5 ms·

It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company. How empowered are new senior hires, and how expensive is the time of the

It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company. How empowered are new senior hires, and how expensive is the time of the team? At larger companies senior engineers are often phenomenally expensive and at smaller companies controls over potentially business ending operations are usually minimal. A friend of mine at a FAANG recently dealt with a bad hire. Their guess was that in the 6 months the bad hire was there they cost the company maybe ~5 million between wasted engineer time and delayed release schedules after people kept having to put out their fires. On the other end of companies, I've heard of seniors corrupting the database and its backup and ending an entire startup. This is not a defense of whiteboard interviews per se, just an observation on why companies desperately want to avoid bad hires.

dgb23 5y ago
In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge / whiteboard process?
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  Across all examples I can think of - some yes, some no. It's not material to my point either way. I was only arguing that for some company's being very afraid of bad hires may be sensible and dismissing their concerns as hysteria does not seem obviously correct to me.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    >In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge / whiteboard process? I think he was trying to point out that if some of the bad candidates had passed a whiteboard test, it brings in to the questions of the effectiveness of whiteboard tests to filter out bad candidates. I remember a guy we hired years ago who answered all the tech questions we asked with flying colors. He was lazy and unmotivated and ended up dumping all his work on other people (me). I would have much rather had a motivated person who I had to teach some stuff to rather than him.
    - hippyup 5y ago
      Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so it's useless is not a great argument. Reality is that bad hires are really expensive (as argued above) and that current interview methods are somewhat - admittedly not 100% - effective at avoiding those while mostly - again not 100% - effective at admitting the great hires. Maybe this "convert to discussion" method is more effective (I have my doubts), and I'm sure there are more effective methods out there and we should look for them, but let's recognize the reasons for what we have while we look for something better.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        >Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so it's useless is not a great argument. Who said that?
csydas 5y ago
Honestly, one of the safest and most powerful tools is just to continually ask "why" questions as a result of whatever they say in regards to technical details, with a scattering of "how?" questions. Others in the comments have expressed some legal concerns about "discussions" instead of Interviews, but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons interpretation of US hiring law. The law requires you ask the same set of questions of all candidates, yes, but it reasonably understands that questions on past projects/work of course will never be the same, and these are legal and valid areas to go off-script. So suppose in your situation you have a candidate and they talk about the project they worked on. To hear about their contribution, you ask (as you would all candidates): "Tell me about a problem you encountered on this project that was particularly challenging from a technical perspective" The candidate will tell you and likely their solution, and then you can start with the why's and how's. "Why did you choose this approach? What are the benefits?" "How did you arrive at this conclusion?" (you can further restate the question with "explain how you got to the idea that you needed to get here") Make it a hard rule for yourself that you must be able to build the entire timeline and understand the candidate's role in that timeline. I find that even if it turns out they mostly were receiving orders from a more senior resource but could reasonably explain in their own words now why they ended up doing what they did, this is still a good candidate for me as they used available resources and took away a good lesson. If there is ambiguity, you can even just ask "why do you think your senior colleague had the right idea here?" The idea of a discussion versus a checklist is you want to learn how a person thinks and how they approach issues. Even as a follow up to more factual check-list questions, "why" is very important as it helps you to understand the current state of the person. Just be honest with yourself that not everyone will have the same background and be honest on whether the "why" is relevant for the position. For example, some trivial linux kernel knowledge I would consider "nice to know", but it's by far not essential unless they're doing specific dev work on that field or claim to know it. The other big catch you need to train yourself for is accepting that people will do things far differently than you do, even things that you consider wrong, but they work. The important part to focus on isn't about how close their answer is to yours, but to make sure you understand how and why someone reached that conclusion. Why and how are very safe and legal questions as a follow up to a very straight-forward technical question.
- 5y ago
swiftcoder 5y ago
> Their guess was that in the 6 months the bad hire was there they cost the company maybe ~5 million between wasted engineer time and delayed release schedules after people kept having to put out their fires. I've worked with one or two of those, but I've also been on interview loops that rejected candidates who went on to massively successful careers at a different FAANG. The cost of false positives is relatively easy to quantify, the cost of false negatives significantly harder. Which is higher?
- afarrell 5y ago
  There is also a cost to hiring folks via an interview process that does not clearly signal, “we have thought about it and decided you belong here.” It reduces their willingness to ask for help and admit ignorance.
- b20000 5y ago
  companies think that during interviews it is cheaper to let a really good candidate go than hiring a bad one. that is a huge mistake. every now and then they will not hire a key unique candidate, so they miss out on billions of $ in value. they don’t understand that if you hire 100 people, only about 5 of them will be doing all the important work and creating all the value.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company I'm always curious how people interview doctors. As bad as getting a bad programmer might potentially be, getting a bad doctor must be exponentially worse, so you'd think they'd have vetting the unqualified folks down to a science by now.
- efaref 5y ago
  In most countries doctors and other health professionals are registered and licensed, and must submit to strict examinations. Mistakes can also be career-ending and potentially result in criminal prosecution. It's way harder to get hired as a doctor than "do a bit of leetcode on a whiteboard".
  - geodel 5y ago
    Exactly. Somehow there is this impression that software engineers are having it really hard and they face worst job requirements/interviews. I'd imagine software/IT might be only place where people who have delivered a couple of toy sized, half-assed webapps are now experts commenting on 'engineering challenges' and 'industry trends' with profundity.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  > "I'm always curious how people interview doctors." They go through several years of medical residency under supervision before becoming a full fledged doctor and are burdened by expensive liability insurance and ongoing education requirements. That takes care of the competency beforehand.

dgb23 5y ago

In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge / whiteboard process?

Hermitian909 5y ago
Across all examples I can think of - some yes, some no. It's not material to my point either way. I was only arguing that for some company's being very afraid of bad hires may be sensible and dismissing their concerns as hysteria does not seem obviously correct to me.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >In your examples, did they go through a coding challenge / whiteboard process? I think he was trying to point out that if some of the bad candidates had passed a whiteboard test, it brings in to the questions of the effectiveness of whiteboard tests to filter out bad candidates. I remember a guy we hired years ago who answered all the tech questions we asked with flying colors. He was lazy and unmotivated and ended up dumping all his work on other people (me). I would have much rather had a motivated person who I had to teach some stuff to rather than him.
  - hippyup 5y ago
    Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so it's useless is not a great argument. Reality is that bad hires are really expensive (as argued above) and that current interview methods are somewhat - admittedly not 100% - effective at avoiding those while mostly - again not 100% - effective at admitting the great hires. Maybe this "convert to discussion" method is more effective (I have my doubts), and I'm sure there are more effective methods out there and we should look for them, but let's recognize the reasons for what we have while we look for something better.
    - Clubber 5y ago
      >Saying this method of interview is not 100% effective so it's useless is not a great argument. Who said that?

csydas 5y ago

Honestly, one of the safest and most powerful tools is just to continually ask "why" questions as a result of whatever they say in regards to technical details, with a scattering of "how?" questions. Others in the comments have expressed some legal concerns about "discussions" instead of Interviews, but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons interpretation of US hiring law. The law requires you ask the same set of questions of all candidates, yes, but it reasonably understands that questions on past projects/work of course will never be the same, and these are legal and valid areas to go off-script. So suppose in your situation you have a candidate and they talk about the project they worked on. To hear about their contribution, you ask (as you would all candidates): "Tell me about a problem you encountered on this project that was particularly challenging from a technical perspective" The candidate will tell you and likely their solution, and then you can start with the why's and how's. "Why did you choose this approach? What are the benefits?" "How did you arrive at this conclusion?" (you can further restate the question with "explain how you got to the idea that you needed to get here") Make it a hard rule for yourself that you must be able to build the entire timeline and understand the candidate's role in that timeline. I find that even if it turns out they mostly were receiving orders from a more senior resource but could reasonably explain in their own words now why they ended up doing what they did, this is still a good candidate for me as they used available resources and took away a good lesson. If there is ambiguity, you can even just ask "why do you think your senior colleague had the right idea here?" The idea of a discussion versus a checklist is you want to learn how a person thinks and how they approach issues. Even as a follow up to more factual check-list questions, "why" is very important as it helps you to understand the current state of the person. Just be honest with yourself that not everyone will have the same background and be honest on whether the "why" is relevant for the position. For example, some trivial linux kernel knowledge I would consider "nice to know", but it's by far not essential unless they're doing specific dev work on that field or claim to know it. The other big catch you need to train yourself for is accepting that people will do things far differently than you do, even things that you consider wrong, but they work. The important part to focus on isn't about how close their answer is to yours, but to make sure you understand how and why someone reached that conclusion. Why and how are very safe and legal questions as a follow up to a very straight-forward technical question.

5y ago

swiftcoder 5y ago

> Their guess was that in the 6 months the bad hire was there they cost the company maybe ~5 million between wasted engineer time and delayed release schedules after people kept having to put out their fires. I've worked with one or two of those, but I've also been on interview loops that rejected candidates who went on to massively successful careers at a different FAANG. The cost of false positives is relatively easy to quantify, the cost of false negatives significantly harder. Which is higher?

afarrell 5y ago
There is also a cost to hiring folks via an interview process that does not clearly signal, “we have thought about it and decided you belong here.” It reduces their willingness to ask for help and admit ignorance.
b20000 5y ago
companies think that during interviews it is cheaper to let a really good candidate go than hiring a bad one. that is a huge mistake. every now and then they will not hire a key unique candidate, so they miss out on billions of $ in value. they don’t understand that if you hire 100 people, only about 5 of them will be doing all the important work and creating all the value.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> It's hard to tell if it's hysterical without knowing the Cost/Benefit for the company I'm always curious how people interview doctors. As bad as getting a bad programmer might potentially be, getting a bad doctor must be exponentially worse, so you'd think they'd have vetting the unqualified folks down to a science by now.

efaref 5y ago
In most countries doctors and other health professionals are registered and licensed, and must submit to strict examinations. Mistakes can also be career-ending and potentially result in criminal prosecution. It's way harder to get hired as a doctor than "do a bit of leetcode on a whiteboard".
- geodel 5y ago
  Exactly. Somehow there is this impression that software engineers are having it really hard and they face worst job requirements/interviews. I'd imagine software/IT might be only place where people who have delivered a couple of toy sized, half-assed webapps are now experts commenting on 'engineering challenges' and 'industry trends' with profundity.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "I'm always curious how people interview doctors." They go through several years of medical residency under supervision before becoming a full fledged doctor and are burdened by expensive liability insurance and ongoing education requirements. That takes care of the competency beforehand.