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I see everyone saying this is satire, but I don't think so. Satire takes a commonly held belief and exaggerates it to the point where problems are easily visib

I see everyone saying this is satire, but I don't think so. Satire takes a commonly held belief and exaggerates it to the point where problems are easily visible. How is that happening here? I can almost see it in the "six hours" part, which I think is the weakest part of the essay, but it doesn't fit because the usual motivation for long hours and hard questions is not the negging/hazing explanation here, but because you want multiple perspectives on the candidate and because you want to establish the candidate's limits. It's useful to know the difference between "Candidate is good enough to work here" and "Candidate is insanely talented". The only way to get that is by asking questions that differentiate between good enough and insanely talented. Other than that aspect, the essay seemed straightforward. It seems true that it would be hard to make the questions the author asks and easy to fake "Tell me about a time you took initiative" style questions. I think the interview described here seems challenging and designed to hire quick thinking hackers, but it doesn't seem absurd or obviously wrong or terribly flawed as I would expect from a satirical piece.

jfarmer 6y ago
The author believes that we should screen for IQ directly and that long technical interviews are second-rate proxy for that. The piece is meant to get the reader to buy into a set of "natural" or "obvious" priorities and then show how absurd most interviews are in light of those priorities. I suspect the author is looking for a reaction like: "Wait, if I agree this is absurd, then why _don't_ we just administer IQ tests and be done with it?" Some of the author's tweets about identifying talent, IQ, and temperament: · https://share.getcloudapp.com/YEuyyKbE https://share.getcloudapp.com/YEuyyKbE · https://share.getcloudapp.com/z8uYY5gZ https://share.getcloudapp.com/z8uYY5gZ · https://share.getcloudapp.com/7Ku882yG https://share.getcloudapp.com/7Ku882yG · https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0urr8B5 https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0urr8B5
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  It's not obvious to me that testing IQ is a bad thing. Maybe it's not a good indicator for job performance, but that seems like something you'd need to discover empirically.
stefanmichael 6y ago
I think the fact that it does not seem "absurd" or "obviously wrong" is the revelation. It should, but it doesn't. It's clever writing. Imagine a world where engineering interviews were sane and then writing this article in that world, it would be "absurd" and "obviously wrong" and clearly satire. In our world, the real world.. it's not so clear.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Why should it seem absurd or obviously wrong? It seems like the author wants a certain kind of programmer and wants to minimize false positives. If you want the top 1% (according to your own measurements about what "top" means) then it only makes sense that you'd have an interview process that more than 99% of applicants couldn't pass. "More than" because you're also making cuts to avoid false positives which will reject some good candidates. In my view this strikes people as unfair because it excludes most people. It probably excludes them. I think I'd struggle with the tic tac toe problem and would probably need 30-60 minutes on it (hope to try this afternoon to see). It feels bad to see people say the bar is something you can't reach, and that makes people upset at the author. The author is an elitist and people don't like that. Furthermore, the bar is arbitrary. No good programmer needs to implement a tictactoe counting program rapidly so it feels dumb to judge on that. This is like saying though that IQ tests are meaningless because I seldom need to guess which shape comes next in a sequence. However, just like predicting a sequence tells us something about the quality of your cognition (probably) quickly writing an arbitrary program tells us that you have some level of coding, thinking, intelligence, etc. You may have that level of talent and fail the test, but you can't lack that level of talent and pass the test. At least, that's the theory in this essay. It seems mostly correct to me, barring an otherwise incompetent person who just coincidentally practices lots of tic tac toe problems. Given that hiring a bad person is a lot costlier than failing to hire a good one, it seems logical that some people would need to structure hiring like this. I don't think this is a good bar for FAANG companies. They need too many people. I don't think this is a good bar for companies where software is mundane not core competency stuff, you don't need high speed hackers. I'd doubt this is a good strategy for underfunded startups, you probably can't afford extensive interview processes with high bars or to hire the folks who would pass them. This seems like it might be a good pattern for a well funded software startup that needs to move fast.
munchbunny 6y ago
I really hope it's satire, but based on those tweets shared in the other comment, I don't think it is. The problem is that the views and practices here are just within the range of views I've actually seen interviewers and hiring managers express. And that's more damning of our industry's hiring practices than the person who wrote this.

jfarmer 6y ago

The author believes that we should screen for IQ directly and that long technical interviews are second-rate proxy for that. The piece is meant to get the reader to buy into a set of "natural" or "obvious" priorities and then show how absurd most interviews are in light of those priorities. I suspect the author is looking for a reaction like: "Wait, if I agree this is absurd, then why _don't_ we just administer IQ tests and be done with it?" Some of the author's tweets about identifying talent, IQ, and temperament: · https://share.getcloudapp.com/YEuyyKbE https://share.getcloudapp.com/YEuyyKbE · https://share.getcloudapp.com/z8uYY5gZ https://share.getcloudapp.com/z8uYY5gZ · https://share.getcloudapp.com/7Ku882yG https://share.getcloudapp.com/7Ku882yG · https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0urr8B5 https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0urr8B5

ALittleLight 6y ago
It's not obvious to me that testing IQ is a bad thing. Maybe it's not a good indicator for job performance, but that seems like something you'd need to discover empirically.

stefanmichael 6y ago

I think the fact that it does not seem "absurd" or "obviously wrong" is the revelation. It should, but it doesn't. It's clever writing. Imagine a world where engineering interviews were sane and then writing this article in that world, it would be "absurd" and "obviously wrong" and clearly satire. In our world, the real world.. it's not so clear.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Why should it seem absurd or obviously wrong? It seems like the author wants a certain kind of programmer and wants to minimize false positives. If you want the top 1% (according to your own measurements about what "top" means) then it only makes sense that you'd have an interview process that more than 99% of applicants couldn't pass. "More than" because you're also making cuts to avoid false positives which will reject some good candidates. In my view this strikes people as unfair because it excludes most people. It probably excludes them. I think I'd struggle with the tic tac toe problem and would probably need 30-60 minutes on it (hope to try this afternoon to see). It feels bad to see people say the bar is something you can't reach, and that makes people upset at the author. The author is an elitist and people don't like that. Furthermore, the bar is arbitrary. No good programmer needs to implement a tictactoe counting program rapidly so it feels dumb to judge on that. This is like saying though that IQ tests are meaningless because I seldom need to guess which shape comes next in a sequence. However, just like predicting a sequence tells us something about the quality of your cognition (probably) quickly writing an arbitrary program tells us that you have some level of coding, thinking, intelligence, etc. You may have that level of talent and fail the test, but you can't lack that level of talent and pass the test. At least, that's the theory in this essay. It seems mostly correct to me, barring an otherwise incompetent person who just coincidentally practices lots of tic tac toe problems. Given that hiring a bad person is a lot costlier than failing to hire a good one, it seems logical that some people would need to structure hiring like this. I don't think this is a good bar for FAANG companies. They need too many people. I don't think this is a good bar for companies where software is mundane not core competency stuff, you don't need high speed hackers. I'd doubt this is a good strategy for underfunded startups, you probably can't afford extensive interview processes with high bars or to hire the folks who would pass them. This seems like it might be a good pattern for a well funded software startup that needs to move fast.

munchbunny 6y ago

I really hope it's satire, but based on those tweets shared in the other comment, I don't think it is. The problem is that the views and practices here are just within the range of views I've actually seen interviewers and hiring managers express. And that's more damning of our industry's hiring practices than the person who wrote this.