9 ms·

What we do instead of technical interviews

63 points by kawera 9y ago

Tade0 9y ago
For me one skill that stands out as a predictor for performance is the person's ability to do code reviews. Of course not all decent devs are particularly good at this [1], but from my experience below average ones are consistently unable to find flaws in both their own and someone else's code or even if they do they don't care enough to point that out. [1] Not saying I'm an especially decent dev, but although I manage, reviews are hard for me because I'm way to lenient - I guess it boils down to trying not to hurt other people's feelings. EDIT: accidental emphasis
- deleted 9y ago
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- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > unable to find flaws in both their own It would be an interesting interview where they put some of my own code from github/bitbucket down and said "code review this, please". Especially if it was reasonably old and I'd forgotten about it...
- meesterdude 9y ago
  I will add, not just "doing code reviews" but how - what are they like to disagree with? How do they express a different perspective? How methodical are they? What do they look for?
funkythingss 9y ago
"Tons of great people, and, disproportionately, women and minorities, can perform less well at technical interviews but be great in role." You lost all your credibility with one sentence. Congratulations.
- glorkk 9y ago
  I cringed too. This is akin to a religious dogma at many places I have worked at and is a huge red flag for me, as an employee. However, the rest of the article makes some good points (testing on the ability to do the job is a better predictor of job performance), you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
- richmarr 9y ago
  > You lost all your credibility with one sentence. Congratulations. Can you explain the basis for that opinion?
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    I think this sentence was added to fit the "we're more diverse" narrative in the beginning of the article
  - danielhooper 9y ago
    The poor guy is simply unaware he is a misogynist.
- Niksko 9y ago
  The data available shows that women and minorities ARE under represented in the tech industry. Corellation does not imply causation, but if you have a limited number of causal factors during the hiring process, the logical conclusion is that parts of the hiring process contribute to this under representation in significant ways. Perhaps the focus is wrong. Perhaps it's not the 'technical' part of the technical interview that causes this disparity. Perhaps it's just good ol' fashioned racism or prejudices, and really the part of the technical interview that causes a disproportionate number of white males to be hired is simply the fact that the interviews happen with the interviewer fully cognizant of the applicants race and gender. You'll notice that the article also mentioned their disdain for being able to see the applicant. To dismiss a fact that reasonably straightforwardly follows from empirical evidence and limited options for causality is simply obstinancr.
  - 9y ago
docdeek 9y ago
"We interview people who fit the basic criteria, and for less than one hour (sometimes 15 minutes!). If the person seems capable and there aren’t major red flags, we hire them (we use an extremely coarse grained filter). If we have five applicants, sometimes we’ll hire all five. They’re then on a 90 day probationary period to see if they work out…” Not sure how that would fly outside of the US. In France we have probationary periods but I have never heard of a company hiring multiple people for a full time role (CDI) and then laying off the ones that aren’t the best fit after a couple of months. That sounds to me like a way to get in a bit of trouble - legally, socially, with unions - in the employment context here. Would be interested in learning whether there’s a French company that does anything like this - maybe a half dozen CDD’s with the express commitment to hire one of the six on a CDI after three months? But who is leaving a CDI on that sort of bet?
- superplussed 9y ago
  I'm an American living in Berlin, and I think the problem here would be more of a cultural one than a legal one. Germans just have an expectation that once hired they will be given every chance to succeed, to the point that firings seem to come across as a shock or an implication of major wrong-doing. "Hire fast, fire fast" is already ingrained in American startups, so I think the policy outlined in this article would be easier to adopt in the US. Americans in general view jobs as more transient than Europeans do.
  - mifreewil 9y ago
    I think you meant “hire slow, fire fast.” Never heard fast for both.
    - blumomo 9y ago
      That's what the article says that is being discussed. Probably you didn't read it.
      - arkades 9y ago
justherefortart 9y ago
I've found simply talking to prospective employees (be it software or anything else) about how they work, challenges they've encountered and how they overcame them and figuring out their attitudes has never failed me in hiring. The bullshit feeling that everyone has to live and breathe coding is the biggest nonsense thing I encounter in this field (software development). A good job with a good work environment is more than enough to get productivity and results from your coworkers. 99.9% of the issues I encounter in companies as a consultant or employee revolve around poor management. They don't have budgets. They don't have plans. They don't have people that understand IT. Their IT doesn't understand how their products affect the bottom line. Add in about 1000 other "management doesn't get it" items and you might be close to the realistic picture. It's quite depressing in practice.
- jaggederest 9y ago
  Yep. The most critical question I ask if I'm interviewing is "What are the problems?" I'm not even especially interested in the actual answers, per se. I'm interested in two things: do people know what they are, and are people willing to say so out loud.
- ekidd 9y ago
  > I've found simply talking to prospective employees (be it software or anything else) about how they work, challenges they've encountered and how they overcame them and figuring out their attitudes has never failed me in hiring. At previous jobs, I've run into candidates who interview well but code poorly. They look good at first: 1. Their resume looks reasonable. 2. They sound qualified on a phone screen. 3. They can talk about previous projects. 4. They seem like great people to work with. ...but when put to the test, they can't code. I'm talking really simple stuff, like "You have 40 minutes to write (something no harder than FizzBuzz)." They can use their own laptop, with the language of their choice, and StackOverflow. Or for a job involving Scheme, we asked them reverse a singly-linked list. These were almost insultingly easy tests, given the posted job requirements. But I saw otherwise promising candidates struggle for the better part of an hour. But asking people to code can also help them get hired. I remember one interviewee who was doing poorly until we asked him to code, and then he solved the coding problems in literally about 20 seconds. We hired him, and he turned out to be a incredibly strong team member for many years. I think one fair way to handle these things might be to offer interviewees a choice: 1. We can ask you to write code during the interview, or 2. You can submit a link to a small open source project for us to look at. That gives both people who can't code under pressure and people who don't write code outside their day job an option. And it provides the interviewer with a work sample to discuss in the interview.
joncrocks 9y ago
So you still do technical interviews, just long ones that require you to quit your current job first. No thanks. This might work if you're looking to fill a pipeline with 'good enough' junior people who you can then push into an appropriate role, rather than hiring for something specific.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  NEVER quit the job for another one where they just want to sniff you. Try to learn how many people the company is hiring and how many positions long term they want to sustain.
- fnthawar2 9y ago
  Thanks for engaging. Actually the offers are exactly the same as if we did 7hours of interviews, so it's not an interview after we hire you. Let me know if that answers your question.
DoubleGlazing 9y ago
As someone who has had to conduct technical interviews I have found the best way to evaluate technical skills is to just chat. No tests, no whiteboard challenges, no list of requirements to tick off. Just let the candidate talk about their career and what they have done. Ask their opinion of certain things. Ask about how they tackled certain projects and give them the time to answer and go off on tangents. Treat it like you are a few friends having an in-depth discussion over drinks. Technical interviews focus too much on headline points. They want the candidate to touch on or mention certain things that everyone should know about the subject. I'm not interested in that, I'm more interested about them mentioning less obvious things such as known quirks, bugs or tricks about the subject matter. Stuff that only a regular user would learn about. The problem with this approach is that for many companies HR insists on structured interviews. I once had do some interviews for a couple of C# roles. The interview format was literally the same as the game show Talk About. The interviewee was given time to talk about a subject and we had to tick off a list whether they mentioned certain keywords and phrases in the allotted time. The same format applied to the HR interview. Whoever scored highest got the job, a very silly way to do recruitment.
- hasenj 9y ago
  That's just about the worst way to filter candidates. You are selecting for chatty people.
  - Renaud 9y ago
    No, you filter on people’s ability to communicate about what they already know.
  - Mikushi 9y ago
    Competent chatty people. If you can't express your competency during an interview chat I don't see how you could be a good candidate (there are exceptions), nothing more damaging to a team that someone who can't communicate.
    - SpEd3Y 9y ago
comstock 9y ago
I knew a company a bit like this once. The CEO would hire people very quickly. In most cases they didn’t have the appropriate skill set, and had personality issues. They’d have a massive negative impact on the culture of this early stage startup. They’d then get fired. The CEO would say, it will be better for them in the long term and I’m sure they’ll be happier. This wasn’t true, they had their issues but actually the CEO has screwed them too by not doing the due diligence and hiring too quickly... Honestly the best solution I can think of is to work as a paid consultant for the company and see how that goes. If the relationship seems to work, then join full time. Not everybody has the time to take on consulting gigs though which is a significant downside.
thepratt 9y ago
This approach is so far from reality it hurts. What are you learning in 15 minutes that can inform you enough to make a decision to hire someone for a minimum of 90 days? Not enough. You're missing out on other aspects of hiring like recruiter fees. If I were to hire every idiot that ticked off the boxes but couldn't demonstrate relate knowledge to something tangible I would've put my current and previous company out of business. Your 90-day long interview process (this is what it is, face it) is not only a financial detriment, but a productivity tumor. Yes, I do agree that the current wide-spread use of "solve this on a whiteboard", "implement merge-sort", or some other backwards method of technical ability does not work; that is why I implement questions, and paired exercises that are tailored to the position they will be filling and the background they're coming from. The process I have in place consists of 3-parts: phone screen, and 2 in-person interviews - this process normally doesn't extend past 3 hours. The interviews are structured as a conversation to make sure the most nervous of interviewees can perform comfortably. I'd rather waste 2 hours more per candidate opposed to ~20-40k GBP for a poor trial, and a decrease in overall team velocity.
- fnthawar2 9y ago
  Great points. The 90-day interview (as you call it), is the same if we did 3 hours of interviews (like you do) or 15 minutes. We didn't see a better accuracy as we shrunk our interviews down from 3 hours to eventually 15 minutes. I really like your pairing idea espescially if that's close to the reality of the actual job.
throwaay3192321 9y ago
Is it only me who can't think properly when constantly being prodded to by a bunch of people ? I also feel that the game is so rigged that one doesn't have any real option other than to be pretentious; to be the "model programmer" who is "passionate" about whatever shit that the company is doing; to fit into the "culture" of whatever flavor of WASP is running it. Frankly, SV bullshit smells worse than Trump's hotel bed.
- mikelevins 9y ago
  No, it's not only you who can't think when being prodded. I have similar issues. Actually, my issues are kind of entertaining when they don't get in the way of my livelihood. My brain appears to prioritize processing interaction with people, especially strangers, over some other kinds of activity, including the kind that's needed to solve logic problems. Ask me to take some open-ended time alone to write a solution to a problem, and I'll give you one when I'm done. Ask me to do the same thing with people watching or, worse, interacting with me as I do it, and you will get random results that may or may not bear any relation to the problem. It affects things other than coding. When she was a teenager, my daughter sometimes engaged me in conversation when I was driving somewhere, just to see where we would end up. I remember a particular instance of winding up in the parking lot of a Safeway in Capitola, California, wondering why I was there, while my daughter laughed her head off. I've been at this programming thing for a long time now. I have a reasonable idea of how good I am at it. Given the right circumstances and the right kinds of problems, I can be (and have been) extremely productive. I've been described by someone paying me as one of those "10X" programmers, and the dvcs logs bore him out (but I know what he didn't: if the tools and goals and problem space had been different, or if the work circumstances had been different, then I wouldn't have been nearly as productive). But technical interviews aren't going to reveal any of that, certainly not about me, specifically. I'm always going to look like something between an idiot and a mediocrity in the typical technical interview. Various critics are complaining that the OP's methods aren't going to work, but all the data we have says that current fashions in hiring already don't work. The correlation between interview performance and job performance is laughable. Companies all like to say they hire "the best"; what they really mean is that they hire the best that currently-known methods can distinguish, which is to say, a random selection of people. About the most you can say about current methods is that they select for people who want a job, which I suppose is better for hiring than pure sortition. We don't know how to hire good people in technology. Popular hiring strategies are voodoo. The only method that has been shown to produce much better results than chance is blind, standardized skills-testing, which is not currently popular. Technical interviews are nonsense. The proper role of interviewing is to find out whether the candidate seems to be a glaring asshole. If you want to select for skills, administer standardized tests. If you don't want to do that, then it doesn't matter much what you do. It all seems to be about equally useless. You might try doing a Tarot card reading for the candidate.
GuB-42 9y ago
An actual test drive takes just a few minutes, an hour at most. The "test drives" they suggest take 30 to 90 days... It is not a test, it is a job. Their suggestion is essentially "you don't need to make sure you are hiring the right people, because you can fix it later by firing them". I think the flipside of this strategy is that you won't get the people who are good at the job and good at interviews. Imagine I am offered a job where 90% of people pass probation because of a thorough interview process vs one where only 20% pass. If I pass the interview, other things being equal, it is easy to guess the job I'll take. The 20% company won't even have a chance to "test" me.
placebo 9y ago
I'm delighted to see comments that show some people here actually get this. While my conclusions are based only on my own experience, they have served me well so far. In the dozens of interviews that I've conducted over the years, not once did I need to resort to quizzes that do a fine job of showing how a person can answer a quiz under pressure of an interview but not much beyond that. Most of the important qualities I'm interested in concerning an applicant have very little to do with this sort of ability. A decision based on a chat which reveals more than any professional quiz ever could (if you know how to listen) is usually a better one. Not only do I refuse to ask candidates quizzes, but after getting enough professional experience, I started refusing to answer them when I was looking for new positions. One such case involved two executives that interviewed me for a certain senior R&D position. The interview was going well when at a certain point one of them asked if he could test me on some professional stuff. I politely answered that while I respect their candidate filtering methods, it doesn't fit my MO and that I'll pass on that. Not surprisingly, I later received a negative reply from them. A couple of weeks passed and I was hired for the same position by a much larger company (and with much better compensation) that didn't insist on me standing next to a whiteboard to see if I can pick up on some silly trick. About 3 months later, I received a call from one of the executives in the company from which I received a negative reply. Apparently they hired someone who had managed to pass their interview tests with flying colours, but was terrible at his job and so they asked me whether I would like to work for them (of course, this time with no tests). I said I'll pass on that too. I think the reason for the difficulty in finding the right people for the job stems from a deeper problem of people having lost touch with their inner drive and resorting to external means to understand what is good for them. It starts in grade school and continues on from there. This is not a problem that can (or should) go away quickly, but the more I see people at least being aware of the issue, the more hopeful I am that a more sane process for people fulfilling their potential will eventually replace the existing method.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  As someone who recently rejected a company who wanted a 2-3 hour test + 90 minute interview after a 45 minute phone interview (which I did), this is gratifying to read.
Paul_S 9y ago
That is a real cruel process. You are taking advantage of your position as an employer - are you at least honest with those people and tell them there's a 90% chance you will fire them in 90 days? Sure, it might be good for you as a company but it's really bad for the 90% of people who quit their job to get fired by you 90 days later because you can't be arsed to interview them. I can't believe you want to be praised for this approach.
- vlehto 9y ago
  If it's really 90% of the people who are left behind, it's probably not good for the company really. People in existing teams will be very fatigued from getting to know new people and then trying to forget them. This is well documented in the military. After a while veterans don't want to get to know the fresh reinforcements that arrive into their unit, as the new guys will probably die quickly simply because they are inexperienced and thrown to battlefield. As a result, any investment in social relationship with them is wasted. And as a result, the whole unit will get grumpy.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - fnthawar2 9y ago
    Interesting points. We never found smart effective folks who did not want to get to know newer smart and effective folks.
    - vlehto 9y ago
      I'd guess there is something like 50% cutoff point. Less than 50% of hires stay: "oh geez, more meat to the grinder." More than 50% of hires stay: "A new guy came, do you play ping pong?" But my cut off point might be way off. And there might be some elasticity between those where people are more iffy about the whole deal. I'd suggest testing this. Stack slightly not so promising new hires to one team and more promising in other. Let's hope there is different retain rate. Now you can measure the performance changes of both teams and see the net effect.
expertentipp 9y ago
Women, minorities?! At this point even those "privileged" (male, qualified, experienced) have problem getting hired. The technical recruitment has become perpetuum-mobile of job postings, assignments, countless audio and video calls, technical teasing. Sometimes I'm wondering - is there any actual hiring happening? I have impression there are people in companies who are literally getting paid for creating recruitment noise and infinite "hiring".
barrkel 9y ago
I'm not a fan of technical interviews, at least not whiteboard ones, or asking people trick questions, or algorithm analysis bingo. I like to work through a problem. The problem is synthetic, unfortunately, but anything actually relevant will give too much of a leg up to people who are familiar with frameworks. Steps: (a) discuss the problem and come up with potential solutions, and once we've agreed on a solution (b) turn the solution into code in any language they want, as long as we can easily install it on Ubuntu. An explicit non-goal is actually coming up with a solution to the problem: it's great if they do come up with a solution, but far more important is mind-melding on a problem and solution, and being able to convert agreed solutions into working code. The idea is to simulate work: I assume that everyone we interview has at least basic ability to code (we use a Codility pre-check), so I create a scenario where I'd be helping set up a team member to work on a functional piece of the application. Communicate and ensure we have a shared understanding of the problem, discuss a solution, and see them actually produce a solution. Once we have a solution, I do want to know if they understand what the performance characteristics are; that's a very practical concern, as the company I work for deals with data batches ranging in 100 items to 10 million items, so code should be written to scale linearly at worst.
twic 9y ago
This is a particularly bizarre article to come from someone who is ex-Pivotal, given that Pivotal's interviews are all-day pair programming on real code (mostly) rather than whiteboard nonsense, and don't suffer from the problems described here. AFAIK, Farhan came in through Pivotal's acquisition of Xtreme Labs, but I thought the point of Xtreme Labs was that they copied the Pivotal way of doing things, including hiring. Also: > For example, let’s say that someone is working on our mobile client and it’s not going as quickly as we need it to go. We’ll ... work with them to identify and remove the impediments slowing them down, while revising our plan to be more realistic? > let them know that they need to speed up This guy is an asshole.
piyush_soni 9y ago
Yeah. No. I'd never like to interview with a company which just hires me (I don't think I've any red flags) and then after 3 months tells me "Sorry, we only had to hire 2, we hired 5, and though you're good, you're not as good as Mr. X". I'd rather work at a place which has the intention of keeping me for a long time.
venturis_voice 9y ago
We've often found that employers want to see a willingness and ability to learn and adapt to new challenges as opposed to a candidate having an encyclopedic knowledge of coding languages etc. With a competent knowledge of your market you can be taught the rest of your role but if you're unable to articulate your goals and mission to non-technical people you'll often come unstuck when trying to communicate what your doing to others. This seems a lot more important in the hiring process for tech people now as technology is usually the product or output of a company as opposed to being shut up in a basement somewhere just helping a company operate. We've just spoke to an internal IT recruiter about this and he's echoed a lot of the sentiments put across in this thread. Links below if you wanna listen :) http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/internal-recruitment/ http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/internal-recruitment/
cacrawford 9y ago
I had a 3-month job search over the last summer, encompassing about 150 contacts which I filtered into roughly 25 actual interviews. It takes an enormous amount of time to deal with all the various interview techniques out there. Such as: * Four or five-hour interviews. * Interview prep suggested by recruiters for tech interviews. * All-day work sessions pairing with employees. * "Homework" that can take anywhere from 5 hours to days. * Multiple online sessions, each to solve a tech riddle. I can't imagine how I could've done this when holding a job at the same time. I'd have to be incredibly picky about who I chose to interview with - which means, I wouldn't have interviewed with my current company because they didn't interest me during the screening, only until after the interview when I got to talk with actual developers.
draw_down 9y ago
I wouldn’t take a job with a probationary period, personally.
leowoo91 9y ago
Technical interviews are just a form of an expensive filter that works for big companies and should be considered as a warmup.
maltalex 9y ago
This makes no sense to me. Most candidates aren't unemployed; they're switching jobs. Leaving a job they don't like, or looking for an upgrade. Many have to be persuaded to leave their current employer. If I were thinking about switching, I'd want a lot more commitment from my future employer than "we'll hire you and four more guys for the same position, then we'll see which one of you will last 90 days". Regardless of my confidence in being able to do the job, who wants to compete for a job for 90 days? Interviews are horrible and stressful, but this is just replacing them with what is essentially a 90 day interview for which you have you quit your current job.

63 points by kawera 9y ago

For me one skill that stands out as a predictor for performance is the person's ability to do code reviews. Of course not all decent devs are particularly good at this [1], but from my experience below average ones are consistently unable to find flaws in both their own and someone else's code or even if they do they don't care enough to point that out. [1] Not saying I'm an especially decent dev, but although I manage, reviews are hard for me because I'm way to lenient - I guess it boils down to trying not to hurt other people's feelings. EDIT: accidental emphasis

deleted 9y ago
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zimpenfish 9y ago
> unable to find flaws in both their own It would be an interesting interview where they put some of my own code from github/bitbucket down and said "code review this, please". Especially if it was reasonably old and I'd forgotten about it...
meesterdude 9y ago
I will add, not just "doing code reviews" but how - what are they like to disagree with? How do they express a different perspective? How methodical are they? What do they look for?

funkythingss 9y ago

"Tons of great people, and, disproportionately, women and minorities, can perform less well at technical interviews but be great in role." You lost all your credibility with one sentence. Congratulations.

glorkk 9y ago
I cringed too. This is akin to a religious dogma at many places I have worked at and is a huge red flag for me, as an employee. However, the rest of the article makes some good points (testing on the ability to do the job is a better predictor of job performance), you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
richmarr 9y ago
> You lost all your credibility with one sentence. Congratulations. Can you explain the basis for that opinion?
- ttoinou 9y ago
  I think this sentence was added to fit the "we're more diverse" narrative in the beginning of the article
- danielhooper 9y ago
  The poor guy is simply unaware he is a misogynist.
Niksko 9y ago
The data available shows that women and minorities ARE under represented in the tech industry. Corellation does not imply causation, but if you have a limited number of causal factors during the hiring process, the logical conclusion is that parts of the hiring process contribute to this under representation in significant ways. Perhaps the focus is wrong. Perhaps it's not the 'technical' part of the technical interview that causes this disparity. Perhaps it's just good ol' fashioned racism or prejudices, and really the part of the technical interview that causes a disproportionate number of white males to be hired is simply the fact that the interviews happen with the interviewer fully cognizant of the applicants race and gender. You'll notice that the article also mentioned their disdain for being able to see the applicant. To dismiss a fact that reasonably straightforwardly follows from empirical evidence and limited options for causality is simply obstinancr.
- 9y ago

docdeek 9y ago

"We interview people who fit the basic criteria, and for less than one hour (sometimes 15 minutes!). If the person seems capable and there aren’t major red flags, we hire them (we use an extremely coarse grained filter). If we have five applicants, sometimes we’ll hire all five. They’re then on a 90 day probationary period to see if they work out…” Not sure how that would fly outside of the US. In France we have probationary periods but I have never heard of a company hiring multiple people for a full time role (CDI) and then laying off the ones that aren’t the best fit after a couple of months. That sounds to me like a way to get in a bit of trouble - legally, socially, with unions - in the employment context here. Would be interested in learning whether there’s a French company that does anything like this - maybe a half dozen CDD’s with the express commitment to hire one of the six on a CDI after three months? But who is leaving a CDI on that sort of bet?

superplussed 9y ago
I'm an American living in Berlin, and I think the problem here would be more of a cultural one than a legal one. Germans just have an expectation that once hired they will be given every chance to succeed, to the point that firings seem to come across as a shock or an implication of major wrong-doing. "Hire fast, fire fast" is already ingrained in American startups, so I think the policy outlined in this article would be easier to adopt in the US. Americans in general view jobs as more transient than Europeans do.
- mifreewil 9y ago
  I think you meant “hire slow, fire fast.” Never heard fast for both.
  - blumomo 9y ago
    That's what the article says that is being discussed. Probably you didn't read it.
    - arkades 9y ago

justherefortart 9y ago

I've found simply talking to prospective employees (be it software or anything else) about how they work, challenges they've encountered and how they overcame them and figuring out their attitudes has never failed me in hiring. The bullshit feeling that everyone has to live and breathe coding is the biggest nonsense thing I encounter in this field (software development). A good job with a good work environment is more than enough to get productivity and results from your coworkers. 99.9% of the issues I encounter in companies as a consultant or employee revolve around poor management. They don't have budgets. They don't have plans. They don't have people that understand IT. Their IT doesn't understand how their products affect the bottom line. Add in about 1000 other "management doesn't get it" items and you might be close to the realistic picture. It's quite depressing in practice.

jaggederest 9y ago
Yep. The most critical question I ask if I'm interviewing is "What are the problems?" I'm not even especially interested in the actual answers, per se. I'm interested in two things: do people know what they are, and are people willing to say so out loud.
ekidd 9y ago
> I've found simply talking to prospective employees (be it software or anything else) about how they work, challenges they've encountered and how they overcame them and figuring out their attitudes has never failed me in hiring. At previous jobs, I've run into candidates who interview well but code poorly. They look good at first: 1. Their resume looks reasonable. 2. They sound qualified on a phone screen. 3. They can talk about previous projects. 4. They seem like great people to work with. ...but when put to the test, they can't code. I'm talking really simple stuff, like "You have 40 minutes to write (something no harder than FizzBuzz)." They can use their own laptop, with the language of their choice, and StackOverflow. Or for a job involving Scheme, we asked them reverse a singly-linked list. These were almost insultingly easy tests, given the posted job requirements. But I saw otherwise promising candidates struggle for the better part of an hour. But asking people to code can also help them get hired. I remember one interviewee who was doing poorly until we asked him to code, and then he solved the coding problems in literally about 20 seconds. We hired him, and he turned out to be a incredibly strong team member for many years. I think one fair way to handle these things might be to offer interviewees a choice: 1. We can ask you to write code during the interview, or 2. You can submit a link to a small open source project for us to look at. That gives both people who can't code under pressure and people who don't write code outside their day job an option. And it provides the interviewer with a work sample to discuss in the interview.

joncrocks 9y ago

So you still do technical interviews, just long ones that require you to quit your current job first. No thanks. This might work if you're looking to fill a pipeline with 'good enough' junior people who you can then push into an appropriate role, rather than hiring for something specific.

expertentipp 9y ago
NEVER quit the job for another one where they just want to sniff you. Try to learn how many people the company is hiring and how many positions long term they want to sustain.
fnthawar2 9y ago
Thanks for engaging. Actually the offers are exactly the same as if we did 7hours of interviews, so it's not an interview after we hire you. Let me know if that answers your question.

DoubleGlazing 9y ago

As someone who has had to conduct technical interviews I have found the best way to evaluate technical skills is to just chat. No tests, no whiteboard challenges, no list of requirements to tick off. Just let the candidate talk about their career and what they have done. Ask their opinion of certain things. Ask about how they tackled certain projects and give them the time to answer and go off on tangents. Treat it like you are a few friends having an in-depth discussion over drinks. Technical interviews focus too much on headline points. They want the candidate to touch on or mention certain things that everyone should know about the subject. I'm not interested in that, I'm more interested about them mentioning less obvious things such as known quirks, bugs or tricks about the subject matter. Stuff that only a regular user would learn about. The problem with this approach is that for many companies HR insists on structured interviews. I once had do some interviews for a couple of C# roles. The interview format was literally the same as the game show Talk About. The interviewee was given time to talk about a subject and we had to tick off a list whether they mentioned certain keywords and phrases in the allotted time. The same format applied to the HR interview. Whoever scored highest got the job, a very silly way to do recruitment.

hasenj 9y ago
That's just about the worst way to filter candidates. You are selecting for chatty people.
- Renaud 9y ago
  No, you filter on people’s ability to communicate about what they already know.
- Mikushi 9y ago
  Competent chatty people. If you can't express your competency during an interview chat I don't see how you could be a good candidate (there are exceptions), nothing more damaging to a team that someone who can't communicate.
  - SpEd3Y 9y ago

comstock 9y ago

I knew a company a bit like this once. The CEO would hire people very quickly. In most cases they didn’t have the appropriate skill set, and had personality issues. They’d have a massive negative impact on the culture of this early stage startup. They’d then get fired. The CEO would say, it will be better for them in the long term and I’m sure they’ll be happier. This wasn’t true, they had their issues but actually the CEO has screwed them too by not doing the due diligence and hiring too quickly... Honestly the best solution I can think of is to work as a paid consultant for the company and see how that goes. If the relationship seems to work, then join full time. Not everybody has the time to take on consulting gigs though which is a significant downside.

thepratt 9y ago

This approach is so far from reality it hurts. What are you learning in 15 minutes that can inform you enough to make a decision to hire someone for a minimum of 90 days? Not enough. You're missing out on other aspects of hiring like recruiter fees. If I were to hire every idiot that ticked off the boxes but couldn't demonstrate relate knowledge to something tangible I would've put my current and previous company out of business. Your 90-day long interview process (this is what it is, face it) is not only a financial detriment, but a productivity tumor. Yes, I do agree that the current wide-spread use of "solve this on a whiteboard", "implement merge-sort", or some other backwards method of technical ability does not work; that is why I implement questions, and paired exercises that are tailored to the position they will be filling and the background they're coming from. The process I have in place consists of 3-parts: phone screen, and 2 in-person interviews - this process normally doesn't extend past 3 hours. The interviews are structured as a conversation to make sure the most nervous of interviewees can perform comfortably. I'd rather waste 2 hours more per candidate opposed to ~20-40k GBP for a poor trial, and a decrease in overall team velocity.

fnthawar2 9y ago
Great points. The 90-day interview (as you call it), is the same if we did 3 hours of interviews (like you do) or 15 minutes. We didn't see a better accuracy as we shrunk our interviews down from 3 hours to eventually 15 minutes. I really like your pairing idea espescially if that's close to the reality of the actual job.

throwaay3192321 9y ago

Is it only me who can't think properly when constantly being prodded to by a bunch of people ? I also feel that the game is so rigged that one doesn't have any real option other than to be pretentious; to be the "model programmer" who is "passionate" about whatever shit that the company is doing; to fit into the "culture" of whatever flavor of WASP is running it. Frankly, SV bullshit smells worse than Trump's hotel bed.

mikelevins 9y ago
No, it's not only you who can't think when being prodded. I have similar issues. Actually, my issues are kind of entertaining when they don't get in the way of my livelihood. My brain appears to prioritize processing interaction with people, especially strangers, over some other kinds of activity, including the kind that's needed to solve logic problems. Ask me to take some open-ended time alone to write a solution to a problem, and I'll give you one when I'm done. Ask me to do the same thing with people watching or, worse, interacting with me as I do it, and you will get random results that may or may not bear any relation to the problem. It affects things other than coding. When she was a teenager, my daughter sometimes engaged me in conversation when I was driving somewhere, just to see where we would end up. I remember a particular instance of winding up in the parking lot of a Safeway in Capitola, California, wondering why I was there, while my daughter laughed her head off. I've been at this programming thing for a long time now. I have a reasonable idea of how good I am at it. Given the right circumstances and the right kinds of problems, I can be (and have been) extremely productive. I've been described by someone paying me as one of those "10X" programmers, and the dvcs logs bore him out (but I know what he didn't: if the tools and goals and problem space had been different, or if the work circumstances had been different, then I wouldn't have been nearly as productive). But technical interviews aren't going to reveal any of that, certainly not about me, specifically. I'm always going to look like something between an idiot and a mediocrity in the typical technical interview. Various critics are complaining that the OP's methods aren't going to work, but all the data we have says that current fashions in hiring already don't work. The correlation between interview performance and job performance is laughable. Companies all like to say they hire "the best"; what they really mean is that they hire the best that currently-known methods can distinguish, which is to say, a random selection of people. About the most you can say about current methods is that they select for people who want a job, which I suppose is better for hiring than pure sortition. We don't know how to hire good people in technology. Popular hiring strategies are voodoo. The only method that has been shown to produce much better results than chance is blind, standardized skills-testing, which is not currently popular. Technical interviews are nonsense. The proper role of interviewing is to find out whether the candidate seems to be a glaring asshole. If you want to select for skills, administer standardized tests. If you don't want to do that, then it doesn't matter much what you do. It all seems to be about equally useless. You might try doing a Tarot card reading for the candidate.

GuB-42 9y ago

An actual test drive takes just a few minutes, an hour at most. The "test drives" they suggest take 30 to 90 days... It is not a test, it is a job. Their suggestion is essentially "you don't need to make sure you are hiring the right people, because you can fix it later by firing them". I think the flipside of this strategy is that you won't get the people who are good at the job and good at interviews. Imagine I am offered a job where 90% of people pass probation because of a thorough interview process vs one where only 20% pass. If I pass the interview, other things being equal, it is easy to guess the job I'll take. The 20% company won't even have a chance to "test" me.

placebo 9y ago

I'm delighted to see comments that show some people here actually get this. While my conclusions are based only on my own experience, they have served me well so far. In the dozens of interviews that I've conducted over the years, not once did I need to resort to quizzes that do a fine job of showing how a person can answer a quiz under pressure of an interview but not much beyond that. Most of the important qualities I'm interested in concerning an applicant have very little to do with this sort of ability. A decision based on a chat which reveals more than any professional quiz ever could (if you know how to listen) is usually a better one. Not only do I refuse to ask candidates quizzes, but after getting enough professional experience, I started refusing to answer them when I was looking for new positions. One such case involved two executives that interviewed me for a certain senior R&D position. The interview was going well when at a certain point one of them asked if he could test me on some professional stuff. I politely answered that while I respect their candidate filtering methods, it doesn't fit my MO and that I'll pass on that. Not surprisingly, I later received a negative reply from them. A couple of weeks passed and I was hired for the same position by a much larger company (and with much better compensation) that didn't insist on me standing next to a whiteboard to see if I can pick up on some silly trick. About 3 months later, I received a call from one of the executives in the company from which I received a negative reply. Apparently they hired someone who had managed to pass their interview tests with flying colours, but was terrible at his job and so they asked me whether I would like to work for them (of course, this time with no tests). I said I'll pass on that too. I think the reason for the difficulty in finding the right people for the job stems from a deeper problem of people having lost touch with their inner drive and resorting to external means to understand what is good for them. It starts in grade school and continues on from there. This is not a problem that can (or should) go away quickly, but the more I see people at least being aware of the issue, the more hopeful I am that a more sane process for people fulfilling their potential will eventually replace the existing method.

zimpenfish 9y ago
As someone who recently rejected a company who wanted a 2-3 hour test + 90 minute interview after a 45 minute phone interview (which I did), this is gratifying to read.

Paul_S 9y ago

That is a real cruel process. You are taking advantage of your position as an employer - are you at least honest with those people and tell them there's a 90% chance you will fire them in 90 days? Sure, it might be good for you as a company but it's really bad for the 90% of people who quit their job to get fired by you 90 days later because you can't be arsed to interview them. I can't believe you want to be praised for this approach.

vlehto 9y ago
If it's really 90% of the people who are left behind, it's probably not good for the company really. People in existing teams will be very fatigued from getting to know new people and then trying to forget them. This is well documented in the military. After a while veterans don't want to get to know the fresh reinforcements that arrive into their unit, as the new guys will probably die quickly simply because they are inexperienced and thrown to battlefield. As a result, any investment in social relationship with them is wasted. And as a result, the whole unit will get grumpy.
- deleted 9y ago
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- fnthawar2 9y ago
  Interesting points. We never found smart effective folks who did not want to get to know newer smart and effective folks.
  - vlehto 9y ago
    I'd guess there is something like 50% cutoff point. Less than 50% of hires stay: "oh geez, more meat to the grinder." More than 50% of hires stay: "A new guy came, do you play ping pong?" But my cut off point might be way off. And there might be some elasticity between those where people are more iffy about the whole deal. I'd suggest testing this. Stack slightly not so promising new hires to one team and more promising in other. Let's hope there is different retain rate. Now you can measure the performance changes of both teams and see the net effect.

expertentipp 9y ago

Women, minorities?! At this point even those "privileged" (male, qualified, experienced) have problem getting hired. The technical recruitment has become perpetuum-mobile of job postings, assignments, countless audio and video calls, technical teasing. Sometimes I'm wondering - is there any actual hiring happening? I have impression there are people in companies who are literally getting paid for creating recruitment noise and infinite "hiring".

barrkel 9y ago

I'm not a fan of technical interviews, at least not whiteboard ones, or asking people trick questions, or algorithm analysis bingo. I like to work through a problem. The problem is synthetic, unfortunately, but anything actually relevant will give too much of a leg up to people who are familiar with frameworks. Steps: (a) discuss the problem and come up with potential solutions, and once we've agreed on a solution (b) turn the solution into code in any language they want, as long as we can easily install it on Ubuntu. An explicit non-goal is actually coming up with a solution to the problem: it's great if they do come up with a solution, but far more important is mind-melding on a problem and solution, and being able to convert agreed solutions into working code. The idea is to simulate work: I assume that everyone we interview has at least basic ability to code (we use a Codility pre-check), so I create a scenario where I'd be helping set up a team member to work on a functional piece of the application. Communicate and ensure we have a shared understanding of the problem, discuss a solution, and see them actually produce a solution. Once we have a solution, I do want to know if they understand what the performance characteristics are; that's a very practical concern, as the company I work for deals with data batches ranging in 100 items to 10 million items, so code should be written to scale linearly at worst.

twic 9y ago

This is a particularly bizarre article to come from someone who is ex-Pivotal, given that Pivotal's interviews are all-day pair programming on real code (mostly) rather than whiteboard nonsense, and don't suffer from the problems described here. AFAIK, Farhan came in through Pivotal's acquisition of Xtreme Labs, but I thought the point of Xtreme Labs was that they copied the Pivotal way of doing things, including hiring. Also: > For example, let’s say that someone is working on our mobile client and it’s not going as quickly as we need it to go. We’ll ... work with them to identify and remove the impediments slowing them down, while revising our plan to be more realistic? > let them know that they need to speed up This guy is an asshole.

piyush_soni 9y ago

Yeah. No. I'd never like to interview with a company which just hires me (I don't think I've any red flags) and then after 3 months tells me "Sorry, we only had to hire 2, we hired 5, and though you're good, you're not as good as Mr. X". I'd rather work at a place which has the intention of keeping me for a long time.

venturis_voice 9y ago

We've often found that employers want to see a willingness and ability to learn and adapt to new challenges as opposed to a candidate having an encyclopedic knowledge of coding languages etc. With a competent knowledge of your market you can be taught the rest of your role but if you're unable to articulate your goals and mission to non-technical people you'll often come unstuck when trying to communicate what your doing to others. This seems a lot more important in the hiring process for tech people now as technology is usually the product or output of a company as opposed to being shut up in a basement somewhere just helping a company operate. We've just spoke to an internal IT recruiter about this and he's echoed a lot of the sentiments put across in this thread. Links below if you wanna listen :) http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/internal-recruitment/ http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/internal-recruitment/

cacrawford 9y ago

I had a 3-month job search over the last summer, encompassing about 150 contacts which I filtered into roughly 25 actual interviews. It takes an enormous amount of time to deal with all the various interview techniques out there. Such as: * Four or five-hour interviews. * Interview prep suggested by recruiters for tech interviews. * All-day work sessions pairing with employees. * "Homework" that can take anywhere from 5 hours to days. * Multiple online sessions, each to solve a tech riddle. I can't imagine how I could've done this when holding a job at the same time. I'd have to be incredibly picky about who I chose to interview with - which means, I wouldn't have interviewed with my current company because they didn't interest me during the screening, only until after the interview when I got to talk with actual developers.

draw_down 9y ago

I wouldn’t take a job with a probationary period, personally.

leowoo91 9y ago

Technical interviews are just a form of an expensive filter that works for big companies and should be considered as a warmup.

maltalex 9y ago

This makes no sense to me. Most candidates aren't unemployed; they're switching jobs. Leaving a job they don't like, or looking for an upgrade. Many have to be persuaded to leave their current employer. If I were thinking about switching, I'd want a lot more commitment from my future employer than "we'll hire you and four more guys for the same position, then we'll see which one of you will last 90 days". Regardless of my confidence in being able to do the job, who wants to compete for a job for 90 days? Interviews are horrible and stressful, but this is just replacing them with what is essentially a 90 day interview for which you have you quit your current job.