12 ms·

Hiring technical talent: An exercise in clarity, patience, and preparation

86 points by wallflower 4y ago

polalavik 4y ago
I think a more important point that should be added: don't have 500 interviews. Have at most 2 or 3 which altogether should not take more than 2 to 3 hours of somebodys time. I've been to 8 hour all day interviews with a new person every hour 1-on-1. It was demoralizing and exhausting. I've been in interview cycles where I keep "moving up" to meet the next higher up person and the next higher up person to the tune of 3-5 interviews. Stop! You can have a meaningful conversation in 2-3 hours over a couple days. Don't burn peoples time to find a unicorn. Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Totally Agree. The endless interviews are the worst ones, and I've dropped out of cycles before because they were too long. And I like the experiment idea, although I don't think anyone will ever do it without a boatload of cash to risk for no reason.
  - polalavik 4y ago
    True. it just grinds my gears - whats the point of a degree if at the end of the day almost 100% of companies assume I know absolutely nothing and will completely flounder in their company if I cannot jump through their little algorithmic brain-trivia hoops? People talk a lot about the price of college not being worth it and that enrollment is declining because of the price + salaries. I think thats one part. but I'm not sure I've seen a discussion about how nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree Or in job experience, for that matter. "You need to have 10 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, and also we assume you're a liar and discount all experience anyway."
      - polalavik 4y ago
        I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify that pretty anonymously/easily (with the interviewees permission, of course) by acting like a landlord or something, calling the previous employer and asking if $PERSON works/worked for your company and had $TITLE and did they work there $YEARS. That should almost be the first step imo after the quick "are you a person / do you have these skills" interview which is normally reserved for an HR person who doesn't know a bit from a byte. If they picked up the phone, claimed to have some skills, a company they work/worked for genuinely seems to exist and employed them, heck hire them - I bet 9/10 it would work out just fine.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        lesuorac 4y ago
        Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...
- nscalf 4y ago
  I turn down interviews that end up being >4 hours. When you get to a senior engineer level, these interviews cost hundreds to thousands of dollars of our time. Often times technical performance doesn't get you a job, it just keeps your from losing the job. The decision is heavily dependent on how well you got along with the hiring manager and what type of mood they're in when they meet you. If you're unlucky, you'll flounder on one of the esoteric algorithm questions that have little to no correlation to your performance at the job. In this case, you've entirely wasted your time.
- returningfory2 4y ago
  > I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky. Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for? I interview at a FAANG and encounter these candidates all the time. I feel the approach of "if their resume looks good they must be fine technically" makes sense until precisely the point when you interview one of these candidates.
  - polalavik 4y ago
    I agree that incompetent people are out there, but I also think the interview setup is completely unnatural and nerve-racking. I've been working 10 years, can get things up and running pretty fast, learn fast, but I'm super anxious in interview (and I've done hundreds). I'm just an anxious person, so most of the time I completely freeze up. Perhaps finding a better way to interview is a better way to hire for diversity. I think there are two camps of people: truly incompetent liars that look good on paper and people just straight up bad at interviewing who are perfectly qualified. So how do you give the latter a fighting chance?
    - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a thought that's already in their head if someone else starts verbalizing it. On the other hand, no amount of hints can help the truly incompetent liar, since they can't produce any thoughts on how to solve the problem in the first place. The problem is that many (most?) interviewers have no idea how to effectively coax a candidate along. They usually sit there in silence for an awkwardly long period of time and then fail the candidate, or offer totally irrelevant hints that don't reflect how someone would actually think about the problem.
    - throwawayboise 4y ago
      Honestly, most companies will prefer the candidate who projects poise and confidence rather than anxiety, all else being equal. Sorry but that's life. Work on overcoming that.
- mbesto 4y ago
  > Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. My experience is exactly the opposite. Most people are actually incompetent.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I think the applicant pool might be mostly incompetent. I don’t think the employed programmer pool is mostly incompetent. When a competent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies, they probably get hired. When an incompetent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies and doesn’t get an offer, they don’t de-materialize but instead keep applying, adding to the adversity in the pool of applicants.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Are these wealthy applicants who don't need a job? If you're applying for jobs, then you either get a job, in which case you become an employed programmer, and thus competent in your eyes, or you eventually run out of money. Difficult to remain unemployed for a long period of time.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Whether they’re working through their previous severance package or waiting tables, anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired will be over-represented in the application pool, for the exact reason you describe [they need money] plus they are more likely to be involuntarily termed and put back into the pool. It’s not that being employed makes them competent in my eyes, but rather that being competent makes them more likely to be employed.
        lapcat 4y ago
        > anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired What is the average? My impression is that even "top" candidates take a lot of interviews, which gives them a lot of options and possibly multiple job offers that they can use to drive up the price in negotiations.
- bspear 4y ago
  The first product every candidate experiences is the interview loop. If they have a sloppy and redundant loop, it directly impacts the quality of talent they get. People who have lots of options aren't going to put up with BS. Usually also shows they have no idea what they're looking for. Another challenge with hiring, esp. at a startup is that many candidates who "qualify" will not be comfortable joining a startup, so you have to find both high quality and high intent people. There are some solutions that address this like https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ and https://angel.co/ https://angel.co/ to some extent. In general, there needs to be clearer signaling of preferences. Too much time wasted.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  "Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge." Most people cannot code. "higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes" Because many offers would be declined, you would end up with mostly lemons. And the non-lemons would leave due to being surrounded by lemons.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
I’ve been struggling to teach some engineers how to peer review thoroughly. What I realized recently is that it’s really an attitude issue: Do you give a shit, or not? Too much time is spent vetting the unnecessary technical.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  This. Whats funny too that I've learned from my last job hunt is its actually better for my career, money-wise, ladder-climbing-wise, to _not_ care about my job function or knowledge, but rather memorize leetcode and system design solutions. Note this doesn't mean I actually strive to be good at those things over my job though. Just pointing it out, that's what the current technical interview process selects for.
pluc 4y ago
I have 25 years of experience and most interviewers interview me like I'm out of college. It's mildly enterfuriating.
- gopher_space 4y ago
  I'll take that over "guess the keyword in a non-technical project manager's head".
- Kranar 4y ago
  It's because in many cases the years of experience doesn't count for much, that's why. The sad truth is I get plenty of resumes from people with 20+ years of experience and when I interview them to see how they actually write code, the code they write is not much different today than it was 20 years ago. There's a difference between someone who has 20 years of genuine experience, and someone who has 3 years of experience that they've been repeating over and over again, and unfortunately my experience is most people who've been at this job for a long time are simply those who gained a few years of experience until they got to a point of diminishing returns and then allowed their skills to stagnate to the point where a recent grad could easily ramp up to out compete them with about 1 year worth of training and investment.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > a recent grad could easily ramp up to out compete them with about 1 year worth of training and investment. What about if you gave the veteran programmer 1 year worth of training and investment?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kranar 4y ago
      The whole point is that I'm mostly indifferent about whether someone is a veteran programmer with 20 years of experience or is a recent grad with 2-3 years of experience. The number of years of experience matters very little to me. Both get the same technical interview, get asked the same questions, and are evaluated on the same basis.
beebmam 4y ago
>Diversity and inclusion are essential, and should be reflected not only in the job posting but throughout this process. I encourage managers to use take-home exercises as a delta for talking points rather than a pass/fail test. Why? Because you can get deeply skilled engineers who can crush code, but it’s not the only thing that matters in most cases. Strong disagree. I would instantly decline an interview with any company that expected me to do my interview work at home. I'm not going to work at a company that expects me to work off my scheduled hours. Moreover, I find it quite ironic that this take-home interview is somehow supportive of "diversity and inclusion". It seems to me that the people most likely to not have the time to do their interview at home are people with families, and especially women, who often are responsible for much of the house/family work during their non-salaried hours.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Kaze404 4y ago
  I've interviewed for companies that presented this as a choice. You could either do a take home assignment followed by a discussion of your solution or a "standard" technical interview.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 4y ago
If you want to out hire competition the solution is simple. Seek out premium candidates and give them a job offer before you even talk to them. If someone is the head of some product at google and you want them cold email an offer you were always comfortable offering. If they accept or counter or want to talk or engage perfect you beat all the others. It could work for targeting lower paying employees at less known places. If the person is worth at least what you are offering it's a no brainer. If a recruitor reached out to me with an offer in hand even if it was lower than my current pay I would engage knowing they are serious. When they reach out now and still require 4 rounds of interviews it becomes a farce to get someone paid for getting people into a hiring funnel. When a founder reaches out personally you listen.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Most premium candidates won't consider your $Y M in illiquid equity to be actual money. And if you're some no-name startup, they definitely won't even consider you. You can't afford to pay them cash either. I also strongly believe in the 10x programmer idea [1] and you're not even going to come across these people unless you run in the same social circles as them. Some random manager at Google is not necessarily a 10x candidate. It's very difficult to vet potential 10x candidates from just a glance because so many people exaggerate and bullshit on their resumes. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
  - greatpostman 4y ago
    Yup. People get confused. There’s probably more 10x developers at google, but choosing at random is going to get you an average candidate
- akavi 4y ago
  Just anecdata, but I've been given offers without interviews purely on the basis of my resume, and viewed it as a pretty big red flag. I've known enough people who've gotten where they've gotten with little technical ability that I'd be suspicious of a place that doesn't even attempt due diligence.
lordnacho 4y ago
> You can also have an in-depth technical interview that’s just a conversation instead of a pass/go asynchronous take-home exercise. Just a conversation is what I've always found worked. Just two people in the same business discussing some technical topic. What do you like about Rust? Why would you write this system in Java? Blah blah, and if the person doesn't actually know much they will run out of things to say. Sprinkle in some references to ordinary tools like git or gcc, and you can't avoid using industry jargon that will function like a shibboleth. If they know how to do stuff they will know the words you throw at them and throw back some of their own. If they read around their area they will know what the adjacent areas are and they'll have opinions and more keywords. It's not actually simple to make this up, for instance how would you pretend to be a surgeon or a pilot? There'd be a bunch of things you'd have to have heard of, and there isn't going to be a shortcut to knowing what they meant. If they're a bullshitter and they somehow manage to blag themselves a job, they will get found out pretty quickly anyway, definitely before the probation period ends. If they're someone who understands stuff, they'll appreciate talking to a technical peer and that will be part of the draw of working with me.
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  I largely agree, although I have known a strange number of people who like talking about tech and programming, but then can't do basic programming tasks. I don't think it's the norm, so perhaps a good conversation is as good a filter as any.
- tech_tuna 4y ago
  Just went through a round of interviewing. . . it's laughable how the coding interviews go. I did well on some, OK on others and bombed a few too. Yet, in every case, the interviewers put so much weight and faith in the coding challenges. I'm like really people? Can you really tell how good or bad I am in a 35 minute live coding challenge? When I'm working I sometimes make mistakes, sometimes many mistakes and then other times, I crank out a lot of decent code with few mistakes.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    In particular poor code is often only visible as unwieldy architecture. How someone does a little coding challenge does not tell you how they put the whole together, whether that's good or bad.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> The hiring process is more than you evaluating the talent; the talent also evaluates you. Joining a company and a team is a bi-directional relationship. Essential! In fact, I had an interview earlier today. The two FE devs on the other end of Zoom, best I could tell, didn't look at a single repo in my CV. Instead we batted around fluff-ish questions (for the most part) instead of "In the repo in you CV why did you...?" I was disappointed and then some.
kingdomcome50 4y ago
I think There is a fundamental mismatch between the signal an interview can provide and the requirements necessary to be successful on the job. You see and interview is like a “test” or a “pop quiz” where the day to day is more like “homework”. That is, you want to hire people who do their homework, but the only reasonable method to evaluate a candidate is to give them a test. And while a “high test score” may serve as a proxy for “completes homework”, as we all know, it’s far from perfect. The unfortunate reality is that the best process for determining the quality of a candidate benefits neither the candidate nor the company. That is some sort of paid-trial-period-type arrangement to evaluate fit. So we are left with these gauntlets of an interview process because it kind of splits the baby…
- angarg12 4y ago
  I've seen this idea of trial periods floated around a bit. My honest question is, how do you run this at big tech scale? Honestly, we get dozens if not hundreds of applicants per opening. Are we going to give all of them a trial? If not, how do we choose which ones? Again we are back at square 1.
twohaibei 4y ago
This article would be much more convincing if I didn't have fresh experience recruiting to netlify. They didn't even bother to send the automated email with rejection, and my experience pretty much 100% matched the job description. Pretty good example of corporate "Lets write article to gain some PR points".

86 points by wallflower 4y ago

I think a more important point that should be added: don't have 500 interviews. Have at most 2 or 3 which altogether should not take more than 2 to 3 hours of somebodys time. I've been to 8 hour all day interviews with a new person every hour 1-on-1. It was demoralizing and exhausting. I've been in interview cycles where I keep "moving up" to meet the next higher up person and the next higher up person to the tune of 3-5 interviews. Stop! You can have a meaningful conversation in 2-3 hours over a couple days. Don't burn peoples time to find a unicorn. Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky.

Ancalagon 4y ago
Totally Agree. The endless interviews are the worst ones, and I've dropped out of cycles before because they were too long. And I like the experiment idea, although I don't think anyone will ever do it without a boatload of cash to risk for no reason.
- polalavik 4y ago
  True. it just grinds my gears - whats the point of a degree if at the end of the day almost 100% of companies assume I know absolutely nothing and will completely flounder in their company if I cannot jump through their little algorithmic brain-trivia hoops? People talk a lot about the price of college not being worth it and that enrollment is declining because of the price + salaries. I think thats one part. but I'm not sure I've seen a discussion about how nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree Or in job experience, for that matter. "You need to have 10 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, and also we assume you're a liar and discount all experience anyway."
    - polalavik 4y ago
      I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify that pretty anonymously/easily (with the interviewees permission, of course) by acting like a landlord or something, calling the previous employer and asking if $PERSON works/worked for your company and had $TITLE and did they work there $YEARS. That should almost be the first step imo after the quick "are you a person / do you have these skills" interview which is normally reserved for an HR person who doesn't know a bit from a byte. If they picked up the phone, claimed to have some skills, a company they work/worked for genuinely seems to exist and employed them, heck hire them - I bet 9/10 it would work out just fine.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...
nscalf 4y ago
I turn down interviews that end up being >4 hours. When you get to a senior engineer level, these interviews cost hundreds to thousands of dollars of our time. Often times technical performance doesn't get you a job, it just keeps your from losing the job. The decision is heavily dependent on how well you got along with the hiring manager and what type of mood they're in when they meet you. If you're unlucky, you'll flounder on one of the esoteric algorithm questions that have little to no correlation to your performance at the job. In this case, you've entirely wasted your time.
returningfory2 4y ago
> I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky. Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for? I interview at a FAANG and encounter these candidates all the time. I feel the approach of "if their resume looks good they must be fine technically" makes sense until precisely the point when you interview one of these candidates.
- polalavik 4y ago
  I agree that incompetent people are out there, but I also think the interview setup is completely unnatural and nerve-racking. I've been working 10 years, can get things up and running pretty fast, learn fast, but I'm super anxious in interview (and I've done hundreds). I'm just an anxious person, so most of the time I completely freeze up. Perhaps finding a better way to interview is a better way to hire for diversity. I think there are two camps of people: truly incompetent liars that look good on paper and people just straight up bad at interviewing who are perfectly qualified. So how do you give the latter a fighting chance?
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a thought that's already in their head if someone else starts verbalizing it. On the other hand, no amount of hints can help the truly incompetent liar, since they can't produce any thoughts on how to solve the problem in the first place. The problem is that many (most?) interviewers have no idea how to effectively coax a candidate along. They usually sit there in silence for an awkwardly long period of time and then fail the candidate, or offer totally irrelevant hints that don't reflect how someone would actually think about the problem.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    Honestly, most companies will prefer the candidate who projects poise and confidence rather than anxiety, all else being equal. Sorry but that's life. Work on overcoming that.
mbesto 4y ago
> Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. My experience is exactly the opposite. Most people are actually incompetent.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think the applicant pool might be mostly incompetent. I don’t think the employed programmer pool is mostly incompetent. When a competent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies, they probably get hired. When an incompetent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies and doesn’t get an offer, they don’t de-materialize but instead keep applying, adding to the adversity in the pool of applicants.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Are these wealthy applicants who don't need a job? If you're applying for jobs, then you either get a job, in which case you become an employed programmer, and thus competent in your eyes, or you eventually run out of money. Difficult to remain unemployed for a long period of time.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Whether they’re working through their previous severance package or waiting tables, anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired will be over-represented in the application pool, for the exact reason you describe [they need money] plus they are more likely to be involuntarily termed and put back into the pool. It’s not that being employed makes them competent in my eyes, but rather that being competent makes them more likely to be employed.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired What is the average? My impression is that even "top" candidates take a lot of interviews, which gives them a lot of options and possibly multiple job offers that they can use to drive up the price in negotiations.
bspear 4y ago
The first product every candidate experiences is the interview loop. If they have a sloppy and redundant loop, it directly impacts the quality of talent they get. People who have lots of options aren't going to put up with BS. Usually also shows they have no idea what they're looking for. Another challenge with hiring, esp. at a startup is that many candidates who "qualify" will not be comfortable joining a startup, so you have to find both high quality and high intent people. There are some solutions that address this like https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ and https://angel.co/ https://angel.co/ to some extent. In general, there needs to be clearer signaling of preferences. Too much time wasted.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
"Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge." Most people cannot code. "higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes" Because many offers would be declined, you would end up with mostly lemons. And the non-lemons would leave due to being surrounded by lemons.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

I’ve been struggling to teach some engineers how to peer review thoroughly. What I realized recently is that it’s really an attitude issue: Do you give a shit, or not? Too much time is spent vetting the unnecessary technical.

Ancalagon 4y ago
This. Whats funny too that I've learned from my last job hunt is its actually better for my career, money-wise, ladder-climbing-wise, to _not_ care about my job function or knowledge, but rather memorize leetcode and system design solutions. Note this doesn't mean I actually strive to be good at those things over my job though. Just pointing it out, that's what the current technical interview process selects for.

pluc 4y ago

I have 25 years of experience and most interviewers interview me like I'm out of college. It's mildly enterfuriating.

gopher_space 4y ago
I'll take that over "guess the keyword in a non-technical project manager's head".
Kranar 4y ago
It's because in many cases the years of experience doesn't count for much, that's why. The sad truth is I get plenty of resumes from people with 20+ years of experience and when I interview them to see how they actually write code, the code they write is not much different today than it was 20 years ago. There's a difference between someone who has 20 years of genuine experience, and someone who has 3 years of experience that they've been repeating over and over again, and unfortunately my experience is most people who've been at this job for a long time are simply those who gained a few years of experience until they got to a point of diminishing returns and then allowed their skills to stagnate to the point where a recent grad could easily ramp up to out compete them with about 1 year worth of training and investment.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > a recent grad could easily ramp up to out compete them with about 1 year worth of training and investment. What about if you gave the veteran programmer 1 year worth of training and investment?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kranar 4y ago
    The whole point is that I'm mostly indifferent about whether someone is a veteran programmer with 20 years of experience or is a recent grad with 2-3 years of experience. The number of years of experience matters very little to me. Both get the same technical interview, get asked the same questions, and are evaluated on the same basis.

beebmam 4y ago

>Diversity and inclusion are essential, and should be reflected not only in the job posting but throughout this process. I encourage managers to use take-home exercises as a delta for talking points rather than a pass/fail test. Why? Because you can get deeply skilled engineers who can crush code, but it’s not the only thing that matters in most cases. Strong disagree. I would instantly decline an interview with any company that expected me to do my interview work at home. I'm not going to work at a company that expects me to work off my scheduled hours. Moreover, I find it quite ironic that this take-home interview is somehow supportive of "diversity and inclusion". It seems to me that the people most likely to not have the time to do their interview at home are people with families, and especially women, who often are responsible for much of the house/family work during their non-salaried hours.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Kaze404 4y ago
I've interviewed for companies that presented this as a choice. You could either do a take home assignment followed by a discussion of your solution or a "standard" technical interview.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ipaddr 4y ago

If you want to out hire competition the solution is simple. Seek out premium candidates and give them a job offer before you even talk to them. If someone is the head of some product at google and you want them cold email an offer you were always comfortable offering. If they accept or counter or want to talk or engage perfect you beat all the others. It could work for targeting lower paying employees at less known places. If the person is worth at least what you are offering it's a no brainer. If a recruitor reached out to me with an offer in hand even if it was lower than my current pay I would engage knowing they are serious. When they reach out now and still require 4 rounds of interviews it becomes a farce to get someone paid for getting people into a hiring funnel. When a founder reaches out personally you listen.

ceeplusplus 4y ago
Most premium candidates won't consider your $Y M in illiquid equity to be actual money. And if you're some no-name startup, they definitely won't even consider you. You can't afford to pay them cash either. I also strongly believe in the 10x programmer idea [1] and you're not even going to come across these people unless you run in the same social circles as them. Some random manager at Google is not necessarily a 10x candidate. It's very difficult to vet potential 10x candidates from just a glance because so many people exaggerate and bullshit on their resumes. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Yup. People get confused. There’s probably more 10x developers at google, but choosing at random is going to get you an average candidate
akavi 4y ago
Just anecdata, but I've been given offers without interviews purely on the basis of my resume, and viewed it as a pretty big red flag. I've known enough people who've gotten where they've gotten with little technical ability that I'd be suspicious of a place that doesn't even attempt due diligence.

lordnacho 4y ago

> You can also have an in-depth technical interview that’s just a conversation instead of a pass/go asynchronous take-home exercise. Just a conversation is what I've always found worked. Just two people in the same business discussing some technical topic. What do you like about Rust? Why would you write this system in Java? Blah blah, and if the person doesn't actually know much they will run out of things to say. Sprinkle in some references to ordinary tools like git or gcc, and you can't avoid using industry jargon that will function like a shibboleth. If they know how to do stuff they will know the words you throw at them and throw back some of their own. If they read around their area they will know what the adjacent areas are and they'll have opinions and more keywords. It's not actually simple to make this up, for instance how would you pretend to be a surgeon or a pilot? There'd be a bunch of things you'd have to have heard of, and there isn't going to be a shortcut to knowing what they meant. If they're a bullshitter and they somehow manage to blag themselves a job, they will get found out pretty quickly anyway, definitely before the probation period ends. If they're someone who understands stuff, they'll appreciate talking to a technical peer and that will be part of the draw of working with me.

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
I largely agree, although I have known a strange number of people who like talking about tech and programming, but then can't do basic programming tasks. I don't think it's the norm, so perhaps a good conversation is as good a filter as any.
tech_tuna 4y ago
Just went through a round of interviewing. . . it's laughable how the coding interviews go. I did well on some, OK on others and bombed a few too. Yet, in every case, the interviewers put so much weight and faith in the coding challenges. I'm like really people? Can you really tell how good or bad I am in a 35 minute live coding challenge? When I'm working I sometimes make mistakes, sometimes many mistakes and then other times, I crank out a lot of decent code with few mistakes.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  In particular poor code is often only visible as unwieldy architecture. How someone does a little coding challenge does not tell you how they put the whole together, whether that's good or bad.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> The hiring process is more than you evaluating the talent; the talent also evaluates you. Joining a company and a team is a bi-directional relationship. Essential! In fact, I had an interview earlier today. The two FE devs on the other end of Zoom, best I could tell, didn't look at a single repo in my CV. Instead we batted around fluff-ish questions (for the most part) instead of "In the repo in you CV why did you...?" I was disappointed and then some.

kingdomcome50 4y ago

I think There is a fundamental mismatch between the signal an interview can provide and the requirements necessary to be successful on the job. You see and interview is like a “test” or a “pop quiz” where the day to day is more like “homework”. That is, you want to hire people who do their homework, but the only reasonable method to evaluate a candidate is to give them a test. And while a “high test score” may serve as a proxy for “completes homework”, as we all know, it’s far from perfect. The unfortunate reality is that the best process for determining the quality of a candidate benefits neither the candidate nor the company. That is some sort of paid-trial-period-type arrangement to evaluate fit. So we are left with these gauntlets of an interview process because it kind of splits the baby…

angarg12 4y ago
I've seen this idea of trial periods floated around a bit. My honest question is, how do you run this at big tech scale? Honestly, we get dozens if not hundreds of applicants per opening. Are we going to give all of them a trial? If not, how do we choose which ones? Again we are back at square 1.

twohaibei 4y ago

This article would be much more convincing if I didn't have fresh experience recruiting to netlify. They didn't even bother to send the automated email with rejection, and my experience pretty much 100% matched the job description. Pretty good example of corporate "Lets write article to gain some PR points".