3 ms·

I agree it's a great interview question, but I would never ask anyone to spend three hours doing this for free. Someone comes to me and says they can program, a

by geocar 5y ago

I agree it's a great interview question, but I would never ask anyone to spend three hours doing this for free. Someone comes to me and says they can program, and that's that. They have other employers and coworkers in their life, or just teachers and other students -- people I can ask what it's like to work with them if I want, but at the end of the day, I'll know if I've been lied to in the first 30 days and neither of us want that, so I think all I'm trying to find out at the interview-stage is whether I want to spend 30 days with this person, and I don't need to study the outcome of three-hours of them guessing at what I want to help me do that. But I like to talk about programming, and this question just creates so many different kinds of ideas in my head too. I like how you immediately think about ordering of events and the implications of that. Maybe memcached needs a division operator too. I think that's fun to talk about. Maybe overflows are important; Maybe the task is to add some new types to memcached to protect against that. Maybe we should add some stats to track the number of overflows (or otherwise give some estimate of the accuracy). Now I am looking at the slide-rule on my desk and wondering what the required precision for the use-case is; That is, is it possible that instead of modifying memcached and having to support your freaky-version forever that you can simply instruct the application to increment by log multiplied out by the desired precision, then reverse with division+exp on output? And now I am thinking about supportability: Once we've decided what we want out of memcached, is it worth trying to get those changes into the upstream memcached so we don't have to worry so much about that feature disappearing (or becoming difficult in the future)? Talking to people about the social aspects of programming with open-source can be important too. So yeah, lots of reasons to like this question. I'm probably going to use some variant of it myself, because wherever the candidate goes with it is going to be informative, but I'm extremely disappointed by the rest of the process (and all of part 2); it's definitely not for me.

mchusma 5y ago
I don't know the rest of the process, but 3 hours for an interview seems 100% fine. And practical tests are so much better than random abstract questions IMO. I think your solution is to watch and plan on firing many people within 30 days, which seems worse for everyone.
- geocar 5y ago
  > I think your solution is to watch and plan on firing many people within 30 days, which seems worse for everyone. Why did you add the word "many" where? I didn't use it. I can count on one hand the number of people who flat-out lied to me about being able to program and I needed to fire them for it, and I've been managing and developing software for around thirty years or so. Do you think that's a lot? Or do you think people lying about what they do is common?
  - judahmeek 5y ago
    > Or do you think people lying about what they do is common? Probably depends on the offered salary range.
    - geocar 5y ago
      How do you mean?
      - urbandw311er 5y ago
        He/she means that they think people will be more likely to try to lie their way into a job if the salary is higher.
        geocar 5y ago
        Higher? How much higher? Higher than what? I haven't said what salaries I hire for. This doesn't sound very much like thinking to me.
legalcorrection 5y ago
Hiring easily with an open mind to firing quickly sounds like a good idea but civil rights law, at least in the US, makes it very difficult. Let's say that "fire quickly" is one of the few women or blacks you've hired. Even worse, let's say that the "fire quickly" contingent is disproportionately women or racial minorities, through no fault of your own. I hope you're ready to pay a lawyer and a decent settlement. It doesn't matter whether you've actually done anything wrong. It just comes down to the economics of the chance they draw a sympathetic judge, the chance a jury will buy their sob story, the amount of money it would cost you to litigate the case, and the amount of money they're willing to go away (i.e. settle) for. Hope no one in your workplace sent a stupid joke over email that will make you look awful in front of a jury. That makes the settlement number go up by a lot. You can maybe get away with this practice with a small enough company, but even then, I'd advise extreme caution. If you can filter people out before offering them a job, you're in a much safer position legally. Edit: I think you're in the UK. I don't know much about employment law over there, but I gather the situation is actually better.
- geocar 5y ago
  > Edit: I think you're in the UK. I don't know much about employment law over there, but I gather the situation is actually better. I'm in Portugal actually, but I've lived in the UK and the US (I've actually worked there for almost 20 years). In a past life I was hired as the country manager for a British company working out of New York, and I had to receive training on employment law in both the UK and US because they actually take it very seriously in the UK, much more so than in the US; An employee (or former employee) can ask tribunal to decide if their termination was fair, and they absolutely do look for race and gender selection. I can appreciate Americans might not get a very good education on workers rights, so it is perhaps worth mentioning to an American when I fire someone, I'm doing it after I've had that decision reviewed by council, and with that training. Now when I said they lie to me, perhaps you got some idea that was just my opinion or something. I didn't mean to imply any amount of whimsy and tried to avoid any words that might suggest it; I admitted elsewhere I've fired less than 5 people for lying to me, and that's paper evidence of a lie. I've probably hired hundreds of people at this point in my life, so we're talking about a 1-2% problem where even if we have to pay a six month settlement, that's peanuts compared to what we save: See, if I had to spend 3 hours for each candidate, and maybe out of hundreds of people I've interviewed thousands, we're talking literal years of my life. I can't realistically do anything else with that time. And not just my life- I have a fiduciary duty to the company I work for, I can't in good-conscience spend the money in the budget for my salary to avoid a much smaller potential penalty that probably won't even happen. But I think it's important to think about some of the things you're saying: If someone thinks they're doing what I'm doing, and find themselves firing so many people that there is any racial or gender bias in the pool they're firing then I don't think they're doing what I'm doing. I might even wonder if they're racist or sexist myself, because my point is this shouldn't happen often enough to worry about.

by geocar 5y ago

mchusma 5y ago

I don't know the rest of the process, but 3 hours for an interview seems 100% fine. And practical tests are so much better than random abstract questions IMO. I think your solution is to watch and plan on firing many people within 30 days, which seems worse for everyone.

geocar 5y ago
> I think your solution is to watch and plan on firing many people within 30 days, which seems worse for everyone. Why did you add the word "many" where? I didn't use it. I can count on one hand the number of people who flat-out lied to me about being able to program and I needed to fire them for it, and I've been managing and developing software for around thirty years or so. Do you think that's a lot? Or do you think people lying about what they do is common?
- judahmeek 5y ago
  > Or do you think people lying about what they do is common? Probably depends on the offered salary range.
  - geocar 5y ago
    How do you mean?
    - urbandw311er 5y ago
      He/she means that they think people will be more likely to try to lie their way into a job if the salary is higher.
      - geocar 5y ago
        Higher? How much higher? Higher than what? I haven't said what salaries I hire for. This doesn't sound very much like thinking to me.

legalcorrection 5y ago

Hiring easily with an open mind to firing quickly sounds like a good idea but civil rights law, at least in the US, makes it very difficult. Let's say that "fire quickly" is one of the few women or blacks you've hired. Even worse, let's say that the "fire quickly" contingent is disproportionately women or racial minorities, through no fault of your own. I hope you're ready to pay a lawyer and a decent settlement. It doesn't matter whether you've actually done anything wrong. It just comes down to the economics of the chance they draw a sympathetic judge, the chance a jury will buy their sob story, the amount of money it would cost you to litigate the case, and the amount of money they're willing to go away (i.e. settle) for. Hope no one in your workplace sent a stupid joke over email that will make you look awful in front of a jury. That makes the settlement number go up by a lot. You can maybe get away with this practice with a small enough company, but even then, I'd advise extreme caution. If you can filter people out before offering them a job, you're in a much safer position legally. Edit: I think you're in the UK. I don't know much about employment law over there, but I gather the situation is actually better.

geocar 5y ago
> Edit: I think you're in the UK. I don't know much about employment law over there, but I gather the situation is actually better. I'm in Portugal actually, but I've lived in the UK and the US (I've actually worked there for almost 20 years). In a past life I was hired as the country manager for a British company working out of New York, and I had to receive training on employment law in both the UK and US because they actually take it very seriously in the UK, much more so than in the US; An employee (or former employee) can ask tribunal to decide if their termination was fair, and they absolutely do look for race and gender selection. I can appreciate Americans might not get a very good education on workers rights, so it is perhaps worth mentioning to an American when I fire someone, I'm doing it after I've had that decision reviewed by council, and with that training. Now when I said they lie to me, perhaps you got some idea that was just my opinion or something. I didn't mean to imply any amount of whimsy and tried to avoid any words that might suggest it; I admitted elsewhere I've fired less than 5 people for lying to me, and that's paper evidence of a lie. I've probably hired hundreds of people at this point in my life, so we're talking about a 1-2% problem where even if we have to pay a six month settlement, that's peanuts compared to what we save: See, if I had to spend 3 hours for each candidate, and maybe out of hundreds of people I've interviewed thousands, we're talking literal years of my life. I can't realistically do anything else with that time. And not just my life- I have a fiduciary duty to the company I work for, I can't in good-conscience spend the money in the budget for my salary to avoid a much smaller potential penalty that probably won't even happen. But I think it's important to think about some of the things you're saying: If someone thinks they're doing what I'm doing, and find themselves firing so many people that there is any racial or gender bias in the pool they're firing then I don't think they're doing what I'm doing. I might even wonder if they're racist or sexist myself, because my point is this shouldn't happen often enough to worry about.