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Hired – Technical Interview Score

• wbillingsley 9y ago
  Always embarrassing when after deciding academic results aren't a good enough indicator, the showcase achievement for "a better process" is a single tutorial question from an undergraduate class (or less than a thousandth the evaluation we do of students while they study)... Welcome to the Cult of Hiring, I guess.
• nxsynonym 9y ago
  Would an industry-approved certification be a viable replacement for on the spot technical interviews? Somebody feel free to change my view - but I don't see why there can't be a standardized certification (could be broken up into specific areas of tech/comp sci/programming) that proves the applicant is competent in the industry standards, and just focus on the personal/soft skills/culture fit of the interview.
  • mkozlows 9y ago
    Certs are worthless. Generally, the most terrible programmers out there are loaded down with certs.
    • geebee 9y ago
      Largely agreed about certs. But the actuarial exams aren't worthless. We may need to look to a new model.
  • kearneyandy 9y ago
    I think this is a good idea and would speed up interviewing at companies since you would be able to focus on the match. It does rely on companies actually knowing what criteria they are looking for and to be upfront about it, which unfortunately, is not common. The real problem is that very good candidates are often not motivated to get certs, since they likely don't need them. However with the added benefit of speeding up the interviewer process, I think more people would do it and it could then become a standard and not a negative signal.
• nawitus 9y ago
  This seems to have a rather strong focus on speed.
  • drstewart 9y ago
    Algorithmic complexities in general, which in the day-to-day life of a developer are rarely considerations. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I ran into a problem that required the type of algorithm design needed in these interviews, yet they form the basis of hiring in many places. Crazy town.
• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  I don't know what to make of this. Looks like a potential headache. As an engineer in an interview, we never get told what we're being scored on in advance (naming, speed, coming up with wonky edge-cases, scalability to 1million times workload, versatility, mentioning a bunch of relevant buzzwords (bloom filters!), confidence?). This is one reason why most interviewing is a subjective clusterfuck (not just software, I suspect). I'd bet really good money that numerous companies would reject Linus, Carmack, etc. Hence the giving of graphs and other media that are meant to project an idea of objectivity while reducing an engineer to a few quantities turns my stomach.
  • spyspy 9y ago
    > giving of graphs and other media that are meant to project an idea of objectivity Agile has the same issues.
    • kyberias 9y ago
      Would you like to elaborate? What "agile graphs" fail and why?
      • lloeki 9y ago
        Burndown charts, planning poker, difficulty weights, priority tiers, team velocity over time, milestone progress bars. I’ve yet to see someone tell me with a straight face that they hold any value like what we want them to be.
        • ashark 9y ago
          Their value is that they make the client comfortable with estimates that are explicitly fuzzy BS, which is vital since there's no way it makes sense for the client to pay for the time it'd take to give them a non-fuzzy, non-BS estimate. It also deflects them from attempting to get non-fuzzy, non-BS estimates out of you in a fraction of the time it'd otherwise take—the reputation and authority of the Agile brand is what gets them to do this, not any actual utility it has. That agile estimation is fuzzy BS is a certainty. But it's a nice comforting blanket to help clients accept "we're just gonna start working on this, if you decide you don't want us to work on it anymore tell us to stop," which is important because that's the most cost-effective way for the client to spend their money, in many cases. It's nowhere near as accurate as anything resembling an actual engineering estimation process, but ain't no-one got the time/money for that. It's probably a little better than the seat-of-pants "just give me a ballpark right now (but I'm totally gonna hold you to it, gee isn't it weird how we're always fighting fires and in crunch mode?)" that it's replacing as far as accuracy, but more importantly it makes that crap not happen (assuming it's functioning correctly).
• notmuchtotell 9y ago
  Clearly the person didn't run the code. The factorial function returns an int. The factorial of 13 is already too big for a 32-bit int. The factorial of 21 is bigger than a 64-bit int.
  • kyberias 9y ago
    I think the code people have to write in interviews is not supposed to work/scale in the real world. The purpose usually is to test whether the candidate can implement a correct algorithm. Even though this is Java (?), it's used more like pseudo code. A follow up question could be: "Do you see some problems with running this with big numbers? How would you scale it?"
    • rafiki6 9y ago
      So why ask people to write "code". What are you testing?
      • kyberias 9y ago
        Personally, I think that asking people to write code in interviews brings very _limited_ data. However, from my experience, it usually is also a very _strong_ signal. Narrow but strong. For example, if a candidate cannot implement a simple algorithm (like the factorial here), he very likely has poor skills. If he can implement it without too much trouble, that's a good sign, but he only proved that he probably has some good skills. Again, the signal is narrow but strong.
        • throw401 9y ago
          And is the signal still strong if candidate has a bad day or for some other reason cannot get the right focus in that specific moment? Moreover, I think it's highly unprofessional to reinvent the wheel by writing most algorithms for production. I always first look for a bullet proof library for that. Won't you use a calculator for 345 x 27?
• wellpast 9y ago
  How well can you decouple? That's all I need to know about you. If you can do this well, I (or you) can fix all your bugs quickly. I (or you) can fix (most of) your performance issues quickly. If you can decouple, you can isolate whatever other areas of ignorance you have with ease. How well can you decouple? Is it instinctual for you to riddle off code architectures and solutions that are decoupled? It takes time + a value system to acquire this skillset (so that it's instinctual) but once you have it, you can move mountains with code. The sad thing is our industry doesn't create the conditions for acquiring this skillset. (And rarely, like in this scoresheet, do you see it measured in interviews.) The usual refrain is "I didn't decouple here or there because, um, it was faster to take on the technical debt." No, you didn't decouple there nor there because you didn't spend several years falling on your face trying to decouple and failing. Because you were too busy getting paid to crank out whatever works in the shortest possible time, all the while saying "I didn't decouple here or there because it was faster to take on the technical debt." You didn't decouple there because you don't know how to decouple there.
  • nnd 9y ago
    What do you mean by decoupling?
    • wellpast 9y ago
      Aka, separation of concerns. There's a lot of literature on this. But the key point is that it's an objective measure. Given two equally functional solutions to the same problem, one will be objectively more, less, or equally coupled than the other. It's a demonstrable, measurable skill set; the relative coupling of two separate solutions is generally speaking not some subjective measure.
• pvelagal 9y ago
  I am really curious to know why there are businesses such as hired.com build around "interview" tools that rate software engineers only ? What tools are available to evaluate other professions : 1) Doctors ? 2) Engineers from other disciplines such as Chemical engineers, mechanical, civil , electrical engineers ? 3) Lawyers ? 4) VPs / CEOs 5) Financial analysts ?
  • Swizec 9y ago
    Wild guess but maybe it’s easier to sell quantitative tools to industries that are already used to making decisions based on quantitative measurements in other parts of the business?
  • kearneyandy 9y ago
    The biggest thing is that there is more money in evaluating software engineers. There's higher demand than most other professions, so companies will pay more. I have limited information about interviews for other industries, but other fields are often not evaluated in the same way. Lawyers do not have a mock trial as part of an interview, so tools for some industries would likely just be a video chat. Also, as a minor correction this tool is Refdash.
  • daleco 9y ago
    I moved from SE to UX because I needed a change from coding 8 hours a day. That's one of the field where I could easily transfer my skills. The interview process usually requires a portfolio, 2 phone interviews and one onsite interview. I had to talk about previous projects and what was my problem solving process, followed by a case to solve. This was refreshing and way less stressful, a walk in the park compared to the white board interview. I understand the challenges that hiring managers face, but who has time to spend a day at 5-10 companies to switch job... A lot of companies still offer only 10-15 days vacation a year...
• rafiki6 9y ago
  What has this proven exactly? Has an study been done to show a strong correlation between these test scores and ACTUAL programmer productivity? What two metrics are you correlating here? All I see is a score. Is this score valuable? I see nothing outside of pure speculation or opinion to suggest that's the case in the link. And anyone who wants to rebut and say, "that's an impossible task" or "but we know what it takes to be a good programmer" is full of it. We don't. We actually have no real, documented objective way of determining what a good programmer is. My definition is creates a program, to spec that is acceptably performant. Even that has tons of subjectivity and bias to it. Guess what, everyone has a different definition or bar. And frankly they are all full of our inherent biases.
  • lolc 9y ago
    While I don't know whether this has been studied, I would expect the interview results to correlate well with years of experience for example. I think what these interviews test best is your ability to interact with your peers. Candidates who interface badly with other people would have trouble getting a good score. So yes some brilliant people will bomb those interviews. And some talkers will manage to pass one interviewer. In total I would expect those interviews to indicate a minimum of professional knowledge in combination with good communication skills. That is valuable data without it being objective in an absolute sense.
    • sulam 9y ago
      I'm not convinced they correlate with years of experience. In fact they may well inversely correlate. I give a relaxed algorithm design screen to candidates (of which roughly 70% pass -- I'm a soft touch) that include a problem that is mildly academic in nature. New grads are the ones that tell me they already know it and I have to move on to the next problem (which, amusingly, they never have experience with). Experience people often have a vague recollection of what it does, but not enough of a recollection to prevent me from learning something from the discussion about how to get it done.
• pfarnsworth 9y ago
  I have never seen a correlation between passing standard coding interviews (whiteboarding, algorithms, etc) and how they perform as a candidate 1 year after hiring. Does anyone have any data that surfaces this information? All these companies like Triplebyte do is standardize incoming interviews, but what's the point if it has no bearing on whether or not the candidate is actually successful.
  • alexandercrohde 9y ago
    Well the other half of the problem is that I think most companies are so disorganized that even if an engineer does great work the company might not know within a year. They may look at tickets completed, "buzz" around the individual, being assigned to a project that was highly profitable, staying late a lot, or any arbitrary thing they want to.
• goodoldboys 9y ago
  I'm assuming this is a fake interview to show off the interview feedback for your platform? If so, I think it looks great and is a huge part of what's missing from the current "standard" engineer interview. Receiving feedback like this would be incredibly helpful in figuring out what I'd need to work on to pass technical screens. The fact that there's very little proven correlation between being able to jump through these hoops and being a good programmer is another story altogether, but I like this!
  • kearneyandy 9y ago
    Not OP, but I work at refdash This is a fake feedback report for an interview, to show what companies and candidates can expect. Thanks for your comment. I do think it's important particularly from a feedback perspective. Since companies don't give feedback, this is one of the first things to attempt to help candidates learn about what is being evaluated and how to improve. I'm hoping this is a first step to finding out a better way to correlate those things, for now I think that things that help candidates find jobs are a good step :)
• bit_logic 9y ago
  Have we reached the tipping point yet? How much worse does the technical interview process need to get before the industry finally decides enough is enough? When this all began, it was with the justification that it's not about getting the right answer, it's about seeing how you think and approach a problem. Companies don't even pretend this is the case anymore. It's now just expected rote memorization of algorithm patterns, talk about it with the right terms and key phrases, still pretend like the candidate had some brilliant "aha" moment, when both sides know it's bullshit, and write the solution on the board as fast as possible without errors. A completely pointless process that's now heavily pushed by an entire industry of tech interview prep (websites, books, interview coaches, etc.) When I now read a discussion about tech interviews, I wonder how many are industry shills who want to keep pushing the narrative that the process is great, but you just have to keep practicing and studying more, using the right materials of course. There's also the side effect of ageism. Who other than college grads or seniors in college has the free time to study for this process? Those with families and full time jobs are of course going to have a hard time. Even if they manage to find some free time here and there, how can they compete with someone in college with no responsibilities who has time to hundreds of problems? The simple answer is they can't. The college grad will always look smarter and faster in the interviews.
  • mkozlows 9y ago
    Memorization? It's a factorial function. You shouldn't need to study or memorize anything to implement a factorial function. If you can't come up with this algorithm off the top of your head, that is legit telling something about your problem-solving ability.
    • vthallam 9y ago
      Not particularly factorial problem, but the general interview questions require some amount of prior knowledge about the techniques. Topics like math based or bit manipulation, permutations/combinations have questions which are often asked in Interviews and require some prior knowledge to be able to give optimized solutions.
• zappo2938 9y ago
  In 4 - 6 weeks I'll be interviewing again. If anyone asks me to implement an algorithm during an interview, I'm going to search for the answer and use it. I don't have time to waste nor do I want to work for a company that wastes time which is money. How can they afford me if they keep wasting it?
• _arvin 9y ago
  crowd boos
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  What degree of control do I have over the sharing of my interview score? If I sign up for an interview with Refdash and get an outcome of "1.0/4, do not hire," is that information going to be sent to every employer Refdash works with? Individual interview results for a single candidate vary wildly from day to day. I wouldn't want one bad day to sink my chances with a large number of companies at once; I'd much rather interview with each company separately if that were the case. Using this company would just be far too risky, even if I was 90% sure I'd ace the interview. On the other hand, if my score was entirely private, and I needed to actively grant each company that was interested permission to view it, I would view this as a useful tool. A bad score would provide useful personal feedback for improving my interview skills in the future, and I'd be happy to send along a great score to potential employers.
  • kearneyandy 9y ago
    The interview data is only ever shown anonymously to companies, even if you apply to a company with it. Only when the candidate and company agree to do an onsite are names revealed. Basically it's a good chance to practice and get feedback in the worst case, and a way to save some time and get your foot in the door in the best case. disclaimer: I work for refdash
    • CobrastanJorji 9y ago
      Could I ask you to add that to your FAQ? Knowing that the information is anonymous would be super great. It'd be even better if I could TAKE the interview anonymously. Then I wouldn't need to trust Refdash on whether it was recording my information. Bonus: it's much easier to limit bias when you don't know any demographic information about the interviewee. I understand that the downside here is that I could potentially take the interview many times until I generated a positive result. But maybe there's a happy middle ground somewhere.
      • kearneyandy 9y ago
        Thanks for the suggestion, just added it. Interviews are somewhat anonymous, the interviewer only gets your first name (added that too). We've discussed making it even more anonymous (voice modulation, hiding video, etc.) but it seems like this has been studied before and did not have much of an effect. http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
• graphememes 9y ago
  This is horrible.
• throw401 9y ago
  The company I work for has turned into an Agile church. My productivity dropped with more than 50%. Most of my colleagues have left already, now I'm stuck with Agile masters, coaches and all the misery they come up with. I know I need to look for a new job, but I hate the hiring process sooooo much that I keep procrastinating. I'm a senior full-stack, have written loads of production software over 20 years of experience. Who the hack from refdash is going to assess me with some stupid algorithm question? Can he build shit himself? If so, he knows this whole process is irrelevant. Sometimes I really want to quit this business, it has destroyed a lot of fun and passion for coding already..
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • lj3 9y ago
    Ditto. I'm taking steps to move into the business end of things.
• pklausler 9y ago
  Don't just whine about bad programming interview practices. Suggest something better that wouldn't have more false positive hires (i.e., candidate can't program, but can pass interview), and maybe fewer false negatives (candidate can program, but gets filtered out anyway). This is a hard problem. Kindly think about it from the perspective of a technical interviewer who really has no idea whether the candidate on the other side of the table can program a computer or not and has to make a hire/no-hire call in 45 minutes.
• kearneyandy 9y ago
  Just for some context about this document, this is a fake interview with fake interview feedback. It is meant to highlight some of the criteria which Refdash uses to evaluate candidates and how companies and candidates can expect to receive that feedback. disclaimer: I work for Refdash
• nnd 9y ago
  I've tried Refdash twice as a candidate. Frist time I used, I couldn't connect with the interviewer because of the issues with VOIP, the second time it went smoother and the interviewer appeared to be doing a great job at providing written feedback after the interview. On the downside, scheduling seems to be awkward: you have to manually select your availability, instead of picking a timeslot, then the interview is scheduled for you. Personally, I prefer to select my own timeslots like with interviewing.io, unfortunately, the latter ironically is almost always out of availability.