5 ms·

Honestly, I think until FAANG start doing something else, the vast majority of tech/semi-tech companies will just copy them. A few smaller companies might branc

by skizm 7y ago

Honestly, I think until FAANG start doing something else, the vast majority of tech/semi-tech companies will just copy them. A few smaller companies might branch out and try some other stuff, but most people hiring at mid and large size companies are just trying to minimize risk more than go grab that great diamond in the rough. If the big guys are doing X, the medium guys are gonna keep doing X also.

zozbot234 7y ago
I'm actually rather unconvinced that these interviews are positively good at minimizing risk (false positives). This whole 'whiteboarding' thing has degenerated into 100% pointless trivia, with many elements of a popularity contest - I just don't see any reason why we should trust this to yield 'safe' candidates. Even sticking to the pure 'trivia' aspect, there's just so much of it that people are missing altogether. (Sure, maybe you can write out a nifty algorithm on the whiteboard, but can you sketch even a very rough proof that the algorithm is correct? I don't think many people can do anything like this. I'm not even sure that the topic of correctness comes up all that much in a CS/SE curriculum - which is surprising, since we are supposed to be doing engineering. And yet, someone who is familiar with what provably-correct code might look like in practice will likely be a lot more productive as a result.)
- wojciii 7y ago
  I have a CS degree .. and I find it more difficult to write good requirements and come up with good design (since people are generally changing the requirements and the design should be flexible) prior to programming than to solve some problem on a whiteboard. I decided to not to do any whiteboard challenges unless the whiteboard has a built in editor, search engine and stack overflow. So far people who interviewed me just wanted to know about the different projects that I worked on during the last 15 years. I'm lazy and don't have time to prepare for interviews or do home assignments because of family life. I'm going to be frank about this if I'm asked to do anything more than talking during an interview.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > This whole 'whiteboarding' thing has degenerated into 100% pointless trivia, with many elements of a popularity contest - I just don't see any reason why we should trust this to yield 'safe' candidates. People blindly and dumbly implementing any practice is going to yield bad results. I've interviewed for Google, for a small company with a crappy pipeline and a low need for talent, and for my current job, which needs Google-level talent across multiple specialties[1]. Whiteboarding has played a critical role in all of these. The goal isn't to have them answer trivia questions in marker, it's a basic test of their ability to think critically and program. Naturally, the exact questions differ based on the role: for the second job, it was basic processing of data structures, while for the third, I got a question that involves some degree of spatial reasoning. But in general, this is a pretty fundamental way to test a pretty fundamental set of skills. I even was lucky enough to get a negative example: I ran the tech org for the second company, which had two non-technical founders. We hired a candidate with no engineering experience on my recommendation because he did very well in his coding interview: this guy ended up being the most reliable, clutch engineer in the company. I also rejected a candidate on the basis of failing the simple whiteboard problems, and the founders decided to hire him anyway based on his years of experience. The founder ended up having to bounce him around from task to task, leaving a trail of destruction wherever he went. His code would bring production down, he'd create weeks of work for others in a couple of days, he utterly destroyed devops during his brief tenure there, etc. He was very sweet, hardworking, had a great temperament... But the inescapable fact was that he was just kinda dumb. The whiteboard interview handily caught this, _which is what it's supposed to do_, and all the HN sniveling about whiteboard interviews only being useless trivia contests doesn't erase that fact. [1] You can imagine how hard hiring is for us right now...
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > I also rejected a candidate on the basis of failing the simple whiteboard problems OK, but this topic is not about "simple" whiteboard problems. (People can of course disagree wrt. what's 'simple', but a rule of thumb is that anything where the average dev would need to train and memorize whiteboard trivia for an extended period in order to perform satisfactorily is far from simple.)
- skizm 7y ago
  > I'm actually rather unconvinced that these interviews are positively good at minimizing risk (false positives). I was talking about minimizing risk for the people hiring at sub-FAANG companies. If they make crap hires, they can just say "well we're doing it exactly like FAANG". But yes, I also agree there might be better ways to optimize for minimizing bad hires.
- closeparen 7y ago
  There is some minimum level of intelligence and conscientiousness it takes to learn to pass these things. People who have it are at least better positioned than a random selection of the population to learn whatever else is required.
dehrmann 7y ago
Google stopped asking logic riddles, so things can definitely improve. Maybe FAANG-style interviews are the least worst option we have right now.
- p_l 7y ago
  Google made logic riddles disallowed on interviews by over a decade ago (I think 2005? plus-minus few years), yet they are still thought to ask them. Despite it being a turn of the decade 1980/1990 Microsoft thing.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Are you talking about logic problems or Fermi estimation? They are different things, but I'm not sure the people who complain about either distinguish.
    - p_l 7y ago
      The problem is that they are composed as riddles, with the whole thing made so that unless you trained yourself on solving riddles, you might not figure out that it's a fermi problem. Meanwhile asking questions that are grounded in the actual work you're going to have the candidate do, often gets you people making the estimation even if they haven't heard of Fermi Estimation, ever. That's what makes them riddles, to me, and mostly useless BS in actual interview.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        People often confuse knowing things with being smart. It seems useful to me to ask questions that sound on the face of it like things nobody knows, but can actually be figured out based on knowledge everyone has, because it reduces the elements of chance and bias from testing arbitrary knowledge. When someone says they hate "logic problems", it sounds as though they're talking about this: https://www.pennydellpuzzles.com/products/logic-math/original-logic-problems/ https://www.pennydellpuzzles.com/products/logic-math/origina... I don't like those either, but I doubt they are used in interviews.
tomnj 7y ago
Maybe FAANG should institute random DS&A tests for all employees and fire underperformers as potential false positives. /s

by skizm 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

I'm actually rather unconvinced that these interviews are positively good at minimizing risk (false positives). This whole 'whiteboarding' thing has degenerated into 100% pointless trivia, with many elements of a popularity contest - I just don't see any reason why we should trust this to yield 'safe' candidates. Even sticking to the pure 'trivia' aspect, there's just so much of it that people are missing altogether. (Sure, maybe you can write out a nifty algorithm on the whiteboard, but can you sketch even a very rough proof that the algorithm is correct? I don't think many people can do anything like this. I'm not even sure that the topic of correctness comes up all that much in a CS/SE curriculum - which is surprising, since we are supposed to be doing engineering. And yet, someone who is familiar with what provably-correct code might look like in practice will likely be a lot more productive as a result.)

wojciii 7y ago
I have a CS degree .. and I find it more difficult to write good requirements and come up with good design (since people are generally changing the requirements and the design should be flexible) prior to programming than to solve some problem on a whiteboard. I decided to not to do any whiteboard challenges unless the whiteboard has a built in editor, search engine and stack overflow. So far people who interviewed me just wanted to know about the different projects that I worked on during the last 15 years. I'm lazy and don't have time to prepare for interviews or do home assignments because of family life. I'm going to be frank about this if I'm asked to do anything more than talking during an interview.
wutbrodo 7y ago
> This whole 'whiteboarding' thing has degenerated into 100% pointless trivia, with many elements of a popularity contest - I just don't see any reason why we should trust this to yield 'safe' candidates. People blindly and dumbly implementing any practice is going to yield bad results. I've interviewed for Google, for a small company with a crappy pipeline and a low need for talent, and for my current job, which needs Google-level talent across multiple specialties[1]. Whiteboarding has played a critical role in all of these. The goal isn't to have them answer trivia questions in marker, it's a basic test of their ability to think critically and program. Naturally, the exact questions differ based on the role: for the second job, it was basic processing of data structures, while for the third, I got a question that involves some degree of spatial reasoning. But in general, this is a pretty fundamental way to test a pretty fundamental set of skills. I even was lucky enough to get a negative example: I ran the tech org for the second company, which had two non-technical founders. We hired a candidate with no engineering experience on my recommendation because he did very well in his coding interview: this guy ended up being the most reliable, clutch engineer in the company. I also rejected a candidate on the basis of failing the simple whiteboard problems, and the founders decided to hire him anyway based on his years of experience. The founder ended up having to bounce him around from task to task, leaving a trail of destruction wherever he went. His code would bring production down, he'd create weeks of work for others in a couple of days, he utterly destroyed devops during his brief tenure there, etc. He was very sweet, hardworking, had a great temperament... But the inescapable fact was that he was just kinda dumb. The whiteboard interview handily caught this, _which is what it's supposed to do_, and all the HN sniveling about whiteboard interviews only being useless trivia contests doesn't erase that fact. [1] You can imagine how hard hiring is for us right now...
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > I also rejected a candidate on the basis of failing the simple whiteboard problems OK, but this topic is not about "simple" whiteboard problems. (People can of course disagree wrt. what's 'simple', but a rule of thumb is that anything where the average dev would need to train and memorize whiteboard trivia for an extended period in order to perform satisfactorily is far from simple.)
skizm 7y ago
> I'm actually rather unconvinced that these interviews are positively good at minimizing risk (false positives). I was talking about minimizing risk for the people hiring at sub-FAANG companies. If they make crap hires, they can just say "well we're doing it exactly like FAANG". But yes, I also agree there might be better ways to optimize for minimizing bad hires.
closeparen 7y ago
There is some minimum level of intelligence and conscientiousness it takes to learn to pass these things. People who have it are at least better positioned than a random selection of the population to learn whatever else is required.

dehrmann 7y ago

Google stopped asking logic riddles, so things can definitely improve. Maybe FAANG-style interviews are the least worst option we have right now.

p_l 7y ago
Google made logic riddles disallowed on interviews by over a decade ago (I think 2005? plus-minus few years), yet they are still thought to ask them. Despite it being a turn of the decade 1980/1990 Microsoft thing.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Are you talking about logic problems or Fermi estimation? They are different things, but I'm not sure the people who complain about either distinguish.
  - p_l 7y ago
    The problem is that they are composed as riddles, with the whole thing made so that unless you trained yourself on solving riddles, you might not figure out that it's a fermi problem. Meanwhile asking questions that are grounded in the actual work you're going to have the candidate do, often gets you people making the estimation even if they haven't heard of Fermi Estimation, ever. That's what makes them riddles, to me, and mostly useless BS in actual interview.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      People often confuse knowing things with being smart. It seems useful to me to ask questions that sound on the face of it like things nobody knows, but can actually be figured out based on knowledge everyone has, because it reduces the elements of chance and bias from testing arbitrary knowledge. When someone says they hate "logic problems", it sounds as though they're talking about this: https://www.pennydellpuzzles.com/products/logic-math/original-logic-problems/ https://www.pennydellpuzzles.com/products/logic-math/origina... I don't like those either, but I doubt they are used in interviews.

tomnj 7y ago

Maybe FAANG should institute random DS&A tests for all employees and fire underperformers as potential false positives. /s