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> We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I
by ingvul 6y ago
> We have a really high bar for hiring at Repl.it, Dalia and the other youngsters from Palestine performed better than at least half the experienced engineers I've interviewed in the past.
I really don't want to sound negative, but I find this difficult to believe. Sorry if I sound too harsh, but experienced engineers who don't perform better than recent graduates sure it's a thing, but 50% of the ones you have interviewed don't perform better than a recent graduate? Perhaps you were exaggerating? Or perhaps your interview process is really focused on what recent graduates know best (popular algorithms) and not in what experienced engineers know best (how to deal with real world codebases). Again, I don't mean to sound harsh, I think perhaps that "...at least half..." was just a way of saying "Dalia was really good" (which sounds more credible).
- bostonsre 6y agoThey didn't say all recent graduates performed better than 50%, just the ones that they interviewed from Palestine. It sounds plausible that they only interviewed a handful and they were better than that 50%.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Graffur 6y agoThen the numbers are too low to draw conclusions.
- bostonsre 6y agoYea, the numbers would be if that was the case. I don't think the person that said that statistic was saying it like it passed the 5 sigma mark. It was given as an offhand anecdote and I didn't see a reason for the overly negative post that I responded to originally.
- abdulmuhaimin 6y agowhere did he draw any conclusion?? It seem like you're the one who jump to conclusion here. It was just merely stating a fact that Dalia and her acquaintance perform better in the hiring process than at least half the experienced engineers he has ever interview. If anyone is jumping to conclusion its you guys
- Graffur 6y ago"It seem" you're the one jumping for a fight. My comment still stands regardless of anyone coming to any conclusion. I don't know who "you guys" is.
- abdulmuhaimin 6y agotake it as whatever it is you want.
- nostrademons 6y agoExperienced engineers who perform better than a recent graduate are usually not interviewing. They have jobs that pay them extremely well. There's an adverse selection problem with interviewing, in that people who are good tend to disappear from the labor market and when they do appear on the labor market they get snapped up quickly. New grads don't have this adverse selection effect: there is a very good reason why they don't already have a job. This is why companies invest so much in internships: this will often be the only time to snap up a promising young developer before they start building a career at your competitor. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
- jmchuster 6y agoExactly. People who are good are always going to be referrals, once they've worked at a few places, their networks are just not going to let them get away. The only times I've found where you are interviewing someone experienced who turns out good is 1) someone coming from a big corporate job where they were undervalued/underutilized 2) someone coming from a different region, different country, where they have no local network
- protomyth 6y agoExactly. People who are good are always going to be referrals Only inside a community, not coming from outside.
- ryandrake 6y agoAlso, referrals still have to go through interviews, so it's not really unusual to interview someone who is senior and skilled.
- jmchuster 6y agoRight, and that's why we still source and recruit, to pull in people from outside of our community. It just has a much lower hit rate.
- 6y ago
- amasad 6y agoOur interview has almost zero traditional algorithms. And no, he’s not exaggerating. I’ve been interviewing people for a decade now and neither experience or pedigree is a good predictor of success. Read the post if you haven’t because it touched on our process. And watch this video to learn more: https://youtu.be/kABh44IVWMo https://youtu.be/kABh44IVWMo
- cheeze 6y agoCollege kids often just took an algorithms course. Experienced devs have to brush up on this stuff to jump through the hoops while also managing their day job and any other commitments. I do a lot of hiring at a "big n" company and I'd agree with this
- masfrost 6y agoWe don't really do an "Algorithms and Data structures" interview, our interview questions are modeled after real world problems we face(d).
- lawn 6y agoI'll wager doing well in interviews isn't a good predicator of success either.
- amasad 6y agoIn our interview it is because it’s modeled after the real world as opposed to LARPing computer science.
- excalibur 6y agoNot sure who owns pedantic.com or why it doesn't redirect to HN. It certainly should.
- zukhan 6y agoI believe all of the Palestinians Repl.it has interviewed have come from Manara. Manara has a pretty strong vetting system and in order for applicants to be accepted into the cohorts, they have to pass a coding assessment, video interviews, etc. Manara takes strong Palestinian talent and tries to make them exceptional. This is the reason why they might be performing better than more experienced engineers.
- ball_of_lint 6y agohttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve... Interview processes are significantly biased towards seeing large numbers of non-hire-able people over hire-able people. It's not surprising that someone with few connections and just starting their career could perform well against the biased view of an unfiltered interview pipeline. oh, nostrademons beat me to the punch.
- remote_phone 6y agoThat’s because the interview is basically memorizing algorithms. A real on-site interview should be: 1) give vague instructions on a fixing/modifying a moderately complex piece of software 2) have them ask good questions until they get to the heart of what they are supposed to do. 3) work with someone to accomplish this task. Use google or whatever else you need to finish it. This interview should be 5 hours long including lunch. This is your best indicator of success.
- wyclif 6y agoWhen did 5 hour interviews become the new normal? That seems sadistic to me.
- remote_phone 6y agoMicrosoft had all day interviews back in the 90s. It’s more efficient for both parties and has been for decades.
- unishark 6y agoWell in academia, and generally in research, interviews are about 1.5 days of solid interviews, plus an hour presentation. In normal times, add a good dose of jetlag. I once interviewed at a place that was almost two solid days of 30 minute interviews, one after another. By the end of the second day I completely didn't care about anything they wanted to ask about or what they thought about my responses. I think this stamina crushing test was actually part of the evaluation. Not kidding about that.
- thewarrior 6y agoYou’re simply taking away from an incredible achievement here. She cleared interviews at both Repl.it and Google. She implemented an assignment based on operational transformations and having studied this myself it’s far from trivial. If you folks ever retire this question Id love to have a crack at it. She also cleared the Google interview which goes deep into algorithmic aspects and system design. Which means that she’s brilliant at both abstract design and execution. To be able to do both while graduating does place someone in the upper brackets of engineering skill. Some don’t fulfill it because of other reasons but that’s another matter. It’s not like the bar is being lowered. They’re held to the same bar as Stanford and MIT grads who apply and they come from a third world country with only a bit of remedial coaching. It’s what top school grads already know from their campus coaching and tips from their seniors. People who say this is akin to gaming the process you too can easily get the same by dropping a trivial amount of money on CTCI, EPI and Pramp for mock interviews. I wrote this a little bit too much in frustration but I’m tired of these assumptions that people from the third world cannot show incredible potential sometimes exceeding their first world peers and are only held back by bad systems and politics. There are untold depths of genius all over the planet. We haven’t even come CLOSE to most people on earth realizing even a fraction of their potential. “ I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould
- blub 6y agoBut this is what people are objecting to, isn't it? That anyone reasonably clever which spends months studying CTCI, EPI and Pramp and whatever else and doing mock interviews will pass the interview, while an experienced programmer will not just by virtue of their skills and knowledge.
- thewarrior 6y agoBut OP also passed a different kind of interview so it’s a moot point in this case.
- throwaway1212dd 6y ago
- babesh 6y agoThe interview process is being gamed. Just read the article. I am not trying to single out her. It is an industry wide practice. You mostly get people who are good at passing the interview versus who know how to program. But that is ok, because the promotion process is being gamed too. You have people who know how to get promoted vs who know how to provide value. Don’t worry, our educational system is being gamed as well.
- Graffur 6y agoI agree with this. Here's some truths: * Experienced engineers will perform better than graduates in general * The distribution of experienced engineers who are poor performers won't over represent application to one particular company unless they are an outlier (Repl.it is not Google) This makes me wonder what Repl.it's hiring process is and why it is not doing well at attracting good people.
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- robocat 6y ago> Experienced engineers will perform better than graduates in general In my experience there are a lot of experienced engineers that are very low quality, and it isn’t uncommon to have experienced engineers that have negative productivity (working with them costs more than they produce). See https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/ . Starting with recent grads (filtered for potential) can easily be more productive over time, because you can teach them good habits. > The distribution of experienced engineers who are poor performers won't over represent application Hiring being inundated with poor quality candidates is a common problem due to adverse selection: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26254114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26254114
- Graffur 6y agoThat Joel article is enlightening. Thanks.
- mbrameld 6y agoIt sounds like you simply don't have experience interviewing engineers, especially since you don't cite any such experience to back up your beliefs. I interviewed exactly 151 engineers over the last year for a mix of entry-level and senior roles, using the same format for all the interviews. The interview is a mix of scenario-based questions and actual coding. There is no discussion of data structures or algorithms, the coding exercise requires no special knowledge and can be done in any language, and there are no trick questions. If you can build useable software you can ace the interview. My experience lines up exactly with what the GP said. The overwhelming majority of experienced engineers that are interviewing simply can't write useable code. I understand it's hard to believe, but it is the reality whether you believe it or not.
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoCan you elaborate? I believe that a fair amount of people coming out of college cannot merge 2 sorted linked lists, they can't code even fizzbuzz. But for people that write code every day, I think all of them could do those things. PMs and managers who used to code 10 years ago (like me, ahem) should be able to do that but they might be rusty.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]