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> I've never gotten this feedback from anyone I would consider competent. You may not have gotten it personally, but some very smart people have given precisel

> I've never gotten this feedback from anyone I would consider competent. You may not have gotten it personally, but some very smart people have given precisely that feedback regarding those sorts of questions. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

beagle3 9y ago
On phone now, so can't search but ... there were a couple of threads on HN when that tweet was made, and IIRC the majority actually didn't think he was in the right. Being smart and being a good fit are not equivalent. Linus Pauling was definitely smart - and most definitely wrong about quite a few things (most famous was his statement that "there are no quasi crystals, only quasi scientists", a derogatory remark about Dan Shechtman who later got a nobel prize for those quadicrystals)
- fenomas 9y ago
  The tweet isn't a counterargument that disproves your premise; it's a data point you seem to be unaware of. Certainly there are smart people who think your question is fine, but if you think that the people who disagree are mostly incompetent, I think that's a defense mechanism. Put it this way: if I decided someone was incompetent as a programmer based on some criteria, and then I later found out that that person wrote Homebrew, I would take a pretty hard look at the criteria, and how strongly I believed in its predictions.
  - beagle3 9y ago
    With all due respect for Max Howell, his response is a defense mechanism. "invert a binary tree" is an ill defined question (maybe he was joking, I don't know), perhaps he didn't even understand what he was asked and didn't bother inquiring. He was not told WHY he wasn't accepted - it might have been for displaying a "rock star better than though" attitude which some places reward but Google does not. I do not disqualify people who cannot reverse a list (as long as they demonstrate critical thinking skills and reasonable capability). I do disqualify people who get up in arms like Howell did, and I dare say this tweet does show Howell to be a bad match for many teams, regardless of his technical skills; He is likely not a competent team player. (As much as can be inferred from the tweetstorm that happened 2 years ago, and as much as I can remember it).
    - fenomas 9y ago
      Howell's actual competence or the particulars of his interview are out of our scope. His tweet could have been a petulant defense mechanism or it could have been eminently justified; we have no way of knowing. (And if we're paying him due respect, let's leave out speculation about rock-star attitudes or his competence as a team player entirely please.) All I'm talking about is the predictive power of the "please rejigger this data structure" interview question, and how much faith people place in it. I mean, if someone looks at the Howell thing and says, "well, any interview can have false negatives, but questions like this are still good predictors of competence", I'd certainly have no argument with that. But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built". When someone says that, they're implicitly claiming that "passed an interview question" is a better predictor of programmer competence than "built and maintained one of the world's more popular developer tools". Doesn't that strike you as a pretty extreme amount of faith to put in an interview question?
      - beagle3 9y ago
        > But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built". The responses I remember (memory bias possible) were along the lines of "well, he might have built that but is not a good match for google if he failed a question like that". I have actually calibrated my interview in the past on friends, colleagues, employees and students, and I know that it has predictive power for the kind of work I do (which does NOT include, e.g. CRUD or the simple if-then-query logic which is often referred to as "business logic"). With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out, but will say that the attitude he displayed on twitter would disqualify him from a lot of places, regardless of his technical merits. (And as for the real reason he was disqualified - it was pure speculation on his side).
        fenomas 9y ago
        The response that stuck in my memory was from Jonathan Blow (whom I greatly admire, apart from the following), and amounted to "then you're not a very good programmer". Personally, I strongly suspect that the predictive power of interview questions depends ~90% on the knowledge and experience of the interviewer, and the specific questions aren't that important. I reckon the disconnect here is that you and JBlow are judging things as the guy had failed the interview question as you would have administered it. And it's possible that that's roughly the case, but it's also possible that he failed the interview as administered by a bad interviewer - who, say, cut him off after the first trivial error rather than suggesting he check his answer for bugs, or whatever. As such, I take no issue with data structure questions per se, I just find it hard to buy this idea that they're massively predictive - compared to, say, having shipped lots of good code for a long time. > With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out.. This would read better if it wasn't followed by speculating where the guy's qualified to work (based on memories of a tweet from three years ago!) and then speculating what he does and doesn't know about an interview he was in.

beagle3 9y ago

On phone now, so can't search but ... there were a couple of threads on HN when that tweet was made, and IIRC the majority actually didn't think he was in the right. Being smart and being a good fit are not equivalent. Linus Pauling was definitely smart - and most definitely wrong about quite a few things (most famous was his statement that "there are no quasi crystals, only quasi scientists", a derogatory remark about Dan Shechtman who later got a nobel prize for those quadicrystals)

fenomas 9y ago
The tweet isn't a counterargument that disproves your premise; it's a data point you seem to be unaware of. Certainly there are smart people who think your question is fine, but if you think that the people who disagree are mostly incompetent, I think that's a defense mechanism. Put it this way: if I decided someone was incompetent as a programmer based on some criteria, and then I later found out that that person wrote Homebrew, I would take a pretty hard look at the criteria, and how strongly I believed in its predictions.
- beagle3 9y ago
  With all due respect for Max Howell, his response is a defense mechanism. "invert a binary tree" is an ill defined question (maybe he was joking, I don't know), perhaps he didn't even understand what he was asked and didn't bother inquiring. He was not told WHY he wasn't accepted - it might have been for displaying a "rock star better than though" attitude which some places reward but Google does not. I do not disqualify people who cannot reverse a list (as long as they demonstrate critical thinking skills and reasonable capability). I do disqualify people who get up in arms like Howell did, and I dare say this tweet does show Howell to be a bad match for many teams, regardless of his technical skills; He is likely not a competent team player. (As much as can be inferred from the tweetstorm that happened 2 years ago, and as much as I can remember it).
  - fenomas 9y ago
    Howell's actual competence or the particulars of his interview are out of our scope. His tweet could have been a petulant defense mechanism or it could have been eminently justified; we have no way of knowing. (And if we're paying him due respect, let's leave out speculation about rock-star attitudes or his competence as a team player entirely please.) All I'm talking about is the predictive power of the "please rejigger this data structure" interview question, and how much faith people place in it. I mean, if someone looks at the Howell thing and says, "well, any interview can have false negatives, but questions like this are still good predictors of competence", I'd certainly have no argument with that. But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built". When someone says that, they're implicitly claiming that "passed an interview question" is a better predictor of programmer competence than "built and maintained one of the world's more popular developer tools". Doesn't that strike you as a pretty extreme amount of faith to put in an interview question?
    - beagle3 9y ago
      > But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built". The responses I remember (memory bias possible) were along the lines of "well, he might have built that but is not a good match for google if he failed a question like that". I have actually calibrated my interview in the past on friends, colleagues, employees and students, and I know that it has predictive power for the kind of work I do (which does NOT include, e.g. CRUD or the simple if-then-query logic which is often referred to as "business logic"). With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out, but will say that the attitude he displayed on twitter would disqualify him from a lot of places, regardless of his technical merits. (And as for the real reason he was disqualified - it was pure speculation on his side).
      - fenomas 9y ago
        The response that stuck in my memory was from Jonathan Blow (whom I greatly admire, apart from the following), and amounted to "then you're not a very good programmer". Personally, I strongly suspect that the predictive power of interview questions depends ~90% on the knowledge and experience of the interviewer, and the specific questions aren't that important. I reckon the disconnect here is that you and JBlow are judging things as the guy had failed the interview question as you would have administered it. And it's possible that that's roughly the case, but it's also possible that he failed the interview as administered by a bad interviewer - who, say, cut him off after the first trivial error rather than suggesting he check his answer for bugs, or whatever. As such, I take no issue with data structure questions per se, I just find it hard to buy this idea that they're massively predictive - compared to, say, having shipped lots of good code for a long time. > With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out.. This would read better if it wasn't followed by speculating where the guy's qualified to work (based on memories of a tweet from three years ago!) and then speculating what he does and doesn't know about an interview he was in.