16 ms·

How to Hire Great Engineers

116 points by bink 6y ago

scarface74 6y ago
...and if you share the same kind of jokes and values. Cultural alignment No less important is the cultural alignment, the “Can I work with you?” question. This screams all sorts of “isms” to me.
- m3kw9 6y ago
  In the real world that’s how it is, everyone has their own moral compasses
- amflare 6y ago
  No, an -ism would be to deliberately reject an individual that did fit cultural and merit based parameters for reasons unrelated or not under the control of the individual.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    "Cultural parameters" can be used to cover over all kinds of discriminatory practices. "Yes, it is true our company has only hired young white heterosexual males, but it is just a complete coincidence that none of the candidates not matching that description were a good cultural fit."
    - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
      Perhaps this is utopian, but I like to believe that cultural fit encompasses a little more than just the distinction between those who are woke and those who reject that specific culture.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        It’s not about being “woke”. The idea is that the only thing that matters whether you get a job is how well you can do your job and how well you collaborate with your coworkers when it comes to adding value to the company. Your religion (or lack thereof), your race, your outside hobbies, your sex, your sexual orientation shouldn’t matter.
        yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
        Yes, I agree with you. What I was referring to was the parent comment's seeming insinuation that "bad cultural fit" is usually a blanket excuse made by bigots, and I don't think that's fair.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Yeah it usual is. Not just by bigots in the classical sense but about anyone that doesn’t “pattern match” for any reason.
    - amflare 6y ago
      So? Just because it can doesn't mean it inherently does. If someone is using it as cover, you relabel the action, you don't redefine the label.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I love if I can share jokes with coworkers, but making that a prerequisite for hiring is kind of brain-dead.
zihotki 6y ago
Half of the article is just an advertisement of their service.
- allknowingfrog 6y ago
  I would argue that the whole article is an advertisement. The second half is just where they admit it. How does this kind of trash make the front page?
  - tangjurine 6y ago
    Are all advertisements trash? The article introduces a problem and a solution that they came up with. Are you saying it's trash just because they have a chance of making money off it? It's ok to have a conflict of interest, imo - the work should stand for itself, and in this case I feel it was a good article.
    - allknowingfrog 6y ago
      The article introduces a problem as though the author is a neutral third-party, and that's slimey. I generally enjoy write-ups from companies that explain why they exist. Reading this one felt like being invited over for dinner and then finding out it's a timeshare pitch.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  The entire article is an advertisement of their service, and it is a pretty well executed advertisement. By the time I got to the end, I realized it was an advertisement, but still felt I had learned something useful.
  - ilyaa 6y ago
    Thanks! Full disclosure -- it is my first advertisement, ever, so I'm glad you liked it :) I would challenge the assumption that this is purely advertisement, though. In my head, this is not "buy our shit™" type of post -- in fact, there's no mention of buying the subscription anywhere. All there is is a link to a demo, with a valid challenge (not a fizzbuzz/fibonacci, but one you can actually have a lot of fun with), which we provide for free to anyone, w/o even requiring valid email -- it is up to you if you don't wanna reset the password later. Instead, the post is more of a "use the right metric -- here's our experience and what has worked for us" type of post. Would you agree that this is a more fair assessment?
raziel2p 6y ago
Engineering is vastly more complex than chopping onions. I strive for the ability to on-board in less than a day for projects I work on but it's not realistic in many cases. Companies need to put effort into having small side projects with dedicated github issues only meant for these candidates (anecdote: the few companies I've applied to that do this type of thing did not do a good job: their tickets were vague, lacking context, and mostly just led me wanting to talk to the PO). Many engineers are also looking for jobs while they currently have one, making a half/whole day "trial" very difficult or impossible. Asking people to commit their weekend or free time is also discriminating against those with families, social lives, and those who just like leaving programming behind when office hours are over. The article only talks about algorithmic interviews. There are plenty of other interview styles that delve into more pragmatic problem solving that still aren't perfect, but work much better.
- jordan801 6y ago
  Contract work would work similarly for engineers. Do it on your own time if you have a job. They can ask the current team questions via chat. Get some real code into PRs and prove that they have skills. Personally I don't even apply to jobs anymore. I am tired of 6+ hour code reviews that I don't get paid for, and no explanation when I get passed up. I would much rather be a contract worker and get paid at least something while doing actual work, over building a search engine for star wars characters. I'm exactly like what you describe. When I leave the office, I want to camp, rock climb, and prep for marathons. I don't want to spend more time coding. That's exactly what makes me absolutely disgusted with applying for new opportunities. Eight interviews with various people, just to get ghosted. Time I could have been improving at other passions. Instead I'm left with no time, no indication of what I can improve on, and no job.
  - Icathian 6y ago
    I see sentiments like this expressed sometimes, and I'm usually a bit confused. Are you currently employed, and if so is it in a permanent role or as a contractor? What do you plan to do the next time you want to change jobs? Genuinely curious here, I only know one model and it works well enough for me, but you seem to have a different one and I'd like to know more about it.
commandlinefan 6y ago
So... restaurants hire people by giving them onions to chop and seeing if they can make good jokes. Every white collar job that's ever existed hires people by checking resumes, checking references, considering education and past work experience and a face-to-face introductory meeting. So, is programming (sorry, "engineering") more like cooking food or more like every other job where you sit in an office and work toward delivering business value?
- scarface74 6y ago
  Amazingly enough, restaurants don’t see if chefs can grow food and raise cattle, yet big tech does expect you to be able to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.
protonimitate 6y ago
I really like the idea of "chopping the onion". I've personally had a handful of devs who passed our interview process with flying colors, but couldn't actually deliver anything once they got in the door. They could recite any leetcode problem from memory, but didn't know how to contribute value to their team or company. > The grading is automatic. I think is ok as _one_ metric, but I wouldn't want it to the be the _only_ metric that is being looked at. ICs aren't really ICs. You can be a JIRA champion, knocking tickets into the done column at the speed of light, but Great Engineers do more than just that. Great Engineers build up their team, and help others grow. They know how to push back on unrealistic asks. They can incite help when they get stuck. They can translate complex issues into digestible bites. Writing good code is the bare minimum quality of being a Great Engineer. The main barrier I see to hiring Great Engineers is that you really need to hire Great People. But a lot of hiring practices are taking all the human aspects out of hiring (except for the "behavioral" questions, but even these can be gamed like system design or leetcode). Great People worthy of hiring are driven, passionate (not "spent all my waking time coding", but "truly believe in the mission/goals of the company/project"), empathetic, intelligent, and trust worthy. None of those traits are easily discernible from random logic puzzles. I don't know what the solution is. At some point there has to be a "can actually write code" litmus test, but I don't believe any of the current methods work well to prove that. I think take home tests are closer to the "chopping onions" idea, but only require commitment from the applicant, not the employer, which leads to a lot of wasted time. Personally, I think temp-to-hire or work-for-a-day type models could work, if there was some standards to prevent abuse. I would rather sacrifice a few days to a week to see if I actually like working somewhere, and to prove to them that I can do the job, then look at CTCI ever again.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  > handful of devs who passed our interview process with flying colors, but couldn't actually deliver anything once they got in the door. They could recite any leetcode problem from memory, but didn't know how to contribute value to their team or company. Interesting, why do you think was this the case?
  - alpha_squared 6y ago
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kanobo 6y ago
Chopping the onion? This is very roundabout advertisement. Why not just post your company's homepage? At least the information is more direct.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  It is a very direct advertisement.
ryanianian 6y ago
So much nope to this. > They would put you to the test for like 2-3 days to see how you perform And pay you. And give you some level of feedback along the way, not just "here make some salads" and then "nah nevermind" after 3 days of hard work. And you get to work with them and decide if you like working there too. It's not a one-way street like these bullshit homework interview pipelines. Unlike in food, you're not going to be productive with real code for a few months. Unlike in food, just doing the coding is only 40-60% of the job. Unlike in food, it's hard to improvise code in a language, framework, test-style, knowledge-domain, or other toolset you may not be familiar with. Hiring for restuarants is not a relevant comparison. This just seems like the typical unpaid homework assignment--which is usually a couple softball algorithm questions mixed with some arbitrary glue-code riddles--with some CI-flavored slop on top.
- site-packages1 6y ago
  WordPress does the take home assignment but they pay you for your time, which is very cool.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  > you're not going to be productive with real code for a few months I've hired several engineers who get productive within the first week. Most manage to get in a PR and deploy to production by the end of the first day. If it's taking a few months before the candidate can get productive, something has gone horrifically wrong.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > ... something has gone horrifically wrong Agree 100%. And in most cases it probably isn't a problem with the candidate. It's a problem with the existing software and development process. It shouldn't take someone months to become useful on a new project.
  - masonhensley 6y ago
    We've probably all seen or heard of places where a developer sits around for weeks, going to standups with their status update - "waiting on license XYZ" or waiting for access to the project (git, TFS, jira, vpns etc). It's a huge problem in many orgs. It's also a good sniff test if you're interviewing. Slow and steady might be up your alley too. There's definitely a hierarchy of security and compliance needs depending on the org, but many orgs loose the forest for the trees.
kodbraker 6y ago
What's the blogging engine? Looks familiar
- Narigo 6y ago
  I suspect Hugo: https://autoiterative.com/blog/index.xml https://autoiterative.com/blog/index.xml
  - ilyaa 6y ago
    You're spot on. We use hugo with a custom theme, which is derived from etch (https://themes.gohugo.io/etch/ https://themes.gohugo.io/etch/).
yeswecatan 6y ago
Hiring is not a one size fits all problem. It's true that early stage startups could probably use more product-minded engineers (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engineer/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engine...) and engineers who can ship code fast with the drawback being that it's not as scalable. Even then, different teams have different needs. Some need people who just want requirements and go. Some teams need junior developers, some need senior.
ilyaa 6y ago
Hey folks! co-founder here, I'm one of the people behind autoiterative.com. I did a ShowHN yesterday[1], but obviously, the blog post provokes much more engaged discussion, love it ;) I appreciate your feedback, please keep it coming and challenge our assumptions! I will try to address the questions tomorrow, I already see some of them require a ton of thinking indeed. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986002
- busrf 6y ago
  Hi Ilya, I saw in your linked post that this started as an internal tool to assess candidates which you then spun out. Could you talk more about that? How many people did you screen and hire with this tool?
  - ilyaa 6y ago
    Hi! Thanks for asking. We will blog about it in more detail, but I can give you some numbers right away. At the moment when we decided to start making it into a product, we've been using this approach for roughly 4 months. During this period, the data was: - we processed roughly 600 candidates - of which we hired about 50 - per-recruiter rate of processing people increased from 15/month to 100/month - average invite-to-offer time reduced from two months to two weeks - on top of that, the number of challenges to review by our engineers dropped by 60%. The explanation of why will be in our next blog post about the cost of engineering engagement. At this point, we decided that this is too good to hold only for ourselves. Thus, AutoIterative was born, where we also significantly improved the parts that weren't polished well enough and added features we lacked.
- juped 6y ago
  This is very, very similar to something I've been working on. I'll email you to trade thoughts, if you're interested.
  - ilyaa 6y ago
    Hey juped, of course, please do reach out, I would love to hear your take on this problem because it is a very complex one indeed. Some context: we're not claiming we have a silver bullet or fit-it-all solution as some people got from the post (and that's my fault because I'm responsible for that text, and blogging is hard, haha). And we're also not claiming we can replace _the whole_ of your hiring loop (that would be the silver bullet). We claim that choosing the right metric can drastically improve the hiring loop, and we've built the tool that automates the assessment of this exact metric.
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kevsim 6y ago
I’m not sure better coding exercises is the solution here. What you want to do is bring people in for a week and let them work with the team. But unless you’re the hottest thing in town, no one is going to spend a week with you, at least most likely not the people you want to hire.
- nutshell89 6y ago
  I guess the argument is that the restaurant industry does it all the time - hell, hiring a designer will often involve assigning them a project, having them give a presentation on it, and asking questions about their portfolio. We tend to put more trust in end product in that regard more than any specific process (like quizzing them on the process to create a specific animation in After Effects or on interaction cost or cognitive ergonomics).
oxfordmale 6y ago
The difference is that you get paid at a restaurant for chopping onions, even if it is for three days only. A highly valued IC wouldn't have time to spend three days coding for free. On the other hand someone can outsource this to a skilled developer in India or a friend who is good at coding.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  > A highly valued IC wouldn't have time to spend three days coding for free. So pay them, even if it's just a token amount. At least shows some appreciation for the candidate sacrificing their time.
dcewcrrec 6y ago
Does anyone else feel like it should be illegal to make someone go through 3 or 4 interview stages, essentially making them work for free, only to not give them the job? On another note, if your code base uses very niche software and there aren't too many people out there who know it, what's the process for hiring an engineer that will be able to learn it? What do you look for?
- Traster 6y ago
  I don't think you can sensibly say that most interviews are making people "work" for free- you're not going to get any productive work product out of an interview unless you're literally making someone do a trial shift in a coffee shop, which I think people would agree is scummy. That doesn't really happen in Tech. I can pay you to do our coding test, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that 350 different solutions to the exact same toy programming problem has any value to my company. Also, what am I going to pay you? Minimum wage? £20 or so? We could do that, but I'm not sure it would make any difference to anyone but the most marginal candidate.
site-packages1 6y ago
> Small and medium companies pick the crumbs of those rituals and fall into cargo culting. They want to reap the same promised benefits of the obscure interview rituals. Yet they miss the reasons behind these rituals and do not fully understand what trained interviewers exactly seek. Just my opinion, but I think this line comes across as a little too condescending or perhaps paternalistic. I work at a small (40-50 ppl) unknown to you company and all of us (so far) are senior in our fields and largely have FAMGAN experience on our CVs. We’re not just cargo culting, but rather taking things from the FAMGAN hiring processes that make sense and using them.
- ilyaa 6y ago
  Hey, post author here. Apologies if it sounded paternalistic, that was definitely not the intention. I would argue that 40-50 senior people in one place would be rather an exception from the norm, and your company would be quite an outlier on the bell curve. If all of you are not just seniors, but also had first-hand experience participating (or even building) in hiring loops of the large companies, then you would have all the necessary knowledge of why those rituals were created, and why. The point of the blog post was that this is usually not the case, so the imitation is the only option. Could you elaborate on your hiring loop? Which of the stages is the most effective and brings you the most value?
eternalban 6y ago
"The restaurant industry figured the hiring way better than the software engineering industry! They test both professional skills and cultural alignment! In other words, they test your ability to deliver. They do not ask you to explain a recipe by heart or describe how you would chop the onion. They ask you to do it. Live." It's ironic that the article points out the error in blindly imitating others and then we get this entirely apples and oranges 'recipe for effective interviews'. What are the fixed costs of having a 'live' chop the onions and shoot the breeze on slack for software companies? For a restaurant, they simply need a bit of tabletop for the 'new workstation'. - All onions are pretty much the same in one industry; in our industry, we famously have 'a new way to slice onions' every other day! Let's not even discuss the variety of knives .. - What 'secret sauce' info is disclosed during the 'live' getting to know each other? Can we just put candidates in company slack and check out how it works? Seems problematic.
d_burfoot 6y ago
I think a lot of small/medium companies should simply get realistic about the following facts: - They are probably not going to be able to hire "great" engineers - Even if they get a couple of great engineers, they are not going to be able to create an engineering culture where those engineers can do great work. Instead of looking for "greatness", most companies in this position should simply settle for competence. Hire people who use boring technology and build systems that do things simply and directly.
- austincheney 6y ago
  That’s what most big companies already do and why it burns out experiences developers. The degree of settling for competence is a sliding scale that sets horrid expectations. That’s so many developers can’t tell the difference between expert beginners and actual experts.
  - babycake 6y ago
    I don't know about this. Most experienced developers I know of have family, and they generally value their personal time. They don't mind doing boring software. And even if they are bored, I don't think it burns them out. What I do know is that company processes burns out all sorts of people - experienced or not. From stack ranking, agile micromanagement, unrealistic deadlines, office politics, bad bosses... These things are prominent in nearly every company, especially in top companies like Google. I agree with the parent post, even if you by chance somehow hired fantastic 10x developers to your team, the environment in which those developers will be working in will probably burn them out quicker than just working on 'boring' software.
- dcewcrrec 6y ago
  I don't like this negativity. Pay and position doesn't necessarily reflect competence. I don't buy that the smartest engineers in the world are all working for big companies.
  - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    I worked in unicorns and small companies over a couple of of dozen of years. Best people do thing that matter. There are fewer things that matter in big companies.
908B64B197 6y ago
I'll copy-paste and expand something I wrote earlier about interviewing [0]. I think you are spot-on that algorithmic interviews are a form of cargo culting and that they select for the wrong thing but that's not because they are algorithmic interview; it's because they are poorly conducted. I'll play devil's advocate and defend whiteboard interviews as compared to take home or online assessments. Take homes are not very respectful of the candidate's time and, especially if they are not time bound, often leads to a candidate wasting a significant amount of time on these assignments. Plus, there's always the possibility that desperate candidates would cheat and have the assignment done by someone else. I would only use take homes and HackerRank style quiz for applicants that are from institutions I don't fully trust with quality or applications that are very spammy in nature, i.e from a college/bootcamp that has an abysmal application-to-hire ratio [1]. For candidates from serious institutions I favor a two-step approach: a screening interview with a light coding question and a full whiteboard interview. The screening's purpose is really only to answer questions about the hiring process and check that the candidate can write very simple code by himself when given a trivial problem [2]. Something not more complicated than FizzBuzz really. A lot of folks do whiteboard interviews wrong. They often expect to get the exact implementation of an algorithm they found in a textbook and for code on the board to compile. This isn't the point of whiteboarding. Doing this only promotes rote memorization. A good whiteboard interview should be a toy problem that can be solved in several different ways by using different strategies or data-structures. The idea is to see how the candidate will break down the problem. Is the candidate able to formulate test cases, write a simple implementation, verify his code and correct the implementation should it fail a test? On the more meta side of things is the candidate able to take feedback and explain why a certain strategy was chosen? Of course, it's not representative of real world engineering but it's a good way to peek at someone's ability to debug and reason about programs; these abilities translate well into debugging and design. Especially at the college level, I really can't make any assumptions on what the candidates know. People, especially non-technical, over-emphasis on knowledge of specific languages and framework and disregard computer science fundamentals, and I've been doing the exact opposite. I'm not judging their knowledge of the standard library of X programming language or the framework-du-jour but their ability to learn it fast. Now, large tech companies optimize hiring at the college level because that's when everyone is on the market at the same time [3]. It's also why they have internship programs, to make sure that the best talent is already in the hiring pipelines a few years before even getting their diplomas. After that initial post-graduation job search phase, you'll see great engineers often spending several years at the same company and not even looking for a job. They are often the strongest candidates and totally invisible to recruiters. Lastly, you can either really hope hard to find a diamond in the rough at whichever market rate you set or decide to compete with the companies that are actually attracting top talent. There's really no secret formula it's: compensation, interesting projects, technical career path and technical management. You can try to play games with CoL or market rate, but just keep in mind that if you do some of the top applicants won't even bother sending a resume in the first place. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989466 [1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-report/articleshow/58278004.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [3] https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I know someone that was hired by Plex. He spent a couple of months as a contractor before they hired him. I assume it worked out, because he's still there. I was a hiring manager for a long time. I seemed to make good decisions, most of the time (a couple of notable exceptions). I kept fairly senior-level employees on board for decades. I don't know if I ever developed a "system." It was always important for me to establish as much of a relationship with the prospective employees as possible, up front; which meant treating them with respect, and being open and emotionally available to them. I found that an attitude of trust and respect goes a long way to figuring out how people will deal with you and your team. Tests were worthless. I loved portfolios, and discussing the details of projects they had done. I did a great deal of homework before each interview; carefully reviewing their resume, and finding out about as much as I could. From all that, I have learned to be an "open book," myself. There's really not much about me that can't be figured out with some quick googling. That's on purpose. But this seems to be more or less an advertisement for their company. It may be a good idea and a good company, but I can't really say.
dotemacs 6y ago
Yes, this is an ad for their service. But then, you are on HN, not on Lobsters. I think that this is great idea that you're trying this. I hope you stick with it and succeed. Because it would be great to be able to hire and be hired, where you're not competing on how cheap you are or some other demeaning metric. Godspeed.
acd 6y ago
Actually if you think differently it’s better. This is like diverse team skills. If you are the same what difference does you bring to the team?
- snoman 6y ago
  It's not as straightforward as 'thinking differently'. Diversity of knowledge, experience, and skill is extraordinarily valuable but if you... * hoard knowledge * refuse to elevate those around you * are frequently combative * lie about your knowledge/experience * seek to be right instead of discover optimal solutions ... then all of that diversity is lost or wasted. It's not about diversity for diversity's sake, it's about sharing in diversity and using all of the differing perspectives to reach optimal solutions that your organization would be blind to otherwise.
fxtentacle 6y ago
How do they prevent people sending the problem to a friend or a paid advisor and, thus, letting someone else solve it for you? "The same happens with time-constrained problem-solving. That’s not how real life happens. People need time to think and reflect on the problems they face to build the right solution. Because of this, we do not artificially limit time for solving a challenge." sounds very critical in that regard. If you have lots of time, that makes it much easier to get outside advice.
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santoshalper 6y ago
I don't agree with the author's (salesman's) conclusion. Most software engineers in a small company are going to do a lot of design. There won't be architects or principal engineers doing the design for you. The kind of "chef" you interview by asking to chop an onion or cook for a few days is not the type of chef you are probably going to ask to design the menu. You're not making the menu, it's an almost pure execution role. One of the things that can really set a great engineer apart is the ability to design elegant systems and manage complexity. You're likely not going to find that out coding with them for a few days unless you make sure to index for it. Ironically, bigger companies where much of the design is centralized would benefit from this approach much more. They can get a lot more out of a "grunt" engineer who does journeyman work and is careful about testing.
comvidyarthi 6y ago
I do not agree with the premise that the best way to hire engineers is to follow the hire—chef model of restaurants. I don’t think it’s fair in any way to ask someone to work for free for few days, while you keep the candidate guessing whether you will give the job to the candidate or not. Also how can one plan to hire engineers who already have day jobs? Should the engineers take 3 days leave from their employer every-time they try to interview? This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). This reasoning works well for companies whose job is to recruit or help recruit engineers. After all, they are being paid by the employer and not the candidate, so they want to make the process optimal for the employers. But as much as I like the doing the right thing for customer attitude, this seems like taking that to an extreme and exploiting everything that isn’t paying.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). And the issue with that is that great talent will simply lose interest. Unless of course the company is willing to be extremely aggressive salary-wise or is a leader in a very visible field (SpaceX). Because they typically have have multiple offers on the table.
- kettro 6y ago
  I agree. Taking more than the requisite ~6 hours to do a full on-site for interview is a non-starter. I can do a take-home over the weekend, but my job has deadlines, and I don't want to be noticed. Especially if I'm in full-on hunt-mode, I might be doing a couple interviews a week. This is totally infeasible. I'm all for ditching the canned CTCI rigamarole, but please point to something that respects the candidate.
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Animats 6y ago
Anyone try their "demo"? Is it any good? (Oh, autoiterative people? Where's your privacy policy? Where's your opt-out of tracking link? For that matter, where's your company? And why is your domain registered via WhoisGuard out of Panama?)
- ilyaa 6y ago
  Hey John, how about you try it yourself? For the right mindset, I've been told that it is very fun and addictive :) Thanks for the questions, let me elaborate: - I didn't have time to prepare privacy policy, but we'll indeed make one and post it. You're right, we should have it. - There is no tracking. Never will be. We'll blog about why we're for 100% anonymity of the candidates in more detail, but for now: We don't collect names. We don't require valid emails to enroll in the demo. We don't use tracking cookies. We don't send HTML emails with tracking pixels, and we don't use any 3rd party service. We use cookies to authenticate you, and that's it. Javascript, social media buttons, or trackers or analytics of any sort on our pages are considered a bug. What we don't have, is a proper explicit privacy policy explaining all that. - We're a European company. - That's how Namecheap sets it up -- curious, why do you think it is a bad thing?
Tehdasi 6y ago
I've always thought that a good way to do a practical interview is to get the candidate to do a fizzbuzz. Then tell them that the requirements have changed, they need to add feature x. Then feature y, and so on. I reckon this would avoid ppl who just learn the test, and comes some way to emulating what actually happens in a real world job. But anyways, I'm not a hiring manager, so someone go out and try this and tell me why it's a terrible idea.
- nhumrich 6y ago
  This is exactly how I do my interviews. I have them "whiteboard" (or use a real computer) to wrote a very simple function, then I change requirements when they are almost done to see what they do.
ilaksh 6y ago
"We automatically test not only that the solution complies with the problem definition, but that it works correctly, that it handles edge cases and errors, that it replies within latency tolerance, and that it keeps working when we throw a lot of load at it. The candidate only has access to the initial test that gives them early feedback on how they are doing. The rest of the stages are visible only to the hiring manager." I almost love this, except for the second paragraph. It sounds as if you can't see how well your code performed in latency, load tests, or edge cases. That does not seem like a realistic simulation of work, because normally one would need to iterate a little bit to optimize those things. I mean I know I would prefer to just do an average job passing the core tests before I try to completely optimize it. Are the candidates even informed that the latency and load tests exist? I think it could be okay if you just mention that is part of it and there is a straightforward way for them to do their own latency and load testing.. so hopefully that's the case?
krschultz 6y ago
> Second—people who had spent the last month memorizing the “Cracking The Coding Interview.” They will pass as well, but you will have no assessment of whether they can apply their knowledge. That is, until their first deployment to your production environment. Everyone criticizes this, including me before I decided to capitulate to the system and do it myself. But it's actually kind of fair? Everyone knows the game. Some people will choose to train hard enough to play, some people will not. That is a signal in of itself as to whether the candidate will work well in the big tech company environment.
- unscaled 6y ago
  I didn't read it as criticism of the engineers reading “Cracking The Coding Interview.” - if you want to pass algorithmic interviews you have to read it or something equivalent - or be fresh out of college. But just as this post says, as a hiring manager, you'll get very little insight into how good the candidate is until after you've hired them. This does serve as a weak signal for dedication, but: 1. You don't want to make your hiring decision only based on dedication. 2. There are other, better signals for dedication.
  - kamaal 6y ago
    >>very little insight into how good the candidate is until after you've hired them. The fact that one depends on a proxy measurement which has little correlation with actual results is the core of the problem here.
- f0rfun 6y ago
  Just wondering, was it any good? Would you say it played a big part in passing whiteboard coding and landed your current job? Asking because I'm thinking of doing it myself..
  - krschultz 6y ago
    Absolutely. I went to the local library every Saturday for a month or two and did practice problems without distractions. Total prep time was probably ~40 hours. My compensation increased by at least $150,000 a year. Best ROI I've gotten on anything I've done in my life. I tell that stories to people considering doing it all the time, you'd be amazed how many people hear my experience and say, yeah, naw I'm not going to spend that time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
throwawaygh 6y ago
I feel like the crux here is requiring real work for 3-4 days. In addition to screening time and so on. A few days of a truly great engineers time costs like 4K-5k. At least.
Traster 6y ago
I wonder if other industries spend quite as much time focusing on how to hire exceptional people? Do we see articles in "The Stage" magazine about how to hire the next Lin-Manuel Miranda for your next production? Do we see Human Resources industry magazine publish a thousand pieces about how to spot the next Hannibal Lecter to really boost your HR teams performance?
GoToRO 6y ago
I was like: No. No. No. Up until I reached “Cultural alignment”! Then I was like: hell no! You know who does “Cultural alignment”? All the dictatorships in the world! I once worked with a guy that was very difficult. People warned me ahead of time. I made sure to accommodate him and we got it done. Otherwise, he would not fit anywhere, he would be jobless and then what? If you don’t respect the people’s right to work, you exclude them from society. And then what do you think it will happen?

116 points by bink 6y ago

...and if you share the same kind of jokes and values. Cultural alignment No less important is the cultural alignment, the “Can I work with you?” question. This screams all sorts of “isms” to me.

m3kw9 6y ago
In the real world that’s how it is, everyone has their own moral compasses
amflare 6y ago
No, an -ism would be to deliberately reject an individual that did fit cultural and merit based parameters for reasons unrelated or not under the control of the individual.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  "Cultural parameters" can be used to cover over all kinds of discriminatory practices. "Yes, it is true our company has only hired young white heterosexual males, but it is just a complete coincidence that none of the candidates not matching that description were a good cultural fit."
  - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
    Perhaps this is utopian, but I like to believe that cultural fit encompasses a little more than just the distinction between those who are woke and those who reject that specific culture.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      It’s not about being “woke”. The idea is that the only thing that matters whether you get a job is how well you can do your job and how well you collaborate with your coworkers when it comes to adding value to the company. Your religion (or lack thereof), your race, your outside hobbies, your sex, your sexual orientation shouldn’t matter.
      - yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
        Yes, I agree with you. What I was referring to was the parent comment's seeming insinuation that "bad cultural fit" is usually a blanket excuse made by bigots, and I don't think that's fair.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Yeah it usual is. Not just by bigots in the classical sense but about anyone that doesn’t “pattern match” for any reason.
  - amflare 6y ago
    So? Just because it can doesn't mean it inherently does. If someone is using it as cover, you relabel the action, you don't redefine the label.
Tainnor 6y ago
I love if I can share jokes with coworkers, but making that a prerequisite for hiring is kind of brain-dead.

zihotki 6y ago

Half of the article is just an advertisement of their service.

allknowingfrog 6y ago
I would argue that the whole article is an advertisement. The second half is just where they admit it. How does this kind of trash make the front page?
- tangjurine 6y ago
  Are all advertisements trash? The article introduces a problem and a solution that they came up with. Are you saying it's trash just because they have a chance of making money off it? It's ok to have a conflict of interest, imo - the work should stand for itself, and in this case I feel it was a good article.
  - allknowingfrog 6y ago
    The article introduces a problem as though the author is a neutral third-party, and that's slimey. I generally enjoy write-ups from companies that explain why they exist. Reading this one felt like being invited over for dinner and then finding out it's a timeshare pitch.
jimbokun 6y ago
The entire article is an advertisement of their service, and it is a pretty well executed advertisement. By the time I got to the end, I realized it was an advertisement, but still felt I had learned something useful.
- ilyaa 6y ago
  Thanks! Full disclosure -- it is my first advertisement, ever, so I'm glad you liked it :) I would challenge the assumption that this is purely advertisement, though. In my head, this is not "buy our shit™" type of post -- in fact, there's no mention of buying the subscription anywhere. All there is is a link to a demo, with a valid challenge (not a fizzbuzz/fibonacci, but one you can actually have a lot of fun with), which we provide for free to anyone, w/o even requiring valid email -- it is up to you if you don't wanna reset the password later. Instead, the post is more of a "use the right metric -- here's our experience and what has worked for us" type of post. Would you agree that this is a more fair assessment?

raziel2p 6y ago

Engineering is vastly more complex than chopping onions. I strive for the ability to on-board in less than a day for projects I work on but it's not realistic in many cases. Companies need to put effort into having small side projects with dedicated github issues only meant for these candidates (anecdote: the few companies I've applied to that do this type of thing did not do a good job: their tickets were vague, lacking context, and mostly just led me wanting to talk to the PO). Many engineers are also looking for jobs while they currently have one, making a half/whole day "trial" very difficult or impossible. Asking people to commit their weekend or free time is also discriminating against those with families, social lives, and those who just like leaving programming behind when office hours are over. The article only talks about algorithmic interviews. There are plenty of other interview styles that delve into more pragmatic problem solving that still aren't perfect, but work much better.

jordan801 6y ago
Contract work would work similarly for engineers. Do it on your own time if you have a job. They can ask the current team questions via chat. Get some real code into PRs and prove that they have skills. Personally I don't even apply to jobs anymore. I am tired of 6+ hour code reviews that I don't get paid for, and no explanation when I get passed up. I would much rather be a contract worker and get paid at least something while doing actual work, over building a search engine for star wars characters. I'm exactly like what you describe. When I leave the office, I want to camp, rock climb, and prep for marathons. I don't want to spend more time coding. That's exactly what makes me absolutely disgusted with applying for new opportunities. Eight interviews with various people, just to get ghosted. Time I could have been improving at other passions. Instead I'm left with no time, no indication of what I can improve on, and no job.
- Icathian 6y ago
  I see sentiments like this expressed sometimes, and I'm usually a bit confused. Are you currently employed, and if so is it in a permanent role or as a contractor? What do you plan to do the next time you want to change jobs? Genuinely curious here, I only know one model and it works well enough for me, but you seem to have a different one and I'd like to know more about it.

commandlinefan 6y ago

So... restaurants hire people by giving them onions to chop and seeing if they can make good jokes. Every white collar job that's ever existed hires people by checking resumes, checking references, considering education and past work experience and a face-to-face introductory meeting. So, is programming (sorry, "engineering") more like cooking food or more like every other job where you sit in an office and work toward delivering business value?

scarface74 6y ago
Amazingly enough, restaurants don’t see if chefs can grow food and raise cattle, yet big tech does expect you to be able to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.

protonimitate 6y ago

I really like the idea of "chopping the onion". I've personally had a handful of devs who passed our interview process with flying colors, but couldn't actually deliver anything once they got in the door. They could recite any leetcode problem from memory, but didn't know how to contribute value to their team or company. > The grading is automatic. I think is ok as _one_ metric, but I wouldn't want it to the be the _only_ metric that is being looked at. ICs aren't really ICs. You can be a JIRA champion, knocking tickets into the done column at the speed of light, but Great Engineers do more than just that. Great Engineers build up their team, and help others grow. They know how to push back on unrealistic asks. They can incite help when they get stuck. They can translate complex issues into digestible bites. Writing good code is the bare minimum quality of being a Great Engineer. The main barrier I see to hiring Great Engineers is that you really need to hire Great People. But a lot of hiring practices are taking all the human aspects out of hiring (except for the "behavioral" questions, but even these can be gamed like system design or leetcode). Great People worthy of hiring are driven, passionate (not "spent all my waking time coding", but "truly believe in the mission/goals of the company/project"), empathetic, intelligent, and trust worthy. None of those traits are easily discernible from random logic puzzles. I don't know what the solution is. At some point there has to be a "can actually write code" litmus test, but I don't believe any of the current methods work well to prove that. I think take home tests are closer to the "chopping onions" idea, but only require commitment from the applicant, not the employer, which leads to a lot of wasted time. Personally, I think temp-to-hire or work-for-a-day type models could work, if there was some standards to prevent abuse. I would rather sacrifice a few days to a week to see if I actually like working somewhere, and to prove to them that I can do the job, then look at CTCI ever again.

Fiveplus 6y ago
> handful of devs who passed our interview process with flying colors, but couldn't actually deliver anything once they got in the door. They could recite any leetcode problem from memory, but didn't know how to contribute value to their team or company. Interesting, why do you think was this the case?
- alpha_squared 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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kanobo 6y ago

Chopping the onion? This is very roundabout advertisement. Why not just post your company's homepage? At least the information is more direct.

jimbokun 6y ago
It is a very direct advertisement.

ryanianian 6y ago

So much nope to this. > They would put you to the test for like 2-3 days to see how you perform And pay you. And give you some level of feedback along the way, not just "here make some salads" and then "nah nevermind" after 3 days of hard work. And you get to work with them and decide if you like working there too. It's not a one-way street like these bullshit homework interview pipelines. Unlike in food, you're not going to be productive with real code for a few months. Unlike in food, just doing the coding is only 40-60% of the job. Unlike in food, it's hard to improvise code in a language, framework, test-style, knowledge-domain, or other toolset you may not be familiar with. Hiring for restuarants is not a relevant comparison. This just seems like the typical unpaid homework assignment--which is usually a couple softball algorithm questions mixed with some arbitrary glue-code riddles--with some CI-flavored slop on top.

site-packages1 6y ago
WordPress does the take home assignment but they pay you for your time, which is very cool.
yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
> you're not going to be productive with real code for a few months I've hired several engineers who get productive within the first week. Most manage to get in a PR and deploy to production by the end of the first day. If it's taking a few months before the candidate can get productive, something has gone horrifically wrong.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > ... something has gone horrifically wrong Agree 100%. And in most cases it probably isn't a problem with the candidate. It's a problem with the existing software and development process. It shouldn't take someone months to become useful on a new project.
- masonhensley 6y ago
  We've probably all seen or heard of places where a developer sits around for weeks, going to standups with their status update - "waiting on license XYZ" or waiting for access to the project (git, TFS, jira, vpns etc). It's a huge problem in many orgs. It's also a good sniff test if you're interviewing. Slow and steady might be up your alley too. There's definitely a hierarchy of security and compliance needs depending on the org, but many orgs loose the forest for the trees.

kodbraker 6y ago

What's the blogging engine? Looks familiar

Narigo 6y ago
I suspect Hugo: https://autoiterative.com/blog/index.xml https://autoiterative.com/blog/index.xml
- ilyaa 6y ago
  You're spot on. We use hugo with a custom theme, which is derived from etch (https://themes.gohugo.io/etch/ https://themes.gohugo.io/etch/).

yeswecatan 6y ago

Hiring is not a one size fits all problem. It's true that early stage startups could probably use more product-minded engineers (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engineer/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engine...) and engineers who can ship code fast with the drawback being that it's not as scalable. Even then, different teams have different needs. Some need people who just want requirements and go. Some teams need junior developers, some need senior.

ilyaa 6y ago

Hey folks! co-founder here, I'm one of the people behind autoiterative.com. I did a ShowHN yesterday[1], but obviously, the blog post provokes much more engaged discussion, love it ;) I appreciate your feedback, please keep it coming and challenge our assumptions! I will try to address the questions tomorrow, I already see some of them require a ton of thinking indeed. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23986002

busrf 6y ago
Hi Ilya, I saw in your linked post that this started as an internal tool to assess candidates which you then spun out. Could you talk more about that? How many people did you screen and hire with this tool?
- ilyaa 6y ago
  Hi! Thanks for asking. We will blog about it in more detail, but I can give you some numbers right away. At the moment when we decided to start making it into a product, we've been using this approach for roughly 4 months. During this period, the data was: - we processed roughly 600 candidates - of which we hired about 50 - per-recruiter rate of processing people increased from 15/month to 100/month - average invite-to-offer time reduced from two months to two weeks - on top of that, the number of challenges to review by our engineers dropped by 60%. The explanation of why will be in our next blog post about the cost of engineering engagement. At this point, we decided that this is too good to hold only for ourselves. Thus, AutoIterative was born, where we also significantly improved the parts that weren't polished well enough and added features we lacked.
juped 6y ago
This is very, very similar to something I've been working on. I'll email you to trade thoughts, if you're interested.
- ilyaa 6y ago
  Hey juped, of course, please do reach out, I would love to hear your take on this problem because it is a very complex one indeed. Some context: we're not claiming we have a silver bullet or fit-it-all solution as some people got from the post (and that's my fault because I'm responsible for that text, and blogging is hard, haha). And we're also not claiming we can replace _the whole_ of your hiring loop (that would be the silver bullet). We claim that choosing the right metric can drastically improve the hiring loop, and we've built the tool that automates the assessment of this exact metric.

deleted 6y ago

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kevsim 6y ago

I’m not sure better coding exercises is the solution here. What you want to do is bring people in for a week and let them work with the team. But unless you’re the hottest thing in town, no one is going to spend a week with you, at least most likely not the people you want to hire.

nutshell89 6y ago
I guess the argument is that the restaurant industry does it all the time - hell, hiring a designer will often involve assigning them a project, having them give a presentation on it, and asking questions about their portfolio. We tend to put more trust in end product in that regard more than any specific process (like quizzing them on the process to create a specific animation in After Effects or on interaction cost or cognitive ergonomics).

oxfordmale 6y ago

The difference is that you get paid at a restaurant for chopping onions, even if it is for three days only. A highly valued IC wouldn't have time to spend three days coding for free. On the other hand someone can outsource this to a skilled developer in India or a friend who is good at coding.

jimbokun 6y ago
> A highly valued IC wouldn't have time to spend three days coding for free. So pay them, even if it's just a token amount. At least shows some appreciation for the candidate sacrificing their time.

dcewcrrec 6y ago

Does anyone else feel like it should be illegal to make someone go through 3 or 4 interview stages, essentially making them work for free, only to not give them the job? On another note, if your code base uses very niche software and there aren't too many people out there who know it, what's the process for hiring an engineer that will be able to learn it? What do you look for?

Traster 6y ago
I don't think you can sensibly say that most interviews are making people "work" for free- you're not going to get any productive work product out of an interview unless you're literally making someone do a trial shift in a coffee shop, which I think people would agree is scummy. That doesn't really happen in Tech. I can pay you to do our coding test, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that 350 different solutions to the exact same toy programming problem has any value to my company. Also, what am I going to pay you? Minimum wage? £20 or so? We could do that, but I'm not sure it would make any difference to anyone but the most marginal candidate.

site-packages1 6y ago

> Small and medium companies pick the crumbs of those rituals and fall into cargo culting. They want to reap the same promised benefits of the obscure interview rituals. Yet they miss the reasons behind these rituals and do not fully understand what trained interviewers exactly seek. Just my opinion, but I think this line comes across as a little too condescending or perhaps paternalistic. I work at a small (40-50 ppl) unknown to you company and all of us (so far) are senior in our fields and largely have FAMGAN experience on our CVs. We’re not just cargo culting, but rather taking things from the FAMGAN hiring processes that make sense and using them.

ilyaa 6y ago
Hey, post author here. Apologies if it sounded paternalistic, that was definitely not the intention. I would argue that 40-50 senior people in one place would be rather an exception from the norm, and your company would be quite an outlier on the bell curve. If all of you are not just seniors, but also had first-hand experience participating (or even building) in hiring loops of the large companies, then you would have all the necessary knowledge of why those rituals were created, and why. The point of the blog post was that this is usually not the case, so the imitation is the only option. Could you elaborate on your hiring loop? Which of the stages is the most effective and brings you the most value?

eternalban 6y ago

"The restaurant industry figured the hiring way better than the software engineering industry! They test both professional skills and cultural alignment! In other words, they test your ability to deliver. They do not ask you to explain a recipe by heart or describe how you would chop the onion. They ask you to do it. Live." It's ironic that the article points out the error in blindly imitating others and then we get this entirely apples and oranges 'recipe for effective interviews'. What are the fixed costs of having a 'live' chop the onions and shoot the breeze on slack for software companies? For a restaurant, they simply need a bit of tabletop for the 'new workstation'. - All onions are pretty much the same in one industry; in our industry, we famously have 'a new way to slice onions' every other day! Let's not even discuss the variety of knives .. - What 'secret sauce' info is disclosed during the 'live' getting to know each other? Can we just put candidates in company slack and check out how it works? Seems problematic.

d_burfoot 6y ago

I think a lot of small/medium companies should simply get realistic about the following facts: - They are probably not going to be able to hire "great" engineers - Even if they get a couple of great engineers, they are not going to be able to create an engineering culture where those engineers can do great work. Instead of looking for "greatness", most companies in this position should simply settle for competence. Hire people who use boring technology and build systems that do things simply and directly.

austincheney 6y ago
That’s what most big companies already do and why it burns out experiences developers. The degree of settling for competence is a sliding scale that sets horrid expectations. That’s so many developers can’t tell the difference between expert beginners and actual experts.
- babycake 6y ago
  I don't know about this. Most experienced developers I know of have family, and they generally value their personal time. They don't mind doing boring software. And even if they are bored, I don't think it burns them out. What I do know is that company processes burns out all sorts of people - experienced or not. From stack ranking, agile micromanagement, unrealistic deadlines, office politics, bad bosses... These things are prominent in nearly every company, especially in top companies like Google. I agree with the parent post, even if you by chance somehow hired fantastic 10x developers to your team, the environment in which those developers will be working in will probably burn them out quicker than just working on 'boring' software.
dcewcrrec 6y ago
I don't like this negativity. Pay and position doesn't necessarily reflect competence. I don't buy that the smartest engineers in the world are all working for big companies.
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  I worked in unicorns and small companies over a couple of of dozen of years. Best people do thing that matter. There are fewer things that matter in big companies.

908B64B197 6y ago

I'll copy-paste and expand something I wrote earlier about interviewing [0]. I think you are spot-on that algorithmic interviews are a form of cargo culting and that they select for the wrong thing but that's not because they are algorithmic interview; it's because they are poorly conducted. I'll play devil's advocate and defend whiteboard interviews as compared to take home or online assessments. Take homes are not very respectful of the candidate's time and, especially if they are not time bound, often leads to a candidate wasting a significant amount of time on these assignments. Plus, there's always the possibility that desperate candidates would cheat and have the assignment done by someone else. I would only use take homes and HackerRank style quiz for applicants that are from institutions I don't fully trust with quality or applications that are very spammy in nature, i.e from a college/bootcamp that has an abysmal application-to-hire ratio [1]. For candidates from serious institutions I favor a two-step approach: a screening interview with a light coding question and a full whiteboard interview. The screening's purpose is really only to answer questions about the hiring process and check that the candidate can write very simple code by himself when given a trivial problem [2]. Something not more complicated than FizzBuzz really. A lot of folks do whiteboard interviews wrong. They often expect to get the exact implementation of an algorithm they found in a textbook and for code on the board to compile. This isn't the point of whiteboarding. Doing this only promotes rote memorization. A good whiteboard interview should be a toy problem that can be solved in several different ways by using different strategies or data-structures. The idea is to see how the candidate will break down the problem. Is the candidate able to formulate test cases, write a simple implementation, verify his code and correct the implementation should it fail a test? On the more meta side of things is the candidate able to take feedback and explain why a certain strategy was chosen? Of course, it's not representative of real world engineering but it's a good way to peek at someone's ability to debug and reason about programs; these abilities translate well into debugging and design. Especially at the college level, I really can't make any assumptions on what the candidates know. People, especially non-technical, over-emphasis on knowledge of specific languages and framework and disregard computer science fundamentals, and I've been doing the exact opposite. I'm not judging their knowledge of the standard library of X programming language or the framework-du-jour but their ability to learn it fast. Now, large tech companies optimize hiring at the college level because that's when everyone is on the market at the same time [3]. It's also why they have internship programs, to make sure that the best talent is already in the hiring pipelines a few years before even getting their diplomas. After that initial post-graduation job search phase, you'll see great engineers often spending several years at the same company and not even looking for a job. They are often the strongest candidates and totally invisible to recruiters. Lastly, you can either really hope hard to find a diamond in the rough at whichever market rate you set or decide to compete with the companies that are actually attracting top talent. There's really no secret formula it's: compensation, interesting projects, technical career path and technical management. You can try to play games with CoL or market rate, but just keep in mind that if you do some of the top applicants won't even bother sending a resume in the first place. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23989466 [1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-report/articleshow/58278004.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [3] https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I know someone that was hired by Plex. He spent a couple of months as a contractor before they hired him. I assume it worked out, because he's still there. I was a hiring manager for a long time. I seemed to make good decisions, most of the time (a couple of notable exceptions). I kept fairly senior-level employees on board for decades. I don't know if I ever developed a "system." It was always important for me to establish as much of a relationship with the prospective employees as possible, up front; which meant treating them with respect, and being open and emotionally available to them. I found that an attitude of trust and respect goes a long way to figuring out how people will deal with you and your team. Tests were worthless. I loved portfolios, and discussing the details of projects they had done. I did a great deal of homework before each interview; carefully reviewing their resume, and finding out about as much as I could. From all that, I have learned to be an "open book," myself. There's really not much about me that can't be figured out with some quick googling. That's on purpose. But this seems to be more or less an advertisement for their company. It may be a good idea and a good company, but I can't really say.

dotemacs 6y ago

Yes, this is an ad for their service. But then, you are on HN, not on Lobsters. I think that this is great idea that you're trying this. I hope you stick with it and succeed. Because it would be great to be able to hire and be hired, where you're not competing on how cheap you are or some other demeaning metric. Godspeed.

acd 6y ago

Actually if you think differently it’s better. This is like diverse team skills. If you are the same what difference does you bring to the team?

snoman 6y ago
It's not as straightforward as 'thinking differently'. Diversity of knowledge, experience, and skill is extraordinarily valuable but if you... * hoard knowledge * refuse to elevate those around you * are frequently combative * lie about your knowledge/experience * seek to be right instead of discover optimal solutions ... then all of that diversity is lost or wasted. It's not about diversity for diversity's sake, it's about sharing in diversity and using all of the differing perspectives to reach optimal solutions that your organization would be blind to otherwise.

fxtentacle 6y ago

How do they prevent people sending the problem to a friend or a paid advisor and, thus, letting someone else solve it for you? "The same happens with time-constrained problem-solving. That’s not how real life happens. People need time to think and reflect on the problems they face to build the right solution. Because of this, we do not artificially limit time for solving a challenge." sounds very critical in that regard. If you have lots of time, that makes it much easier to get outside advice.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

santoshalper 6y ago

I don't agree with the author's (salesman's) conclusion. Most software engineers in a small company are going to do a lot of design. There won't be architects or principal engineers doing the design for you. The kind of "chef" you interview by asking to chop an onion or cook for a few days is not the type of chef you are probably going to ask to design the menu. You're not making the menu, it's an almost pure execution role. One of the things that can really set a great engineer apart is the ability to design elegant systems and manage complexity. You're likely not going to find that out coding with them for a few days unless you make sure to index for it. Ironically, bigger companies where much of the design is centralized would benefit from this approach much more. They can get a lot more out of a "grunt" engineer who does journeyman work and is careful about testing.

comvidyarthi 6y ago

I do not agree with the premise that the best way to hire engineers is to follow the hire—chef model of restaurants. I don’t think it’s fair in any way to ask someone to work for free for few days, while you keep the candidate guessing whether you will give the job to the candidate or not. Also how can one plan to hire engineers who already have day jobs? Should the engineers take 3 days leave from their employer every-time they try to interview? This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). This reasoning works well for companies whose job is to recruit or help recruit engineers. After all, they are being paid by the employer and not the candidate, so they want to make the process optimal for the employers. But as much as I like the doing the right thing for customer attitude, this seems like taking that to an extreme and exploiting everything that isn’t paying.

908B64B197 6y ago
> This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). And the issue with that is that great talent will simply lose interest. Unless of course the company is willing to be extremely aggressive salary-wise or is a leader in a very visible field (SpaceX). Because they typically have have multiple offers on the table.
kettro 6y ago
I agree. Taking more than the requisite ~6 hours to do a full on-site for interview is a non-starter. I can do a take-home over the weekend, but my job has deadlines, and I don't want to be noticed. Especially if I'm in full-on hunt-mode, I might be doing a couple interviews a week. This is totally infeasible. I'm all for ditching the canned CTCI rigamarole, but please point to something that respects the candidate.

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Animats 6y ago

Anyone try their "demo"? Is it any good? (Oh, autoiterative people? Where's your privacy policy? Where's your opt-out of tracking link? For that matter, where's your company? And why is your domain registered via WhoisGuard out of Panama?)

ilyaa 6y ago
Hey John, how about you try it yourself? For the right mindset, I've been told that it is very fun and addictive :) Thanks for the questions, let me elaborate: - I didn't have time to prepare privacy policy, but we'll indeed make one and post it. You're right, we should have it. - There is no tracking. Never will be. We'll blog about why we're for 100% anonymity of the candidates in more detail, but for now: We don't collect names. We don't require valid emails to enroll in the demo. We don't use tracking cookies. We don't send HTML emails with tracking pixels, and we don't use any 3rd party service. We use cookies to authenticate you, and that's it. Javascript, social media buttons, or trackers or analytics of any sort on our pages are considered a bug. What we don't have, is a proper explicit privacy policy explaining all that. - We're a European company. - That's how Namecheap sets it up -- curious, why do you think it is a bad thing?

Tehdasi 6y ago

I've always thought that a good way to do a practical interview is to get the candidate to do a fizzbuzz. Then tell them that the requirements have changed, they need to add feature x. Then feature y, and so on. I reckon this would avoid ppl who just learn the test, and comes some way to emulating what actually happens in a real world job. But anyways, I'm not a hiring manager, so someone go out and try this and tell me why it's a terrible idea.

nhumrich 6y ago
This is exactly how I do my interviews. I have them "whiteboard" (or use a real computer) to wrote a very simple function, then I change requirements when they are almost done to see what they do.

ilaksh 6y ago

"We automatically test not only that the solution complies with the problem definition, but that it works correctly, that it handles edge cases and errors, that it replies within latency tolerance, and that it keeps working when we throw a lot of load at it. The candidate only has access to the initial test that gives them early feedback on how they are doing. The rest of the stages are visible only to the hiring manager." I almost love this, except for the second paragraph. It sounds as if you can't see how well your code performed in latency, load tests, or edge cases. That does not seem like a realistic simulation of work, because normally one would need to iterate a little bit to optimize those things. I mean I know I would prefer to just do an average job passing the core tests before I try to completely optimize it. Are the candidates even informed that the latency and load tests exist? I think it could be okay if you just mention that is part of it and there is a straightforward way for them to do their own latency and load testing.. so hopefully that's the case?

krschultz 6y ago

> Second—people who had spent the last month memorizing the “Cracking The Coding Interview.” They will pass as well, but you will have no assessment of whether they can apply their knowledge. That is, until their first deployment to your production environment. Everyone criticizes this, including me before I decided to capitulate to the system and do it myself. But it's actually kind of fair? Everyone knows the game. Some people will choose to train hard enough to play, some people will not. That is a signal in of itself as to whether the candidate will work well in the big tech company environment.

unscaled 6y ago
I didn't read it as criticism of the engineers reading “Cracking The Coding Interview.” - if you want to pass algorithmic interviews you have to read it or something equivalent - or be fresh out of college. But just as this post says, as a hiring manager, you'll get very little insight into how good the candidate is until after you've hired them. This does serve as a weak signal for dedication, but: 1. You don't want to make your hiring decision only based on dedication. 2. There are other, better signals for dedication.
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>very little insight into how good the candidate is until after you've hired them. The fact that one depends on a proxy measurement which has little correlation with actual results is the core of the problem here.
f0rfun 6y ago
Just wondering, was it any good? Would you say it played a big part in passing whiteboard coding and landed your current job? Asking because I'm thinking of doing it myself..
- krschultz 6y ago
  Absolutely. I went to the local library every Saturday for a month or two and did practice problems without distractions. Total prep time was probably ~40 hours. My compensation increased by at least $150,000 a year. Best ROI I've gotten on anything I've done in my life. I tell that stories to people considering doing it all the time, you'd be amazed how many people hear my experience and say, yeah, naw I'm not going to spend that time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

throwawaygh 6y ago

I feel like the crux here is requiring real work for 3-4 days. In addition to screening time and so on. A few days of a truly great engineers time costs like 4K-5k. At least.

Traster 6y ago

I wonder if other industries spend quite as much time focusing on how to hire exceptional people? Do we see articles in "The Stage" magazine about how to hire the next Lin-Manuel Miranda for your next production? Do we see Human Resources industry magazine publish a thousand pieces about how to spot the next Hannibal Lecter to really boost your HR teams performance?

GoToRO 6y ago

I was like: No. No. No. Up until I reached “Cultural alignment”! Then I was like: hell no! You know who does “Cultural alignment”? All the dictatorships in the world! I once worked with a guy that was very difficult. People warned me ahead of time. I made sure to accommodate him and we got it done. Otherwise, he would not fit anywhere, he would be jobless and then what? If you don’t respect the people’s right to work, you exclude them from society. And then what do you think it will happen?