5 ms·

Well said. I've been telling people for years that tech sector interviews select for the wrong skill sets.

by avoutthere 9y ago

pgwhalen 9y ago
What skill sets should they select for?
- existencebox 9y ago
  Having done a good handful of interviews, I tend to look for "generic problem solving" (not in the sense of trick questions, but in the sense of running through ambiguous engineering and mixed social/engineering scenarios to see how they'd move forward) communication skills (the ability to communicate the above effectively, talk about past work, problems, successes) and frankly track record. (this is obviously harder for new hires so you look for things like coursework, projects, even successes in other lines of work can demonstrate someone's professionalism and capability) You may note that these are all primarily "soft skills" and I would hope this is the takeaway from my ramble. My experience has been that it's often easier for a hire to pick up the technical rather than the nontechnical side of things. Depending on the level of the job, of course you have to filter for a certain level of competency as well, but I can usually get a good sense of that within the questions I ask above. When I get someone to really start talking about "what have I succeeded/failed at; why; what would I do different" I tend to find I can get a decent read on if they're bullshitting me or not.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Are you hiring programmers/developers or people like sys admins? It sounds like the latter, I can't imagine anyone hiring the former claiming dev skills are easy to pick up.
    - WalterSear 9y ago
      I think they are talking about picking up unfamiliar tools and languages that are reasonably close to their existing skillset rather than 'learning to code'.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        Maybe, evaluating a dev is tricky, judging them on soft skills alone would lead to many false positives and negatives.
        WalterSear 9y ago
        Sure. I think the parent is implying that this evaluation is what is flawed, and overly driven by a focus on the superficial layers of technology. So, for instance, a Reactjs developer fresh out of bootcamp gets considered over a veteran Angular developer, 'because they know React.'
    - xemdetia 9y ago
      I use a similar criteria for programmers/developers, if you have sound fundamentals in troubleshooting and working through a (technical) problem on your own you are more useful than someone who after hiring lacks those skills. The learning curve of any dev job is a sequence of problem solving steps to get to the technical knowledge required to speak of the code accurately. If they are not willing or able to do that work without handholding and you don't have time to handhold it's probably not going to work as well than someone who can do this independently. If you haven't encountered someone who is unwilling to even look at a makefile/build/ide setting page without assistance you might not see the use of it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - ikeyany 9y ago
    The industry chases away all the talented people with soft skills by telling them those skills aren't "merit-based".
    - damnfine 9y ago
      And vice versa, chases out many with the hard skills, because they are socially lacking. They want some weird in between that doesnt seem to exist in nature.
      - watwut 9y ago
        It is possible to have both. There is no contradiction between those those two types of skills.
      - ikeyany 9y ago
        That's why it's essential to have a well-rounded education, even if you're a technical wizard.
  - stlHusker 9y ago
    I really hope that more people would look at it that way. Just my own personal experience, but I've honestly seen the trial-by-fire method used either at the sole exclusion of, or weighted more heavily than actually talking to the candidate about their past work. I can't count the number of times in the past where I've encountered this. At most points when this occurs and it seems there is no end in sight, I typically state: "You know, I've solved some pretty interesting problems over my career, why don't you ask me about that, I think problem xyz it is similar to what you are looking for; let me tell you why". Subsequent laughs and eye-rolls later you get a canned: "I don't care about that, I care about things that matter to me" response. When you start selecting "problems" for candidates to work through, you add additional layers of interference into the activity: 1) Have you selected the right interviewer for this type of questioning line? Can they describe a the problem adequately? Can they ask probing questions? Are they only able to follow one line of thought? Are they patient? Are they arrogant? 2) Does the problem test for what you think it does? 3) Is the candidate able to think on their feet on a minutes notice on a topic they may not be familiar with in front of an audience? Where I work (aerospace, embedded systems) interviews are ~75% behavioral and ~25% "technical" with a major focus on having the candidate work through problems they have solved in the past, with the interviewer asking questions not to break but to really learn about them. I have family members that work at various levels within the medical profession, none of them get the "generic problem solving" trial-by-fire experience when interviewing. (Yes, I realize there is a higher level of trust there, certifications, boards and all. I just think it is a bit crazy that we cannot find a better way).
    - extr 9y ago
      This reminds me of an data science interview I had early in my career that was exactly along these lines. Several "case studies" that turned out to be semi-guided math/cs interview problems. One guy started off on a variation of the secretary problem, I recognized the general form of it and pointed out that there is a straightforward way to derive the optimal solution, which we could tweak for our situation. No no, we have an hour to kill. I want you to explain my way of solving the problem back to me. Cue an hour of frustrating whiteboarding where neither I nor the interviewer seemed to really grok the intuition for the steps we were taking. I went through 3 more situations like this over the course of a grueling 8 hour day, probably about an hour of which I had the chance to talk about my own background. Didn't get the job, and was specifically called out for my "poor technical performance". I had been through so few interviews at that point I had no idea it wasn't the norm. I legitimately wondered if I was cut out to be in the profession. Felt like major shit. A little while after I had an interview more like what you describe. It was night and day. We did a brief technical portion that was mainly to ensure I wasn't bullshitting my experience level, then a few hours of discussing my past projects with various current team members. I actually enjoyed it, found myself relating to my interviewers, and easily got the job.
- UnpossibleJim 9y ago
  In my experience, a lot of skill tests in the tech sector look for a specific set of skills that a CEO has read about, that are the new skills du jour, and not the skill set they actually need. It comes down to money people coming in the tech sector because there is money there and putting their trust in other money peoples, while treating the people that make the tech sector run like an inexhaustible, cheap resource. People have heard that there is a "gold rush" in the tech sector without actually understanding the product. It's an obvious money grab and isulting when you go into a job interview that needs a small subset of programming skills and they "require" a math degree, programming experience, design experience and are willing to pay a junior developer salary (even though you are managing a team of two or three) because you "get resume cred for working at our big name company/get in on the ground floor of tgis awesome start up"...... well, that's the west coast anyway. The ego over here is truly amazing.
- bitbang 9y ago
  What skill sets a person has (provided it's related in some way to the open position) is less important than how quickly they can adapt and acquire new skill sets.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    By this logic, no one should hire senior developers as they are just a waste of money.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Being a senior dev is more about high level soft skills and architecture skills, as opposed to knowing the intricacies of whatever programming language the company uses. Coding syntax can be learned to master level in a couple weeks. "designing software" and "managing a project" skills cannot.
      - dkhenry 9y ago
        Just to pile on, I have had people who complained that they should have been a senior dev because they knew the most about algorithms and the internals of compilers, languages, libraries, and CPU's. Those same people couldn't communicate that knowledge to others and couldn't design complex systems containing multiple independent components, but they felt since they had strong technical skills that was all they needed.
- hueving 9y ago
  Implementing small algorithms in a vacuum.

Well said. I've been telling people for years that tech sector interviews select for the wrong skill sets.

pgwhalen 9y ago

What skill sets should they select for?

existencebox 9y ago
Having done a good handful of interviews, I tend to look for "generic problem solving" (not in the sense of trick questions, but in the sense of running through ambiguous engineering and mixed social/engineering scenarios to see how they'd move forward) communication skills (the ability to communicate the above effectively, talk about past work, problems, successes) and frankly track record. (this is obviously harder for new hires so you look for things like coursework, projects, even successes in other lines of work can demonstrate someone's professionalism and capability) You may note that these are all primarily "soft skills" and I would hope this is the takeaway from my ramble. My experience has been that it's often easier for a hire to pick up the technical rather than the nontechnical side of things. Depending on the level of the job, of course you have to filter for a certain level of competency as well, but I can usually get a good sense of that within the questions I ask above. When I get someone to really start talking about "what have I succeeded/failed at; why; what would I do different" I tend to find I can get a decent read on if they're bullshitting me or not.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Are you hiring programmers/developers or people like sys admins? It sounds like the latter, I can't imagine anyone hiring the former claiming dev skills are easy to pick up.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    I think they are talking about picking up unfamiliar tools and languages that are reasonably close to their existing skillset rather than 'learning to code'.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Maybe, evaluating a dev is tricky, judging them on soft skills alone would lead to many false positives and negatives.
      - WalterSear 9y ago
        Sure. I think the parent is implying that this evaluation is what is flawed, and overly driven by a focus on the superficial layers of technology. So, for instance, a Reactjs developer fresh out of bootcamp gets considered over a veteran Angular developer, 'because they know React.'
  - xemdetia 9y ago
    I use a similar criteria for programmers/developers, if you have sound fundamentals in troubleshooting and working through a (technical) problem on your own you are more useful than someone who after hiring lacks those skills. The learning curve of any dev job is a sequence of problem solving steps to get to the technical knowledge required to speak of the code accurately. If they are not willing or able to do that work without handholding and you don't have time to handhold it's probably not going to work as well than someone who can do this independently. If you haven't encountered someone who is unwilling to even look at a makefile/build/ide setting page without assistance you might not see the use of it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- ikeyany 9y ago
  The industry chases away all the talented people with soft skills by telling them those skills aren't "merit-based".
  - damnfine 9y ago
    And vice versa, chases out many with the hard skills, because they are socially lacking. They want some weird in between that doesnt seem to exist in nature.
    - watwut 9y ago
      It is possible to have both. There is no contradiction between those those two types of skills.
    - ikeyany 9y ago
      That's why it's essential to have a well-rounded education, even if you're a technical wizard.
- stlHusker 9y ago
  I really hope that more people would look at it that way. Just my own personal experience, but I've honestly seen the trial-by-fire method used either at the sole exclusion of, or weighted more heavily than actually talking to the candidate about their past work. I can't count the number of times in the past where I've encountered this. At most points when this occurs and it seems there is no end in sight, I typically state: "You know, I've solved some pretty interesting problems over my career, why don't you ask me about that, I think problem xyz it is similar to what you are looking for; let me tell you why". Subsequent laughs and eye-rolls later you get a canned: "I don't care about that, I care about things that matter to me" response. When you start selecting "problems" for candidates to work through, you add additional layers of interference into the activity: 1) Have you selected the right interviewer for this type of questioning line? Can they describe a the problem adequately? Can they ask probing questions? Are they only able to follow one line of thought? Are they patient? Are they arrogant? 2) Does the problem test for what you think it does? 3) Is the candidate able to think on their feet on a minutes notice on a topic they may not be familiar with in front of an audience? Where I work (aerospace, embedded systems) interviews are ~75% behavioral and ~25% "technical" with a major focus on having the candidate work through problems they have solved in the past, with the interviewer asking questions not to break but to really learn about them. I have family members that work at various levels within the medical profession, none of them get the "generic problem solving" trial-by-fire experience when interviewing. (Yes, I realize there is a higher level of trust there, certifications, boards and all. I just think it is a bit crazy that we cannot find a better way).
  - extr 9y ago
    This reminds me of an data science interview I had early in my career that was exactly along these lines. Several "case studies" that turned out to be semi-guided math/cs interview problems. One guy started off on a variation of the secretary problem, I recognized the general form of it and pointed out that there is a straightforward way to derive the optimal solution, which we could tweak for our situation. No no, we have an hour to kill. I want you to explain my way of solving the problem back to me. Cue an hour of frustrating whiteboarding where neither I nor the interviewer seemed to really grok the intuition for the steps we were taking. I went through 3 more situations like this over the course of a grueling 8 hour day, probably about an hour of which I had the chance to talk about my own background. Didn't get the job, and was specifically called out for my "poor technical performance". I had been through so few interviews at that point I had no idea it wasn't the norm. I legitimately wondered if I was cut out to be in the profession. Felt like major shit. A little while after I had an interview more like what you describe. It was night and day. We did a brief technical portion that was mainly to ensure I wasn't bullshitting my experience level, then a few hours of discussing my past projects with various current team members. I actually enjoyed it, found myself relating to my interviewers, and easily got the job.
UnpossibleJim 9y ago
In my experience, a lot of skill tests in the tech sector look for a specific set of skills that a CEO has read about, that are the new skills du jour, and not the skill set they actually need. It comes down to money people coming in the tech sector because there is money there and putting their trust in other money peoples, while treating the people that make the tech sector run like an inexhaustible, cheap resource. People have heard that there is a "gold rush" in the tech sector without actually understanding the product. It's an obvious money grab and isulting when you go into a job interview that needs a small subset of programming skills and they "require" a math degree, programming experience, design experience and are willing to pay a junior developer salary (even though you are managing a team of two or three) because you "get resume cred for working at our big name company/get in on the ground floor of tgis awesome start up"...... well, that's the west coast anyway. The ego over here is truly amazing.
bitbang 9y ago
What skill sets a person has (provided it's related in some way to the open position) is less important than how quickly they can adapt and acquire new skill sets.
- jayd16 9y ago
  By this logic, no one should hire senior developers as they are just a waste of money.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Being a senior dev is more about high level soft skills and architecture skills, as opposed to knowing the intricacies of whatever programming language the company uses. Coding syntax can be learned to master level in a couple weeks. "designing software" and "managing a project" skills cannot.
    - dkhenry 9y ago
      Just to pile on, I have had people who complained that they should have been a senior dev because they knew the most about algorithms and the internals of compilers, languages, libraries, and CPU's. Those same people couldn't communicate that knowledge to others and couldn't design complex systems containing multiple independent components, but they felt since they had strong technical skills that was all they needed.
hueving 9y ago
Implementing small algorithms in a vacuum.