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Technical interviews are disguised IQ tests. IQ tests are actually not allowed in the US based on a Supreme Court decision[1] that said they were discriminatory

• tjpnz 7y ago
  That's how I view them as well. It's why a lot of people can get through them by doing lots of Leetcode in the same way that one might do lots of logic problems in order to score higher on an IQ test.
  • lwansbrough 7y ago
    At least there’s considerable variance in the problems on an IQ test so your intelligence is diversified across many problem types. The type of shit I’ve come up against in past interviews has often been essentially an all-or-nothing single problem. Which is why I now refuse technical interviews.
    • hsksbr 7y ago
      Advice on getting a job as a software engineer without a technical interview? Literally 100% of the dozens of interviews I've had in my life were coding interviews.
      • Google234 7y ago
        I don't see how asking a potential software engineer to write a 30 line function in 30 minutes is bad. Being able to write code is part of the job description.
        • lwansbrough 7y ago
          I don’t need to “prove” that I can write code by memorizing an algorithm. I have made more than enough code available on my GitHub which I’d be happy to explain in depth with anyone who is interested. Not interested? Great, you’ve made it easier for me to make my decision.
          • milemi 7y ago
            Sounds to me like the uninterested person is the one who made the decision.
            • spunker540 7y ago
              Yeah if they’re not interested in the only evidence of ability you’re willing to provide, then I think you’re not being considered in the first place.
        • pmiller2 7y ago
          Depending on what those 30 lines are supposed to do and whether they have to be asymptotically optimal at doing it, writing down 30 lines of code while talking about every decision you’re making, to show the “thought process” might very well be more than a 30 minute task.
      • lwansbrough 7y ago
        Have projects available online that showcase your ability/ingenuity/creativity. Just reject the technical interview and explain your reasoning, offer an alternative. Works for me because I don’t want to work anywhere where interviews aren’t being conducted by people competent enough to handle fluid requirements.
      • jpindar 7y ago
        Be willing to work for a company whose product is not software.
        • jpindar 7y ago
          I didn't mean to imply that this is the only way, just that it's a way that has worked for me. I've worked with embedded systems and with desktop software that was used by my employers (electronics manufacturers) rather than sold by them, and I have never been asked to code in an interview.
  • danpalmer 7y ago
    Leetcode practice gets you through a particular kind of coding test. I would say that only covers ~half what a good coding test interview should cover. It makes you good at the "how", and solving algorithmic or textbook architecture questions. The questions I prefer to ask are about writing a basic but readable and maintainable piece of code, maybe 50-100 lines long, that requires the candidate to talk about why they are making certain trade-offs, questions that look at when they would involve other team members in decisions (when do you ask a Product Manager or Designer for help?), questions that try to understand whether they can solve problems rather than the one problem in one language given to them in the interview. I typically do those interviews in Python but some of the best candidates have never written any Python – but their communication, intuition, and problem solving abilities were great.
    • hvidgaard 7y ago
      For junior positions, I tend to ask very simple questions. Reverse a string or given an array and an int count how many times that number occurs (or variants thereof). Something that requires a loop and some ifs. It opens the posibility of endless discussions about extensions, refactoring, runtime, edgecases - it gives a solid bases on which to judge their ability. For senior positions, it's slightly more advanced. But if they make it through to second round, we have them bug hunt and refactor some piece of code. Programming is a craft and I need to evaluate that craft.
• e10a 7y ago
  > We know that cognitive ability has one of the strongest correlations with job performance There is a good argument that the technical interview success is much more strongly correlated to the number of hours spent practicing Leetcode-type questions than to actual cognitive ability.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • dvdbloc 7y ago
    And shear luck that you have seen a problem or similar before
  • closeparen 7y ago
    The process can definitely reject good candidates who are out of practice, but it’d be pretty hard to do the practice and give good performances without some underlying skill.
    • xwolfi 7y ago
      But look at it that way: a candidate that didn't practice before the interview, is either not so interested, a bit dull about basic human interaction or cannot even understand what an interview is. It's honestly like coming to an interview without a suit and a tie. Sure if you're a pretentious startup it'll horrify you, but anywhere else it shows that the candidate just doesn't understand what's happening, that he could have just made the cheapest first impression effort and didn't even think about it, he came in sandals and tshirt instead. Do you want him talking to clients ? Can you afford him not talking to clients ?
  • typon 7y ago
    I've noticed that exactly. IQ presumably is something inherent.. But personal experience shows that technical interviews have nothing to do with IQ. They can be easily solved by creating a dynamic programming problem pattern matcher in your brain, which is what I created after doing 300 leetcode problems. I did not become smarter in general or at coding at all, I just got good at mapping problems to binary trees or dynamic programming or string search.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• adrusi 7y ago
  This is a common misconception about the Griggs ruling. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/26/dont-blame-griggs/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/26/dont-blame-griggs/ The Griggs decision explicitly places the same restrictions on college degrees that it does on IQ tests. Obviously nobody cares about this, and it turns out the Griggs restrictions aren’t that strict and most people manage to ask about college degree just fine. This changes the argument to be about whether there’s complicated case law around Griggs which makes employers figure that college degrees will probably be accepted in practice, but IQ tests probably won’t be. There's not actually a prohibition on IQ tests in hiring, and in fact, during my recent job search, one company I interviewed with had me take an IQ test (it wasn't explicitly labeled as one, but it had exactly the sorts of questions you would find on one). The same company also had me go through a more typical algorithm-heavy technical interview later in the process.
  • threatofrain 7y ago
    There's historical basis and case law to suggest that IQ exams have been used as illegal barriers on race, and it's not too far of an argument that your test could also be discriminating against a protected class. And it's potentially horrible PR. > What is required by Congress is the removal of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment when the barriers operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of racial or other impermissible classification... > On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability. Rather, a vice-president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the workforce. > The evidence, however, shows that employees who have not completed high school or taken the tests have continued to perform satisfactorily, and make progress in departments for which the high school and test criteria are now used.[8] The promotion record of present employees who would not be able to meet the new criteria thus suggests the possibility that the requirements may not be needed even for the limited purpose of preserving the avowed policy of advancement within the Company. > In the context of this case, it is unnecessary to reach the question whether testing requirements that take into account capability for the next succeeding position or related future promotion might be utilized upon a showing that such long-range requirements fulfill a genuine business need. In the present case, the Company has made no such showing.
• sien 7y ago
  Technical interviews are done outside the US where they are legal. Some places outside the US will do both an IQ test and a programming test.
• tptacek 7y ago
  Maybe they are at Google, but hiring managers are not generally savvy enough to have the ulterior motive you're attributing to them; most of them are just doing what they were taught to do at previous jobs.
• okaram 7y ago
  IQ Tests ARE allowed in the US, as clearly stated in the page you linked ... "Broad aptitude tests used in hiring practices that disparately impact ethnic minorities must be reasonably related to the job." Technical interviews are NOT a loophole about IQ tests ... they are tests that are related to the job.
  • blatantlies 7y ago
    > they are tests that are related to the job This is questionable. There is data suggesting job performance is not correlated to interview performance. Also, none of the questions in my last interviews have anything related my actual job, not even the language nor the problems I solved (since I could pick any language to write the code). The link between them are very arbitrary imo.
• hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  I think your comment is a pretty gross mischaracterization of the relevant Supreme Court ruling. It's definitely not the case that "IQ tests are actually not allowed in the US". From the wiki page you link: The Supreme Court ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, if such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required. I think it's pretty trivial for any company to argue that technical interviews are relevant to a developer job.
  • sgift 7y ago
    > I think it's pretty trivial for any company to argue that technical interviews are relevant to a developer job. Is it? Can you show, right now, that your companies technical interviews and job performance correlate positively? Cause from the things I've seen that's not checked commonly in companies and even if it is you don't hear "the technical interview is bullshit, let's do something else" as a result.
  • dragonwriter 7y ago
    Note that the material you quote from Wikipedia is in error; the simple-to-meet “reasonably related” standard only applies for disparate impact cases where the discriminatory effect is based on age over 40, which is not under Title VII; the Title VII test is a much higher bar and once the disparate effect is shown requires showing “business necessity”, and even then disparate impact discrimination can be found if the employer declined to adopt available alternatives with less discriminatory effect.