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This blog post is selling an agenda (as is what i'm about to say :) ), and that agenda is that you should pay Interviewing.io to help you get through interviews

This blog post is selling an agenda (as is what i'm about to say :) ), and that agenda is that you should pay Interviewing.io to help you get through interviews. I think the bigger problem is that technical interviews are broken. I ask everyone to bring their own project to work on, since I hate the traditional tech interview process so much. And it goes incredibly well. It could be adding a feature to a side project, starting something new, or contributing to open source. (Or, we have some stock ideas if people need inspiration.) Rather than asking them to solve a problem they had never heard of before or use a codebase they're not familiar with, I get so much more out of watching them work in their own environment. I can ask them questions about why they're doing something, and they tend to have much more detailed answers because they've been thinking about it for weeks. They're solving a problem they care about in a codebase they know, which mimics how working with them will be a few months in. We could all just buy into this notion that tech interviews suck but we have to deal with them. And then, like SAT Prep classes, there's a whole industry around how to pass them. Or, we can spend more time talking about how there's definitely a better way.

josephg 6y ago
I know this is controversial around here, but I think technical interviews are a fine tool when done well. I interviewed for triplebyte for a year (interviewing about 400 candidates). The triplebyte interview has a series of different parts assessing different skills (live coding, knowledge, debugging, etc). There’s plenty of room for candidates to be weak in some sections of the test but still pass with flying colours. We had a hypothesis internally that some parts of the interview were redundant. The interview was certainly tweaked over time, but the data science team found otherwise. All scores are positively correlated. And removing any major part of our interview would have made the interview worse. Given all my experience with it, I believe the triplebyte interview to be a fair assessment of candidates, and respectful to everyone involved. (Though I’d be very interested to know how much 5+ practice interviews would move the needle on scores, as this article claims.) The hardest part of my job was nervous candidates. Stress is designed to help us survive running away from a lion. When we get stressed, we shut down our ability for creative thought and our memory gets weaker - which is literally the opposite of what you want in a job interview. Most of my energy as an interviewer went into helping candidates stay calm throughout the process, and I wasn’t always successful. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with whiteboard interviews. You’re right - we could probably rearrange the professional world to avoid all stressful assessments but I tend to agree with this article. Just do a bunch of them and you’ll get used to them. Being interviewed is just talking for an hour or two with someone smart about something you care about. Usually you get to talk to someone you would have no access to in your daily life. If you can get past your terror of being judged, they can be a lot of fun.
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Well, it's easier to say when you're doing the one interviewing, right? I think you'd have a different opinion if you were on the other side of the table for those 400 interviews.
  - josephg 6y ago
    After 400 interviews? I highly doubt it. The discomfort you feel in an interview isn’t part of the interview. It’s something you’re generating and bringing into the room with you. Anxiety before a job interview (or exam) is your body believing that if you do badly, you might die. It doesn’t take 400 job interviews to notice you don’t actually die. The article suggests it takes about 5 practices. I also liked what they said about the collage experience. Seeing a lot of my fellow students succeed and fail job interviews seemingly randomly probably helped more than I think. It made failing an interview feel like just a normal uncomfortable thing.
    - gkoberger 6y ago
      Sure, at 400 interviews, you'd get decent. But that's my point! Do you want to hire people who are good at the job, or do you want people who are good at interviewing?
      - josephg 6y ago
        Sure, I want to hire people who are good. But honestly a well designed interview is a pretty good way to find them. You get some false negatives (people who are good, but interviewed poorly because of stress). But I suspect most people I passed on (90%+) were true negatives - they didn’t pass the interview simply because their programming skills aren’t as strong as I’d like to see. And (I hope) most people who struggle with interviews can figure that out with a bit of practice. If it takes you 5 bad interviews before you do a good one (and land the 6th job you apply for), that’s great. Nothing is harmed in the process but your ego, and a bit of time. Every time there’s an article like this on HN there’s people whinging about the interview process. But for most developers, interviews work fine. I stand by my claim that a well designed interview with a balance of content (see my other comments in this thread) is a fair and accurate way to assess a candidate’s programming skills.

josephg 6y ago

I know this is controversial around here, but I think technical interviews are a fine tool when done well. I interviewed for triplebyte for a year (interviewing about 400 candidates). The triplebyte interview has a series of different parts assessing different skills (live coding, knowledge, debugging, etc). There’s plenty of room for candidates to be weak in some sections of the test but still pass with flying colours. We had a hypothesis internally that some parts of the interview were redundant. The interview was certainly tweaked over time, but the data science team found otherwise. All scores are positively correlated. And removing any major part of our interview would have made the interview worse. Given all my experience with it, I believe the triplebyte interview to be a fair assessment of candidates, and respectful to everyone involved. (Though I’d be very interested to know how much 5+ practice interviews would move the needle on scores, as this article claims.) The hardest part of my job was nervous candidates. Stress is designed to help us survive running away from a lion. When we get stressed, we shut down our ability for creative thought and our memory gets weaker - which is literally the opposite of what you want in a job interview. Most of my energy as an interviewer went into helping candidates stay calm throughout the process, and I wasn’t always successful. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with whiteboard interviews. You’re right - we could probably rearrange the professional world to avoid all stressful assessments but I tend to agree with this article. Just do a bunch of them and you’ll get used to them. Being interviewed is just talking for an hour or two with someone smart about something you care about. Usually you get to talk to someone you would have no access to in your daily life. If you can get past your terror of being judged, they can be a lot of fun.

gkoberger 6y ago
Well, it's easier to say when you're doing the one interviewing, right? I think you'd have a different opinion if you were on the other side of the table for those 400 interviews.
- josephg 6y ago
  After 400 interviews? I highly doubt it. The discomfort you feel in an interview isn’t part of the interview. It’s something you’re generating and bringing into the room with you. Anxiety before a job interview (or exam) is your body believing that if you do badly, you might die. It doesn’t take 400 job interviews to notice you don’t actually die. The article suggests it takes about 5 practices. I also liked what they said about the collage experience. Seeing a lot of my fellow students succeed and fail job interviews seemingly randomly probably helped more than I think. It made failing an interview feel like just a normal uncomfortable thing.
  - gkoberger 6y ago
    Sure, at 400 interviews, you'd get decent. But that's my point! Do you want to hire people who are good at the job, or do you want people who are good at interviewing?
    - josephg 6y ago
      Sure, I want to hire people who are good. But honestly a well designed interview is a pretty good way to find them. You get some false negatives (people who are good, but interviewed poorly because of stress). But I suspect most people I passed on (90%+) were true negatives - they didn’t pass the interview simply because their programming skills aren’t as strong as I’d like to see. And (I hope) most people who struggle with interviews can figure that out with a bit of practice. If it takes you 5 bad interviews before you do a good one (and land the 6th job you apply for), that’s great. Nothing is harmed in the process but your ego, and a bit of time. Every time there’s an article like this on HN there’s people whinging about the interview process. But for most developers, interviews work fine. I stand by my claim that a well designed interview with a balance of content (see my other comments in this thread) is a fair and accurate way to assess a candidate’s programming skills.