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There's an old saying: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." The phrase "hiring is broken" comes up dozens of times in HN sea

There's an old saying: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." The phrase "hiring is broken" comes up dozens of times in HN searches. If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.

smithmayowa 6y ago
If everyone had this mindset, we will still be in the Stone Age, things can and should always be made better. Minute progressive changes to systems that already supposedly work end up bringing about systems that work better.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  You're adding a value judgment to the comment you're replying to that wasn't there. > serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. Does not mean "good, but you're too stupid to see it." edit: after one figures out why something is a certain way one could come to the conclusion that it must be changed immediately, and the reason it was that way was more destructive than one could have imagined.
- gagege 6y ago
  It's implied that if the reason is not a good one you should take down the fence.
stmw 6y ago
I think that's what this blog does, no?
Afton 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
admax88q 6y ago
On the other hand, hiring gets discussed endlessly on HN and there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason presented for the status quo. At some point you have to accept that the fence maybe doesn't serve a purpose, or its purpose may be forgotten and not applicable, and its worth the risk to take it down and see what happens.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Just remember that taking down the fence is easy but not enough. You also need to find something else to do the job. Which often turns out to be very hard. There is a long history of dysfunctional processes being replaced with other processes that often turn out to be as dysfunctional as the previous one. Just in a different way. See Scrum and Agile as examples.
- carabiner 6y ago
  The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? How is FAANG on a resume such a strong signal if it just means they got through a broken system? Aline has said some good stuff but she loses me at: "There’s no substitute for chemistry, in dating or in hiring." Hiring is not fucking dating. You are not having sex with your coworkers, you are not discriminating on gender, race, body type as everyone regularly does in dating. Dating is not a healthy system that you should aspire to in employment. It's very much broken in comparison with swipe apps and the like, just broken in different ways.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? Two possible expanations: - What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies. - Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.
  - logicslave 6y ago
neilk 6y ago
Read the article, she discusses that. > Although these approaches are rational under existing constraints, they’re neither particularly efficient nor particularly fair to the individuals subject to them. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve the system … But before we talk about what we have the power to change, let’s dive a bit deeper into the constraints we face today.
- blacksqr 6y ago
  I did read the article. The fact that someone reasons ones way to a dubious conclusion doesn't make the conclusion less dubious. All premature fence-pullers think they have rational reasons for pulling the fence down. They're the ones the quote is meant for.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
“it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.” That sounds a little like conspiracy theory. My theory is that hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale. I know people who are really good at interviewing. I think I myself can interview reasonably for people who have to work with me. But that takes a lot of time and energy. So “specialists” from HR take over. But they don’t understand the real requirements for the job so they have to come up with a lot standardized indirect measures which don’t work well.
- blacksqr 6y ago
  > My theory is that hiring is just really hard Not that hard. Talk to people like human beings and examine their previous work and employment history.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    You conveniently cut off the important part: > hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale Yes, talking to people about their previous work and employment history is a good way to judge their fit for a position. It also takes about half a working day of 2-3 people each time to do it properly.
    - blacksqr 6y ago
      Like Soylent Green, a software company is people. If you have hiring authority and you don't think it's worth your time to spend half a day a couple of times a week to get the right people into your organization, you have the wrong job.
      - MauranKilom 6y ago
        I can confirm that putting in this time is imperative to getting the right people hired. But if you require that any engineer involved should spend a quarter to half of their week on hiring, and that you yourself consider anyone with less commitment unsuitable, don't you agree that scalability becomes a problem? How many half-recruiters, half-engineers do you think are available, compared to the overall need for engineers with hiring authority? I don't have data on the former, but it's apparent to me that, if you hire people to do this full-time instead, you're hiring a recruiter. That's what gets you exactly the system everybody seems to complain about.
tartoran 6y ago
> If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. What does this even imply? That someone benefits from this broken system? The recruiting firms? It is indeed broken as engineers are not happy with going through the middleman gauntlet, companies are short on developers and would ideally want to hire asap. The only problem I see for companies here is find the right candidates (filter the bad candidates) but all these obstacles don't seem to be doing that at all. So back to the drawing board...
- itsdrewmiller 6y ago
  It implies that the things that people complain about in interviews may serve a non-obvious purpose. For example, giving hard algorithm problems may not be to test whether you are a good programmer, but to test whether you are invested enough in landing the job to study for the interview.
  - coralreef 6y ago
    This kind of logic can be used to rationalize anything and does not satisfy first principles thinking. Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes, otherwise there is no metric for measuring their effectiveness. An example of this is coming up with "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" riddles, in the vain attempt at "seeing how the person thinks"/"problem solving"/"creativity".
    - itsdrewmiller 6y ago
      I'm not trying to defend it (and as a hiring manager I don't do it) - I'm just explaining the implication of Chesterton's Fence as applied to interviews. "Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes" seems very wrong to me, though - they should certainly serve useful purposes, and those purposes should be documented, but there is no real reason they need to be obvious to a layperson. Google specifically dropped those riddles because they did not find them effective, which means they have some metric for testing efficacy. They have not dropped algorithmic challenges, though. I wonder why?
Nursie 6y ago
Or alternatively it's a hard problem, in a domain where nailing down a good solution may be non-obvious, or perhaps even really defining the problem domain is not yet done.
- nullsense 6y ago
  The hard problem being you have incredibly limited bandwidth to gather data on a candidate.
- lkbm 6y ago
  I think this is a big part of it. When I think about how I'd like my work to have a big, positive impact on the world, one of the first things that comes to mind is fixing hiring/job hunting. I'm moderately intelligent and have felt this way for a couple decades, and I still haven't done anything about it because I still don't know how to make it not suck, and I've yet to see anyone else working on a good solution either. I've seen a lot of very smart, capable, and talented people have trouble finding a decent job, and eventually settle for underemployment for a good while. A system that could properly utilize their productivity would be vastly superior to our current system. There's a lot of money on the table for anyone who implements that system. I don't know what that system looks like. I just know with certainty that there's a massive amount of wasted productivity under our current system. What I can tell you is that when I graduated college, the way you found a job was to use Monster.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in a tedious process, and interview. Today, you use Indeed.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in approximately the same tedious process, and then interview in approximately the same way. There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. (The fact that I don't know how to improve it a bonus.)
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. In other comments on this article, I wrote my arguments why I don't believe that detecting good candidates is hard (I wrote suggestions there). I believe the hard problem is rather that most companies/recruiters don't actually know (or won't say) what skills they are really looking for, so they use dubious processes to rationalize why they chose a specific candidate.
pydry 6y ago
What if the answer is a combination of laziness, fashion, elitism and a desire to haze?
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
That cuts both ways. There's an old saying, a special case of the one you've cited: "If everyone says X, consistently and over an extended period of time, it could be mass delusion, but I wouldn't bet that way." (Hiring is broken, btw. Largely because engineers too often combine intellectual narrowness with intellectual overconfidence and poor interpersonal skills in a way that makes them think they're competent psyshometricians without even realizing they're attempting to do psychometrics at all, let alone incompetent at it.)
ebiester 6y ago
The fence is there because the risk of doing something new is hard, especially because testing hypotheses in hiring is expensive. I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. However, it comes down to this: I only get 2-3 hires a quarter. Trying to get a meaningful result on changes I make is difficult. If one doesn't work out, did it not work out in a way that my original process would fix? And so, we get conservative because even though it rejects a lot of qualified candidates, it also gets good candidates.
- x0x0 6y ago
  Also a hiring manager. If you conceptualize a hire as "this decision costs me $100k to $200k, and six months", you'll understand why folks are conservative. That's my finger in the wind cost of a bad hire, in terms of their salary, the salary and opportunity cost of their first two weeks buddy, plus all the other related efforts to onboard and train. Plus, again, if it's a bad hire, by the time we spend 2 months getting to the termination, and a 2 month search, and a 2 month onboarding, I wait 1/2 a year before I get the employee I need.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. Simple solution: Be very clear what kind of candidate the company actually needs, e.g. do you need - a genius in algorithm design - a person who knows the subtle details of a specific language/platform/standard X - a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) - how important is it really that the person is also nice to hang up after work - an allrounder vs an expert for X, Y - a person who creates solid code that will be good to maintain vs. a person that "simply get things done" - a person who is is already good at X vs a person who has a high potential to become good at X
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    > a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) Maybe it's just a matter of wording, but the implication that people who will go to bat for an important choice can't also be "nice" strikes me as strange and contradicts my experience. Good comment otherwise though.
user5994461 6y ago
Hiring is not broken, there's simply wayyyyy too many candidates for any opened position, so companies get to be extremely picky and reject 100 people to fill one position. And to be clear I'm not talking about having too many unqualified candidates who can't do a hello world (there's some but don't pass a screening test), I am talking about an oversupply of candidates of all levels who are able to pass the marathon of interview questions and exercises.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  That might be true in some areas but... in almost every company I've been, it's been ridiculously hard to find enough qualified applicants for a given role. There wouldn't even have been 100 people to reject. I think programming is still mostly an employee's market.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    The 100 applicants are down to 10 people for an onsite, 2 or 3 get an offer, 1 is accepting it. Sometimes when I look back at the last few people I interviewed onsite, I'm pretty sure they could all have done the job just fine. It's crazy that they're all getting rejected, there is nothing wrong with them, the company is overly picky for no reason. Digging down there's probably 1 who got an offer and rejected it. Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      > Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that. Easier for that company, but harder for the companies they beat out.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      Same. Pretty much every candidate we interview is more than capable of doing the job technically. Overwhelmingly, why my team picks one person for the job and reject the others is for non-technical/behavioral reasons. Then again my company is a boring investment bank, not a hot tech company. Top quality candidates are not in a rush to trample each other to join us. 90% of the candidates we get would not be able to brute force naively solve an leetcode medium or even a harder leetcode easy, let alone come up with an optimal solution. We would never be able to hire anyone if we rejected everyone that wasn't able to code an optimal solution in 40 minutes. Yet if hired, I have no doubt nearly all of them would be able to do the actual job more than well enough - and that has been the case with everyone that I've interviewed and gave the thumbs up to.
jorblumesea 6y ago
Correct, the algo style interview is mostly a test of work ethic and time spent, not one simple of technical skill.
tdeck 6y ago
I think that phrase is a thought terminating cliche. How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary?
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary? He doesn't claim that it has a valuable hidden purpose, he claims that it had (when it was constructed). :-)
- triceratops 6y ago
  I don't think the claim is "every construct has a valuable hidden purpose". It's "if you can't explain all the important purposes of a construct, you aren't ready to take it down." I remind myself of Chesterton's Fence every time I encounter some WTF code.
jaclaz 6y ago
Only for the record, that is Chesterton's fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

smithmayowa 6y ago

If everyone had this mindset, we will still be in the Stone Age, things can and should always be made better. Minute progressive changes to systems that already supposedly work end up bringing about systems that work better.

pessimizer 6y ago
You're adding a value judgment to the comment you're replying to that wasn't there. > serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. Does not mean "good, but you're too stupid to see it." edit: after one figures out why something is a certain way one could come to the conclusion that it must be changed immediately, and the reason it was that way was more destructive than one could have imagined.
gagege 6y ago
It's implied that if the reason is not a good one you should take down the fence.

stmw 6y ago

I think that's what this blog does, no?

Afton 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

admax88q 6y ago

On the other hand, hiring gets discussed endlessly on HN and there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason presented for the status quo. At some point you have to accept that the fence maybe doesn't serve a purpose, or its purpose may be forgotten and not applicable, and its worth the risk to take it down and see what happens.

spaetzleesser 6y ago
Just remember that taking down the fence is easy but not enough. You also need to find something else to do the job. Which often turns out to be very hard. There is a long history of dysfunctional processes being replaced with other processes that often turn out to be as dysfunctional as the previous one. Just in a different way. See Scrum and Agile as examples.
carabiner 6y ago
The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? How is FAANG on a resume such a strong signal if it just means they got through a broken system? Aline has said some good stuff but she loses me at: "There’s no substitute for chemistry, in dating or in hiring." Hiring is not fucking dating. You are not having sex with your coworkers, you are not discriminating on gender, race, body type as everyone regularly does in dating. Dating is not a healthy system that you should aspire to in employment. It's very much broken in comparison with swipe apps and the like, just broken in different ways.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? Two possible expanations: - What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies. - Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.
- logicslave 6y ago

neilk 6y ago

Read the article, she discusses that. > Although these approaches are rational under existing constraints, they’re neither particularly efficient nor particularly fair to the individuals subject to them. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve the system … But before we talk about what we have the power to change, let’s dive a bit deeper into the constraints we face today.

blacksqr 6y ago
I did read the article. The fact that someone reasons ones way to a dubious conclusion doesn't make the conclusion less dubious. All premature fence-pullers think they have rational reasons for pulling the fence down. They're the ones the quote is meant for.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

“it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.” That sounds a little like conspiracy theory. My theory is that hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale. I know people who are really good at interviewing. I think I myself can interview reasonably for people who have to work with me. But that takes a lot of time and energy. So “specialists” from HR take over. But they don’t understand the real requirements for the job so they have to come up with a lot standardized indirect measures which don’t work well.

blacksqr 6y ago
> My theory is that hiring is just really hard Not that hard. Talk to people like human beings and examine their previous work and employment history.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  You conveniently cut off the important part: > hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale Yes, talking to people about their previous work and employment history is a good way to judge their fit for a position. It also takes about half a working day of 2-3 people each time to do it properly.
  - blacksqr 6y ago
    Like Soylent Green, a software company is people. If you have hiring authority and you don't think it's worth your time to spend half a day a couple of times a week to get the right people into your organization, you have the wrong job.
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
      I can confirm that putting in this time is imperative to getting the right people hired. But if you require that any engineer involved should spend a quarter to half of their week on hiring, and that you yourself consider anyone with less commitment unsuitable, don't you agree that scalability becomes a problem? How many half-recruiters, half-engineers do you think are available, compared to the overall need for engineers with hiring authority? I don't have data on the former, but it's apparent to me that, if you hire people to do this full-time instead, you're hiring a recruiter. That's what gets you exactly the system everybody seems to complain about.

tartoran 6y ago

> If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. What does this even imply? That someone benefits from this broken system? The recruiting firms? It is indeed broken as engineers are not happy with going through the middleman gauntlet, companies are short on developers and would ideally want to hire asap. The only problem I see for companies here is find the right candidates (filter the bad candidates) but all these obstacles don't seem to be doing that at all. So back to the drawing board...

itsdrewmiller 6y ago
It implies that the things that people complain about in interviews may serve a non-obvious purpose. For example, giving hard algorithm problems may not be to test whether you are a good programmer, but to test whether you are invested enough in landing the job to study for the interview.
- coralreef 6y ago
  This kind of logic can be used to rationalize anything and does not satisfy first principles thinking. Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes, otherwise there is no metric for measuring their effectiveness. An example of this is coming up with "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" riddles, in the vain attempt at "seeing how the person thinks"/"problem solving"/"creativity".
  - itsdrewmiller 6y ago
    I'm not trying to defend it (and as a hiring manager I don't do it) - I'm just explaining the implication of Chesterton's Fence as applied to interviews. "Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes" seems very wrong to me, though - they should certainly serve useful purposes, and those purposes should be documented, but there is no real reason they need to be obvious to a layperson. Google specifically dropped those riddles because they did not find them effective, which means they have some metric for testing efficacy. They have not dropped algorithmic challenges, though. I wonder why?

Nursie 6y ago

Or alternatively it's a hard problem, in a domain where nailing down a good solution may be non-obvious, or perhaps even really defining the problem domain is not yet done.

nullsense 6y ago
The hard problem being you have incredibly limited bandwidth to gather data on a candidate.
lkbm 6y ago
I think this is a big part of it. When I think about how I'd like my work to have a big, positive impact on the world, one of the first things that comes to mind is fixing hiring/job hunting. I'm moderately intelligent and have felt this way for a couple decades, and I still haven't done anything about it because I still don't know how to make it not suck, and I've yet to see anyone else working on a good solution either. I've seen a lot of very smart, capable, and talented people have trouble finding a decent job, and eventually settle for underemployment for a good while. A system that could properly utilize their productivity would be vastly superior to our current system. There's a lot of money on the table for anyone who implements that system. I don't know what that system looks like. I just know with certainty that there's a massive amount of wasted productivity under our current system. What I can tell you is that when I graduated college, the way you found a job was to use Monster.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in a tedious process, and interview. Today, you use Indeed.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in approximately the same tedious process, and then interview in approximately the same way. There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. (The fact that I don't know how to improve it a bonus.)
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. In other comments on this article, I wrote my arguments why I don't believe that detecting good candidates is hard (I wrote suggestions there). I believe the hard problem is rather that most companies/recruiters don't actually know (or won't say) what skills they are really looking for, so they use dubious processes to rationalize why they chose a specific candidate.

pydry 6y ago

What if the answer is a combination of laziness, fashion, elitism and a desire to haze?

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

That cuts both ways. There's an old saying, a special case of the one you've cited: "If everyone says X, consistently and over an extended period of time, it could be mass delusion, but I wouldn't bet that way." (Hiring is broken, btw. Largely because engineers too often combine intellectual narrowness with intellectual overconfidence and poor interpersonal skills in a way that makes them think they're competent psyshometricians without even realizing they're attempting to do psychometrics at all, let alone incompetent at it.)

ebiester 6y ago

The fence is there because the risk of doing something new is hard, especially because testing hypotheses in hiring is expensive. I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. However, it comes down to this: I only get 2-3 hires a quarter. Trying to get a meaningful result on changes I make is difficult. If one doesn't work out, did it not work out in a way that my original process would fix? And so, we get conservative because even though it rejects a lot of qualified candidates, it also gets good candidates.

x0x0 6y ago
Also a hiring manager. If you conceptualize a hire as "this decision costs me $100k to $200k, and six months", you'll understand why folks are conservative. That's my finger in the wind cost of a bad hire, in terms of their salary, the salary and opportunity cost of their first two weeks buddy, plus all the other related efforts to onboard and train. Plus, again, if it's a bad hire, by the time we spend 2 months getting to the termination, and a 2 month search, and a 2 month onboarding, I wait 1/2 a year before I get the employee I need.
wolfgke 6y ago
> I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. Simple solution: Be very clear what kind of candidate the company actually needs, e.g. do you need - a genius in algorithm design - a person who knows the subtle details of a specific language/platform/standard X - a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) - how important is it really that the person is also nice to hang up after work - an allrounder vs an expert for X, Y - a person who creates solid code that will be good to maintain vs. a person that "simply get things done" - a person who is is already good at X vs a person who has a high potential to become good at X
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  > a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) Maybe it's just a matter of wording, but the implication that people who will go to bat for an important choice can't also be "nice" strikes me as strange and contradicts my experience. Good comment otherwise though.

user5994461 6y ago

Hiring is not broken, there's simply wayyyyy too many candidates for any opened position, so companies get to be extremely picky and reject 100 people to fill one position. And to be clear I'm not talking about having too many unqualified candidates who can't do a hello world (there's some but don't pass a screening test), I am talking about an oversupply of candidates of all levels who are able to pass the marathon of interview questions and exercises.

Tainnor 6y ago
That might be true in some areas but... in almost every company I've been, it's been ridiculously hard to find enough qualified applicants for a given role. There wouldn't even have been 100 people to reject. I think programming is still mostly an employee's market.
- user5994461 6y ago
  The 100 applicants are down to 10 people for an onsite, 2 or 3 get an offer, 1 is accepting it. Sometimes when I look back at the last few people I interviewed onsite, I'm pretty sure they could all have done the job just fine. It's crazy that they're all getting rejected, there is nothing wrong with them, the company is overly picky for no reason. Digging down there's probably 1 who got an offer and rejected it. Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that.
  - triceratops 6y ago
    > Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that. Easier for that company, but harder for the companies they beat out.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    Same. Pretty much every candidate we interview is more than capable of doing the job technically. Overwhelmingly, why my team picks one person for the job and reject the others is for non-technical/behavioral reasons. Then again my company is a boring investment bank, not a hot tech company. Top quality candidates are not in a rush to trample each other to join us. 90% of the candidates we get would not be able to brute force naively solve an leetcode medium or even a harder leetcode easy, let alone come up with an optimal solution. We would never be able to hire anyone if we rejected everyone that wasn't able to code an optimal solution in 40 minutes. Yet if hired, I have no doubt nearly all of them would be able to do the actual job more than well enough - and that has been the case with everyone that I've interviewed and gave the thumbs up to.

jorblumesea 6y ago

Correct, the algo style interview is mostly a test of work ethic and time spent, not one simple of technical skill.

tdeck 6y ago

I think that phrase is a thought terminating cliche. How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary?

wolfgke 6y ago
> How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary? He doesn't claim that it has a valuable hidden purpose, he claims that it had (when it was constructed). :-)
triceratops 6y ago
I don't think the claim is "every construct has a valuable hidden purpose". It's "if you can't explain all the important purposes of a construct, you aren't ready to take it down." I remind myself of Chesterton's Fence every time I encounter some WTF code.

jaclaz 6y ago

Only for the record, that is Chesterton's fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence