23 ms·

A humble alternative to technical interviews

118 points by realbarack 8y ago

johnrob 8y ago
I suspect this might work better than expected. The fear is that employees will exercise some form of nepotism that would “lower the bar”. That might not happen in practice though. Would love to see an experiment.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Aren't there groups who have exercised some form of nepotism to "raise the bar?" Haven't some early stage startups been able to do this?
forrestthewoods 8y ago
So the solution is... nepotism? (Not technically neptosim. But close enough).
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  The difference is that if you're a trusted referrer and you start referring people who suck, you could easily lose that status.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    I think it would be a better idea if such employees were "probationary" and if the referrer would be penalized for making mistakes.
hashkb 8y ago
This is basically already the case. If you aren't experiencing it, you're a Ringo. Edit: or you work with a ton of Ringos.
nkingsy 8y ago
Not a great way to increase diversity, and totally incompatible with referral bonuses. A hidden cost here would also be exposing perceived statuses (eg an engineer who isn't as well respected would have their recommendations denied).
- daenz 8y ago
  >totally incompatible with referral bonuses. I think it's fair to waive referral bonuses if someone is referred through the "trusted referral" process. If someone is dying for a bonus, they can still steer the candidate towards the company and let them go through the technical loop normally.
ebiester 8y ago
"It could also sew some bitterness within the engineering team: it might be seen as unfair that some people can get hired through the nepotistic route, while others have to do the tech loop." More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already in the system. If that happens in one company, it's likely not a big deal. If it happens systemically, you'll see a bigger problem. (People build networks in college, with people of the same demographics -> people use those networks to get people in with a lower bar of entry while those without the benefit of the network will face a barrier that the people that were hired might not have been able to clear.) The problem is that we don't have a better solution to the technical interview.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already in the system. I'm not entirely convinced of this in the general case. I'm white and male, but probably a minority of the people I would recommend (in the sense of personally vouching for their technical ability) are also white and male.
  - newen 8y ago
    I would say you are a relatively rare case though. Most people I've seen primarity socialize with people of the same race. Not strictly, obviously, but in general. Like in tech circles in the Bay Area, you have the white, indian, east asian groups and they, in general, tend to hang out with the same races. And by this I mean most of the friend groups I see are typically mostly of one race.
    - Ancalagon 8y ago
      I guess you're getting downvoted because this is anecdotal evidence? But honestly this is my (admittedly anecdotal) experience as well.
triplee 8y ago
This is a bad idea and the person proposing it should feel bad. -- Every underrepresented group in tech ever, as well as introverts and junior folks or those switching from other specialities (Seriously, I get that we have problems with pipelines and tech. interviews can be pretty terrible, but this is worse. Respected people are already in a pretty set demographic that's harder to break into, and anyone they've worked with is going to be similar. )
- cortesoft 8y ago
  I totally agree with you, except the part where the person proposing it should feel bad. Many people don't realize the unfair advantages their demographic gets, and shaming them for not seeing it is not a good way to get them to see the flaw in their world view. Let's educate instead of shame.
  - triplee 8y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't hold to that feeling bad part. It's a Futurama meme that gets lost in the context of no GIFs. I forget that HN is like the internet of my youth. :) I 100% agree with the idea of using privilege to promote the unprivileged and educate those in our own demographics.
pm90 8y ago
> The risk that they will be humiliated at some point during the interviews. As a candidate, this has happened far more often than I care to admit. I don't take it personally: having worked at many corporations, I know that its usually not any kind of personal animosity or judgement, its just work politics. But the fact remains that it does happen.
- drugme 8y ago
  It happens and it happens a lot more than it used to. And at some point it becomes a significant deterrent to the prospect of starting a new job search.
  - airfoil 8y ago
    It’s happened to me. I’m terrible at the whiteboard in these situations. I have a severe disdain for whiteboard sessions. I’m an experienced engineer, but I’m likely to fumble at the whiteboard. When I’ve interviewed candidates I make it a point to talk about something they’ve worked on and drill down into it. If they need the whiteboard to convey something, that’s great. We’re having a conversation and I’m not giving them a test. I’ll ask about potential optimizations and/or improvements, but I try my best not to make things adversarial. This has worked out really well. The best conversations have resulted in great hires in my experience.
    - rootusrootus 8y ago
      I think this is a good point. As someone who also fumbles a bit if you put me at a whiteboard and start asking esoteric algorithm questions. So when I am hiring someone for my team, I ask them about projects they are familiar with, and drill down into those. Puts them at ease and you pretty quickly get to know if they are talking out of their ass or not. Then after we get through that, if things are going well, I'll bring up the kinds of problems we're working on and see if it piques their interest.
    - bra-ket 8y ago
      +1, I've been hired like this many times and hired people to my team in exactly the same way - discuss the projects on resume in detail. The algorithm quizzes that are so popular these days are just dumb.
drugme 8y ago
Of course it's kind of hideous but it's basically what ends up happening a lot of the time, anyway.
- deedubaya 8y ago
  Most of the time, it isn't what you know, but who you know. It's unfortunate.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Almost none if the time, it's who you know who also has a special insight into what really makes for a good colleague in a really difficult endeavor in an area people haven't tread before.
dahart 8y ago
I don’t even want the ability to refer someone into my company. That’s very risky and puts pressure on me to be right, when I might be wrong. I have referred friends who’ve been rejected, and I’m glad because that’s better than hiring my friend and having them not fit in. Then it’s my fault. I’ve interviewed and referred many people and made a lot of hiring decisions, I would rather have everyone agree, I don’t think the ability for a single person to refer someone past the interview process is a good idea at all. None of the risks listed even compare to the risk of hiring someone who isn’t actually very good or doesn’t get along with the team.... and despite thorough interviews that still happens all the time. If the candidate is worth referring, then the interviews will not likely be a problem. Things do go wrong occasionally, but not very often. Edit: I also meant to add that I think referrals are already weighed very heavily in interviews in my experience. Sometimes even too much. Interviews are already easier for candidates when someone who’s respected makes the referral, so to some degree the proposal here already reflects reality.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I don’t refer friends, I refer former coworkers that I would like to work with again. Problem is I don’t have the same diversity in my referral pool as I’d like to see at work. Last couple of places have been pretty homogenous and I’m less keen on referring people I last worked with ten years ago.
  - dahart 8y ago
    Of course. My coworkers are also my friends. By “friend” I mean people I know that I’ve worked with before and that I like and would vouch for because they’re good, as opposed to people I’ve worked with that I don’t like, or social acquaintances. I’m with you on diversity too, these days I prefer interviewing people I don’t know and people with very different backgrounds than mine.
- gav 8y ago
  The solution to the fear of being at fault is to ask the person making the referral a question like: [ ] I have first-hand experience of the candidate's technical skills [ ] I have first-hand experience of the candidate's character [ ] Neither apply I've worked at several places with versions of this; they want referrals in the pipeline to avoid having to pay recruiters, there's no skipping interviews.
vgoh1 8y ago
I grew up poor, and out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total of zero engineers. I would still be unemployed to this day if this type of hiring were the norm (although it is not entirely uncommon). I can also say, that the engineers that we have had come through our organization based on referrals have not been the best quality. They tend to be engineers that are generally likeable, but not very good. Referrals are probably the way with the least friction to hire someone, so any time the way with the least friction is not being used as much, you have to wonder why.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total of zero engineers How did you manage to do an engineering degree and not get to know any other engineers?
  - xvector 8y ago
    It happens all the time. Most students make friends with students in their own year. This doesn’t help when looking for jobs. I’d wager that most students don’t really network.
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    I made friends in college by sharing a dorm and by hanging out on campus. Later I made friends through friends, but those were the essential starting points. If you're poor, there's a good chance you're not staying in the (often very expensive) dorms, and that you don't have much time to hang out on campus because you have a job. I can imagine this kind of thing making it much harder to make friends.
    - sethammons 8y ago
      Bingo. I made exactly zero connections while at university. Why? I had a kid young. We both worked to make things float. I did not go to school events, study groups, etc. Once, to finish a group project, we went to a kid's room in a dorm. Literally the only time I was ever in a dorm. My very limited social time was spent with existing friends.
mynameishere 8y ago
Yeah, absolutely not. If anything, the opposite would be better: No referrals, no friends and family, no cliques.
ummonk 8y ago
Such referrals are extremely useful datapoints to refine your technical interview and reduce the false negative rate of the interview process. If your interview process is rejecting a lot of quality people, that should be a sign you need to reform it.
Pokepokalypse 8y ago
I tend to look at a candidate's work history. If they've worked at least 10 years, as a coder - it's VERY unlikely that they're a complete liar. Especially if you can call former co-workers, or look at code samples they have online on a personal github, or look at their post history on stackoverflow, or things like that. Even a technical description of prior projects - is a really good indicator of whether they're competent. Puzzle solving - on the other hand, bears little resemblance to actual job requirements in the real world. It's honestly a dumb way to vet candidates. Would I like to see if a candidate, out of a pack of 5 or so potentially equal candidates, has a better approach to creative problem solving? You bet. But I'm more interested in their inter-personal skills, communication skills, and their instincts towards the ethical challenges we face as engineers. (like: when things go south - and blame starts flying). Who do I want on my team? That's the most important question.
- face_mcgace 8y ago
  One time I sat down with a potential hire and went over a trivial PR. Nothing hard just some code to look at on GitHub to provide a familiar environment. Why? To use it as a way to just look at our tech, get completely off track, and go down the tech rabbit hole. Good devs get really excited and talk about what they're using, what libraries they like, what they'd like to work with, etc. Best hire I've ever made.
- elizabeth_olu 8y ago
  www.elizabethblog.com.ng
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  "Puzzle solving" is a nice way to dumb down the importance of good software engineering vs good coding skills. This is especially important at the big 4 or 5. They don't really, truly care what languages you know or what stack you know. They will give you the environment to use whatever you want. What they need is someone who is good at solving problems, which ties into your comment about dealing with bad situations. This is something startups eventually adopt once they mature past needing a web developer to just throw together a website for them, and on to someone who is more flexible and loyal. So please don't reduce the importance of good engineering down to "puzzles". They are a good indicator of someone who has all those qualities you describe. And i wouldn't limit anyone to the big 5. If you believe Google's interview is pure memorisation and no problem solving, don't interview with them. My point is a good interview knows the importance of problem solving, whether solved correctly or not, is about how you solve the problem, and so they design their interviews thusly. That's my point which is contrary to the common sentiment here that "puzzle" interviews are a waste of time.. This is especially true when really wealthy companies will teach you the technologies you need to learn. You simply can't teach a good problem solving skillset, though.
woolvalley 8y ago
This is a no go in large companies, because the large company wants to avoid 'cliques of incompetence' and personal fiefdoms developing, not to mention all of the other problems people have mentioned. In large organizations, there are too many people for execs to know everyone, so a standardized but rigorous process is better from their perspective. I say tech's process is better than many other industries processes, which is outsourcing evaluation based on credential prestige.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Do it in the same way that ancient empires from the Romans to the Mongols did it- break preexisting relationships with distance. Referrals are posted to "frontier" teams separated sufficiently far away from referrers. Scatter them across the org.
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    Then they have lunch together and talk about work? They would have to work in unrelated things, which is hard to do when everyone is the same kind of profession.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Hard for them to become someone's fiefdom when they're all on separate teams. We're talking about FAANG-sized companies here.
quickthrower2 8y ago
So in summary: If your company has a seemingly broken hiring process that weeds out good people, bypass that process for people your people judge as good, and keep it for everyone else. I suggest that it is better to fix the hiring process in the firsr place and just run everyone through it.
chrshawkes 8y ago
This idea already happens in the industry every day. The last two corporate gigs I received didn't require a technical interview at all and I absolutely refuse to apply to any company that makes me white board or submit anything coding related before they are paying me. I don't mind answering their questions though. As one of the previous commenters stated already, there is already plenty of evidence as to whether or not somebody can code. If John Skeet applies to my company, I'm an idiot if I ask him any programming questions. If there isn't sufficient evidence online to showcase their skills, than make them do the stupid coding examples. In my case, I won't ever work for any company with whiteboard coding exercises. It's the first thing I ask the recruiter and than I politely decline the offer to interview and tell them exactly why. If more people do this, it will catch on.
- deleted 8y ago
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subjoriented 8y ago
I use interviews to evaluate a whole lot more than just hire/no-hire. I'm looking to understand what role someone is going to play in the organization, and to help understand which team a person we're likely going to hire will be a best match for. We organize our interview loops around this, and a critical part of the conversation in the debrief is role and team matching - not just a hire/no-hire decision. Plus, we use this time to provide feedback to whoever the hiring manager is about the candidate and potential future team member, which streamlines more than just headcount. Finally, the interview loop is an opportunity to manage cronyism. While we've got a lot of people I trust to refer exclusively strong candidates, I don't trust a single one to make fiat decisions. There's a human element to giving someone that level of decision making authority, and without sharing gory details - I've benefitted from having committee decisions in this situation. Managing the feelings of referrer's getting their candidates rejected in a hard problem. I've dealt with that in the past a number of ways but don't have a working theory, other than "it's a job, people make mistakes, and hiring is fit and timing as much as it is about technical prowess".
alkonaut 8y ago
A technical interview done well is a good thing. You get to ask the candidate questions and they get to ask you questions. As the candidate, the technical interview is where I can really size up the company. How are coding standards decided? How does the development process work? This is all interesting stuff to talk about for a candidate. The closest thing to whiteboard coding I can think of as useful to the employer is data structure and algorithm knowledge at a toolbox level. What data structure would you use to implement a spell checker? A search for restaurants within X km?
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wenc 8y ago
Trusted referrals have always been a valid approach to getting candidates in the pipeline, as long as it doesn't privilege those candidates over others who came in through other channels. However, I don't agree with waiving the technical interview. Sometimes referrers, though well-meaning, have either an outdated or incomplete idea of the candidate. Assessing a candidate's quality is quite a complicated thing, and not everyone does it well though everyone thinks they do. I say this because I've made erroneous referrals myself. It's a bias-variance tradeoff. If you trust 1-2 key people, and if they are right about a person, good, but if they are wrong they can be very wrong. Whereas if you collect more data points from independent sources, you mitigate the probability of huge errors in hiring, which can be expensive to fix. Of course there are exceptions. In a world where if Larry Page wanted to bring Jeff Dean on-board a fledgling Google because he's seen his work elsewhere and decides to waive the technical interview, then it's a different story. But I'm not sure if these exceptions abound...
llamataboot 8y ago
Technical interviews are awful. They are grueling and they are prone to major false signals in both directions. However, I'm not sure this is the way to go either. Personally, I'd love for a "common form" application where you could do a timed take home coding exercise, in absence of that, why not just talk through code with an interviewee. You don't need to watch them code, if you are a good judge of technical skill, you should be able to tell just by the way that a candidate talks you through tradeoffs, refactorings, etc whether than can code or not in a way that nothing else shows. So you really need someone to write tests for their moon rover they just made you to see that they can actually write unit specs, or would you rather talk through testing tradeoffs, when they use mocks or not, what issues they've encountered with long running test suites or flickering tests, how they test the frontend, what their thoughts are on strict versus loose TDD, etc. Get your candidate excited and let them ramble and you'll learn far more than any contrived coding exercise, even if it isn't a whiteboard interview.
twic 8y ago
I wouldn't want to be hired by a company that did this. I want to work with good people. A rigorous hiring process, uniformly applied, will tend to select good people, so it's an attractive feature of a company for me. Although i have been lucky enough to work with some good people so far, i wouldn't trust any of them to fill a company with equally good people merely by recommendation.
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scarejunba 8y ago
This already happens in SF. If you think a CEO or CTO of a startup is letting some technical interview failure stop him from hiring people he already knows work well, you’re off your rocker. I know one of my best bosses and mentors was hired off a terrible interview and a strong referral. Well, that’s what I expect to happen.
blaze33 8y ago
My preferred interviews were those with programming tests to do at home with some days before the deadline, allowed me to work like a remote dev would. On-site interviews then included a code review of the test. No white board coding, no timed programming exercise without internet, no asking things as if I could memorize all the docs of all the tools I work with. I also liked well designed tests because the more I feel actual work skills are checked, the more confident I am that I would have well qualified colleagues to work with and learn from. With your scenario, I fear in most places it would end up like "we hire all our friends, it's fun". Not even sure it would be legal to discriminate about people you just don't know, however qualified they may be...
cdoxsey 8y ago
I worked with an intern for 6 months. He was great. Did everything I asked of him and has code still running in production. He went back to school and then applied for a full time position, so I referred him with a glowing recommendation. He was rejected because he was quiet and not a good cultural fit. And that's why I avoid giving recommendations for friends. It's not worth the risk of rejection.
robalfonso 8y ago
This seems like a situation where they came up with the wrong solution to the problem. The great engineering leader refers people who don't make it through the technical interview. So the supposition is that "The company is missing out on great developers due to filtering in the technical interview, lets get rid of it" When it should be "Fix the process so it doesn't filter out people while still testing for technical competence" We just don't do whiteboards, we usually do a take home assignment/test where the candidate can make use of the tooling/environment in which they are comfortable. We feel this is also most similar to how they are going to work any ways so it is a true test of their work output.
sytelus 8y ago
One big issue in hiring is that error exponentially multiply as organization grows. One bad hire would hire two more bad hires and so on. Many would say this is the single most important reason why great companies starts to falter as they grow old - the ratio is no longer the same. So in this proposed "solution", a misplaced trust will soon cause chain reaction. Many companies place such trust in hiring manager giving them veto power to go ahead even if all interviewers were in disagreement. I have rarely seen this work out well. All good hiring process have checks and balances - implicit infinite trust is never good idea in any system design.
- umvi 8y ago
  Referrals are not trusted automatically, they still need to prove themselves before they can refer other people
- magnetic 8y ago
  I didn't see any rule that said that anyone the "trusted circle recommends" ends up being in such trust circle, so I don't see how they could be in a position to exponentially multiply.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    It doesn't matter. You are putting someone in trusted circle using some heuristics. Most trust relationships eventually forms delegation chain (A trusts B, B trusts C, ...). All such chain degrades exponentially by some factor, however small it may be. This is why organizations with deep management hierarchies are so dysfunctional and inefficient.
speedplane 8y ago
The problem with this approach is that it requires every employee to be referred in. Unfortunately, most people don't know that many people who are looking for jobs, especially people significantly older or younger than them or from different regions.
wan23 8y ago
Rather than doing this on the individual company level, which leads to all kinds of problems that many other comments here have noted, it would make sense to do this on an industry-wide level. We should have something like a "Master Engineer" credential that should require another master to vouch for you and some rigorous testing. If implemented correctly then it would become obvious that asking FizzBuzz type questions to master engineers is a waste of everyone's time. If we want to be treated like professionals, we should have professional standards. After all, when doctors go for job interviews nobody asks "what is a cell?"or to diagram the Krebs cycle on a whiteboard.

118 points by realbarack 8y ago

I suspect this might work better than expected. The fear is that employees will exercise some form of nepotism that would “lower the bar”. That might not happen in practice though. Would love to see an experiment.

stcredzero 8y ago
Aren't there groups who have exercised some form of nepotism to "raise the bar?" Haven't some early stage startups been able to do this?

forrestthewoods 8y ago

So the solution is... nepotism? (Not technically neptosim. But close enough).

RandallBrown 8y ago
The difference is that if you're a trusted referrer and you start referring people who suck, you could easily lose that status.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I think it would be a better idea if such employees were "probationary" and if the referrer would be penalized for making mistakes.

hashkb 8y ago

This is basically already the case. If you aren't experiencing it, you're a Ringo. Edit: or you work with a ton of Ringos.

nkingsy 8y ago

Not a great way to increase diversity, and totally incompatible with referral bonuses. A hidden cost here would also be exposing perceived statuses (eg an engineer who isn't as well respected would have their recommendations denied).

daenz 8y ago
>totally incompatible with referral bonuses. I think it's fair to waive referral bonuses if someone is referred through the "trusted referral" process. If someone is dying for a bonus, they can still steer the candidate towards the company and let them go through the technical loop normally.

ebiester 8y ago

"It could also sew some bitterness within the engineering team: it might be seen as unfair that some people can get hired through the nepotistic route, while others have to do the tech loop." More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already in the system. If that happens in one company, it's likely not a big deal. If it happens systemically, you'll see a bigger problem. (People build networks in college, with people of the same demographics -> people use those networks to get people in with a lower bar of entry while those without the benefit of the network will face a barrier that the people that were hired might not have been able to clear.) The problem is that we don't have a better solution to the technical interview.

philwelch 8y ago
> More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already in the system. I'm not entirely convinced of this in the general case. I'm white and male, but probably a minority of the people I would recommend (in the sense of personally vouching for their technical ability) are also white and male.
- newen 8y ago
  I would say you are a relatively rare case though. Most people I've seen primarity socialize with people of the same race. Not strictly, obviously, but in general. Like in tech circles in the Bay Area, you have the white, indian, east asian groups and they, in general, tend to hang out with the same races. And by this I mean most of the friend groups I see are typically mostly of one race.
  - Ancalagon 8y ago
    I guess you're getting downvoted because this is anecdotal evidence? But honestly this is my (admittedly anecdotal) experience as well.

triplee 8y ago

This is a bad idea and the person proposing it should feel bad. -- Every underrepresented group in tech ever, as well as introverts and junior folks or those switching from other specialities (Seriously, I get that we have problems with pipelines and tech. interviews can be pretty terrible, but this is worse. Respected people are already in a pretty set demographic that's harder to break into, and anyone they've worked with is going to be similar. )

cortesoft 8y ago
I totally agree with you, except the part where the person proposing it should feel bad. Many people don't realize the unfair advantages their demographic gets, and shaming them for not seeing it is not a good way to get them to see the flaw in their world view. Let's educate instead of shame.
- triplee 8y ago
  Yeah, I wouldn't hold to that feeling bad part. It's a Futurama meme that gets lost in the context of no GIFs. I forget that HN is like the internet of my youth. :) I 100% agree with the idea of using privilege to promote the unprivileged and educate those in our own demographics.

pm90 8y ago

> The risk that they will be humiliated at some point during the interviews. As a candidate, this has happened far more often than I care to admit. I don't take it personally: having worked at many corporations, I know that its usually not any kind of personal animosity or judgement, its just work politics. But the fact remains that it does happen.

drugme 8y ago
It happens and it happens a lot more than it used to. And at some point it becomes a significant deterrent to the prospect of starting a new job search.
- airfoil 8y ago
  It’s happened to me. I’m terrible at the whiteboard in these situations. I have a severe disdain for whiteboard sessions. I’m an experienced engineer, but I’m likely to fumble at the whiteboard. When I’ve interviewed candidates I make it a point to talk about something they’ve worked on and drill down into it. If they need the whiteboard to convey something, that’s great. We’re having a conversation and I’m not giving them a test. I’ll ask about potential optimizations and/or improvements, but I try my best not to make things adversarial. This has worked out really well. The best conversations have resulted in great hires in my experience.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    I think this is a good point. As someone who also fumbles a bit if you put me at a whiteboard and start asking esoteric algorithm questions. So when I am hiring someone for my team, I ask them about projects they are familiar with, and drill down into those. Puts them at ease and you pretty quickly get to know if they are talking out of their ass or not. Then after we get through that, if things are going well, I'll bring up the kinds of problems we're working on and see if it piques their interest.
  - bra-ket 8y ago
    +1, I've been hired like this many times and hired people to my team in exactly the same way - discuss the projects on resume in detail. The algorithm quizzes that are so popular these days are just dumb.

drugme 8y ago

Of course it's kind of hideous but it's basically what ends up happening a lot of the time, anyway.

deedubaya 8y ago
Most of the time, it isn't what you know, but who you know. It's unfortunate.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Almost none if the time, it's who you know who also has a special insight into what really makes for a good colleague in a really difficult endeavor in an area people haven't tread before.

dahart 8y ago

I don’t even want the ability to refer someone into my company. That’s very risky and puts pressure on me to be right, when I might be wrong. I have referred friends who’ve been rejected, and I’m glad because that’s better than hiring my friend and having them not fit in. Then it’s my fault. I’ve interviewed and referred many people and made a lot of hiring decisions, I would rather have everyone agree, I don’t think the ability for a single person to refer someone past the interview process is a good idea at all. None of the risks listed even compare to the risk of hiring someone who isn’t actually very good or doesn’t get along with the team.... and despite thorough interviews that still happens all the time. If the candidate is worth referring, then the interviews will not likely be a problem. Things do go wrong occasionally, but not very often. Edit: I also meant to add that I think referrals are already weighed very heavily in interviews in my experience. Sometimes even too much. Interviews are already easier for candidates when someone who’s respected makes the referral, so to some degree the proposal here already reflects reality.

hinkley 8y ago
I don’t refer friends, I refer former coworkers that I would like to work with again. Problem is I don’t have the same diversity in my referral pool as I’d like to see at work. Last couple of places have been pretty homogenous and I’m less keen on referring people I last worked with ten years ago.
- dahart 8y ago
  Of course. My coworkers are also my friends. By “friend” I mean people I know that I’ve worked with before and that I like and would vouch for because they’re good, as opposed to people I’ve worked with that I don’t like, or social acquaintances. I’m with you on diversity too, these days I prefer interviewing people I don’t know and people with very different backgrounds than mine.
gav 8y ago
The solution to the fear of being at fault is to ask the person making the referral a question like: [ ] I have first-hand experience of the candidate's technical skills [ ] I have first-hand experience of the candidate's character [ ] Neither apply I've worked at several places with versions of this; they want referrals in the pipeline to avoid having to pay recruiters, there's no skipping interviews.

vgoh1 8y ago

I grew up poor, and out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total of zero engineers. I would still be unemployed to this day if this type of hiring were the norm (although it is not entirely uncommon). I can also say, that the engineers that we have had come through our organization based on referrals have not been the best quality. They tend to be engineers that are generally likeable, but not very good. Referrals are probably the way with the least friction to hire someone, so any time the way with the least friction is not being used as much, you have to wonder why.

chrisseaton 8y ago
> out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total of zero engineers How did you manage to do an engineering degree and not get to know any other engineers?
- xvector 8y ago
  It happens all the time. Most students make friends with students in their own year. This doesn’t help when looking for jobs. I’d wager that most students don’t really network.
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  I made friends in college by sharing a dorm and by hanging out on campus. Later I made friends through friends, but those were the essential starting points. If you're poor, there's a good chance you're not staying in the (often very expensive) dorms, and that you don't have much time to hang out on campus because you have a job. I can imagine this kind of thing making it much harder to make friends.
  - sethammons 8y ago
    Bingo. I made exactly zero connections while at university. Why? I had a kid young. We both worked to make things float. I did not go to school events, study groups, etc. Once, to finish a group project, we went to a kid's room in a dorm. Literally the only time I was ever in a dorm. My very limited social time was spent with existing friends.

mynameishere 8y ago

Yeah, absolutely not. If anything, the opposite would be better: No referrals, no friends and family, no cliques.

ummonk 8y ago

Such referrals are extremely useful datapoints to refine your technical interview and reduce the false negative rate of the interview process. If your interview process is rejecting a lot of quality people, that should be a sign you need to reform it.

Pokepokalypse 8y ago

I tend to look at a candidate's work history. If they've worked at least 10 years, as a coder - it's VERY unlikely that they're a complete liar. Especially if you can call former co-workers, or look at code samples they have online on a personal github, or look at their post history on stackoverflow, or things like that. Even a technical description of prior projects - is a really good indicator of whether they're competent. Puzzle solving - on the other hand, bears little resemblance to actual job requirements in the real world. It's honestly a dumb way to vet candidates. Would I like to see if a candidate, out of a pack of 5 or so potentially equal candidates, has a better approach to creative problem solving? You bet. But I'm more interested in their inter-personal skills, communication skills, and their instincts towards the ethical challenges we face as engineers. (like: when things go south - and blame starts flying). Who do I want on my team? That's the most important question.

face_mcgace 8y ago
One time I sat down with a potential hire and went over a trivial PR. Nothing hard just some code to look at on GitHub to provide a familiar environment. Why? To use it as a way to just look at our tech, get completely off track, and go down the tech rabbit hole. Good devs get really excited and talk about what they're using, what libraries they like, what they'd like to work with, etc. Best hire I've ever made.
elizabeth_olu 8y ago
www.elizabethblog.com.ng
WilliamEdward 8y ago
"Puzzle solving" is a nice way to dumb down the importance of good software engineering vs good coding skills. This is especially important at the big 4 or 5. They don't really, truly care what languages you know or what stack you know. They will give you the environment to use whatever you want. What they need is someone who is good at solving problems, which ties into your comment about dealing with bad situations. This is something startups eventually adopt once they mature past needing a web developer to just throw together a website for them, and on to someone who is more flexible and loyal. So please don't reduce the importance of good engineering down to "puzzles". They are a good indicator of someone who has all those qualities you describe. And i wouldn't limit anyone to the big 5. If you believe Google's interview is pure memorisation and no problem solving, don't interview with them. My point is a good interview knows the importance of problem solving, whether solved correctly or not, is about how you solve the problem, and so they design their interviews thusly. That's my point which is contrary to the common sentiment here that "puzzle" interviews are a waste of time.. This is especially true when really wealthy companies will teach you the technologies you need to learn. You simply can't teach a good problem solving skillset, though.

woolvalley 8y ago

This is a no go in large companies, because the large company wants to avoid 'cliques of incompetence' and personal fiefdoms developing, not to mention all of the other problems people have mentioned. In large organizations, there are too many people for execs to know everyone, so a standardized but rigorous process is better from their perspective. I say tech's process is better than many other industries processes, which is outsourcing evaluation based on credential prestige.

Apocryphon 8y ago
Do it in the same way that ancient empires from the Romans to the Mongols did it- break preexisting relationships with distance. Referrals are posted to "frontier" teams separated sufficiently far away from referrers. Scatter them across the org.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  Then they have lunch together and talk about work? They would have to work in unrelated things, which is hard to do when everyone is the same kind of profession.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Hard for them to become someone's fiefdom when they're all on separate teams. We're talking about FAANG-sized companies here.

quickthrower2 8y ago

So in summary: If your company has a seemingly broken hiring process that weeds out good people, bypass that process for people your people judge as good, and keep it for everyone else. I suggest that it is better to fix the hiring process in the firsr place and just run everyone through it.

chrshawkes 8y ago

This idea already happens in the industry every day. The last two corporate gigs I received didn't require a technical interview at all and I absolutely refuse to apply to any company that makes me white board or submit anything coding related before they are paying me. I don't mind answering their questions though. As one of the previous commenters stated already, there is already plenty of evidence as to whether or not somebody can code. If John Skeet applies to my company, I'm an idiot if I ask him any programming questions. If there isn't sufficient evidence online to showcase their skills, than make them do the stupid coding examples. In my case, I won't ever work for any company with whiteboard coding exercises. It's the first thing I ask the recruiter and than I politely decline the offer to interview and tell them exactly why. If more people do this, it will catch on.

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subjoriented 8y ago

I use interviews to evaluate a whole lot more than just hire/no-hire. I'm looking to understand what role someone is going to play in the organization, and to help understand which team a person we're likely going to hire will be a best match for. We organize our interview loops around this, and a critical part of the conversation in the debrief is role and team matching - not just a hire/no-hire decision. Plus, we use this time to provide feedback to whoever the hiring manager is about the candidate and potential future team member, which streamlines more than just headcount. Finally, the interview loop is an opportunity to manage cronyism. While we've got a lot of people I trust to refer exclusively strong candidates, I don't trust a single one to make fiat decisions. There's a human element to giving someone that level of decision making authority, and without sharing gory details - I've benefitted from having committee decisions in this situation. Managing the feelings of referrer's getting their candidates rejected in a hard problem. I've dealt with that in the past a number of ways but don't have a working theory, other than "it's a job, people make mistakes, and hiring is fit and timing as much as it is about technical prowess".

alkonaut 8y ago

A technical interview done well is a good thing. You get to ask the candidate questions and they get to ask you questions. As the candidate, the technical interview is where I can really size up the company. How are coding standards decided? How does the development process work? This is all interesting stuff to talk about for a candidate. The closest thing to whiteboard coding I can think of as useful to the employer is data structure and algorithm knowledge at a toolbox level. What data structure would you use to implement a spell checker? A search for restaurants within X km?

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wenc 8y ago

Trusted referrals have always been a valid approach to getting candidates in the pipeline, as long as it doesn't privilege those candidates over others who came in through other channels. However, I don't agree with waiving the technical interview. Sometimes referrers, though well-meaning, have either an outdated or incomplete idea of the candidate. Assessing a candidate's quality is quite a complicated thing, and not everyone does it well though everyone thinks they do. I say this because I've made erroneous referrals myself. It's a bias-variance tradeoff. If you trust 1-2 key people, and if they are right about a person, good, but if they are wrong they can be very wrong. Whereas if you collect more data points from independent sources, you mitigate the probability of huge errors in hiring, which can be expensive to fix. Of course there are exceptions. In a world where if Larry Page wanted to bring Jeff Dean on-board a fledgling Google because he's seen his work elsewhere and decides to waive the technical interview, then it's a different story. But I'm not sure if these exceptions abound...

llamataboot 8y ago

Technical interviews are awful. They are grueling and they are prone to major false signals in both directions. However, I'm not sure this is the way to go either. Personally, I'd love for a "common form" application where you could do a timed take home coding exercise, in absence of that, why not just talk through code with an interviewee. You don't need to watch them code, if you are a good judge of technical skill, you should be able to tell just by the way that a candidate talks you through tradeoffs, refactorings, etc whether than can code or not in a way that nothing else shows. So you really need someone to write tests for their moon rover they just made you to see that they can actually write unit specs, or would you rather talk through testing tradeoffs, when they use mocks or not, what issues they've encountered with long running test suites or flickering tests, how they test the frontend, what their thoughts are on strict versus loose TDD, etc. Get your candidate excited and let them ramble and you'll learn far more than any contrived coding exercise, even if it isn't a whiteboard interview.

twic 8y ago

I wouldn't want to be hired by a company that did this. I want to work with good people. A rigorous hiring process, uniformly applied, will tend to select good people, so it's an attractive feature of a company for me. Although i have been lucky enough to work with some good people so far, i wouldn't trust any of them to fill a company with equally good people merely by recommendation.

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scarejunba 8y ago

This already happens in SF. If you think a CEO or CTO of a startup is letting some technical interview failure stop him from hiring people he already knows work well, you’re off your rocker. I know one of my best bosses and mentors was hired off a terrible interview and a strong referral. Well, that’s what I expect to happen.

blaze33 8y ago

My preferred interviews were those with programming tests to do at home with some days before the deadline, allowed me to work like a remote dev would. On-site interviews then included a code review of the test. No white board coding, no timed programming exercise without internet, no asking things as if I could memorize all the docs of all the tools I work with. I also liked well designed tests because the more I feel actual work skills are checked, the more confident I am that I would have well qualified colleagues to work with and learn from. With your scenario, I fear in most places it would end up like "we hire all our friends, it's fun". Not even sure it would be legal to discriminate about people you just don't know, however qualified they may be...

cdoxsey 8y ago

I worked with an intern for 6 months. He was great. Did everything I asked of him and has code still running in production. He went back to school and then applied for a full time position, so I referred him with a glowing recommendation. He was rejected because he was quiet and not a good cultural fit. And that's why I avoid giving recommendations for friends. It's not worth the risk of rejection.

robalfonso 8y ago

This seems like a situation where they came up with the wrong solution to the problem. The great engineering leader refers people who don't make it through the technical interview. So the supposition is that "The company is missing out on great developers due to filtering in the technical interview, lets get rid of it" When it should be "Fix the process so it doesn't filter out people while still testing for technical competence" We just don't do whiteboards, we usually do a take home assignment/test where the candidate can make use of the tooling/environment in which they are comfortable. We feel this is also most similar to how they are going to work any ways so it is a true test of their work output.

sytelus 8y ago

One big issue in hiring is that error exponentially multiply as organization grows. One bad hire would hire two more bad hires and so on. Many would say this is the single most important reason why great companies starts to falter as they grow old - the ratio is no longer the same. So in this proposed "solution", a misplaced trust will soon cause chain reaction. Many companies place such trust in hiring manager giving them veto power to go ahead even if all interviewers were in disagreement. I have rarely seen this work out well. All good hiring process have checks and balances - implicit infinite trust is never good idea in any system design.

umvi 8y ago
Referrals are not trusted automatically, they still need to prove themselves before they can refer other people
magnetic 8y ago
I didn't see any rule that said that anyone the "trusted circle recommends" ends up being in such trust circle, so I don't see how they could be in a position to exponentially multiply.
- sytelus 8y ago
  It doesn't matter. You are putting someone in trusted circle using some heuristics. Most trust relationships eventually forms delegation chain (A trusts B, B trusts C, ...). All such chain degrades exponentially by some factor, however small it may be. This is why organizations with deep management hierarchies are so dysfunctional and inefficient.

speedplane 8y ago

The problem with this approach is that it requires every employee to be referred in. Unfortunately, most people don't know that many people who are looking for jobs, especially people significantly older or younger than them or from different regions.

wan23 8y ago

Rather than doing this on the individual company level, which leads to all kinds of problems that many other comments here have noted, it would make sense to do this on an industry-wide level. We should have something like a "Master Engineer" credential that should require another master to vouch for you and some rigorous testing. If implemented correctly then it would become obvious that asking FizzBuzz type questions to master engineers is a waste of everyone's time. If we want to be treated like professionals, we should have professional standards. After all, when doctors go for job interviews nobody asks "what is a cell?"or to diagram the Krebs cycle on a whiteboard.