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The advice about not giving up on the question is a key point here. In a previous startup I would ask a single question that would take 30+ minutes to work thr

The advice about not giving up on the question is a key point here. In a previous startup I would ask a single question that would take 30+ minutes to work through with no expectations that the candidate would ever get the answer. All I cared about was if you could break down the issues and move from one set to the next in trying to narrow down the issue. I cared deeply about how you thought, not what you knew. As people will ask the question had to do with networking and knowning the answer required you to have seen the issue before and have had delved deep enough into the Ethernet HW specs to get the answer. Narrowing down the question just required you to think and be able to problem sovle. At the end most people never figured it out but those that spent the time attacking the problem and asking question are the ones that got job offers.

georgemcbay 9y ago
"I would ask a single question that would take 30+ minutes to work through with no expectations that the candidate would ever get the answer" The major problem with this approach (unless you are very vocal about the process up front, but still even then I see it as problematic) is it flies in the face of most education at all levels, at least as practiced in the USA. This is fundamentally more an issue with the way we scale teaching up to so many students than the way interviews are handled, but it still ends up being a huge problem. People are expected to spend 20-ish-plus-something years learning and being tested in a pass/fail know-it-or-you-don't manner, and then are thrown into an interview environment that is entirely different. It isn't surprising that a lot of people who would be perfectly capable of doing the work get completely hung up on the fact that they are wading through the muck of topics they don't fully understand in this environment that otherwise feels so very much like a school test of knowledge... especially when you throw in the types of social awkwardness and fear of public failure that are relatively common among engineers.
- myrandomcomment 9y ago
  So I was always very upfront. I told the candidate you will not get the answer. This is so I can see how you attack a problem. All the candiates had a background in the subject matter. The question was not on subject matter not tied to the job. Overall we found that the way we did this interview was very successful. At one point we lowered the bar and hired a bunch of people and they were all gone in six months. On the other hand those that were successful with the question and problem solving did very well and are still there. Some of those people I hired even work with me at my new startup. Also I do not understand your comment about schools. Yes in K-12 there is a lot of pass / fail but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved. The interview was designed to test that, not if you memorized how to do a binary tree search.
  - sporkenfang 9y ago
    > I told the candidate you will not get the answer. I've had an interview like this. I said thanks for your time and walked out of the room. I'm not interested in being told problems are unsolvable, I'd really prefer to work in a culture where there's a growth mindset. Even if a problem is unsolvable for me right this second, would it not be within the realm of possibility that with more experience or with a couple other folks on a team, I could solve it?
    - myrandomcomment 9y ago
      The problem is not unsolvable. I though I said that. Sorry if that was unclear. It is just caused by something that is pretty far down the stack which you would never know unless you have seen the problem. Once again this was to see if the canidate could think and problem solve. How far down could they get? Could the test for the obvious answers? If they got stuck and I gave them a hint could they go further? I would look at the background on the resume and say "so you worked with X before right? So you know how X has this behavior? This is similar." There was no arrogance here. The job REQUIRED critical thinking and problem solving. Resumes are generally bullshit and unless you have a major public project were this quality is shown how do you test for it? The first person hired that had to answer this question and go through this was me! I did not get the answer. I got real close. I am really glad I did. That job changed my life. The quality of the people I got to work with was a complete eye opener and made me want to do better and frankly made me a better person. The company is now worth ~11B or so and everyone made money and was well cared for.
    - dpark 9y ago
      The question isn't posed as unsolvable. It's posed as being unreasonable to solve fully in a short interview setting. If someone gives you a challenge and says "I don't expect you to solve this in an hour" and your reaction is to walk out, then you're unprofessional and likely the interviewer will be happy you left.
  - georgemcbay 9y ago
    "but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved" I went to college for Computer Science and while there was definitely a larger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving than in high school and grade school, testing (which is the closest to a school equivalent of a job interview) still ultimately boiled down to you either knew the material or you didn't. Testing was virtually never a conversational process during which I could ask the test-giver questions to get at a deeper problem, so ultimately very different than these problems where the "tester" (interviewer) doesn't actually expect you to solve them during the "test" (interview). My comment has nothing to do with the experience of LEARNING in USA schools, but rather TESTING in USA schools (including the vast majority of colleges). FWIW, as an older experienced software developer, I now excel at the sorts of interviews you are describing, but when I was younger and just out of school I was terrible at them. Not because I was a bad developer/engineer then, but because of anxiety brought about by being asked about things outside of my element, because I just wasn't used to that having never been exposed to it. Based on lots of conversations with other developers, I don't believe I am alone in having this difficult adjustment period with software interviews when first starting out as a professional. It is entirely possible your process works fine for you because it is one of those ones that is unlikely to produce false positives, which is what you really want to avoid, but I'm sure there are also some great developers just out of school that totally bomb your interviews while they would do great at the actual job. If you can hire enough developers to allow those false negatives to exist, then that's no skin off your back but your anecdote about having to lower standards suggests that maybe passing on some of those false negatives was detrimental at least in the short term.
deleted 9y ago
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georgemcbay 9y ago

"I would ask a single question that would take 30+ minutes to work through with no expectations that the candidate would ever get the answer" The major problem with this approach (unless you are very vocal about the process up front, but still even then I see it as problematic) is it flies in the face of most education at all levels, at least as practiced in the USA. This is fundamentally more an issue with the way we scale teaching up to so many students than the way interviews are handled, but it still ends up being a huge problem. People are expected to spend 20-ish-plus-something years learning and being tested in a pass/fail know-it-or-you-don't manner, and then are thrown into an interview environment that is entirely different. It isn't surprising that a lot of people who would be perfectly capable of doing the work get completely hung up on the fact that they are wading through the muck of topics they don't fully understand in this environment that otherwise feels so very much like a school test of knowledge... especially when you throw in the types of social awkwardness and fear of public failure that are relatively common among engineers.

myrandomcomment 9y ago
So I was always very upfront. I told the candidate you will not get the answer. This is so I can see how you attack a problem. All the candiates had a background in the subject matter. The question was not on subject matter not tied to the job. Overall we found that the way we did this interview was very successful. At one point we lowered the bar and hired a bunch of people and they were all gone in six months. On the other hand those that were successful with the question and problem solving did very well and are still there. Some of those people I hired even work with me at my new startup. Also I do not understand your comment about schools. Yes in K-12 there is a lot of pass / fail but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved. The interview was designed to test that, not if you memorized how to do a binary tree search.
- sporkenfang 9y ago
  > I told the candidate you will not get the answer. I've had an interview like this. I said thanks for your time and walked out of the room. I'm not interested in being told problems are unsolvable, I'd really prefer to work in a culture where there's a growth mindset. Even if a problem is unsolvable for me right this second, would it not be within the realm of possibility that with more experience or with a couple other folks on a team, I could solve it?
  - myrandomcomment 9y ago
    The problem is not unsolvable. I though I said that. Sorry if that was unclear. It is just caused by something that is pretty far down the stack which you would never know unless you have seen the problem. Once again this was to see if the canidate could think and problem solve. How far down could they get? Could the test for the obvious answers? If they got stuck and I gave them a hint could they go further? I would look at the background on the resume and say "so you worked with X before right? So you know how X has this behavior? This is similar." There was no arrogance here. The job REQUIRED critical thinking and problem solving. Resumes are generally bullshit and unless you have a major public project were this quality is shown how do you test for it? The first person hired that had to answer this question and go through this was me! I did not get the answer. I got real close. I am really glad I did. That job changed my life. The quality of the people I got to work with was a complete eye opener and made me want to do better and frankly made me a better person. The company is now worth ~11B or so and everyone made money and was well cared for.
  - dpark 9y ago
    The question isn't posed as unsolvable. It's posed as being unreasonable to solve fully in a short interview setting. If someone gives you a challenge and says "I don't expect you to solve this in an hour" and your reaction is to walk out, then you're unprofessional and likely the interviewer will be happy you left.
- georgemcbay 9y ago
  "but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved" I went to college for Computer Science and while there was definitely a larger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving than in high school and grade school, testing (which is the closest to a school equivalent of a job interview) still ultimately boiled down to you either knew the material or you didn't. Testing was virtually never a conversational process during which I could ask the test-giver questions to get at a deeper problem, so ultimately very different than these problems where the "tester" (interviewer) doesn't actually expect you to solve them during the "test" (interview). My comment has nothing to do with the experience of LEARNING in USA schools, but rather TESTING in USA schools (including the vast majority of colleges). FWIW, as an older experienced software developer, I now excel at the sorts of interviews you are describing, but when I was younger and just out of school I was terrible at them. Not because I was a bad developer/engineer then, but because of anxiety brought about by being asked about things outside of my element, because I just wasn't used to that having never been exposed to it. Based on lots of conversations with other developers, I don't believe I am alone in having this difficult adjustment period with software interviews when first starting out as a professional. It is entirely possible your process works fine for you because it is one of those ones that is unlikely to produce false positives, which is what you really want to avoid, but I'm sure there are also some great developers just out of school that totally bomb your interviews while they would do great at the actual job. If you can hire enough developers to allow those false negatives to exist, then that's no skin off your back but your anecdote about having to lower standards suggests that maybe passing on some of those false negatives was detrimental at least in the short term.

deleted 9y ago

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