4 ms·
After more than 500 interviews and having hired about 50 engineers, I have to wholeheartedly disagree. I've A/B tested my interview script and technique over al
by endymi0n 7y ago
After more than 500 interviews and having hired about 50 engineers, I have to wholeheartedly disagree. I've A/B tested my interview script and technique over all those years and there's a massive inverse correlation between how hard the answer to a question is to grade and how good of a predictor they are. Deep and open questions are the best ones, period, and learning to interpret the answers to them takes years. Interviewing is really a skill to be learned and it's a hyperdimensional optimization.
One of my currently best engineers started out with one of the worst coding challenges I've ever received (think JSON marshalling by string concatenation), but he was so smart, empathetic and driven I took the time and energy to build him up. One of the best challenges was by an asshole that was so intelligent he constantly managed to sabotage himself as well as the team.
TL;DR: These days I don't believe anybody anymore who proposes there's just a single skill to be checked in interviewing. Tech Interviewing is just a hard job, just like engineering itself, but it's equally fulfilling if you take the time to learn it and get good.
- braythwayt 7y agoI see your answer as boiling down to "That's a false dichotomy. We need experienced interviewers working with a good interview process in the form of deep and open questions that require experience to grade correctly."
- emtel 7y agoI'm not sure exactly what your disagreement is. I agree interviewing shouldn't test a single skill. I also agree you can get better at interviewing. But I still think the interviewing process you use is more important than the skill of the interviewer. I have done a similar number of interviews as you, and I've found very little correlation between performance on FAANG style interviews and performance on the job.