7 ms·

Give the person 3-5 presentation topics they can choose from and have them come in and present to your company (non-technical & technical). Afterwards hold a Q

Give the person 3-5 presentation topics they can choose from and have them come in and present to your company (non-technical & technical). Afterwards hold a Q&A where the technical and non-technical identify themselves as such and then start asking questions. It allows your company to learn, to get a feel for the person's ability to communicate, and to stay away from stupid things like tests. It's also easily the best interviewing process I've ever experienced. --- edit: Since it appears that multiple people have taken this to represent an hour+ long presentation, let me clarify here. A better way to think about this would be a long-form discussion about a topic. The initial "talk" would be 5-10 minutes, with a Q&A afterwards to ask for clarifying questions. I've been working in this field for over 25 years. I spent roughly 30 minutes of prep for the interview and it was easily the best interview process I've ever experienced.

mlz8 6y ago
SpaceX is the only company I have interviewed with that does something like this, there is a 30 minute presentation followed by a technical q&a and then 1v1 interviews with the team.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
Unless the job is mostly giving presentations, it seems like its optimizing for the wrong thing. For all the talk about software development being a collaborative field, for most people it really is still mostly isolated mental work.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Yeah, asking me to spend 5+ hours building a powerpoint deck is a lot more annoying than asking me to spend 5+ hours on some code project. I'd probably just bow out of the process if asked to do that.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    Perhaps presentation is the wrong word, lets say "talk" instead. Not even a requirement to have anything graphical, just a long form discussion followed by Q&A afterwards.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      Doesn't matter. The people who do well will spend 5+ hours on it since that is how long it takes to put together a talk, refine it, go through it a couple times, get feedback, adjust based on feedback and so on.
      - RandoHolmes 6y ago
        I went through the process and spent probably 30 minutes and that was mostly trying to decide which topic to talk about and then typing up a sheet for notes to guide me during the talk. If someone is spending 5+ hours on this then they don't really know or have opinions about any of the topics and that doesn't seem right for common technical topics. As far as I'm concerned, this is you trying your hardest to have the most negative view on something that's mostly innocuous that you can. You're making it sound as if we would then take them into the next room and beat them until their morale improved.
        marcinzm 6y ago
        >As far as I'm concerned, this is you trying your hardest to have the most negative view on something that's mostly innocuous that you can. You're making it sound as if we would then take them into the next room and beat them until their morale improved. If this is your reaction to someone stating their initial view of your proposal and their perceived issues with it then okay I guess. Not sure why you posted something on a discussion forum when that's how you react to any negativity about it. Anyway, don't see much point in talking with you.
        RandoHolmes 6y ago
        This is just another defensive technique designed to try and get me on my back foot. I've been online 25-30 years and I've seen all the variations of this you can imagine. You're certainly not the first person to try and turn a discussion into a meta-discussion. So with that being said. If you read back over the conversation you'll see that when the initial negative statement was made I realized how presentation could have been misinterpreted as "powerpoint presentation" rather than simply a long form discussion and therefore I responded with a clarification. Up to this point, all reasonable. You could have chosen to respond with something along the lines of "If the time commitment was too onerous I'd probably opt out", or some variation thereof, at which point I would have further clarified. Instead you declared, with authority, that only the ones spending an onerous amount of time on it would do well. This was a completely unreasonable response with undue negativity and unfairness. At which point I responded that I've actually gone through this process and it only took 30 minutes. I then pointed out the unreasonableness and unfairness you were exhibiting. The thing is this. After having declared that I've gone through it myself and it only took 30 minutes, you had no authority to fall back on, so you went meta and started with an attack on my character. So here we are ... doing the meta thing. I will not be responding to you further, and it's probably best that you don't respond to me further as well.
  - dbcurtis 6y ago
    Perfect filter! I would rather not hire someone who doesn’t want to explain their projects and finds it onerous. Win-win.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      There's a difference between being able to say "you need to explain your work and projects to me" vs. you're going to spend the entire interview day preparing and giving presentations. I agree with the other commenter, it baffles me that we think that asking someone to write code, when the majority of their job will be writing code, is somehow an unfair interview process so the solution is to have them give only hours of powerpoint presentations.
      - dbcurtis 6y ago
        All day doing presentations? That isn't what we are talking about here. Starting the day with 30 minutes of "open mic" to introduce yourself and tell us about something cool that you did is an outright invitation to start the day by getting us excited to hire you, a 30-minute uninterrupted opportunity to show yourself in the best light. How can that be a bad thing? Some so presentation-phobic that they won't do that is not going to bring a lot of value to the organization.
        potamic 6y ago
        You seem to have an impression that a certain personality type will be better at doing their work than others. That's a very limiting view in my opinion, and you're going to pass over entire groups of people who can bring a lot of value. Neurodiversity can be just as important as gender diversity and cultural diversity. If you work with only one kind, then your world-view will be limited by that kind. I've come across many a smart person who would abhor the idea of listening to a presentation, let alone give one. Give me a document they'll say, and they will go through it at depth and collaborate amazingly over text. A mix of both is required. You don't want everyone to be giving presentations all day, just as you don't want no one to be attending any presentations. Diversity is essential, and it's more effective to create structures that allow different types of people to work with one another than to mould people into personalities.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  > Unless the job is mostly giving presentations, it seems like its optimizing for the wrong thing. Technically speaking, if we're in an interview to "optimize for the right thing", then we would just have them come in and type. But we all know that's also optimizing for "the wrong thing" despite it being what we do physically day in and day out. This is because you _CAN'T_ "optimize for the right thing" in an interview. It's not possible and this needs to be acknowledged. Therefore you go for something else. Anyone who is a software developer can listen to a 5-10 minute presentation from another developer and start forming general, broad opinions. They can then start asking questions afterwards to help clarify those opinions. But the Q&A also has another purpose. Way too often interviewers will come to conclusions that don't follow (non-sequitur). I once had someone tell me they didn't feel I would be a team player because I told them as long as I had headphones, open office would be ok. The main difference I've found between business people and technical people is that business people will ask clarifying questions. The Q&A sets the expectation for the _INTERVIEWER_ to ask clarifying questions.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  All modern software jobs are mostly about explaining your solution to others (stakeholders, reviewers, senior/staff engineers, managers, executives). If you can’t boil your work down into accessible presentations and adapt them for technical or non-technical audiences, you won’t get anywhere. Nobody will agree to help you, allow your team to grow, give you budget for tools you need, make compromises with you around integration requirements or shared design patterns, unless you can frequently convert your software work into highly professional presentations. I’d argue that competent presenting and writing skills are of equal, or even greater, importance than software skills or expert knowledge, whether for a research software job, software contractor job, SWE within tech / ecommerce / banking etc industries - across the board there are pretty much zero types of software engineering jobs in which software skills are actually the most important thing. Presenting and writing are frequently much more important.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    I agree with your description for senior devs, technical managers, and above. But in my experience there is no reason such a burden needs to be a core part of a mid-level team member's job description. To be clear, explaining your work is a part of every developers job. But top notch presentation skills don't need to be a part of it. Developers can talk to other developers in sub-optimal ways that are still effective. But when your hiring process has an hour long presentation as a part of it, you are optimizing for the thing that is very likely not the most important feature of the role. The point is to structure your hiring process such that it optimizes for the right things for the role.
    - RandoHolmes 6y ago
      I've updated my initial post with a clarification since you're not the only one who came away with the impression this was an hour long presentation. But also, I really really dislike when others talk about "optimizing" people. It's not possible to optimize your hiring process for anything useful. Due to this, there should be a lot more empathy in the hiring process than their actually is because everyone wants to make it robot-like by "optimizing" something.
dbcurtis 6y ago
We have people do a 30 minute presentation on anything they think we might find relevant. It is a really great way to start off a day of interviews with a candidate. It is a great self-introduction and a great stimulus for meaningful interview questions. Our group hires people in the software+hardware+mechatronics space, and we look for people that bring diverse skills we don’t yet cover well. The kind of person we want can teach us something new in 30 minutes, and a good project for that could be backyard hackery or university research. Either is good. I totally love the format. (Then again, I am a “Talk is cheap. Show me a working (even if janky) robot.” kind of person.) Related, a former BioMed engineer coworker said Medtronic used a similar process - start the interview day with a presentation.
jofer 6y ago
This is the normal approach in a lot of other fields. I'm still floored it's not more common in tech. I've done a lot of both traditional interviews (presentation on research or previous work followed by 1:1) and "tech" interviews (coding challenges and whiteboarding) from both sides. Tech-style interviews evaluate a much narrower swath of skills are are much more easily gamed. I feel that a presentation evaluates broader things: how well do you communicate and how comfortable are you discussing and answering questions about a topic you know well. It's a better indicator of job performance, i.m.o.
underwater 6y ago
I've met many talented developers who would describe that as their worst nightmare. Presenting to a group, especially a group you don't know, and with an added high-stakes outcome is incredibly stressful and not at all relevant to the work that most developers will ever have to do.
- rtlfe 6y ago
  Explaining things well to a wide range of people is one of the most important skills for a developer.
  - underwater 6y ago
    Yes communication is important, but communication rarely needs to happen in the format the parent comment suggested. Unless the position involves working with sales or things like developer advocacy, the described approach seems unnecessary. Especially given the original question was asking for ways to create a great candidate experience. Some developers are more comfortable with communicating via 1:1 conversations, design documents, proof of concept PRs, etc. I've done a lot of public speaking and presenting, but am aware I am in the minority of developers. I've also managed a lot of people and many of them have struggled with self confidence and presenting to large groups. This has not been a reflection on their performance as an engineer.
    - RandoHolmes 6y ago
      I just want to say that this is an attitude that's come up over time and as an older person it baffles me. To explain, college curriculum's require atleast 1 public speaking class. These classes are infamously difficult for a lot of people who find it scary to talk in front of a class of 30+ students. But society as a whole considered it to be the young persons responsibility to overcome this fear. Nowadays, it's far more likely that people are going to make arguments such as "the class shouldn't be required" or some other thing to try and help the young person avoid the scary public speaking. My point here is that yes, it's true there are going to be some who struggle with presenting to 5-6 people. That's on them. If they can't talk to 5-6 people they're going to find something as simple as a daily standup to be scary as well, should we just get rid of it? (Actually, I hate standups and think they're a waste of time, but you get the point). It's also not clear to me why you characterized this as a "large group", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you're used to interviews where 20-30 people get involved. That's certainly not what I'm suggesting. And finally, I can't imagine a young developer not being able to have a 5-10 minute talk in front of others about something like, say "What is memory safety in rust and why should it be used for new projects" when we're hiring for someone to work in rust. A more senior person would obviously get more generic options. The one I personally spoke about was roughly "What can we as a company be doing to empower software developers to create the best software possible".
meej 6y ago
This approach is really common in academic libraries, but there candidates typically only get one topic so they can be more easily compared with each other.

mlz8 6y ago

SpaceX is the only company I have interviewed with that does something like this, there is a 30 minute presentation followed by a technical q&a and then 1v1 interviews with the team.

hackinthebochs 6y ago

Unless the job is mostly giving presentations, it seems like its optimizing for the wrong thing. For all the talk about software development being a collaborative field, for most people it really is still mostly isolated mental work.

marcinzm 6y ago
Yeah, asking me to spend 5+ hours building a powerpoint deck is a lot more annoying than asking me to spend 5+ hours on some code project. I'd probably just bow out of the process if asked to do that.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  Perhaps presentation is the wrong word, lets say "talk" instead. Not even a requirement to have anything graphical, just a long form discussion followed by Q&A afterwards.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Doesn't matter. The people who do well will spend 5+ hours on it since that is how long it takes to put together a talk, refine it, go through it a couple times, get feedback, adjust based on feedback and so on.
    - RandoHolmes 6y ago
      I went through the process and spent probably 30 minutes and that was mostly trying to decide which topic to talk about and then typing up a sheet for notes to guide me during the talk. If someone is spending 5+ hours on this then they don't really know or have opinions about any of the topics and that doesn't seem right for common technical topics. As far as I'm concerned, this is you trying your hardest to have the most negative view on something that's mostly innocuous that you can. You're making it sound as if we would then take them into the next room and beat them until their morale improved.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        >As far as I'm concerned, this is you trying your hardest to have the most negative view on something that's mostly innocuous that you can. You're making it sound as if we would then take them into the next room and beat them until their morale improved. If this is your reaction to someone stating their initial view of your proposal and their perceived issues with it then okay I guess. Not sure why you posted something on a discussion forum when that's how you react to any negativity about it. Anyway, don't see much point in talking with you.
        RandoHolmes 6y ago
        This is just another defensive technique designed to try and get me on my back foot. I've been online 25-30 years and I've seen all the variations of this you can imagine. You're certainly not the first person to try and turn a discussion into a meta-discussion. So with that being said. If you read back over the conversation you'll see that when the initial negative statement was made I realized how presentation could have been misinterpreted as "powerpoint presentation" rather than simply a long form discussion and therefore I responded with a clarification. Up to this point, all reasonable. You could have chosen to respond with something along the lines of "If the time commitment was too onerous I'd probably opt out", or some variation thereof, at which point I would have further clarified. Instead you declared, with authority, that only the ones spending an onerous amount of time on it would do well. This was a completely unreasonable response with undue negativity and unfairness. At which point I responded that I've actually gone through this process and it only took 30 minutes. I then pointed out the unreasonableness and unfairness you were exhibiting. The thing is this. After having declared that I've gone through it myself and it only took 30 minutes, you had no authority to fall back on, so you went meta and started with an attack on my character. So here we are ... doing the meta thing. I will not be responding to you further, and it's probably best that you don't respond to me further as well.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  Perfect filter! I would rather not hire someone who doesn’t want to explain their projects and finds it onerous. Win-win.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    There's a difference between being able to say "you need to explain your work and projects to me" vs. you're going to spend the entire interview day preparing and giving presentations. I agree with the other commenter, it baffles me that we think that asking someone to write code, when the majority of their job will be writing code, is somehow an unfair interview process so the solution is to have them give only hours of powerpoint presentations.
    - dbcurtis 6y ago
      All day doing presentations? That isn't what we are talking about here. Starting the day with 30 minutes of "open mic" to introduce yourself and tell us about something cool that you did is an outright invitation to start the day by getting us excited to hire you, a 30-minute uninterrupted opportunity to show yourself in the best light. How can that be a bad thing? Some so presentation-phobic that they won't do that is not going to bring a lot of value to the organization.
      - potamic 6y ago
        You seem to have an impression that a certain personality type will be better at doing their work than others. That's a very limiting view in my opinion, and you're going to pass over entire groups of people who can bring a lot of value. Neurodiversity can be just as important as gender diversity and cultural diversity. If you work with only one kind, then your world-view will be limited by that kind. I've come across many a smart person who would abhor the idea of listening to a presentation, let alone give one. Give me a document they'll say, and they will go through it at depth and collaborate amazingly over text. A mix of both is required. You don't want everyone to be giving presentations all day, just as you don't want no one to be attending any presentations. Diversity is essential, and it's more effective to create structures that allow different types of people to work with one another than to mould people into personalities.
RandoHolmes 6y ago
> Unless the job is mostly giving presentations, it seems like its optimizing for the wrong thing. Technically speaking, if we're in an interview to "optimize for the right thing", then we would just have them come in and type. But we all know that's also optimizing for "the wrong thing" despite it being what we do physically day in and day out. This is because you _CAN'T_ "optimize for the right thing" in an interview. It's not possible and this needs to be acknowledged. Therefore you go for something else. Anyone who is a software developer can listen to a 5-10 minute presentation from another developer and start forming general, broad opinions. They can then start asking questions afterwards to help clarify those opinions. But the Q&A also has another purpose. Way too often interviewers will come to conclusions that don't follow (non-sequitur). I once had someone tell me they didn't feel I would be a team player because I told them as long as I had headphones, open office would be ok. The main difference I've found between business people and technical people is that business people will ask clarifying questions. The Q&A sets the expectation for the _INTERVIEWER_ to ask clarifying questions.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
All modern software jobs are mostly about explaining your solution to others (stakeholders, reviewers, senior/staff engineers, managers, executives). If you can’t boil your work down into accessible presentations and adapt them for technical or non-technical audiences, you won’t get anywhere. Nobody will agree to help you, allow your team to grow, give you budget for tools you need, make compromises with you around integration requirements or shared design patterns, unless you can frequently convert your software work into highly professional presentations. I’d argue that competent presenting and writing skills are of equal, or even greater, importance than software skills or expert knowledge, whether for a research software job, software contractor job, SWE within tech / ecommerce / banking etc industries - across the board there are pretty much zero types of software engineering jobs in which software skills are actually the most important thing. Presenting and writing are frequently much more important.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  I agree with your description for senior devs, technical managers, and above. But in my experience there is no reason such a burden needs to be a core part of a mid-level team member's job description. To be clear, explaining your work is a part of every developers job. But top notch presentation skills don't need to be a part of it. Developers can talk to other developers in sub-optimal ways that are still effective. But when your hiring process has an hour long presentation as a part of it, you are optimizing for the thing that is very likely not the most important feature of the role. The point is to structure your hiring process such that it optimizes for the right things for the role.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    I've updated my initial post with a clarification since you're not the only one who came away with the impression this was an hour long presentation. But also, I really really dislike when others talk about "optimizing" people. It's not possible to optimize your hiring process for anything useful. Due to this, there should be a lot more empathy in the hiring process than their actually is because everyone wants to make it robot-like by "optimizing" something.

dbcurtis 6y ago

We have people do a 30 minute presentation on anything they think we might find relevant. It is a really great way to start off a day of interviews with a candidate. It is a great self-introduction and a great stimulus for meaningful interview questions. Our group hires people in the software+hardware+mechatronics space, and we look for people that bring diverse skills we don’t yet cover well. The kind of person we want can teach us something new in 30 minutes, and a good project for that could be backyard hackery or university research. Either is good. I totally love the format. (Then again, I am a “Talk is cheap. Show me a working (even if janky) robot.” kind of person.) Related, a former BioMed engineer coworker said Medtronic used a similar process - start the interview day with a presentation.

jofer 6y ago

This is the normal approach in a lot of other fields. I'm still floored it's not more common in tech. I've done a lot of both traditional interviews (presentation on research or previous work followed by 1:1) and "tech" interviews (coding challenges and whiteboarding) from both sides. Tech-style interviews evaluate a much narrower swath of skills are are much more easily gamed. I feel that a presentation evaluates broader things: how well do you communicate and how comfortable are you discussing and answering questions about a topic you know well. It's a better indicator of job performance, i.m.o.

underwater 6y ago

I've met many talented developers who would describe that as their worst nightmare. Presenting to a group, especially a group you don't know, and with an added high-stakes outcome is incredibly stressful and not at all relevant to the work that most developers will ever have to do.

rtlfe 6y ago
Explaining things well to a wide range of people is one of the most important skills for a developer.
- underwater 6y ago
  Yes communication is important, but communication rarely needs to happen in the format the parent comment suggested. Unless the position involves working with sales or things like developer advocacy, the described approach seems unnecessary. Especially given the original question was asking for ways to create a great candidate experience. Some developers are more comfortable with communicating via 1:1 conversations, design documents, proof of concept PRs, etc. I've done a lot of public speaking and presenting, but am aware I am in the minority of developers. I've also managed a lot of people and many of them have struggled with self confidence and presenting to large groups. This has not been a reflection on their performance as an engineer.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    I just want to say that this is an attitude that's come up over time and as an older person it baffles me. To explain, college curriculum's require atleast 1 public speaking class. These classes are infamously difficult for a lot of people who find it scary to talk in front of a class of 30+ students. But society as a whole considered it to be the young persons responsibility to overcome this fear. Nowadays, it's far more likely that people are going to make arguments such as "the class shouldn't be required" or some other thing to try and help the young person avoid the scary public speaking. My point here is that yes, it's true there are going to be some who struggle with presenting to 5-6 people. That's on them. If they can't talk to 5-6 people they're going to find something as simple as a daily standup to be scary as well, should we just get rid of it? (Actually, I hate standups and think they're a waste of time, but you get the point). It's also not clear to me why you characterized this as a "large group", but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you're used to interviews where 20-30 people get involved. That's certainly not what I'm suggesting. And finally, I can't imagine a young developer not being able to have a 5-10 minute talk in front of others about something like, say "What is memory safety in rust and why should it be used for new projects" when we're hiring for someone to work in rust. A more senior person would obviously get more generic options. The one I personally spoke about was roughly "What can we as a company be doing to empower software developers to create the best software possible".

meej 6y ago

This approach is really common in academic libraries, but there candidates typically only get one topic so they can be more easily compared with each other.