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I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old gu

by dvt 5y ago

I'm personally very excited to see this change by an industry leader! I think that there's a seismic shift waiting to happen w.r.t. engineer hiring. The "old guard" of hazing, quizzing, and gotcha-style interviews are slowly losing ground. The most friction when switching jobs is the interview process -- and the question is why? I've been writing code for a decade+ now, working on startups, for known tech companies, public open-source, and have written a freakin' book! But, oh, my bad, I couldn't figure out a solution to your optimization question. I forgot how to implement the zig operation in a splay tree. I might simply not function well under pressure. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Companies are missing out on literal geniuses by using outdated hiring practices. And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) They're huge and get X,XXX applicants daily. But why are small startups using the same hiring methodologies? It quite literally makes no sense. They're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm very passionate about this, and I'm working on a book on how to hire engineers. Maybe I'll actually finish it one of these days :)

cinquemb 5y ago
> And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) And yet they will still email you, year after year… as a dev that's worked in finance/academic research labs and for low funded/bootstraped startups all over the world for the past 10 years… I'll never get into these big companies because I simply try to find companies that need work done yesterday, see my experience (maybe reach out to past corps i've done work for), and give me an offer for at least a short term contract (and these big companies will never do this). The worst is when I've think I found an interesting company (that on more than one occasion, publicly likes to complain about not having enough devs… lol), start talking a bit and they send me a triplebyte link… maybe it will be different this time, but I doubt it because these behaviors are too ingrained in a lot of corporate processes (even if its mostly "big co does this, me small co must copy"-NPC type thinking)…
hellcow 5y ago
For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any language of their choosing. I've had people absolutely ace takehome exams, yet in person don't know how to write a function. False positives are also much more expensive than false negatives, so companies would rather accidentally weed out good candidates than risk hiring bad ones.
- rachofsunshine 5y ago
  To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!). That's maybe a little unfair (plenty of people who aren't engineers take our quiz out of curiosity), but the basic point here - that companies are frustrated because they keep getting fizzbuzz-incapable applicants - is more-or-less accurate. That has been (and continues to be) a big part of our offering on the other side of our platform: in the same way that we can provide data about company behavior to engineers, we can provide independent verification of an applicant's skills to companies.
- driverdan 5y ago
  > Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Wow, sounds like you either need to change your sourcing or improve your early screening. If that many poor candidates are making it to the interview stage something is wrong with the process.
  - hellcow 5y ago
    I should have clarified, the first interview is just a code screen. People submit resumes, and we test them with fizzbuzz. 90% of applicants are removed at this first filter.
    - andrewnicolalde 5y ago
      How many (if any) of that 90% are just non-replies?
      - hellcow 5y ago
        Probably 5%. It's extremely low. Most either don't show up on time or fail fizzbuzz.
- 5y ago
wittycardio 5y ago
You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?
- dvt 5y ago
  > You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ? (N.B. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but, yes, for example, I highly doubt Steve Jobs could.) The spirit of my point is that most smart people don't care about the kind of idiotic minutia typical hiring panels ask. They care about interesting/creative problems.
  - wittycardio 5y ago
    I mean Steve Jobs may not be a great software developer. I don't think companies are hiring for a Steve Jobs. You could be really good at other things and not be great at programming
    - headgasket 5y ago
      A SJ type is what TB would need to orient this pivot… to turn the problem around. Sourcing ideas on HN will only lead to “faster horses” suggestions. BTW did the TB interview after been lured by dark patterns on social media a while back when I was still using. Got the bloom filter from a hipster that was playing on his phone while I coded tictactoe in a langage I hadn’t used In years. Complete waste of time. Then they wanted to make profiles I hadn’t signed up for public, good thing they listened to the backlash. Just saying; it seems the management needs to use an hypothetical service like theirs but that works to find someone to help them on the angle for that pivot… a headhunter ?:-) Tongue in cheek, good luck on the pivot guys, it is a tough problem.
  - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
    I think maybe someone like Donald Knuth would have been a better example.
    - 5y ago
naimishviradia 5y ago
I agree, To me discovery process is broken. FANG sends email every year once you have already reached onsite. But I am trying to get into this tech companies new IPO's not FANG. I have applied to many good ones. I have Github repo. I have my own portfolio. I have wrote flutter app deployed to play store to demonstrate I can function individually and still can write production ready code. And All the above just on my own spare time. But every company I have applied told me my skill set doesn't aligned with them. I get response from them that there is no traction on my resume. While some friends get interview after interview and others don't. I am not saying that I am the best but we need different process where entry is given and now show me what you can do.
crazypython 5y ago
Triplebyte quizzes are a much more realistic representation of job skills than leetcode quizzes.
bit_logic 5y ago
Decades of poor technical interview practices started by a blog post (the one about fizzbuzz). It's amazing how a single blog post changed the entire industry by causing such fear about "false positives". Looking at that blog post now, it's obvious how it lacks real analysis of the situation: * The blog post complains that even experienced engineers they interviewed couldn't write some simple code on paper. Did anyone stop and think that maybe it's writing code on paper in an interview setting that's the problem? Stop and think about this. Imagine writing code like you usually do in a text editor. And then writing code with pen and paper. Backspace? Can't do that. Copy/paste some line to move code? Can't do that. Add some newlines? Can't do that. Run the code using the compiler? Can't do that. Of course most developers, even experienced ones, will do poorly under these conditions, this is not how code is normally written. On top of the already stressful situation of an interview, there's this suddenly completely foreign and limited way to write code. * Even the blog post only mentioned fizzbuzz as a quick, easy question to filter out zero coding ability. Another way to say this, it was meant to filter out coding skill <= 0. Not skill <= 50 or skill <= 90. Zero. After that, the interview was supposed to move on to things that actually matter for software engineering. The present day interview has strayed extremely far from this. These days, you get asked two leetcode questions during an interview and even if you perfectly answer the first one, if you don't get the second one then you're an automatic fail. That was certainly not the intent of the original fizzbuzz, since answering any leetcode clearly shows coding ability. And the interview never has a chance to move on to the part that actually discusses software engineering skills. Or even if it does and they do very well on those interviews, the failure of only getting 1/2 leetcode questions correct overrules everything else since they must avoid "false positives".
mpeg 5y ago
What I find particularly jarring about tech interviews is that they often don't adapt to the actual role you're interviewing for. I moved from engineering to management over 5 years ago now and still in interviews for positions like "head of" in 100+ people companies or other management roles in bigger companies I got asked the usual algorithm questions. I just have zero interest to prepare for these interviews, I don't have the time or the motivation, and I honestly just don't care about the answers. Most of my job, and my team's job, has nothing to do with them. The world might be different in FAANG, and admittedly I have not worked there (though I have worked for other top companies) – but most companies are not at that scale, and they should not use the same metrics, particularly for management roles.

by dvt 5y ago

cinquemb 5y ago

> And, I get it, Google doesn't care. Amazon doesn't care. (There's an argument that they should.) And yet they will still email you, year after year… as a dev that's worked in finance/academic research labs and for low funded/bootstraped startups all over the world for the past 10 years… I'll never get into these big companies because I simply try to find companies that need work done yesterday, see my experience (maybe reach out to past corps i've done work for), and give me an offer for at least a short term contract (and these big companies will never do this). The worst is when I've think I found an interesting company (that on more than one occasion, publicly likes to complain about not having enough devs… lol), start talking a bit and they send me a triplebyte link… maybe it will be different this time, but I doubt it because these behaviors are too ingrained in a lot of corporate processes (even if its mostly "big co does this, me small co must copy"-NPC type thinking)…

hellcow 5y ago

For what it's worth on the hiring side, applicants lie (or more charitably, wildly overestimate their own abilities) all the time. Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Past companies and open source contributions are not perfect indicators. I've seen people with stellar resumes fail to even know the syntax for an 'if' statement in any language of their choosing. I've had people absolutely ace takehome exams, yet in person don't know how to write a function. False positives are also much more expensive than false negatives, so companies would rather accidentally weed out good candidates than risk hiring bad ones.

rachofsunshine 5y ago
To put some hard numbers to this: further down this thread, there's a post about how "any engineer" could answer a question the poster thinks is too easy. I looked up the question in our back end and, in fact, barely a third of people who take our quiz get it right (the correct answer isn't even the most common one!). That's maybe a little unfair (plenty of people who aren't engineers take our quiz out of curiosity), but the basic point here - that companies are frustrated because they keep getting fizzbuzz-incapable applicants - is more-or-less accurate. That has been (and continues to be) a big part of our offering on the other side of our platform: in the same way that we can provide data about company behavior to engineers, we can provide independent verification of an applicant's skills to companies.
driverdan 5y ago
> Of resumes I see, 50% of them will not show up on time to their interview. Of the 50% that do, 80% cannot pass fizzbuzz. Wow, sounds like you either need to change your sourcing or improve your early screening. If that many poor candidates are making it to the interview stage something is wrong with the process.
- hellcow 5y ago
  I should have clarified, the first interview is just a code screen. People submit resumes, and we test them with fizzbuzz. 90% of applicants are removed at this first filter.
  - andrewnicolalde 5y ago
    How many (if any) of that 90% are just non-replies?
    - hellcow 5y ago
      Probably 5%. It's extremely low. Most either don't show up on time or fail fizzbuzz.
5y ago

wittycardio 5y ago

You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ?

dvt 5y ago
> You think literal geniuses can't solve sligtly challenging algorithm questions ? (N.B. I was being a bit hyperbolic, but, yes, for example, I highly doubt Steve Jobs could.) The spirit of my point is that most smart people don't care about the kind of idiotic minutia typical hiring panels ask. They care about interesting/creative problems.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  I mean Steve Jobs may not be a great software developer. I don't think companies are hiring for a Steve Jobs. You could be really good at other things and not be great at programming
  - headgasket 5y ago
    A SJ type is what TB would need to orient this pivot… to turn the problem around. Sourcing ideas on HN will only lead to “faster horses” suggestions. BTW did the TB interview after been lured by dark patterns on social media a while back when I was still using. Got the bloom filter from a hipster that was playing on his phone while I coded tictactoe in a langage I hadn’t used In years. Complete waste of time. Then they wanted to make profiles I hadn’t signed up for public, good thing they listened to the backlash. Just saying; it seems the management needs to use an hypothetical service like theirs but that works to find someone to help them on the angle for that pivot… a headhunter ?:-) Tongue in cheek, good luck on the pivot guys, it is a tough problem.
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  I think maybe someone like Donald Knuth would have been a better example.
  - 5y ago

naimishviradia 5y ago

I agree, To me discovery process is broken. FANG sends email every year once you have already reached onsite. But I am trying to get into this tech companies new IPO's not FANG. I have applied to many good ones. I have Github repo. I have my own portfolio. I have wrote flutter app deployed to play store to demonstrate I can function individually and still can write production ready code. And All the above just on my own spare time. But every company I have applied told me my skill set doesn't aligned with them. I get response from them that there is no traction on my resume. While some friends get interview after interview and others don't. I am not saying that I am the best but we need different process where entry is given and now show me what you can do.

crazypython 5y ago

Triplebyte quizzes are a much more realistic representation of job skills than leetcode quizzes.

bit_logic 5y ago

Decades of poor technical interview practices started by a blog post (the one about fizzbuzz). It's amazing how a single blog post changed the entire industry by causing such fear about "false positives". Looking at that blog post now, it's obvious how it lacks real analysis of the situation: * The blog post complains that even experienced engineers they interviewed couldn't write some simple code on paper. Did anyone stop and think that maybe it's writing code on paper in an interview setting that's the problem? Stop and think about this. Imagine writing code like you usually do in a text editor. And then writing code with pen and paper. Backspace? Can't do that. Copy/paste some line to move code? Can't do that. Add some newlines? Can't do that. Run the code using the compiler? Can't do that. Of course most developers, even experienced ones, will do poorly under these conditions, this is not how code is normally written. On top of the already stressful situation of an interview, there's this suddenly completely foreign and limited way to write code. * Even the blog post only mentioned fizzbuzz as a quick, easy question to filter out zero coding ability. Another way to say this, it was meant to filter out coding skill <= 0. Not skill <= 50 or skill <= 90. Zero. After that, the interview was supposed to move on to things that actually matter for software engineering. The present day interview has strayed extremely far from this. These days, you get asked two leetcode questions during an interview and even if you perfectly answer the first one, if you don't get the second one then you're an automatic fail. That was certainly not the intent of the original fizzbuzz, since answering any leetcode clearly shows coding ability. And the interview never has a chance to move on to the part that actually discusses software engineering skills. Or even if it does and they do very well on those interviews, the failure of only getting 1/2 leetcode questions correct overrules everything else since they must avoid "false positives".

mpeg 5y ago

What I find particularly jarring about tech interviews is that they often don't adapt to the actual role you're interviewing for. I moved from engineering to management over 5 years ago now and still in interviews for positions like "head of" in 100+ people companies or other management roles in bigger companies I got asked the usual algorithm questions. I just have zero interest to prepare for these interviews, I don't have the time or the motivation, and I honestly just don't care about the answers. Most of my job, and my team's job, has nothing to do with them. The world might be different in FAANG, and admittedly I have not worked there (though I have worked for other top companies) – but most companies are not at that scale, and they should not use the same metrics, particularly for management roles.