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But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent ne
by pascalxus 7y ago
But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent necessary to conduct proper interviews. Great candidates were being rejected by the truck load. Us engineers, we're great at engineering but many of the junior and mid-level ones don't have much experience interviewing people and usually no training whatsoever. So interviewers tend to ask different questions with every candidate (whatever they feel like it that day), then make some decision based on a random feeling they get. There's not much objectivity. There's not much thought that goes into the questions. Most engineers think intervewing is a game of "how to stump the candidate".
As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
- castratikron 7y agoOne time after I was hired I learned that one of the engineers didn't want to hire me because I didn't wear a tie to the interview. This was a few years ago.
- mooreds 7y agoWe switched from a random set of questions to a take home coding assignment (that we compensate for) and a discussion of said coding assignment. It's pretty clear what kind of work someone will do when you can look at work they've done.
- soneca 7y agoJust took a look at Culture Foundry, seems great, will apply! :)
- mooreds 7y agoExcellent, looking forward to hearing from you!
- caprese 7y agoGreat! Have you encountered any abuse of the compensation aspect? I typically want to see how people use resources and deliver with real IDEs and collaborative tools like git
- mooreds 7y agoI'm not sure what kind of abuse of the compensation you are thinking of? I agree that the most valuable thing is not seeing how the solution was implemented (we want to keep the total hours expended to less than 20 for the senior engineer challenge and less than 5 for the junior challenge) but seeing how someone navigates their environment and how they talk through how they arrived at the solution. It's especially interesting to ask about alternatives, areas for extension and tradeoffs.
- caprese 7y agoLike too many unqualified candidates trying for it? Candidates arguing about the amount? Comp for a take home interview assignment isnt common yet so the social more doesnt exist.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoOne of my best interviewing experiences (as a candidate) was very much the same.
- ScottFree 7y agoWhat would you do if a candidate turned down your home coding assignment, but gave you one of the coding assignments he completed for a different job interview?
- maehwasu 7y ago(I'm not OP) My concern would be that the candidate might have memorized the explanation for his code, and would be able to discuss it despite not having written it. I agree with the DRY intuition though: making coders repeat code challenges/assignments is stupid. Some sort of verification or credentialing after completion of assignment, signed by a 3rd party, would be really cool.
- mooreds 7y agoHmm. We had one candidate who had an exceptional resume and walked us through an open source project that he wrote. It was an adequate substitute. We wouldn't compensate for a project like you mentioned but the real goal of the exercise is to gain an understanding of how you approach a problem and use your tools.
- around_here 7y agoThe question is when do you give the assignment? I'm starting to hear of a lot of candidates that get it before they even hit a phone screen.
- mooreds 7y agoWe give it after the initial screen and after we mutually decide that fte is a good path (as opposed to contract to hire). We don't pay until after the code review.
- deegles 7y agoMaybe you’re on to something. Maybe there should be a “recruiting engineer” role who focuses on doing nothing but hiring, and also keeps track of their candidates performance after they’ve started and adjusts their approach accordingly. There could be an element of career coaching/mentoring as a full time part of the job.
- repler 7y agoI ask candidates to tell me about something they created they are proud of, and why. All you have to do after that is listen.
- wolfgke 7y ago> I ask candidates to tell me about something they created they are proud of, and why. Never be proud of anything that you created - since it probably is not of "top of the world quality". Even in the rare case that it is - it is very likely that even "top of the world" can still be improved.
- repler 7y agoNo offense, but that's pretty sad. I hope you find more rewarding work before you retire. We're only on this Earth once.
- wolfgke 7y agoI love my current work (in research). But it is nothing that I would ever claim to be proud of. Doing work on top of the world level is not something to be proud of, but a minimum qualification to be even suitable for research.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoBelieve you’ve just learned how culture specific this question is.
- throwaway713 7y agoI worked at a non-tech company in the southeast before my current job at a FANG company, and the lead data scientist at this company wrote up the most ridiculous interview questions I've ever seen. WAYY harder than FANG questions, and this company honestly needed business analysts far more than it needed ML researchers. The salary was like $100k for a junior data scientist position. Some of the questions were things like describing forward mode vs reverse mode differentiation, describing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and explaining Judea Pearl's concept of causality. Considering there were like 30 data scientists in the whole city, I'm not sure what the point was other than to make potential candidates feel stupid.
- ravenstine 7y agoI would have told the interviewer to go become a professor and teach his highfalutin causality mumbo jumbo at some university and stop wasting everyone's time.
- ravenstine 7y agoInterviews in their traditional form hardly need to exist at this point. There's no good reason that members of a team can't pair in person or remotely with a candidate on a realistic coding task(even completing an actual ticket) to assess their aptitude and ability to work with others. Instead, engineers are still subject to "where do you see yourself in 5 years" bullshit, yet it the reason companies are struggling to find talent continues to go right over their heads.