8 ms·

Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. But y

• sidlls 7y ago
  Except for extreme outliers it is not clear that it's possible to tell with much confidence in either case. Why do you think it's possible to have such high confidence in one case but not the other?
  • terryschiavo22 7y ago
    Because if you can't FizzBuzz, you definitely aren't going to be able to pick up the codebase in a satisfactorily short amount of time. If you come in in gross clothes and swear, you're not going to fit the company culture. If you're rude to your interviewer, you're not likely to be less rude to your other coworkers. etc.
    • DougWebb 7y ago
      Two of those things is not like the other.
      • sonnyblarney 7y ago
        They are all in the same category when you consider basic professionalism. Working is getting along in a social environment, not just coding.
    • dba7dba 7y ago
      I agree about FizzBuzz. But how often do interviewees showing up with gross clothes, swear, or be rude to interviewer? I'd say almost 0?
      • jerf 7y ago
        "I'd say almost 0?" It's definitely higher than that. It is a pretty easy thing to avoid, you'd think, but some people fail.
      • bpyne 7y ago
        Funny that this was brought up. I agree fully that it's rare. But...a friend of mine was "den mother" for graduate students in a top 20 comp sci program. The students were often doctoral candidates but could also be MS students doing a thesis. A large part of her job was prepping them for interviews with companies like Google, MS, Oracle, etc. Here are a few gems she had to remind/inform them of. "Yes, you have to shower the day of an interview." "It's never acceptable to pull out your lunch and eat in the middle of the interview, please don't do it again." "Yes, you have to wear something other than the shirt you slept in."
        • perl4ever 7y ago
          If I was going to an interview with a company like that, I would want to know - will they reject me if I wear a suit? If so, what is safe to wear?
          • simplyluke 7y ago
            Will they reject you for that? Probably not. Would a lot of employees of tech companies (particularly west coast) interpret it as a lack of familiarity with the industry? Probably. Jeans and a button down or a button down and slacks seems pretty standard in my experience.
          • bpyne 7y ago
            It depended on the company. MS interviewers came in khaki slacks and buttoned down shirts. Google came in jeans with lots of ink and piercings on display. Part of my friend's responsibility was to give feedback to the interviewers. Her students were passing over MS to go to Google, despite MS offering significantly more for a salary. Their interviewers asked her for feedback to figure out why. She had to politely say that Google was seen as cooler. (The cooler impression wasn't just the image gained from the interviewers, it was the problems Google was trying to solve. But, the interviewers added to the company's image of "coolness".) She held this position probably a decade ago and left after a few years. Things may be different now.
    • sureaboutthis 7y ago
      I've been programming for 35 years and I can't fizzbuzz cause I don't know what it is. Yes, I've heard about it before cause it's mentioned on forums, and I even looked it up once, but I always consider such things childish. (I honestly don't remember anything about it.) Ask me about an algorithm and I'm there but don't play games with me. EDIT: Just looked it up. Yep. A game. Now compare that to my years of accomplishments and you'll say asking me to write fizzbuzz childish, too.
      • bvinc 7y ago
        Fizzbuzz isn't a trick questions that you have to have heard of. It's designed to be an EXTREMELY easy question, answerable by anyone with even a basic knowledge of programming. It's not a game. It's a way to weed out people that don't know anything. If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.
        • sureaboutthis 7y ago
          I never said it was a trick question. Where did you and the other guy come up with that? It may be easy but you would have to explain it to me if you were interviewing me. After looking up what it is, as I said I did, yes, I could do it easily but don't ask me to code your game "fizzbuzz" as if I would know what it was.
          • MikeTaylor 7y ago
            No-one remotely confident would ever fail a candidate for not knowing what "fizzbuzz" means. But any competent interviewer would fail a candidate who, having have "fizzbuzz" explained to them, could not implement it.
      • CJefferson 7y ago
        You wouldn't be asked to "fizzbuzz". You would be asked to write an extremely trivial program, which would take you about 3 minutes. Also, if you have guaranteed years of experience, fizzbuzz isn't for you. However, a suprisingly large number of applicants who can write an impressive looking CV can't write it.
    • sidlls 7y ago
      I cannot recall the last time I interviewed someone for a position other than intern who could not at least muddle through a FizzBuzz problem. I'm talking hundreds of candidates. The likelihood of a "lucky streak" as long as that if "can't FizzBuzz" is common (i.e. not an outlier) is small. Usually when I dig into a person claiming "can't FizzBuzz is common" the result is I find what they're calling "FizzBuzz" is nothing of the sort, but is actually a more tricky data structures or algorithms problem.
      • toast0 7y ago
        I've gotten enough candidates who can't FizzBuzz to say you can expect to get at least a couple in a group of 100 candidates. More or less depending on what screening you do before interviews. There is definitely a second line above the simple FizzBuzz many more candidates would have a lot more trouble with two nested loops.
      • Corrado 7y ago
        Several years ago I asked a potential programmer candidate what their favorite operating system was and they replied "MS Office". I couldn't end the interview quickly enough.
      • itsdrewmiller 7y ago
        I have to assume you are doing some kind of very strict resume screening or your application form is behind a puzzle or something - I 100% guarantee if you post your job broadly and interview everyone who applies you will have a very bad fizz buzz rate (and probably go insane), and I believe that if you do filter but try to keep an open mind to non-traditional backgrounds you will have a pretty significant fizz buzz fail rate. (I too oversee the screening of hundreds of candidates out of thousands of applicants.)
• ignoramous 7y ago
  And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview process if not everything was broken, surely? Refs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 (On Secretly Terrible Engineers). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 (How Not to Hire a Software Engineer).
  • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. In my experience working with a couple of wildly different companies who prided themselves on "culture", it's largely just "don't be a dick". It's still important though.
  • scarmig 7y ago
    And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit. The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.
    • sanderjd 7y ago
      If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.
• thatoneuser 7y ago
  How would you know if you failed in identifying someone as not being able? You wouldn't hire them so you wouldn't know when you were wrong
  • xhrpost 7y ago
    Yes, to some extent you have to accept that you could end up passing on some candidates whom could have turned out to be good employees. Couple thoughts though: 1.) It's still only in hindsight that you could say something like that (ie. "wow that person really did turn out good") 2.) If you're still hiring good employees at a decent rate, does it matter? Short of being 100% efficient (which is an inappropriate goal anyways), you'd only need to address this if you were somehow not hiring anyone or hiring way below industry pace
  • twblalock 7y ago
    Hiring a bad person is worse than passing on a good person. You have to optimize your interview process to account for this, and that means you will almost certainly pass on some good candidates.
• skookumchuck 7y ago
  An awful lot of programmers have very high and entirely unjustified view of their programming abilities. I'm sure they find the hiring process weeding them out to be very frustrating.
  • throwaway55554 7y ago
    And then there are those of us who, even with an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, feel incompetent.
    • skookumchuck 7y ago
      Yes, I know about impostor syndrome. I know a few who've confessed to me they suffer from it - and I sure prefer to work with them than the delusions of grandeur types who waste my time.
  • dev_throw 7y ago
    This would be more applicable if the interviewing process had any correlation with on the job expectations. Working on a job also requires: 1. Communication about expectations with team lead, PM and other stakeholders, vetting requirements, and pushing back where necessary. 2. Writing tests that cover as many edge cases as possible (This actually takes just as long as coding a feature if done right) 3. Understanding the pipeline and release cycle, and being able to build new hooks 4. Look at stack traces to debug application crashes. This usually involves debugging code that other people have written. 5. Review other engineer's merge requests, and communicate in a emotionally aware manner. A leetcode/hackerrank type interview does not test any of these skills. If I work on improving these skills that make me an amazing engineer, it does not get me far in a typical interview, hence my frustration with their "weeding".
• BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  > You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. > But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong.
  • lgessler 7y ago
    > These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.
    • MikeTaylor 7y ago
      Exactly. You want to know, roughly, something like "is this candidate in the top 10%?". You might conclude "She seems to be at about the 85th percentile, give or take 10%", so she might be in the top 10% of might not. But you might conclude "He seems to be at about te 50th percentile, give or take 10%", in which case you're not interested. There is a fundamental asymmetry here.
  • voxl 7y ago
    It's hilarious to me that your name is BinaryIdiot and your post is a false dichotomy.