7 ms·

Every few days an article of this type is written and posted on HN. And all the comments are people either proposing another (same old) approach to hiring or pe

Every few days an article of this type is written and posted on HN. And all the comments are people either proposing another (same old) approach to hiring or people replying to those comments explaining why they'd hate that approach. This is then done for every possible combination of approaches (homework questions, whiteboard interview, pair programming, fizzbuzz questions, algorithmic questions, work-history questions, career-progression questions, mini-project, magical incantations, and so on...) It may sound cynical but at this point it feels like no one has any new ideas about it and the same content keeps getting recycled in the form of yet another article and yet another comments section. Half of these articles are from company blogs which exist largely as just a marketing tool. Since there is no actual new thought, everyone just cargo-cults the Google approach.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Kluny 9y ago
I've never done hiring, but I've chosen roommates, and I feel like it's the same. You make a checklist of stuff you're looking for and red flags, do a reference check or whatever, but ultimately, the decision always comes down to some gut impulse. My gut has always been right so far, but I guess the day it burns me is the day I start trying to find some optimal solution to protect myself from letting an asshole move in.
- johnrob 9y ago
  Anecdotally, most if not all of the times I’ve been burned has been when I ignored my gut feeling.
  - dudul 9y ago
    I have the same anecdote :) the interview all checked out, everybody gave a thumb up, but my guts were telling me "it's not gonna work". I forced myself to ignore it, put it on the account of unfair bias or something and hired the candidates. After 6 to 8 months they were gone after a disastrous tenure. It actually shook me a little after the 2nd time, because I thought I was doing the right thing not dismissing people just because of gut feeling.
- tempay 9y ago
  The problem with using gut instincts for these kinds of decisions is that it introduces bias and discrimination. For a roommate that might be positive as it will bias towards people that are similar to you, but for companies it's too easy to end up making rooms full of middle class white dudes.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Exactly. While it isn't ideal for your personal development as a human being to always hang out and live with people who confirm your unconscious biases, at least there it's somewhat understandable and isn't the end of the world. But allowing your unconscious biases to influence hiring decisions is disastrous for diversity.
kurtisc 9y ago
Maybe if they hate the approach, the interview is a successful filter.
nxsynonym 9y ago
I think the bigger issue is that the interview-to-hire process is not fool-proof, and never will be. It's a gamble, no matter how in depth or complicated your hiring process is (from personality interviews to whiteboarding to take homes). Being interviewed and doing well is a skill set and it's very different from a full time work-place skill set. All of these interviewing processes that get refined and more lengthy just create a new class of people who are good at being interviewed. I don't know what the solution is, but making candidates jump through 3-4 interview rounds, memorize algorithms just for the sake of it, and go through 4 to 8 hour on sites probably isn't it. Even if it happens to give you a better-than-average employee, what are you sacrificing (as a business) in terms of man-hours, productivity, and focus? Personally I'd like to see more companies institute a temp-to-hire process. Bring in new candidates for a two or three week contract, see how they fit in, pay for the their time (at a discount), and then go from there. If it doesn't work out, you get some work done for your company, and they get some relevant experience for their resume. Writing the perfect resume and re-reading CTCI for the 10th time won't tell you how well the candidate will perform, but seeing them actually work might. As to your point about marketing - I agree. Not one of these approaches are really novel or helpful to anyone but the company themselves, and is just a glorified "look at how we took a chance" tactic.
- mrisoli 9y ago
  It is impossible because it is always possible to game the system. If you devise an interview framework or a hiring profile, no matter how many traits you want to evaluate(as the article points out), they will lump those together and measure in some scale of how likely they are to hire the candidate(sometimes that is even just binary), if a candidate can emulate their desired profile he gets a high "score" and gets an offer, the bigger the financial incentives to do this, more people will game the system(prepare for specific interviews), think, if you can play the part for a couple of 1-hour interviews, you can get a 6-figure salary at a tech startup, that is a high ROI. Most companies can't stop that, there isn't limitless budget for interviewing so the interview process has limited resources to evaluate people, which leads to false positives. There are also a lot of talented people that don't practice their interviewing skills enough and end up as false negatives. It's human nature, people need to evaluate things on a single criterion and you can game that. The same thing happens with school, you can work your way through school material to maximize your grades without learning much.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
I don't think the problem is about lack of innovative thought. The problem is a lack of a verification mechanism. Say I come to you with an amazing new black box. A candidate puts their hand in the box, and if a light on top of the box turns green, that will be a good employee and you should hire them. How do you verify whether my box works?
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  That's biased against the unhanded
auxym 9y ago
Why though? Why is programming seemingly the only field where companies feel the need to put up these super interview processes with mutiple interview rounds, technical tests, white boarding, etc? Is it the high salaries? In that case, do you see such testing in law, or finance? Is it the technical difficulty? In a previous life (read: up to a few months ago) I worked as a mechanical engineer, in a pretty technical field (numerical simulation of structures). Additionally to demanding reasonably deep knowledge in a few areas, the job came with the responsibility of making sure that your designs do not kill or injure people. I had never had a technical test in an interview before I interviewed for my current IT position. Nor have I heard of colleagues having such a test. Is it because most engineers in Canada are licensed (myself included), and most jobs require you be licensed? If that's the case, it's pretty funny, because at least in my province, the test you have to pass for the license is entirely about ethics and professionalism, nothing technical. Part of the code of ethics though, is that it's on you as a professional to ensure you have the necessary competence to do the work.
- meri_dian 9y ago
  You're kidding, right? That other industries don't have high entry barriers? Just some I can name off the top of my head... Medicine, law, pharmacy, actuarial science, accounting... For most upper class jobs it's the norm.
  - auxym 9y ago
    I edited my post to reflect my meaning better. I didn't mean high barriers generally, such as a degree, because that definitely isn't specific to software. I was thinking of the complicated interview process, which seems rather exclusive to software, at least as far as I know. Medicine, pharmacy, actuarial are all licensed professions. A lot (most?) law and accounting practitioners are also licensed. So, is the difference for software that it doesn't require a professional license, so employers are forced to sort of invent their own "licensing" in the form of these very difficult interviews? Not that I'm advocating for licensing by the way, it comes with its own set of problems (notably rent seeking behavior). Just trying to understand why software as a field seems to stand out here.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
You would probably enjoy http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com .
Clubber 9y ago
The approach I prefer is have one of your tops talk to them about technology for an hour or less. Talk about their favorite projects, least favorite projects, favorite code, etc. The top will be able to tell if they have the interest and ability. The interest is what makes a entry level developer improve.
- imiric 9y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree. Make the process a conversation rather than an interview. Get to meet the person, have lunch with them, talk about what motivates them and what they're passionate about, discuss tech stuff, and at some point during that hour or two both you and them will have an idea whether you want to turn it into a steady relationship. :) I like to add a code review stage to the mix, where we show them a small chunk of intentionally badly written code that might come up during a code review, which has both obvious and more obscure issues related to syntax, clarity, efficiency, etc., and you judge how they approach it and what issues they bring up. I've found this to be quite a useful metric that mostly replicates a real world scenario, but in a more comfortable setting than asking them to write code on a whiteboard. And you try your hardest to block any biases for/against them you might have when making your decision.
ubernostrum 9y ago
For what it's worth, I'm one of the people who consistently shows up to rant about interviewing processes and what's wrong with them in HN threads that come anywhere near the topic. I also work at the company this article is about, and the article was written by one of my colleagues. While no process is perfect (including ours -- both the one detailed in this article, and the one we use for general engineers), one of the things that I like about working where I do is the emphasis on putting thought into the interview process and questioning a lot of things that get assumed without a second glance by interview processes elsewhere.
drewmol 9y ago
Here's an anecdote for a different approach that wasn't intential, but wound up giving the company a good sampling of my skills and personality, and me a good sampling of what it was like working for them. I volunteer some consulting and IT services for a local non-profit. They were having another company build some business specific software for them, which had been recommended to them by their board(client is part of a franchise structure of sorts). It was far past schedule, and from my perspective the client had misunderstanding of the scope and timeframe for this type project, which let to the client questioning me "should we just scrap it?". By volunteering along side the company doing the software build(which was also volunteering, mostly) we were able to get the project on track, and update the client's expectations to a more realistic view of the timeframe and outcome. By volunteering alongside them, for another org that we both were happy to support, I didn't feel like I was doing free work for them, and they weren't struggling to pay full salary and onboarding cost to find out the same. Just a thought for an approach to get a sample of each other without one party doing free work for the other.
Apocryphon 9y ago
How about employment by sortition: let the RNG decide.
- punchclockhero 9y ago
  Probably the only fair method.
ramzyo 9y ago
Well written, thanks for posting. This is my sentiment exactly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Kluny 9y ago

I've never done hiring, but I've chosen roommates, and I feel like it's the same. You make a checklist of stuff you're looking for and red flags, do a reference check or whatever, but ultimately, the decision always comes down to some gut impulse. My gut has always been right so far, but I guess the day it burns me is the day I start trying to find some optimal solution to protect myself from letting an asshole move in.

johnrob 9y ago
Anecdotally, most if not all of the times I’ve been burned has been when I ignored my gut feeling.
- dudul 9y ago
  I have the same anecdote :) the interview all checked out, everybody gave a thumb up, but my guts were telling me "it's not gonna work". I forced myself to ignore it, put it on the account of unfair bias or something and hired the candidates. After 6 to 8 months they were gone after a disastrous tenure. It actually shook me a little after the 2nd time, because I thought I was doing the right thing not dismissing people just because of gut feeling.
tempay 9y ago
The problem with using gut instincts for these kinds of decisions is that it introduces bias and discrimination. For a roommate that might be positive as it will bias towards people that are similar to you, but for companies it's too easy to end up making rooms full of middle class white dudes.
- kelnos 9y ago
  Exactly. While it isn't ideal for your personal development as a human being to always hang out and live with people who confirm your unconscious biases, at least there it's somewhat understandable and isn't the end of the world. But allowing your unconscious biases to influence hiring decisions is disastrous for diversity.

kurtisc 9y ago

Maybe if they hate the approach, the interview is a successful filter.

nxsynonym 9y ago

I think the bigger issue is that the interview-to-hire process is not fool-proof, and never will be. It's a gamble, no matter how in depth or complicated your hiring process is (from personality interviews to whiteboarding to take homes). Being interviewed and doing well is a skill set and it's very different from a full time work-place skill set. All of these interviewing processes that get refined and more lengthy just create a new class of people who are good at being interviewed. I don't know what the solution is, but making candidates jump through 3-4 interview rounds, memorize algorithms just for the sake of it, and go through 4 to 8 hour on sites probably isn't it. Even if it happens to give you a better-than-average employee, what are you sacrificing (as a business) in terms of man-hours, productivity, and focus? Personally I'd like to see more companies institute a temp-to-hire process. Bring in new candidates for a two or three week contract, see how they fit in, pay for the their time (at a discount), and then go from there. If it doesn't work out, you get some work done for your company, and they get some relevant experience for their resume. Writing the perfect resume and re-reading CTCI for the 10th time won't tell you how well the candidate will perform, but seeing them actually work might. As to your point about marketing - I agree. Not one of these approaches are really novel or helpful to anyone but the company themselves, and is just a glorified "look at how we took a chance" tactic.

mrisoli 9y ago
It is impossible because it is always possible to game the system. If you devise an interview framework or a hiring profile, no matter how many traits you want to evaluate(as the article points out), they will lump those together and measure in some scale of how likely they are to hire the candidate(sometimes that is even just binary), if a candidate can emulate their desired profile he gets a high "score" and gets an offer, the bigger the financial incentives to do this, more people will game the system(prepare for specific interviews), think, if you can play the part for a couple of 1-hour interviews, you can get a 6-figure salary at a tech startup, that is a high ROI. Most companies can't stop that, there isn't limitless budget for interviewing so the interview process has limited resources to evaluate people, which leads to false positives. There are also a lot of talented people that don't practice their interviewing skills enough and end up as false negatives. It's human nature, people need to evaluate things on a single criterion and you can game that. The same thing happens with school, you can work your way through school material to maximize your grades without learning much.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago

I don't think the problem is about lack of innovative thought. The problem is a lack of a verification mechanism. Say I come to you with an amazing new black box. A candidate puts their hand in the box, and if a light on top of the box turns green, that will be a good employee and you should hire them. How do you verify whether my box works?

fjsolwmv 9y ago
That's biased against the unhanded

auxym 9y ago

Why though? Why is programming seemingly the only field where companies feel the need to put up these super interview processes with mutiple interview rounds, technical tests, white boarding, etc? Is it the high salaries? In that case, do you see such testing in law, or finance? Is it the technical difficulty? In a previous life (read: up to a few months ago) I worked as a mechanical engineer, in a pretty technical field (numerical simulation of structures). Additionally to demanding reasonably deep knowledge in a few areas, the job came with the responsibility of making sure that your designs do not kill or injure people. I had never had a technical test in an interview before I interviewed for my current IT position. Nor have I heard of colleagues having such a test. Is it because most engineers in Canada are licensed (myself included), and most jobs require you be licensed? If that's the case, it's pretty funny, because at least in my province, the test you have to pass for the license is entirely about ethics and professionalism, nothing technical. Part of the code of ethics though, is that it's on you as a professional to ensure you have the necessary competence to do the work.

meri_dian 9y ago
You're kidding, right? That other industries don't have high entry barriers? Just some I can name off the top of my head... Medicine, law, pharmacy, actuarial science, accounting... For most upper class jobs it's the norm.
- auxym 9y ago
  I edited my post to reflect my meaning better. I didn't mean high barriers generally, such as a degree, because that definitely isn't specific to software. I was thinking of the complicated interview process, which seems rather exclusive to software, at least as far as I know. Medicine, pharmacy, actuarial are all licensed professions. A lot (most?) law and accounting practitioners are also licensed. So, is the difference for software that it doesn't require a professional license, so employers are forced to sort of invent their own "licensing" in the form of these very difficult interviews? Not that I'm advocating for licensing by the way, it comes with its own set of problems (notably rent seeking behavior). Just trying to understand why software as a field seems to stand out here.

AlexCoventry 9y ago

You would probably enjoy http://n-gate.com http://n-gate.com .

Clubber 9y ago

The approach I prefer is have one of your tops talk to them about technology for an hour or less. Talk about their favorite projects, least favorite projects, favorite code, etc. The top will be able to tell if they have the interest and ability. The interest is what makes a entry level developer improve.

imiric 9y ago
Wholeheartedly agree. Make the process a conversation rather than an interview. Get to meet the person, have lunch with them, talk about what motivates them and what they're passionate about, discuss tech stuff, and at some point during that hour or two both you and them will have an idea whether you want to turn it into a steady relationship. :) I like to add a code review stage to the mix, where we show them a small chunk of intentionally badly written code that might come up during a code review, which has both obvious and more obscure issues related to syntax, clarity, efficiency, etc., and you judge how they approach it and what issues they bring up. I've found this to be quite a useful metric that mostly replicates a real world scenario, but in a more comfortable setting than asking them to write code on a whiteboard. And you try your hardest to block any biases for/against them you might have when making your decision.

ubernostrum 9y ago

For what it's worth, I'm one of the people who consistently shows up to rant about interviewing processes and what's wrong with them in HN threads that come anywhere near the topic. I also work at the company this article is about, and the article was written by one of my colleagues. While no process is perfect (including ours -- both the one detailed in this article, and the one we use for general engineers), one of the things that I like about working where I do is the emphasis on putting thought into the interview process and questioning a lot of things that get assumed without a second glance by interview processes elsewhere.

drewmol 9y ago

Here's an anecdote for a different approach that wasn't intential, but wound up giving the company a good sampling of my skills and personality, and me a good sampling of what it was like working for them. I volunteer some consulting and IT services for a local non-profit. They were having another company build some business specific software for them, which had been recommended to them by their board(client is part of a franchise structure of sorts). It was far past schedule, and from my perspective the client had misunderstanding of the scope and timeframe for this type project, which let to the client questioning me "should we just scrap it?". By volunteering along side the company doing the software build(which was also volunteering, mostly) we were able to get the project on track, and update the client's expectations to a more realistic view of the timeframe and outcome. By volunteering alongside them, for another org that we both were happy to support, I didn't feel like I was doing free work for them, and they weren't struggling to pay full salary and onboarding cost to find out the same. Just a thought for an approach to get a sample of each other without one party doing free work for the other.

Apocryphon 9y ago

How about employment by sortition: let the RNG decide.

punchclockhero 9y ago
Probably the only fair method.

ramzyo 9y ago

Well written, thanks for posting. This is my sentiment exactly.