6 ms·

Im not a huge fan of leetcode or work samples but on the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. We'd get tons of copy/pasted together infr

by nijave 5y ago

Im not a huge fan of leetcode or work samples but on the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. We'd get tons of copy/pasted together infra as code from top Google results that wasn't even close to runnable (usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission)

vanusa 5y ago
On the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. Along with (as was the main point of the original blog post) probably quite a few false negatives, Like the author of that post, for example. Meanwhile, you can achieve the same filtering benefit by far less obnoxious and more accurate means (a cursory glance at their repo, fore example).
- kevinburke 5y ago
  People say this but then they reject answers that e.g correctly code the brute force solution or they don’t provide an algorithm to code for, so it’s not just “can you code,” it’s can you find the optimal algorithm and also code it, and usually the algorithm isn’t trivial or one you’d ever run into at work.
- wiseowise 5y ago
  I'd rather filter out good candidate than let bad in. It's a domino effect. You let one bad, he will hire more in the future.
  - klipklop 5y ago
    I always hear this but never seen proof. If they are bad how do they get into a position that lets them make hiring decisions? Everyone likes to think they are the good candidate and not the bad one that slipped through…
    - wiseowise 5y ago
      > If they are bad how do they get into a position that lets them make hiring decisions? We have flat hierarchy. Just volunteer to interview because your voice is on the same level as others.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
      When they put it in the promo committee calibration doc that X level has done Y interviews per quarter, they end up on interview loops but then feel they must say no to Z% else they’re not “raising the bar”
  - Supermancho 5y ago
    > You let one bad, he will hire more in the future. When your organization can recognize a poor investment but cannot act on it, you have an organizational problem. Why would someone get to hire more "bad" (for whatever that means) if you can recognize it? Even if you're doing all the hiring yourself, it's unlikely you'll have a 100% record over time.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      Most companies have organizational problems. So a system that only works if you don't will fail for the majority of companies.
      - vanusa 5y ago
        Most companies have organizational problems. Right. But we can't talk about that, of course. Instead the corrective strategy seems to be: "Let's torture some more candidates. It's cheap and it's easy, after all."
    - quietbritishjim 5y ago
      For one thing, in many countries it's hard to get rid of a poor employee unless they're malicious or really exceptionally terrible. For another, even if "an organisational problem" or inconvenient labour laws don't get in your way, firing employees can have a serious effect on the morale of those left behind. And for good reason! Usually companies that regularly fire people for poor performance has a different sort of culture than companies that don't. In my experience, that's the worse organisational problem. The right solution is just to be more careful about who you hire in the first place.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Isn't this why there are trial periods ( no idea if it's a thing in the US with the "right to work" thing)?. Over here in the EU a work contract can't be terminated from the company just like that, there needs to be a specific reason ( like downsizing, or a serious error), and you can't quit just like that a mandatory notice period is required ( of course negotiable depending on the situation), usually in the 1-3 months range. Therefore there's a trial period at the beginning, 3-6 months usually, during which any party can end the employment with a very small notice ( a day or two). So if someone lied their way through interviews, in the first couple of months you should be able to detect that and terminate their trial period.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > So if someone lied their way through interviews, in the first couple of months you should be able to detect that and terminate their trial period. Managers hates firing people, it is really uncomfortable. So instead of firing this person to look for a new, they keep the person and say they need even more headcount and hope the next one is better.
      - marcos100 5y ago
        Totally, it's like admitting that you don't know how to hire. And it's worse if HR is involved.
    - marcinzm 5y ago
      In the US you are always on a trial period. The problem is that firing people is annoying and bad for team morale. More importantly even dealing with a bad coworker is really bad for team morale. No one wants to join a company that is likely to fire them in 3 months because the company f-ed up their own hiring process. No one wants to recommend their connections join a company where that is likely to happen. Made worse due to a lot of compensation is tied to staying a year at a company so leaving early is basically getting paid 50% for that time.
      - baskethead 5y ago
  - baskethead 5y ago
    The question is whether or not your interviewing practices filter out bad candidates. If your entire company has no employees then maybe but I find that hard to believe.
- nijave 5y ago
  A lot of candidates don't have public repos and you need an equal comparison across all candidates (you can introduce a lot of bias trying to gauge two candidates against different sets of criteria)
  - vanusa 5y ago
    A lot of candidates don't have public repos It doesn't have to be a public repo of course. They can just send zip file. You need an equal comparison across all candidates. "We'd like to see a code sample -- something we can build and compile, that you feel is representative of your skill level." Sounds pretty straightforward and egalitarian to me.
    - detaro 5y ago
      I'm curious, if we exclude all your open-source work (assuming you have some), what did/would you submit when given the question?
      - vanusa 5y ago
        Floppy disk? A printout? Long before open source was a thing, and repos were even thought of -- I always had a few 1,000+ line personal projects I could dig up and show people.
        detaro 5y ago
        right, and plenty people don't have large personal projects, or not personal projects that align with their work skillset, and the question is extremely vague what scope you're looking for.
        vanusa 5y ago
        Right - it's a bar, and some people won't meet that bar. And that said - a pretty minimal bar. 1,000 lines isn't that large, btw - but yeah, maybe 500 would be a better number.
ipaddr 5y ago
You wouldn't know if they are bad candidates because you didn't hire them.
- wiseowise 5y ago
  We do code submission instead of LC. Believe me, most candidate are complete, utter shit. And that's without even hiring them.
  - yosito 5y ago
    Sounds like many competent candidates are dodging a bullet by not being hired by you. What's the turnover rate on your team like?
    - wiseowise 5y ago
      > Sounds like many competent candidates are dodging a bullet by not being hired by you How so? > turnover rate on your team like? 2 years since I joined, hired one dev recently, no one left so far.
indymike 5y ago
This is my experience hiring developers. If I hire without a code screen, it's a 50-50% chance the developer cannot close a ticket in their first month. With a code screen, I've had one developer not work out (personal problems). And I'm talking about "ensure that no trailing spaces are being inserted to the database in this csv import function" kind of tickets. >usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission This is exactly what we do: check the solution, and if it's close we continue the hiring process. There is a huge difference between an almost working solution and what you get 70% of the time: code that will never, ever, ever work, even if it could run.
gentleman11 5y ago
> weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. A lot of hiring managers have no concept of experiment design. You can’t invent a measure (or copy it from a blogs about how other companies hire), look at who it rejects, and conclude they are bad. You don’t know if they were good or bad. You never worked with any of them. You only know that you applied your measure. The only candidates you have any information about are the ones you hired, yet you are insulting the others on the internet today
- vanusa 5y ago
  You never worked with any of them. You only know that you applied your measure. What's interesting is that the people doing all this "weeding out" seem so sure that they're bravely defending the fort against an onslaught of incompetent hordes... and yet they're missing this extremely basic point about the nature of the process they've chosen to use.

by nijave 5y ago

vanusa 5y ago

On the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. Along with (as was the main point of the original blog post) probably quite a few false negatives, Like the author of that post, for example. Meanwhile, you can achieve the same filtering benefit by far less obnoxious and more accurate means (a cursory glance at their repo, fore example).

kevinburke 5y ago
People say this but then they reject answers that e.g correctly code the brute force solution or they don’t provide an algorithm to code for, so it’s not just “can you code,” it’s can you find the optimal algorithm and also code it, and usually the algorithm isn’t trivial or one you’d ever run into at work.
wiseowise 5y ago
I'd rather filter out good candidate than let bad in. It's a domino effect. You let one bad, he will hire more in the future.
- klipklop 5y ago
  I always hear this but never seen proof. If they are bad how do they get into a position that lets them make hiring decisions? Everyone likes to think they are the good candidate and not the bad one that slipped through…
  - wiseowise 5y ago
    > If they are bad how do they get into a position that lets them make hiring decisions? We have flat hierarchy. Just volunteer to interview because your voice is on the same level as others.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
    When they put it in the promo committee calibration doc that X level has done Y interviews per quarter, they end up on interview loops but then feel they must say no to Z% else they’re not “raising the bar”
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > You let one bad, he will hire more in the future. When your organization can recognize a poor investment but cannot act on it, you have an organizational problem. Why would someone get to hire more "bad" (for whatever that means) if you can recognize it? Even if you're doing all the hiring yourself, it's unlikely you'll have a 100% record over time.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    Most companies have organizational problems. So a system that only works if you don't will fail for the majority of companies.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      Most companies have organizational problems. Right. But we can't talk about that, of course. Instead the corrective strategy seems to be: "Let's torture some more candidates. It's cheap and it's easy, after all."
  - quietbritishjim 5y ago
    For one thing, in many countries it's hard to get rid of a poor employee unless they're malicious or really exceptionally terrible. For another, even if "an organisational problem" or inconvenient labour laws don't get in your way, firing employees can have a serious effect on the morale of those left behind. And for good reason! Usually companies that regularly fire people for poor performance has a different sort of culture than companies that don't. In my experience, that's the worse organisational problem. The right solution is just to be more careful about who you hire in the first place.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Isn't this why there are trial periods ( no idea if it's a thing in the US with the "right to work" thing)?. Over here in the EU a work contract can't be terminated from the company just like that, there needs to be a specific reason ( like downsizing, or a serious error), and you can't quit just like that a mandatory notice period is required ( of course negotiable depending on the situation), usually in the 1-3 months range. Therefore there's a trial period at the beginning, 3-6 months usually, during which any party can end the employment with a very small notice ( a day or two). So if someone lied their way through interviews, in the first couple of months you should be able to detect that and terminate their trial period.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > So if someone lied their way through interviews, in the first couple of months you should be able to detect that and terminate their trial period. Managers hates firing people, it is really uncomfortable. So instead of firing this person to look for a new, they keep the person and say they need even more headcount and hope the next one is better.
    - marcos100 5y ago
      Totally, it's like admitting that you don't know how to hire. And it's worse if HR is involved.
  - marcinzm 5y ago
    In the US you are always on a trial period. The problem is that firing people is annoying and bad for team morale. More importantly even dealing with a bad coworker is really bad for team morale. No one wants to join a company that is likely to fire them in 3 months because the company f-ed up their own hiring process. No one wants to recommend their connections join a company where that is likely to happen. Made worse due to a lot of compensation is tied to staying a year at a company so leaving early is basically getting paid 50% for that time.
    - baskethead 5y ago
- baskethead 5y ago
  The question is whether or not your interviewing practices filter out bad candidates. If your entire company has no employees then maybe but I find that hard to believe.
nijave 5y ago
A lot of candidates don't have public repos and you need an equal comparison across all candidates (you can introduce a lot of bias trying to gauge two candidates against different sets of criteria)
- vanusa 5y ago
  A lot of candidates don't have public repos It doesn't have to be a public repo of course. They can just send zip file. You need an equal comparison across all candidates. "We'd like to see a code sample -- something we can build and compile, that you feel is representative of your skill level." Sounds pretty straightforward and egalitarian to me.
  - detaro 5y ago
    I'm curious, if we exclude all your open-source work (assuming you have some), what did/would you submit when given the question?
    - vanusa 5y ago
      Floppy disk? A printout? Long before open source was a thing, and repos were even thought of -- I always had a few 1,000+ line personal projects I could dig up and show people.
      - detaro 5y ago
        right, and plenty people don't have large personal projects, or not personal projects that align with their work skillset, and the question is extremely vague what scope you're looking for.
        vanusa 5y ago
        Right - it's a bar, and some people won't meet that bar. And that said - a pretty minimal bar. 1,000 lines isn't that large, btw - but yeah, maybe 500 would be a better number.

ipaddr 5y ago

You wouldn't know if they are bad candidates because you didn't hire them.

wiseowise 5y ago
We do code submission instead of LC. Believe me, most candidate are complete, utter shit. And that's without even hiring them.
- yosito 5y ago
  Sounds like many competent candidates are dodging a bullet by not being hired by you. What's the turnover rate on your team like?
  - wiseowise 5y ago
    > Sounds like many competent candidates are dodging a bullet by not being hired by you How so? > turnover rate on your team like? 2 years since I joined, hired one dev recently, no one left so far.

indymike 5y ago

This is my experience hiring developers. If I hire without a code screen, it's a 50-50% chance the developer cannot close a ticket in their first month. With a code screen, I've had one developer not work out (personal problems). And I'm talking about "ensure that no trailing spaces are being inserted to the database in this csv import function" kind of tickets. >usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission This is exactly what we do: check the solution, and if it's close we continue the hiring process. There is a huge difference between an almost working solution and what you get 70% of the time: code that will never, ever, ever work, even if it could run.

gentleman11 5y ago

> weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. A lot of hiring managers have no concept of experiment design. You can’t invent a measure (or copy it from a blogs about how other companies hire), look at who it rejects, and conclude they are bad. You don’t know if they were good or bad. You never worked with any of them. You only know that you applied your measure. The only candidates you have any information about are the ones you hired, yet you are insulting the others on the internet today

vanusa 5y ago
You never worked with any of them. You only know that you applied your measure. What's interesting is that the people doing all this "weeding out" seem so sure that they're bravely defending the fort against an onslaught of incompetent hordes... and yet they're missing this extremely basic point about the nature of the process they've chosen to use.