's probably worth checking people on their stated qualifications.

johndubchak 10y ago
Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.
- optimuspaul 10y ago
  I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about it.
  - sziwan 10y ago
    > Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
    - rizzom5000 10y ago
      If you have a CS degree and cannot answer this type of question in your language of choice, you simply aren't ready for even a junior position in my opinion. This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences. I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.
      - jdbernard 10y ago
        > I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing Absolutely. Last time I went through trying to hire people was about a year ago. Easily 90% of the applicants we saw were completely unqualified. You have to have a way to weed them out.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I think coding questions are really important. You see their logic flow. Now stupid coding questions (in a list, find all the number pairs that add up to another number in the list) are terrible. They're complex and even good programmers need time to think about them. Fibonacci is one that people expect, so they look up all the variations and you get people who are good test takers (would ace a GRE/MCAT) but not good designers. You want a simple question that isn't common, but that shows how they break down a problem under stress. Example: you have an input with paragraphs at 80 characters. Write a function to return the same paragraphs wrapped to 40 characters. You cannot break a word and must maintain paragraphs. Great design questions: a word problem (You have an autoshop with, staff and customers. Customers can own multiple cars. A staff member gets assigned to a car with a work order...) .. draw an ER diagram. This is actually a pretty low stress question. It should be straight forward. If someone draws a terrible ER diagram with lists in tables and no normalization, or unnecessary relationships (or you have to keep asking them to label 1-to-n/n-to-1 relationships and they struggle), you know they're not going to be good at designing database schemas. Another great general knowledge question: "A user types in a web address into a web browser and hits enter. Describe what happens. Go into as much detail as you can." This gives people a change to elaborate as much as they can. People can talk about DNS, HTTP, load balances, HTTP request/response, cookies, load balancers, web apps vs static content... Questions need to be geared to the job. You don't ask someone to draw an ER diagram if they're being hired to rack servers and setup VMWare. Likewise you don't ask a web developer to write a function to do matrix multiplication.
    - HereBeBeasties 10y ago
      I often ask the web browser one and find it quite illuminating. Best answer so far started with something like "Well, there's a microswitch in the keyboard if it's a decent one, and a circuit that debounces the input - err, is it a USB keyboard or a PS/2 one? Hmmm... How long do I have to answer this question?" THAT is the guy you want to hire...
      - mikeash 10y ago
        Last time I got that question, I started with nerve impulses.
  - exDM69 10y ago
    My company has been giving the fizzbuzz for students applying for internship, with any language they wish and extra for style points. The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it. It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.
    - throw_away_777 10y ago
      How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I know that I use google extensively at work - interviews don't allow you to use search.
      - zeven7 10y ago
        I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.
        throw_away_777 10y ago
        Can you cite your source? I haven't seen this anywhere.
        zeven7 10y ago
        I haven't read it myself, but I heard that's what Laszlo Bock said in Work Rules.
      - empath75 10y ago
        We actually do let people use Google during our code interviews. They'll use it at work, so why not. We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.
  - HereBeBeasties 10y ago
    The question is, "why wouldn't you?" If the person is competent they will dismiss it in seconds and you can move onto something more interesting.
    - optimuspaul 10y ago
      But this is Director level. You are wasting your time and their time. Far more important things to be factoring in for a director level.
  - oxyclean 10y ago
    I don't ask multiple questions like FizzBuzz, but I do ask for FizzBuzz. (I will explain the modulo operator if necessary because it doesn't come up that often in web development and people many forget about it until prompted.) Everything else about FizzBuzz (loop over a range, use a conditional, define a function, compare, etc.) is so basic you would think you wouldn't need to test it - but then you run into a person with 10 years experience who can't do it. It's a (sadly) useful screen. Even more sad when you realize how popular and widespread that particular question is.
- wffurr 10y ago
  Not being able to answer even a simple coding question with for-loops is a really bad sign, even if the question is "beneath" the candidate's level. I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    Now take into account stress, lack of preparation, environment the person is not used to, unusual syntax patterns for them, biases against them, their way of talking, their appearance, etc. and you get yourself people good at your kinds of interviews in your biased view. You can only hope they are at least average at their job.
    - whoops1122 10y ago
      The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design. if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?
      - zzzcpan 10y ago
        I think there is no point in assessing anything that doesn't take years to learn. And it's fairly easy for any team to come up with some fundamentals, that a candidate should know. There are more important qualities, than knowledge, though, as google-funded research suggests, like empathy.
      - CobrastanJorji 10y ago
        I see where you're going, and I generally agree with you, but I think that every programmer should at least be able to FizzBuzz, just as every architect or master home builder should be able to answer the question "which one of these is a brick?"
      - empath75 10y ago
- alexbanks 10y ago
  Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing for Software Development Manager, so he got an initial phone screen and then a face-to-face with myself and another dev on the team he'd be managing. I was impressed with how little he knew about programming. "Name some data structures." "What does MVC stand for?" "Name some design patterns" etc. All of which were unanswerable. Generally when it becomes clear someone was dishonest about their skillset, the ability to get hired for any position becomes impossible.
  - zeppelin101 10y ago
    How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!
    - weaksauce 10y ago
      I mean, yeah, 99% of candidates should know what that means because it is an extremely common initialism. Although, I could see some engineer who worked on networking drivers for 10 years might not be up to date on the design patterns of frontend engineering.
      - vskarine 10y ago
        That's exactly what happened to me. I was stuck in embedded systems world right out of college and then one day took interview with Google, they were asking me questions clearly looking to hear "MVC" in my answer but I just didn't know it back then...
    - ctdonath 10y ago
      Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.
- lmm 10y ago
  If the interview distinguishes between people you want to hire and people you don't it's a pretty good interview, surely?
socratees 10y ago
Agreed.
clifanatic 10y ago
> completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?
- PetahNZ 10y ago
  Because its quick, right?
  - thechao 10y ago
    It also sorts.
    - danesparza 10y ago
      Also: It has a cool name. It's much better than 'slowsort'
- tankenmate 10y ago
  Apart from the fact that it isn't always the best sorting algorithm and it's pathological worst case is in fact as bad as a bubble sort's worst case (O(n^2) with a higher base operational cost, as at least bubble sort's worst case is somewhat cache friendly). This happens in three cases; 1) all the elements are sorted in descending order, 2) all the elements are sorted in ascending order, or 3) a special case of 1) and 2) combined, all the elements are equal.
noobermin 10y ago
It's fair to discuss in the abstract, but seriously, in the OP the interview that failed him didn't fail him for an ordinary site maintenance position because he wasn't capable, it was because the recruiter was incompetent. Of course, a sample of one (anecdota) which is most likely the min of the distribution is always the worst way to judge a distribution, but this is still upsetting.
weixiyen 10y ago
Agree with everything you said... but I find it not applicable to this particular candidate given his answers. It's possible that he got frustrated, became condescending towards the recruiter, and the recruiter decided to screen him out. There are plenty of companies who turn down candidates that are false negatives for various reasons. Author should probably not take that personally and just apply again.

by rb2k_ 10y ago

johndubchak 10y ago

Perhaps that suggests you're giving them the wrong interview.

optimuspaul 10y ago
I agree. Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? It's absurd. I also tend to shy away from asking coding questions in interviews, they don't tell me much about aptitude for critical thinking and culture fit. Skills can be taught but culture is much harder. ... But I'm not saying to throw in some questions that don't prove that they are actually competent, just be casual about it.
- sziwan 10y ago
  > Why the hell would you ask someone at that level basic questions like fizz buzz? Because there are people applying for software engineering jobs that still can't answer those questions.
  - rizzom5000 10y ago
    If you have a CS degree and cannot answer this type of question in your language of choice, you simply aren't ready for even a junior position in my opinion. This type of coding exercise can potentially answer more questions about the candidate in two minutes than 30 minutes of softball questions about the candidate's past experiences. I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing or haven't worked on a team with someone who couldn't do much more than copy/paste code from SO.
    - jdbernard 10y ago
      > I think that people who disagree simply haven't done much interviewing Absolutely. Last time I went through trying to hire people was about a year ago. Easily 90% of the applicants we saw were completely unqualified. You have to have a way to weed them out.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I think coding questions are really important. You see their logic flow. Now stupid coding questions (in a list, find all the number pairs that add up to another number in the list) are terrible. They're complex and even good programmers need time to think about them. Fibonacci is one that people expect, so they look up all the variations and you get people who are good test takers (would ace a GRE/MCAT) but not good designers. You want a simple question that isn't common, but that shows how they break down a problem under stress. Example: you have an input with paragraphs at 80 characters. Write a function to return the same paragraphs wrapped to 40 characters. You cannot break a word and must maintain paragraphs. Great design questions: a word problem (You have an autoshop with, staff and customers. Customers can own multiple cars. A staff member gets assigned to a car with a work order...) .. draw an ER diagram. This is actually a pretty low stress question. It should be straight forward. If someone draws a terrible ER diagram with lists in tables and no normalization, or unnecessary relationships (or you have to keep asking them to label 1-to-n/n-to-1 relationships and they struggle), you know they're not going to be good at designing database schemas. Another great general knowledge question: "A user types in a web address into a web browser and hits enter. Describe what happens. Go into as much detail as you can." This gives people a change to elaborate as much as they can. People can talk about DNS, HTTP, load balances, HTTP request/response, cookies, load balancers, web apps vs static content... Questions need to be geared to the job. You don't ask someone to draw an ER diagram if they're being hired to rack servers and setup VMWare. Likewise you don't ask a web developer to write a function to do matrix multiplication.
  - HereBeBeasties 10y ago
    I often ask the web browser one and find it quite illuminating. Best answer so far started with something like "Well, there's a microswitch in the keyboard if it's a decent one, and a circuit that debounces the input - err, is it a USB keyboard or a PS/2 one? Hmmm... How long do I have to answer this question?" THAT is the guy you want to hire...
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Last time I got that question, I started with nerve impulses.
- exDM69 10y ago
  My company has been giving the fizzbuzz for students applying for internship, with any language they wish and extra for style points. The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it. It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I know that I use google extensively at work - interviews don't allow you to use search.
    - zeven7 10y ago
      I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.
      - throw_away_777 10y ago
        Can you cite your source? I haven't seen this anywhere.
        zeven7 10y ago
        I haven't read it myself, but I heard that's what Laszlo Bock said in Work Rules.
    - empath75 10y ago
      We actually do let people use Google during our code interviews. They'll use it at work, so why not. We do watch them work though so if they just copy and paste from stack overflow and they don't understand the problem, it's pretty obvious.
- HereBeBeasties 10y ago
  The question is, "why wouldn't you?" If the person is competent they will dismiss it in seconds and you can move onto something more interesting.
  - optimuspaul 10y ago
    But this is Director level. You are wasting your time and their time. Far more important things to be factoring in for a director level.
- oxyclean 10y ago
  I don't ask multiple questions like FizzBuzz, but I do ask for FizzBuzz. (I will explain the modulo operator if necessary because it doesn't come up that often in web development and people many forget about it until prompted.) Everything else about FizzBuzz (loop over a range, use a conditional, define a function, compare, etc.) is so basic you would think you wouldn't need to test it - but then you run into a person with 10 years experience who can't do it. It's a (sadly) useful screen. Even more sad when you realize how popular and widespread that particular question is.
wffurr 10y ago
Not being able to answer even a simple coding question with for-loops is a really bad sign, even if the question is "beneath" the candidate's level. I'd expect any technical candidate to be able to do at least a fizzbuzz-type question.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Now take into account stress, lack of preparation, environment the person is not used to, unusual syntax patterns for them, biases against them, their way of talking, their appearance, etc. and you get yourself people good at your kinds of interviews in your biased view. You can only hope they are at least average at their job.
  - whoops1122 10y ago
    The most beautiful and elegant part of coding is the logic, Not how to use a for loop. Anything question that can be answered with google should be forbid from a interview test. show him a method, ask him how he can improve the performance. ask him a opinion based question on OO design. if you hiring a house builder u would not ask him what a brick looks like right?
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      I think there is no point in assessing anything that doesn't take years to learn. And it's fairly easy for any team to come up with some fundamentals, that a candidate should know. There are more important qualities, than knowledge, though, as google-funded research suggests, like empathy.
    - CobrastanJorji 10y ago
      I see where you're going, and I generally agree with you, but I think that every programmer should at least be able to FizzBuzz, just as every architect or master home builder should be able to answer the question "which one of these is a brick?"
    - empath75 10y ago
alexbanks 10y ago
Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing for Software Development Manager, so he got an initial phone screen and then a face-to-face with myself and another dev on the team he'd be managing. I was impressed with how little he knew about programming. "Name some data structures." "What does MVC stand for?" "Name some design patterns" etc. All of which were unanswerable. Generally when it becomes clear someone was dishonest about their skillset, the ability to get hired for any position becomes impossible.
- zeppelin101 10y ago
  How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    I mean, yeah, 99% of candidates should know what that means because it is an extremely common initialism. Although, I could see some engineer who worked on networking drivers for 10 years might not be up to date on the design patterns of frontend engineering.
    - vskarine 10y ago
      That's exactly what happened to me. I was stuck in embedded systems world right out of college and then one day took interview with Google, they were asking me questions clearly looking to hear "MVC" in my answer but I just didn't know it back then...
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.
lmm 10y ago
If the interview distinguishes between people you want to hire and people you don't it's a pretty good interview, surely?

socratees 10y ago

Agreed.

clifanatic 10y ago

> completely failed even the most basic system / coding questions. But could they at least tell you why quick sort was the best sorting algorithm?

PetahNZ 10y ago
Because its quick, right?
- thechao 10y ago
  It also sorts.
  - danesparza 10y ago
    Also: It has a cool name. It's much better than 'slowsort'
tankenmate 10y ago
Apart from the fact that it isn't always the best sorting algorithm and it's pathological worst case is in fact as bad as a bubble sort's worst case (O(n^2) with a higher base operational cost, as at least bubble sort's worst case is somewhat cache friendly). This happens in three cases; 1) all the elements are sorted in descending order, 2) all the elements are sorted in ascending order, or 3) a special case of 1) and 2) combined, all the elements are equal.

noobermin 10y ago

It's fair to discuss in the abstract, but seriously, in the OP the interview that failed him didn't fail him for an ordinary site maintenance position because he wasn't capable, it was because the recruiter was incompetent. Of course, a sample of one (anecdota) which is most likely the min of the distribution is always the worst way to judge a distribution, but this is still upsetting.

weixiyen 10y ago

Agree with everything you said... but I find it not applicable to this particular candidate given his answers. It's possible that he got frustrated, became condescending towards the recruiter, and the recruiter decided to screen him out. There are plenty of companies who turn down candidates that are false negatives for various reasons. Author should probably not take that personally and just apply again.