10 ms·

> 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

• 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.
    • lapcat 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. Most companies will also prefer the candidate who who projects tallness and youth. Maybe these biases are something that companies need to overcome?
      • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        The difference between being confident and anxious almost certainly has a bigger effect on your work than being tall/young and short/old.
        • lapcat 4y ago
          How so? I'm talking specifically about confidence and anxiousness in a job interview. One can be very confident in one's work yet be anxious in a job interview.
          • polalavik 4y ago
            Also someone can be very confident AND incompetent but convince people otherwise - that is, they can convince people that they are fully capable of doing a job they are not capable of.
          • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
            "job interview" is an instance of what someone is anxious about. No one is specifically anxious about job interviews, they're anxious about what occurs during a job interview. Ex: being anxious about a job interview might really mean they get anxious in high pressure situations, talking with unfamiliar people, etc. Depending on the role, these situations could easily be ones you encounter at work as well.
  • lesuorac 4y ago
    I mean what questions are you getting that you freeze up on but could otherwise solve in ~1h? I nearly always use a glorified DFS and I find that roughly - 50% of the candidates cannot write an iterative or recursive function (never mind actually solve the problem). - 15% of the candidates can't figure out how to pass data recursively (i.e. a counter) and resort to a global or do it incorrectly (i.e. pass-by-value which won't work). - 10% start with an iterative solution and change to recursive once they start having trouble (IMO good call but it is solvable iteratively). - 10% actually come up with a completely correct answer. ~ 5% test their solution with non-provided input. Sometimes I do wonder what prep the candidate has been given. A lot of the time they seem afraid to add a new function and instead only modify the provided template (do-able but obviously more difficult).
    • lapcat 4y ago
      > I mean what questions are you getting that you freeze up on but could otherwise solve in ~1h? You're thinking that the difficulty of the question matters, but it doesn't. The difficulty is the situation. You freeze up in an interview, but then immediately after the interview you go back and solve the same problem quickly, because the anxiety is gone, and nobody is standing over you watching. But you don't get a second chance after you're rejected. If you're not anxious, you can solve very hard problems. If you are anxious, you can't solve very easy problems. Many interviewers are astonished that candidates can't do FizzBuzz or whatever, but it's often because these interviewers don't understand fundamental human psychology, and expect everyone to be a robot with no emotions.
      • 331c8c71 4y ago
        Can't upvote enough. I tend to freeze big time in tech/mathy interviews unless I feel there is a good emotional connection with the interviewer.
    • edmcnulty101 4y ago
      Pass data recursively You mean back up the stack via the return statement? or via parameters in the function call?
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    Hiring is about satisficing, not optimizing. As long as your process gets you to a great candidate or two, it works and does all you need even if it filtered out someone who might have been 10% better (because it's not something which is possible to that accuracy during the limited time/effort plausible during an interview, and your final selection would not necessarily pick them) but a process that gets you to a candidate which seems great but has a 10% chance of being totally worthless is costly.
    • lapcat 4y ago
      > Hiring is about satisficing, not optimizing. Yet the OP's suggestion was this: "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." In other words, the OP was recommending satisficing rather than optimizing. Companies waste so much time on interviewing. Their own time and candidate time. Hundreds of interviews, multiple rounds, just a massive amount of time for 1 job. It certainly feels like they're trying to optimize rather than satisfice.
• treeman79 4y ago
  I spent a couple years hiringly crazy at a fast growth startup. After a while it got to the point where I’d walk in give an easy five minute coding exercise walk out and give a thumbs up or down. They could use any language editor or tool they wanted. We even provided a few alternatives they could pick from in case they just had a weird mental block on our preferred one. Others would make sure that they weren’t too insane personality wise. Other team members were constantly shocked by candidates that were verbally great but couldn’t do deal with hashes or arrays at all.
  • gopher_space 4y ago
    > Other team members were constantly shocked by candidates that were verbally great but couldn’t do deal with hashes or arrays at all. Quick questions like this always throw me. I don't think about programming in a way where free floating questions make much sense to me initially.
    • treeman79 4y ago
      A a b b c c c c d e Give me a count of each letter. Give me a function that given a number returns the letters that have that many in it. You have 60 minutes. Any language.
      • popularonion 4y ago
        In my experience interviewing, about 25% of candidates would fail the first part and another 25% would fail the second part. This is after the initial resume screen and sometimes even after they did an online leetcode style test.
        • throwaway6734 4y ago
          Are they just blatantly lying on their resumes?
          • lapcat 4y ago
• lapcat 4y ago
  > Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for? It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you're using FizzBuzz to judge whether people are competent. Programmers aren't stage performers, but companies treat interviews like auditions. Anyone with "performance anxiety" is assumed to be incompetent, which is silly. The tech interview/audition is unnatural and very different from normal work. It's been shown by researchers over and over that interviews test for anxiety, not skills, but interviewers refuse to listen. https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
  • mlboss 4y ago
    We all know interviews are unrealistic. But nobody knows an alternative way of testing a candidate in few hours.
    • 0x20cowboy 4y ago
      It doesn’t work, but we’re going to do it anyway. Science.
    • lapcat 4y ago
      > nobody knows an alternative way of testing a candidate in few hours Why test? Seriously, why are interviews tests? Everyone seems very worried about incompetent job candidates, but what about incompetent colleagues and managers? We act like interviews are one-way when in fact they're two-way, and the candidate needs to decide if they actually want to work for the potential employer. Does the candidate get to test the interviewers? Nobody wants to work with incompetent colleagues, and especially not an incompetent manager, which is the worst. There are a lot of incompetent engineering managers, and indeed I would estimate that engineering managers are more likely to be incompetent than engineers, because engineers are frequently promoted to engineering managers despite having no background or training in management. It's ok though, I'll let the manager do a take home test in their spare time.
      • 4y ago
• VirusNewbie 4y ago
  >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 think that's fair, and why most people aren't against an hour or 90 minute tech screen where someone has to write some code. But I've had to do a 3 hour take home assignment, then an hour long tech screen solving some medium level LC problem, THEN an all day onsite doing design+multiple coding rounds. On top of that there's the randomness factor. I know people who interviewed at FAANGs and basically had to do some easy level graph traversals and some linked list manipulations. Others get asked hard bottom up DP coding questions and need to use Prim's algorithm for MSPs like, wtf lol those are not the same thing.
• ipaddr 4y ago
  Who cares if they can do the job. Someone who has a resume with accomplishments means that person has a proven record of getting the job done. Not being able to do a FAANG FizzBuzz has no relationship to their ability to get the job done. You never hired these people so you have no idea how they would do either. Have you ever heard of someone hiring a surgeon by giving them an over ripe orange and a plastic knife and asking them to cut out every 2nd segment without getting any juice on the table?
  • necubi 4y ago
    Surgeons have to do a 7 year residency before they get hired. There's nothing remotely comparable for software engineers.
    • lapcat 4y ago
      > Surgeons have to do a 7 year residency before they get hired. There's nothing remotely comparable for software engineers. Yet software engineers with 7 years of experience are still assumed to be fakers.
      • nicoburns 4y ago
        Well there are reputable institutions who will vouch for the surgeons experience. Literally anyone can put that they have 7 years experience as a software developer on their cv
        • lapcat 4y ago
          There are reputable institutions who will vouch for the software engineer's experience, namely their previous employers. You can verify previous employment. The previous employer might not say anything else about the candidate, but they can certainly verify that the CV is not just invented.
        • jjav 4y ago
          > Well there are reputable institutions who will vouch for the surgeons experience. Literally anyone can put that they have 7 years experience as a software developer on their cv The reputable institution is called their previous employer(s). If someone has worked for a recognized company for 7 years writing production code, that's the same as the surgeon having done those 7 years in a reputable hospital.
• 0x20cowboy 4y ago
  I would love to see some studies on this. I am almost convinced that the market has made it so people have to lie on their CVs to get through the HR filters to even have a shot. I’ve only ever interviewed people for “normal” level jobs, and I have never once seen someone lie on their resume or even act like they knew something they didn’t. I think big companies either make up this problem, or they created this environment for themselves.
• cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Do you need a full day of interview to screen for FizzBuzz?
• mLuby 4y ago
  Are there actually fizzbuzz-failing candidates with multi-year programming roles on their resumes? I have a hard time believing they exist, excepting blatant fraud.
• throwaway6734 4y ago
  How do they get that far along the interview process?
• hiyer 4y ago
  So an interview like that should be the first, and if they don't clear it, reject them outright. Do the same for every round. I don't know which sadist in HR or management came up with the idea of doing 6-8 mandatory interviews for every candidate and then telling them, "Oh sorry, you're not selected because you didn't do your first (or second) round well". This is an utter waste of time for the interviewers and especially the candidate.
• jjav 4y ago
  > Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? How would you possibly know they can't code basic things? Did you hire them and over many months it turned out they actually can't code a basic thing? Or did you ask some arbitrary algorith memorization question, completely unrelated to the actual job so of course it's not something they do day to day, and they didn't give the perfect performance balanced just right between pretending they haven't seen it before and acting like they're deriving a decade of CS research on the whiteboard in 45 minutes out of the blue? I'm betting on the second.
  • returningfory2 4y ago
    For example, I have interviewed candidates with professional experience who weren't able to correctly write a function to find the minimum element in the array. This is what I meant by "basic things".
    • jjav 4y ago
      I believe it can seem that way in the interview context. But taking a step back and thinking about it: is it really possible for someone to have been writing production code for years and not know how to iterate through an array looking for smallest element? I firmly assert that no, it is not possible. This shouldn't be controversial. Seriously, it's not possible to not know how to do that for anyone who has written more than a few days of casual code, let alone years of professional production code. And yet the interview makes it seem like they can't? Which I'll also believe. So what's going on? What's going on is that the interviews are measuring something entirely different, not programming skill. Which means the interview technique is wrong because it isn't measuring the skills, it's just measuring tolerance to the extreme stress of the interview. Which many conflict-avoiding introvert programmer types are very bad at, even though they are excellent at programming.
      • returningfory2 4y ago
        That seems to be a very theoretical approach to me. But in the end I have literally sat in an interview with someone who has professional experience and who couldn't write a function to find the smallest element in an array without significant help from me. That's just a fact. I'm not sure what the theoretical basis of that was. I'm not sure how the person could have experience and not be able to complete such a simple thing. All I know is that it literally happened. Trying to argue from some theoretical principles that it couldn't have happened doesn't make much sense to me given that, like, it actually happened.