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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

• nemo44x 5y ago
  It matters where you are in your career in terms of the power dynamic of interviews. Early on while unproven your answers matter and how you answer matters while having good questions is super important. As you establish yourself the power dynamic changes considerably as companies are really trying to convince you to come over. At this point it really should be a conversation to understand if you’re a fit and it’s worth your time. Do the people you’re speaking with impress you?
• soheil 5y ago
  > Do they ask clarifying questions when they don't feel judged Sure, you can tell yourself fairytale stories, but you and the other person both know there will be generated a number right after the call ends that can only range from 1 to 4 and you will be assigned it. Also if you treat this as a discussion you may come off as arrogant. After all everyone else is showing nervousness so the interviewer probably thinks "what's with this person who acts like they're already on my team?"
• posharma 5y ago
  Sorry. Countless articles have been written about how interviews should be conducted. But nothing changes. There are thousands of engineers vying for FAANG/MAMAA and they’ll do backflips to get a job there; leetcode is nothing for them. Some do it to get better salaries as your compensation drops after the 4 yr cliff, some for prestige. So unless you can influence these companies to change nothing will change.
• metters 5y ago
  Not the main topic of the article, but in my opinion an interview/discussion also is supposed to answer another (third) question: Does the company fulfill the expectations of the potential employee? Not only the candidate has to sell their own service/skill during the interview/discussion, the company is being evaluated, too.
  • cema 5y ago
    One of the business for interviewers our company has is to leave a good impression even on a weak candidate. This makes for an overall better experience and, should the candidate become a better fit in the future, we do not want to lose them.
    • cema 5y ago
      One of the "goals" not business but ok.
  • amirkdv 5y ago
    This so much. This would be on the syllabus of the missing Employment 101 course. Very few people I've seen try to evaluate the company as much as they're being evaluated. We all grow up with the false, ingrained assumption that it's some sort of one-way privilege for you, the employee, to rent your time/body/mind to the employer.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      That’s because in most interviews for most people the company holds far more power than the applicant. For those who have done well in tech and don’t need to take the next job offered to pay for the next months food bill, because they have the savings, because they have 2 or 3 offers already, we may have the luxury of interviewing the company. Most people aren’t in that situation, especially early in the career
• Daishiman 5y ago
  To me it comes down to the following: you're not going to advance your career at a place you don't do your best in, and the best way to find out is to see how well you do with future _peers_. Treating your interview as talking with your peers frames your thinking in a much more productive manner. Life's too short to be stuck with mediocre employers.
  • axegon_ 5y ago
    > Life's too short to be stuck with mediocre employers. Billboard worthy quote right there.
    • emodendroket 5y ago
      At the risk of sounding cynical it sounds exactly like a slogan that would appear on billboards for one of those low-rent employment agencies.
      • axegon_ 5y ago
        I get what you mean, but I totally agree with the message itself.
  • dudul 5y ago
    > you're not going to advance your career at a place you don't do your best in Hard disagree. I've worked at a lot of places where I was frustrated, didn't give a damn and felt like I was completely underperforming. And yet, my career has been advancing both in terms of title and earnings. So, unless you have a different metric for "advancing your career" I disagree. That being said, I agree with your main point :)
    • Daishiman 5y ago
      You can advance your title and earnings while also simultaneously not lose your will to live. I've done the whole money+title things at places where my work barely made any impact. You'll pay for it later on; 40+ hours of weekly grind takes a toll on your mind and body.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• airpoint 5y ago
  > Use "We" instead of "you" because it feels more inclusive and it is. For example, ask a question as "Suppose we have this problem to solve. How would we go about doing that?" Oh god how much I hate this! It’s misused by (some) managers so much these days, it’s infuriating. For me it has the very opposite effect than the intended inclusivity.
  • baal80spam 5y ago
    On a tangent - to this day I can't stomach when Windows talks about itself in plural ("We are setting things up"). It started around Windows 10 and I hate it. Ugh...
    • midasuni 5y ago
      Well windows is plural…
• greenail 5y ago
  I'm not sure why but it seems that most of my "interviews" end up with me asking lots of tough questions along with the reasoning behind my questions. I end up leading the discussion. I don't have numbers but it seems I get offers when I take the lead and ask tough questions about the business, what challenges exist, and how the interviewer deals with them. Anecdotally when I've been passive in the past I've not moved forward in the process. On the flip side, when doing the interview and when I'm answering/explaining something to a candidate, I'm not really able to think ahead to the next tougher question in a chain of questions. I wonder how that impacts my assessments. I used to do 3-5 interviews per week, it is a shame I didn't take notice of this and compare to the group's consensus and outcome.
• anotheraccount9 5y ago
  Discussion will only be possible/advantageous if the interviewer decides to engage in a less strict and structured approach. I've had interviewers sticking to very specific questions and wanting very specific answers (not necessary what they needed to know me, but what they wanted to complete a form). A discussion means an organic, constructive exchange. If anyone is too stuck-up, it way not work well. Obviously getting to know the candidate through discussion is best.
• arketyp 5y ago
  I've been involved in interviews for new hires a couple of years now. I'm pretty sure I could have the interviewee talk about cucumbers for 10 minutes and I could determine if its a good hire or not. It's all about getting insight about how the person thinks.
  • ragona 5y ago
    To be honest I sometimes get better signal from things like cucumbers than I do with technology. Tech has a real issue with biasing towards people who happen to have worked on a particular topic, and as we all know we get bounced to unfamiliar topics constantly.
  • jstx1 5y ago
    If I'm kind of stiff in conversations with strangers but decent at programming, does that mean that your company doesn't have a place for me?
    • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
      Are you stiff when talking about programming? Regardless what you're talking about, you're going to have to work with a team and communicate the problems at hand. I think that's really the crux of "having a conversational interview". Can you communicate technical things, both broadly and in depth, effectively.
    • kube-system 5y ago
      Not the OP, but I have a similar experience. Being “stiff in conversations” is not really enough detail to answer the question. I don’t care about whether people are social butterflies. I care about whether they can accomplish the work as a part of a team. I know that sounds cliche but it’s the truth. I just want people who are accepting to feedback, don’t act unprofessionally, and can effectively work in a team.
      • cema 5y ago
        Accepting feedback, but also providing feedback, also asking for it. So being able to initiate a conversation when needed is an important skill.
• bigmattystyles 5y ago
  I do the discussion approach, but my goal is to make sure I 'give candidates enough rope to hang themselves'. I also make extremely clear that it's ok to tell me that they don't know or aren't sure. A lot of times, I never ask the question that makes someone look bad, I just let them talk. No interview system is good, but after cycling through many interview styles, this is the one I have found to be the least bad. On a side note, I also can't believe tools like hackerrank report if a candidate has alt-tabbed out of the browser. I'm nearly 20 years in and I still have to look up basic syntax.
  • FalconSensei 5y ago
    In my company we use hackerrank for the coding interviews, but more as a whiteboard, since we are not doing in-person interviews anymore. We say that syntax is not the most important thing, we are not going to run the code, and that anything they would usually check on google/SO, they can just ask us.
  • quercusa 5y ago
    I usually pick some topic to do a deep dive on; I want to hear someone say "I don't know." If they can't or won't do that and just try to fill in with BS - that's a really bad sign.
• jstx1 5y ago
  "Discussion interviews" can suck because they're a lie. You're still being examined, and now you have to pretend that you aren't being examined in addition to performing well. Some of my best interviewing experiences have been when as part of the interview I ended up having a discussion about something. But the interview didn't explicitly start with that format in mind. Some of the worst interviewing interviewing experiences that I've had is when they say that it will be a discussion, and it is, up to the point when they spring an algorithm question out of the blue... it feels so scummy and fake. Ask me about the algorithm if you want, but mixing your question into 40 minutes of discussing other things and pretending that you aren't examining me is a farce. The intention seems to be to make the experience more authentic and it often ends up having the exact opposite effect. If your criteria for hiring boil down to "did I like talking to this person", you're probably not hiring well and you're allowing all kinds of biases to influence your decision. If your criteria are specific but you're hiding them behind the pretense of "discussion", you're doing everyone involved a disservice.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    Discussion style interviews aren't about pretending they're not interviewing you though.
    • jstx1 5y ago
      The title is "Don't do interviews, do discussions". That's repeated in the main text. The author seems to be concerned about the feeling of "I am being evaluated". I think that's counterproductive because it's false - being evaluatated is the whole point of the conversation and it's better if both sides were honest about it instead of lying to each other and playing games.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        The tone of an evaluation can change the experience and isn’t boolean.
        • 5y ago
• callamdelaney 5y ago
  I interviewed a guy who had this approach. He seemed to think it was a great way to avoid answering actual questions, needless to say it wasn't a positive result.
• Jugurtha 5y ago
  There usually is not a table between us. I sometimes sit on a couch, or we both go to the balcony and talk facing the sea (balcony view:https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/1451368193889538055?s=20 https://twitter.com/jugurthahadjar/status/145136819388953805...). If they smoke they'll have a cigarette there. We sometimes hack on a project together right there. I use the term conversation or dialogue often to do away from discussion's root of 'breaking' or 'stomping'. I offer to make them coffee. We talk about pretty much everything. I ask questions. They ask questions. We try to quickly get rid of the interview vibe by making them feel comfortable. We've refined this over the years.
• 123pie123 5y ago
  Depending on the interview I always try to make it light hearted and a discussion One of the best times this happened is when I was being interviewed by the future manager and he said after 5 minutes you clearly know more than me and we started talking about the best places to go for a drink in the area. I got the job and he was a fantastic manager and good friend
  • throwaway984393 5y ago
    Same! In a few situations I didn't ask a single technical question, it was just obvious they knew what they were doing and showed great insights.
• pezzana 5y ago
  > Here are some tips for converting interview into the discussion as an interviewer ... Two ideas follow. I don't think they'll work very well. Here's the #1 thing you can do as a candidate to turn the interview into a discussion: Come prepared with some interrogative-led questions. These usually begin with the words "who"; "where"; "what"; "when"; and "why". Then ask your questions at appropriate times. A good time might be, for example, right after you answer a question on a topic related to the question you're about to ask. Another good time might be when the interviewer asks "Do you have any questions for me?" Having been on the other side of the interviewing table a lot, it's quite surprising how few candidates have anything to ask about one of the biggest decisions they'll ever make. The quality of your questions will determine what you get out of the interview. To prepare good question, you'll need to understand the following at more than just surface level: - the position - the company/group/pod - the interviewer Research these three things before the interview. The questions you bring to the interview should be designed to gather relevant and missing information on these points. What's "relevant information"? You'll need some goals to figure that out. Don't set foot in the interview until you have some goals that make sense for you. Reversing the above into a process for preparing for an interview: 1. figure out why you're interviewing at all, and interviewing at that company in particular 2. research the position, the company/group/pod, and your interviewers 3. draft questions you'll ask during the interview 4. ask your questions at appropriate times during the interview
  • tchalla 5y ago
    > ere's the #1 thing you can do as a candidate to turn the interview into a discussion: Come prepared with some interrogative-led questions. Yes, the candidate should come prepared to (1) resolve Leetcode Medium/Hard problems with obscure data structures and algorithms, (2) have a Github profile and demonstrate their side projects and (3) have best instances of their past careers to answer behavioural questions in the STAR format. In the same time, we want to demonstrate how the candidate "thinks of their feet" and now we have interrogative style questions. The way I see it - we don't really require interviewers at all. I don't see any benefit of an interviewer. We can replace them with robots.
• danielvaughn 5y ago
  I tried the discussion approach instinctively in most of the interviews I performed. I tried to look at it as if both the interviewee and I are evaluating each other to see if we're a match. Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new. The only difference is that I would drill into specifics in certain areas, but keeping it conversation-style so that it doesn't feel like a pointed question. Usually I found it to be pretty easy to see a persons level of knowledge because they tend to hit a certain depth where they aren't able to keep the conversation flowing, so you have to pull back up into their more familiar territory. The only drawback with this approach is that I have to be really mindful about potentially being biased. Pointed questions aren't as much fun but they're easier to approach from an objective viewpoint.
  • nickjj 5y ago
    This is exactly how I would approach interviews too. I say "would" because I mostly do contract work and sometimes sit in on interviews when other companies are trying to hire someone. I've always thought to myself almost exactly what you wrote. I think having a low pressure conversation with someone can get you almost everything you need to be comfortable hiring someone or at least trialing them out with contract work to begin with. You can absolutely get a good sense of their tech skills from just chatting and you can also get a decent feel for how they communicate in general which IMO is more important than tech skills once you reach a certain point.
  • grvdrm 5y ago
    > Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new. I like your phrasing. I'm not in tech and don't interview folks for tech jobs, but do interview plenty of people for technical roles in financial services (for me: insurance industry). There are lots of ways to dig into their technical skills - white-boarding, take-homes, etc. but I am often digging instead for fit. By fit I don't mean whether a candidate has the skills. I ask questions about interests. What does the person do with their free time? Is there something they are obsessed with? What would their friends tell me they talk about way too much? What topics eat at their brains at all hours regardless of time of day. What do they do to feed their interests? Have had the most success with candidates who come alive (or more alive) answering those types of questions. They show their drive and passion with their hand motions, facial expressions, tone, and more. It's awesome, but importantly, it IS a discussion. It's no longer Q&A to me. And if those folks fit my other needs (e.g. tech skills, requirements for job), I hire them.
• turbinerneiter 5y ago
  I've lately been trying to get people to teach me something as an interview. Interviewed a guy with a PhD in organic electronics and asked him how to make an organic transistor at home. It was a great conversation, not sure yet if it was a great interview.
  • mark-r 5y ago
    I once had an interviewer ask me an obscure C++ question. I didn't know the answer, so I reversed it and asked if he knew. He did, and it taught me something I didn't know before. No, I didn't get the job. I no longer even remember the interviewer's name, but I remember well the question and answer.
    • turbinerneiter 5y ago
      When I started doing interviews I also had some C++ questions (like what is the difference between const and define and some random stuff like that), that I was always unsure about: are these things actually telling me that the person is a good C++ programmer, or am I just asking some random stuff that I happen to know?
• CalRobert 5y ago
  I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If nothing else, it's _amazing_ for negotiating. "honestly I'm really happy where I am, but every man has his price, what can you offer?" does wonders.
  • gpderetta 5y ago
    I had similar experiences as well. When there are no stakes you can be very relaxed during the interview and have all the cards during negotiations.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    This is the proper way to negotiate. Most people don't do it while they have a job, only when they want one, and it puts them at a serious disadvantage.
    • SkyPuncher 5y ago
      The flip side is it will often get you dropped out of most interview funnels since you're likely to be a waste of time.
      • sillysaurusx 5y ago
        Quite the opposite. Companies fight that much harder to get a candidate they know is valuable.
        • isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
          That's true, if you have something to show for your value. You do sometimes get candidates who are very full of themselves but whose record track is not impressive, trying to use their confidence to skip past the interviews.
• 01100011 5y ago
  Depends on the role and the candidate. If I'm hiring for a lower skill position and the candidate has a strong resume I just might want to verify the resume and confirm they have a basic grasp of the relevant skills. If I'm hiring for a high-output FANG job, you bet your ass we're going to the whiteboard. Sure, I hate it too(on either side of the table), but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on your feet and solve hard problems if that's what the job is. I generally tend to have discussions because I'm not very confrontational and also because I hate the modern coding interview. After moving to a FANG though, I now understand why the process is so hard. I also get that a lot of folks are frustrated because they've been told their whole career that they're smart, and they probably are, but for some roles the bar is just set higher. My 30 year old self, who thought he was hot shit because of all the praise I got for doing basic work(shake and bake linux embedded work, deep dive bugfixing, mostly writing glue code), was in no way qualified to exist in the world I (barely manage to) work in now.
  • Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    >but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on your feet and solve hard problems if that's what the job is. Because the most common say to day issue is needing to think of an algorithm on the spot... You hate it because you know that's not true. Yet you're using it.
    • wiseowise 5y ago
      > Because the most common say to day issue is needing to think of an algorithm on the spot... Are you trolling? Everything that you do as an engineer is coming up with an algorithm. Algorithm is how you solve a problem, how you think about constraints and requirements.
      • Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
        You're being pedantic. You know what I mean. There's plenty of algorithms I know and I can see relevant business contexts to use them in. Do I know all of their implementations off the top of my head to regurgitate onto a whiteboard? No, because I don't need to. When the time comes I will just look that up. The easy part is the implementation. This isn't a school exam testing your memory.
• kerng 5y ago
  A friend once told me that he is interviewing Google. I found that mindset very powerful. And the best part, he got an offer but didnt accept it.
  • andrekandre 5y ago
    yes! 1000x this. don't let the power asymmetry get to you, take that attitude and you wont easily made nervous or uneasy and instead projects confidence prepare insightful and incisive questions about how decisions are made, tech stacks, even how executives think about dev process and the business etc etc as it turns out, many companies really appreciate the thoughtfulness!
• indymike 5y ago
  I'm not even sure what an interview that is not a discussion would look like and even less sure it would provide value, especially when it comes to technical talent. There's far too much time spent on validating "can this person do X that they claim they do." That can be easily tested or validated with reference checks. What is hard is knowing if an interviewee knows when to do X, when to do Y, and can they coordinate with teams A and B to get it done.
• EGreg 5y ago
  I do that on my own show, when I interview Noam Chomsky, former regulators etc. I don’t like to fawn over them and ask the same questions as everyone. I try to bridge what they talk about and modern technology, and see if we can have a meaningful DISCUSSION about freedom of speech or sociopolitics or economics or regulations. Here are some episodes: Economics: Thomas Greco, community currency economist https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-thomas-h-greco-community-currency-economist/ https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-thomas-h-gr... Regulations: Sara Hanks, former SEC regulator and author of Regulation S https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-sara-hanks-ceo-and-co-founder-of-crowdcheck/1529 https://community.intercoin.org/t/interview-with-sara-hanks-... Freedom of Speech: Noam Chomsky, sociopolitical commentator and linguist https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalism-in-2021-interview-with-noam-chomsky-community-economist https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis... I don’t hold back, in the Noam Chomsky discussion I accuse him for example of having a lot of social capital (followers and influence is a form of capital that is convertible to other forms) and he brushes it off. Overall the discussions tend to focus 99% on substance, and deal with the Web, Social Platforms, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, how they can change the world and the issues surrounding them. PS: I know that for now no one has heard of Intercoin or Qbix or my interviews and I am OK with that. Eventually it will be discovered once our products are more mainstream. I am looking forward to interviewing Edward Snowden and a few other people next.
• austincheney 5y ago
  The biggest challenge with software interviews is that you don’t know when to lie. The process is maximally biased and so you have maximum incentive to lie. The only reason to not lie is reputation damage in the highly unlikely case you are caught. In the end you are either hired for more money or you are just wasting your time as a candidate. Most of us really want to be as honest as possible, not just because we are good people, but because went want to ensure maximum compatibility. This is incredibly deceptive in itself because employer compatibility doesn’t really matter. As an employee you do things the company way or you don’t work there. So, just lie. I really hate that, but there is no reason not to and every reason to do so. It’s just the nature of conforming to system of inherent implicit bias.
  • rsj_hn 5y ago
    > So, just lie. I think this is bad advice. I have never lied in an interview. I've also never had a job not offered to me if I made it to the in person interview part. This isn't to say that I have magical job-getting powers, but only that not lying has not hurt my chances. In one job I applied for, I didn't have a lot of domain knowledge, but I had knowledge in an adjacent domain and wanted to to jump over to this one. I told this to the interviewer up front, and the interview was a bit rough but I managed to do OK. What I did was explained my thinking process and in many cases arrived at the right solution, or close to it. In others I didn't. The interviewer was sufficiently happy with my ability to solve problems on the spot that they hired me. It wasn't hard to acquire that new domain knowledge, but I had to work at it. I also took a level down in the new job, but they increased my pay over my old job, so I didn't care about the leveling. Long term, that helped me as my salary ended up being higher as a gained levels in the new place. So being honest about not being the perfect fit has worked out for me. I think it can work out for you, too.
    • austincheney 5y ago
      Think about it like this. The goals are attain employment and maximize compensation. That’s it. That said you are probably best off training machine learning to do this for you. It won’t suffer the nonverbal faults associated with dishonesty, because truth to a machine is how effectively it completes the assigned goal.
• tchalla 5y ago
  In the attempt of bias removal, interviewers now want to ask the same question to everyone and leave the effort to the interviewer. Take for example, the standard behavioural question which is expected to answer in a STAR format [0]. The question will go as "Tell me about a time you did .... ". Now, it all sounds fine and dandy but you are basically offloading everything to the poor interviewee. You want them to (1) think of an instance in their past and (2) think of a good, relevant instance in their career and (3) follow a format for your convenience. I'd say that's a lot of pressure. Even if you want to stick to the STAR format - you can still be consistent and ask the same question with a twist. "Did you have any conflict at work? Tell me about such situations" "What was the impact of the conflict?" "What steps did you take to resolve it?" "What changed after you took those steps?" Well, it's the same line of questioning and addresses all needs of the interviewer. Yet, most of them wouldn't do that. It's still a discussion format and win-win. [0] https://careercenter.lehigh.edu/node/145 https://careercenter.lehigh.edu/node/145
  • akomtu 5y ago
    Don't experienced candidates know that behavioral questions is bs and just make things up on the fly? You ask them about a conflict in past, they invent a story about a small disagreement with coworkers that got resolved in a model textbook way, leaving everyone better and wiser? It's not a deposition under oath, after all.
    • mark-r 5y ago
      You're probably right, but it pains me to admit it. I would never make up some BS just to get through an interview, it's not in my nature.
• xwdv 5y ago
  Imagine a hellish interview process where multiple candidates are brought in for a “discussion” at the same time and based on the impression they give one could get the job.
  • tpxl 5y ago
    No need to imagine, group interviews are a thing.
• joelbondurant 5y ago
  To enforce the mandatory level of diversity, all tax cattle communications must be standardized and final hiring decisions must be based on gender and race.
• ab_testing 5y ago
  I think the author has not really interviewed in the past couple of months / years. Now-a-days I see interviewers skipping the pleasantries and straight jumping on to LC style questions. In fact, in a lot of companies, the first couple of rounds are online assessments where you try to pound on LC mediums or hards without even talking to anybody else
  • version_five 5y ago
    Do you think this is a response to tech salaries getting higher, and more unqualified people who interview well applying for jobs? A couple years ago we were hiring data scientists, and started with a chat with the hiring manager, and then at some point a technical evaluation. We attracted business grads and others for the position (in addition to cs folks), and a lot of them talked a good game but couldn't do basic data science stuff. So we ended up switching the process to have some kind of table stakes technical evaluation up front, and then do the interviews. I don't think it's ideal, but the filter has to be somewhere, and companies want to optimize hiring to cut people as quickly as possible rather than do a bunch of interviews and drop them later.
    • brailsafe 5y ago
      I think it's a result of the cost of technical testing reducing to a negligible amount, and then as you say, an unhealthy relationship with risk aversion. If any company can open a funnel to the entire timezone or world and put everyone through a HackerRank test they bought off the shelf, they have sunk no real cost by the time they interview someone and potentially no shortage of people who'll go through with it. This is proven out by how little of a signal these cost-of-entry tests apparently provide, because they go on to do other tests anyway, and inevitably reject candidates who passed all of them for any reason they can come up with.
      • version_five 5y ago
        > I think it's a result of the cost of technical testing reducing to a negligible amount This is a good point that I overlooked and definitely agree is also present. The same thing is happening with other types of interviews - I have seen companies hiring now where the candidate is asked to record video answers to prompted question, that from what I remember are evaluated by some kind of machine learning. They can open up the funnel without having to do anything (except forgo candidates that either have some self respect or are not desperate for work)
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  > This makes me (and I guess most of us) nervous. It doesn't me nervous. It makes me wonder if they know what year it is. :) Ultimately, it's a relationship. Yes, it has to work for them. But it has to work for me as well. Fit matters. If they're doing all the asking and I'm doing all the answering that's a red flag. If we get to the end and they say "We have a couple minutes left...do you have any questions?" That's another red flag. Put another way, as I've said before: How you hire is who you hire. So if you're hiring ppl that can't see your red flags...well...um...that's a red flag ;)
• jschrf 5y ago
  I love this thread and the comments in it. I just had a useless interview with a company that pops up here from time to time. The only thing I liked about the experience was that the itinerary at least tried to make it clear what the key values seemed to be: listening to customers, outcomes, evolving vision. I tried to "map" my experience with their potential customers and how they could think about the "box" and listen and solve. There's a 10 billion dollar problem in this particular industry and if you take the time to understand customers, it's pretty obvious. I watched first-hand the biggest competitor of this org pivot for this after being around for decades. The "discussions" I had were not discussions at all. They all seemed rushed. There was no "deep dive" into tech at all. Next time I interview, I'm going to try a radically different approach: I am going to undershare rather than overshare. As an interviewer, I'm going to start asking people about cucumbers rather than speak about particular tech or follow some form-based process.
• charles_f 5y ago
  Every few weeks someone comes back with the one true way of interviewing, or the X things wrong with how interviews are led. I have conducted a few hundred of these by now, and the most I know about it is that there's no good way, because you try to figure someone out in just a few hours based on stuff they tell you. The format that seems to work the least worse for me is when you get them to tell you about actual stuff from their experience, which tends to prevent getting completely pointless people. I have been forced to do coding exercises for a while but I replaced by a general discussion on some tech they have been using recently, just to get a feeling of whether they understand what they're doing. Recently I have been looking for another team internally to my company. An interesting fit is that I went through 3 interviews. I'm an engineering manager. Two interviews were focused on system design, one was coding. The only non coding question I received was around how I coach people. The three persons who interviewed me I asked: "what does the team need to do better", and they all answered a variation of "it takes a while to get stuff to prod once it's built. We need someone who can help get better at that". Yet not a single question for that. I guess the lesson learnt is that if you are looking for a particular skilk, maybe focus on that as well.
  • wiseowise 5y ago
    The is heavily biased to people who did X.
    • charles_f 5y ago
      How so?
  • RNCTX 5y ago
    > they all answered a variation of "it takes a while to get stuff to prod once it's built. We need someone who can help get better at that". Yet not a single question for that. I guess the lesson learnt is that if you are looking for a particular skilk, maybe focus on that as well. If they knew enough about the problem and its solutions for it to filter down to people doing interviews, they wouldn't need to hire someone to teach them how to do it, right?
• mikesabbagh 5y ago
  Best interview questions are open ended general questions. What is your opinion on software security? How would you improve your efficiency? This usually is a great discussion where everyone feels good at the end, but tell a lot about the sophistication of the person being interviewed. After this, pass a small test to make sure the person can do some real work.
• dtoms 5y ago
  Don't do interviews, do take home tests. Do what's representative of the work you will be doing. I highly doubt even at google that it's a life or death situation that you correctly code an obscure algorithm in 30 minutes. Folks think you "cheat" on take home, but all they are doing is selecting for folks who "cheat" by being able to memorize massive amount of leetcode questions, its still a poor signal. 6-8 400-500K interviewees, likely costs more than 2 folks reviewing a take home for 2 hours.
  • ernst_10 5y ago
    > all they are doing is selecting for folks who "cheat" by being able to memorize massive amount of leetcode questions This takes an extremely high level of cognitive ability, which is a far, far better signal than a take-home test.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Slightly OT - on hiring, not interviewing - I recently realized what could improve hiring, and it's simultaneously a great and terrible idea. How does hiring work today? First, the employer sets out a "careers" page (which varies quite a bit, even within the same company, even for the same job title!) which includes the following banal information: A job title, part-time/full-time/remote/location-based, a company values blurb, a paragraph about the general responsibilities of anyone with this job title, a tech stack, a list of prerequisites that nobody will ever meet "or relevant experience", and maybe the benefits and perks. Nowhere does it describe the actual project they're working on, their timelines, what kind of situation you're walking into, what the specific team's culture is like, whether there's a strong team lead or everyone is just a genius, if they're culturally diverse, what their daily workflow is, whether their OKRs have sustainability or social responsibility goals, or feedback from team members. Is the project they're working on greenfield or brownfield? What's the architecture? Will you be on-call? Will you be supporting customers or working in a silo? What is the reporting structure like? Career advancement / lateral movement? Training? Do they go to happy hour on Fridays? Is there an LGBTQ ERG? And from the other side, the company knows next to nothing about who's applying. After all the candidates have played tech buzzword bingo in their resumes, the company (or worse, recruiter) pulls out a divining rod and tries to pick up the one or two candidates who they imagine are a match culturally, technically, and professionally. If you don't know somebody inside the company, or a recruiter doesn't push you as one of the two candidates they've found locally, you might as well be a translucent blob of Arial 12-point font. How can we connect employees and employers in a meaningful way that isn't an arbitrary screening process? Well it seems to me that somebody has already come up with an answer: dating sites. Please, stop throwing things at me and hear me out! What are jobs? Relationships between an employee and an employer. Well, dating sites are masters at finding the intersections where people match, in order to find good relationship matches. You can create a curated list of multiple-choice weighted questions, and ask the other person to fill them out, with a small text blurb to elaborate on your answer. The most common/popular ones automatically bubble up for everybody as default questions. This combination of quantitative and qualitative matching would allow people to quickly see which employees/employers are the best match. We may still need a way to ascertain technical skill or professional experience, but at least the people who come in the door would appear to be the closest matches to what we want. Will there be some catfishing? Sure, but there already is with today's hiring mess! Can somebody please make the OkCupid of hiring? I'm waiting to open my account.
• sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
  I prefer a "real" interview. A discussion is nice, but is not as focused as a "normal" interview. I would like to be able to guess roughly how well I have done based on the answers I have given. Lastly, I don't want to have to guess what we should talk about so that you can feel you know I can do the job.
• FPGAhacker 5y ago
  A discussion is fine, but I’m too easily fooled by people.
• somberi 5y ago
  Been on the hiring side for more than a decade. In addition to other advice in this thread, I would like to add - I treat the interview as my chance to help the candidate pass the interview. This bent of thought may seem subtle, but makes all the difference in meeting the candidate in their terrain, and seeing the world from their point of view. Consequently, the case studies given explicitly state that if the candidate finds something else that intrigues them, I am happy to take that as a case study instead - gives them something to flaunt and for me to learn about. Some candidates are shy to open up, or just not comfortable conversing with strangers, or misread the power asymmetry in the interview and get anxious - I spend a fair bit of time just conversing human to human. For the really uncommunicative candidates, I make a slight of what they built (fake slight) and this gets the conversation going like a star. The good candidates exhibit a great amount of "Builder's Pride" and defend what they built. They really good ones admit to the possibility that there were other better ways to have built, or explain to me the constraints under which they made the choices they did.
  • harry8 5y ago
    > They really good ones admit to the possibility that there were other better ways to have built, or explain to me the constraints under which they made the choices they did. Does anyone just clam up because you are making slights about something where you don't know the constraints and make inferences about you from that? Most of us have dealt with utterly terrible, opinionated, under-skilled, supercilious and rude interviewers. How do you avoid coming off at least a little bit like that? Generally speaking there's zero point picking fights with an interviewer no matter how wrong they are.
    • somberi 5y ago
      Yes, what you said exactly happens, but not often enough to negate the value of opening up the otherwise clammed up candidate. Hopefully, the first part where the human<>human chat happens, the candidate is able to see that the intent is to have a genuine conversation, albeit with a more senior person (aka older) person on the other side. Where I differ from you is the zero-payoff framing. There have been cases where the candidate put me in my place, rightfully so, and ended up getting hired. This is subjective territory, but I actually prefer a candidate that spars. It gives me a chance to explain my position as well as hear his/hers.
• dboreham 5y ago
  This is the way.
• asdfman123 5y ago
  I think this is pretty much the opposite of what the evidence suggests: that unstructured interviews are pretty much worthless. Conversations gives both parties more fuzzy feelings, but are they actually better or just easier and less awkward?
  • benatkin 5y ago
    Both interviews and discussions are conversations. I know lots of interviews are too formal in some ways. I think it might be useful to start formal, get informal but still stick to rules like not asking discriminatory questions, and then get formal again for the end of the interview. Sort of like a feedback sandwich.
    • Jensson 5y ago
      > I know lots of interviews are too formal in some ways How do you know that? Maybe those interviews are the right amount of formal. Do you have evidence that they are too formal?
      • benatkin 5y ago
        Because I've been on both ends of the interviews and I've seen places where a handful of unplanned questions and comments have gotten useful information and other interviews where no on-the-fly questions were asked and I think it was a missed opportunity. If you were to apply no true Scotsman to what is considered informal you might not include this because it was useful but I'd rather not do that.
• synergy20 5y ago
  Good idea on paper, not practical in real. FAANG etc are whiteboard/leetcode-ing everyone, I believe it's one way to filter out the seniors. Be senior's definition it means people don't spend a few months on algorithms to pass interviews because they had no need to use them in the past 20+ years of their career. It's intentional, talking about 'dont do interviews, do discussions' is missing the point. By the way, I do think whiteboard/leetcode is important, just not that important.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • CobrastanJorji 5y ago
    I hate leetcode-style interviewing, but I see no reason to believe that FAANG companies use then primarily because of ageism. The reasons they're used are simpler. First, these companies need MANY programmers, so they're mostly hiring generalists without a regard for the specific work they'll be doing. Second, they need to conduct many thousands of interviews per week. These two fairly unusual conditions make for a situation where you want a controlled, quantifiable, and simple approach. A leetcode-style interview hits those marks much more easily than other styles. Plus, you can teach someone how to do it in an hour or two (not how to interview well, but how to ask a leetcode problem while not making any headaches for legal in the process). While I agree that this is probably at least slightly biased against more senior devs, I think senior developers actually get an advantage here. In my experience, as you apply for loftier positions, the technical questions become much more of a conversation.
• robertwt7 5y ago
  I love it, love the way principal engineers in google said that. I know how nervous some candidates are, also how nervous I am when I want to change jobs to big tech companies and being interviewed like that (man live coding sucks). Wished more companies are implementing this way of interviews
• totorovirus 5y ago
  It is really hard to filter those "discussers" in this way. They often know tons of possibilities and not the practical solution or skills to carry out their proposed solution
• swman 5y ago
  I wish I could a 2-3 hour interview where I (or the candidate) showcase one of my projects and explain the architectural details and decisions in addition to showing any cool/hairy/insane code that got the job done. We can discuss those things and see how to improve them, or laugh at the crazy solutions. Honestly how many times do I need to rehearse these dumbass algos (blah blah blah, so I'll optimize for space with blah blah blah) okay already. I would much rather show you real world code that I've built, or passion projects I spend my free time on. I want to bring me to your company/projects, so get to know what I'm about holistically as an engineer. I think you can best understand that by looking at actual work done and judging whether or not the person is capable of contributing to your needs. Whenever we face challenges, we learn from them. At scale, we learn everyday. So just hire people who are passionate about facing challenges and learning from them. Not someone who can spend 8 hours a day like a college student playing leet code instead of building something useful. It really isn't that hard to memorize a dozen essential data structures and algorithms. But then what? So cringe.
  • Consultant32452 5y ago
    This is almost exactly how I hold interviews, except they are usually < 1hr. I ask a person to tell me about a recent project and then keep asking more detailed questions about things until one of us hits our limit of understanding. No gotcha questions or random trivia. I only ask questions about something they claim to have done. Occasionally I'll ask a category question like, "Have you done any work with multi-threading?" And if they say yes, I ask about that project. I've found this technique to be extremely successful. It's possible I may have had some false negatives, but I've never had a false positive. Everyone I've recommended for hiring has been successful.
    • onion2k 5y ago
      Everyone I've recommended for hiring has been successful. It's possible you're good at spotting good people, and rejecting bad people, but it's also possible that hiring is just easier than you think it is, and most people are capable of doing the jobs you hire for. You have no way to tell if you'd have the same result just hiring people by picking random resumes. Maybe negatives are just rare.
• spicyramen 5y ago
  In my experience I have seen some candidates that work very hard and mainly do boiler plate code in their projects, they struggle in the Algos/data structures but at the end of the day they get the job done. Others perform very good in Algos/data structures but produce very little at work, and also people that do good and perform above expectations. Is hard for me to actually filter good candidates, and at the end of the day, I value output and some quality.
• iamsb 5y ago
  Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews. Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of putting it into practice without thinking through the bias problem. I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought. Most of it was comprised of "tech-bros". Scripted interviews do not mean you ask through a basket of questions. It just means that you stay within the guardrails of a set of topics and you go through all the topics. With in a topic, you have fair amount of flexibility. For example if you are hiring for a mid level Java programmer your topics may include - Java 8, Testing pyramid, Functional programming, type safety, developer safety(CI/CD/Rollbacks/Code reviews/Pair programming etc), some domain specific knowledge and so on.
  • ryandrake 5y ago
    > In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought. Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team, or any other negative business results that were specific to that team? If not, who’s to say which interviewing method was better or worse? As an interviewer I’ve always felt very constrained by scripted interviews and “approved question lists”. I always struggle to really evaluate a candidate when I’m asking pre-selected questions without knowing why I’m asking those questions.
    • angarg12 5y ago
      Odd comment. We hate the tech interview because it doesn't fairly evaluate on the job performance of candidates, but apparently it's ok to reject them because they don't fit the interviewer's tribe.
    • iamsb 5y ago
      > Did this result in poorer job performance for the DevOps team, or any other negative business results that were specific to that team? If not, who’s to say which interviewing method was better or worse? It did. And even if it had not in this particular case, it will hurt the company in the long run. There is not even a shred of doubt in my mind that diversity (of thought) is the best investment that leads to success. I have been using scripted interviews, the same method I mentioned in original comment, for more than 5 years now, hiring more than 200 engineers in three continent and I am super happy with my results.
• madmax108 5y ago
  Some of these are great tips and I agree wholeheartedly. However, in personal experience, I've found that this works much better with more experienced developers rather than with junior engineers. Why? Because for some reason, a lot of junior engineers have been pavlov-ed into thinking every interview is for something at Google/Facebook scale (no matter where they are interviewing) and they start describing extremely convoluted designs using tech that they are also not completely familiar with just because they want to come across as knowledgeable. Something that I struggle with in these cases is reining in the dev back to the "what" rather than the "how", because I've seen even good engineers go into this "let's add a system-bus for everything" way of thinking. Constraining problems explicitly tends to devolve into the "Interviewer-Interviewee information asymmetry" which is the same with most DSA problems (At least with DSA, most constraints are known by both parties). On the other hand, almost every time I've picked an actual problem we have with a system, be it a bug or a new product or something else, as an interview question with an experienced interviewee, I feel like I've come out understanding the problem space AND solution space better just through the process of discussion and in multiple cases, actually ended up using a lot of ideas from these discussions, so interviewing feels much more "natural" and a "dominant strategy" in game theoretic sense.
• akudha 5y ago
  Interviews can be made much more useful and pleasant simply by making a subtle change - instead of finding out/exposing what the interviewee does not know, find out what they do know.
• mark-r 5y ago
  I recently had the best interview experience of my life from an interviewer who had this philosophy. He's a professional interviewer who's done thousands of interviews over the past few years. He feels that the best way to gauge a candidate is not by their knowledge of minutia, but by whether you can trust the things they claim about themselves. He's so passionate about the subject that he created a Youtube channel. It's aimed at both interviewers who want to do a better job and interviewees who want to influence their chances of success. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhCnsRMXhadbiHsTcxMCgeYxFRAfk1_C7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhCnsRMXhadbiHsTcxMCg...
• coygui 5y ago
  This works for me.
• christkv 5y ago
  I usually would do three things. One show me or tell me about some code you are proud off, some code you are not proud off and what your learned from it and finally teach me something interesting that can be code or something else. I’m looking for confidence, ability to accept making mistakes and improving and finally the ability to convey information in a teachable fashion.
• wayanon 5y ago
  Interviews have the benefit of appearing equal at least - everyone is asked exactly the same questions. Discussions might run the risk of appearing to give some people an easier ride than others.
• vbg 5y ago
  I can interview any developer and by asking the right questions prove they are an incompetent fraud. It’s a simple matter of asking the right questions. Who’s wrong and who’s right? The interviewer is always right. If you don’t know what I think you should know then you’re incompetent.
• DeathArrow 5y ago
  Any interview should be simple. You just have to not be a jerk: -threat the guy as a human being, showing respect and kindness -try to understand his mental processes -try to asses his knowledge level by meaningful discussions, no "tricky questions" or "leetcode" -ask to explain what he work on, what decisions he took and why -explain some of your actual work issues and ask how he would address them -do not try to make yourself look smart while trying to make your interlocutor look stupid
• inertiatic 5y ago
  As a person who used to take interviews, I thought discussions were the best way to figure out if someone is competent. I mean, when I ended up in a discussion with someone, I felt like I did great. I had a good time and it frequently led to an offer. As someone who's now interviewing a person or more every week (during a hiring surge), I still don't know of a better way to interview someone, but I'm not convinced this is great. A lot of people, who are unquestionably smart, coming into the interview after long careers in big companies, have a lot of trouble expressing themselves (especially if it's not in their native language), let alone selling themselves. They come in trying to find the correct answer for each question, even if it's open ended questions to trigger discussion. And when asked for a concrete answer to something, they will instead fumble around, only touch upon the answer, and talk about something that distracted them. We still frequently hire people who interview like that, but it takes a lot of thinking and extrapolating. I'm still not sure what to do.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    The problem is that "Summarise a project you have worked on in a few minutes" isn't a task you normally do at your job either, software engineers job is to care about the full picture and ensure it all works together without missing any details, making quick explanations that are fit for small talk has nothing to do with it. If the engineer is expected to talk to a lot of non-engineers then that might be a good signal, but for other more technical roles it isn't needed at all. So your process will select for people who love to smalltalk about stuff, they will look great. But many great engineers doesn't love to smalltalk about stuff, it isn't a part of being good at the job.
• lwouis 5y ago
  I read a lot of anti-diplomas ideology, especially from US culture. Over the years I've realized that the multi-years selection people go through in academia is a decent and most importantly long process to select people. A lot of the conversation is on interviews these days, on the idea that anyone can be a genius programmer after a bootcamp. While I don't deny it's possible, I think traditional selection based on the school people went to, and building a relationship between companies and school is a good thing. Trying to holistically evaluate a worker in a few hours is not nice. It's very intense for candidates to have such opportunities to unlock in such a short time. People prepare for interviews intensely, and can live rejections as a deep traumas as a result. Having this process happen over years in academia seems healthier, and more accurate. Companies would benefit from having their HR spend time studying curriculums of some schools, and build relationships. That guarantees a steady flow of qualified workers. I see this where I live here in Japan, and I'm quite found of the work culture / society it produces.
  • waisbrot 5y ago
    That's good except, as you point out, in the US where schools are paid by the individual. At least some of the anti-diploma sentiment here in the US is because we understand that it would just result in "people born rich are the only ones who can get hired for good jobs".
    • lwouis 5y ago
      I don't think there is anything you can do to prevent rich kids from having an easy life. They are not numerous though, but definition. So the concern shouldn't be too large as well. In France where i'm from, and also here in Japan, i see the education system as mostly working. People get educated and the people more designed for more study can pursue while other go working before them. This seems to work enough to me. I wouldn't know how to improve it without regressing more on other fronts, for instance
• thadk 5y ago
  Some of these comments, like attending to relative position in space, remind me of Phil Agre's fantastic "How to Help Someone Use a Computer" (1996) – https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html Phil's instructions mix some good influences and can be used when working with people in other mediated spot environments like interviews/discussions too.
• margofx 5y ago
  This is a way to go for me. It would be great to brainstorm and discuss things relevant to the industry or in the real world.
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  I just got a development job where there was no whiteboarding, no linked list implementing, no balancing a red-black tree, etc. They just asked me to talk about some of my previous projects that interested them. Maybe things are changing. Or maybe it's as the CTO said to me "it's hard to hire people right now". At any rate, I was pretty happy with this kind of interview.
• flerovium 5y ago
  The problem with this piece is that it spends more time discussing a word change that how to make interviews more like actual discussions. The word "boss" was original chosen because it avoided implications of a power dynamic between the boss and the worker. Centuries later, it has re-acquired the same connotation.