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So you had one bad experience with one person who didn't do a whiteboard? How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've

So you had one bad experience with one person who didn't do a whiteboard? How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've lost count. >like using mutable objects with changing hash codes as dictionary keys kind of bad I don't think a leet code question would necessarily have screened stuff like that out at all. >Yeah, but when you ask someone for references they're not likely to give you people who wouldn't speak well of them. Did you actually talk with these references about what it was like to work with him? >On the last day he cornered me in the elevator and offered me $100/hr to do his work for him under the table so that he could claim it was his. That's $200k a year. I find it pretty hard to believe that he was serious.

shaftway 6y ago
> So you had one bad experience with one person who didn't do a whiteboard? It was a bad experience with someone who utterly failed a whiteboard. > How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've lost count. > I don't think a leet code question would necessarily have screened stuff like that out at all. I'm sure I have too, but I never advocated for only whiteboard interviewing. There should be a spread covering all sorts of aspects of their abilities. > Did you actually talk with these references about what it was like to work with him? Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet. > That's $200k a year. I find it pretty hard to believe that he was serious. I was another senior engineer on the project, so I definitely could have covered the work. I had deeper experience, and given his quality I could have churned things out more quickly. I suspect he wasn't offering me $100 / hour at 40 hours per week. The job had a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy involved. I suspect if I was just doing the coding parts I could have covered it at about 10 hours per week, which is a lot more feasible. Obviously I turned this down for ethical reasons.
- learc83 6y ago
  >Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Could it be that you have people who will give you good references because you're a good developer? >Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. So if I pull those friends up on linked in, they're developers too, and you'll have some plausible overlapping work history? > I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet. It's not a magic bullet. But faking 10 years of development work history and multiple decent quality references is a fairly high bar. It's not going to catch everyone but neither is whiteboarding. The goal shouldn't be to catch everyone. Sometimes you make a bad hire. Despite every test you put someone through, you'll get false positives. The problem is that if you ratchet your test up to far to avoid false positives, you end up turning off good engineers, or failing good engineers. I think the problem is that the company wasn't willing to just admit they made a mistake and fire the guy, not that he was hired in the first place. America (assuming you're in the US) has nearly unrestricted at will employment. Why are you so afraid of hiring one bad employee? If you can't identify bad employees after a few weeks of working with, you have zero chance identifying them before you hire them. Maybe instead of spending months trying to find the perfect candidate, just do what literally every other industry does and hire experienced candidates based on reputation, resume, talking to them about the job and past projects, and fire them if it turns out they were completely lying to you.

shaftway 6y ago

> So you had one bad experience with one person who didn't do a whiteboard? It was a bad experience with someone who utterly failed a whiteboard. > How many bad experiences have you had with someone who did? I've had enough that I've lost count. > I don't think a leet code question would necessarily have screened stuff like that out at all. I'm sure I have too, but I never advocated for only whiteboard interviewing. There should be a spread covering all sorts of aspects of their abilities. > Did you actually talk with these references about what it was like to work with him? Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet. > That's $200k a year. I find it pretty hard to believe that he was serious. I was another senior engineer on the project, so I definitely could have covered the work. I had deeper experience, and given his quality I could have churned things out more quickly. I suspect he wasn't offering me $100 / hour at 40 hours per week. The job had a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy involved. I suspect if I was just doing the coding parts I could have covered it at about 10 hours per week, which is a lot more feasible. Obviously I turned this down for ethical reasons.

learc83 6y ago
>Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Could it be that you have people who will give you good references because you're a good developer? >Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. So if I pull those friends up on linked in, they're developers too, and you'll have some plausible overlapping work history? > I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet. It's not a magic bullet. But faking 10 years of development work history and multiple decent quality references is a fairly high bar. It's not going to catch everyone but neither is whiteboarding. The goal shouldn't be to catch everyone. Sometimes you make a bad hire. Despite every test you put someone through, you'll get false positives. The problem is that if you ratchet your test up to far to avoid false positives, you end up turning off good engineers, or failing good engineers. I think the problem is that the company wasn't willing to just admit they made a mistake and fire the guy, not that he was hired in the first place. America (assuming you're in the US) has nearly unrestricted at will employment. Why are you so afraid of hiring one bad employee? If you can't identify bad employees after a few weeks of working with, you have zero chance identifying them before you hire them. Maybe instead of spending months trying to find the perfect candidate, just do what literally every other industry does and hire experienced candidates based on reputation, resume, talking to them about the job and past projects, and fire them if it turns out they were completely lying to you.