7 ms·

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair t

Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? How do they really tell anything about the person, other than the fact they are good at interviews? How is it fair that all the other people queued up to interview didn’t get a shot because they didn’t do as well in a 5 minute high pressure period? This 5 minutes probably determined the courses of their lives. What the fuck? Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interviews and tests? I just cannot do them, I need time and space to think.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
> Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interviews and tests? Yes. You're at worst the average, at best part of the majority. Almost everyone sucks at interviews and most job hiring processes are incredibly degrading. Feedback is terrible (includes no feedback). Hiring managers are all looking for different things, either subtly or wildly. Onus to get good at interviews is entirely on the individual, not on the company to make the process less of a hellscape. Hiring managers are largely biased, untrained, as are most interview processes. Many aspects of interview processes aren't even grounded in reality. But almost nobody is talking about this as it's just something you "get done" and "bite through" once every N years. Plenty of perfectly capable people fall to the wayside and are told they are the problem. Or worse, you get a bunch of (LinkedIn) thought leaders trying to gaslight everyone into thinking corporate holds the truth and the remainder of us are peasants who simply don't understand.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  Devil's Advocate: It's never been as easy to interview with multiple companies as it is now. It's a numbers game, and I would (and have) had interviews purely for practice, or our of curiosity about some companies tech stack. If you make it all about the numbers, suddenly you feel less bad about blowing an interview, or filtering bad ones out early in the process. > not on the company to make the process less of a hellscape. I mean, they do suffer in the long term. Companies after all, are the products of their hiring processes.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I also need "time and space to think" (and so would most people), but given the choice between someone who needs time and space to think, and someone who doesn't (either works well under extreme pressure or is just that self-confident), who would you choose? Sure interviews are unfair (there are many problems like the one described in TFA, as well as people who just practice the skill), but are there better options?
- abirch 4y ago
  Contract to hire. My best jobs came this way, but I understand it's not for everyone.
  - johnsanders 4y ago
    Yep. No way on earth I would have gotten the job I have if I'd been in the recruiting cattle call.
- joeman1000 4y ago
  I’d pick the person who can prove themselves capable in their own way. Their tyrannical measure of capability simply rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I should not be pushed aside because I’ve got anxiety issues stopping me from jumping through their fucking little hoop.
  - pc86 4y ago
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  You should assume that someone who impresses you without needing time to think likely knew the answer already.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  > but given the choice between someone who needs time and space to think, and someone who doesn't. I’ve worked with people who needed time to think, but at the end of that time came up with better solutions than the people who were quicker. High pressure leetcode tests select for a specific type of thinker who may or may not be good at solving the problems you’re actually hiring them for. > but are there better options I’ve had success pair programming together on a problem you both don’t know the immediate answer to. I’ve also had success with allowing candidates to choose take home assignments. I’ve also had success doing what every other other industry does: trust their resume, ask them to talk me through projects, and talk to references. Then fire them quickly if it turns out they are one of those dreaded fake programmers that everyone is worried about.
rapind 4y ago
It’s fair in that the company also suffers from the wrong talent measurements. That they can get away with such a bad measurement though just shows that there’s a large gap between the costs per and profits per developer.
- joeman1000 4y ago
  Yeah: they’re literally filtering incredibly talented but shy people and taking people who are good at bullshitting and potentially are talented. It’s really not fair for people who have a lot to offer, just not in a highly anxiety-inducing 5 minute time slot.
pc86 4y ago
This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive. This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence. We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each variable going into the equation with which we filter false positives. Layering proxy on proxy doesn't guarantee an increase in the ratio of true positives to false positives. All these variables are costly and subject to diminishing returns. At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. If you're a big corp like MS getting at least a few dozen candidates after initial automated filters, that's one thing. If you're a relative no-name with a handful of candidates and a fat management layer pulling these shenanigans, it's about time we get real and call them out.
  - 542458 4y ago
    > At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressure against it. Furthermore, I think a lot of people can attest to working with both very good and bad developers on the same team - so even inside a workplace you see a range of individual productivity.
    - 4y ago
psyfi 4y ago
> Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? They are not, and no company cares about fairness
mewse 4y ago
I once worked at a tech-focused games company (sadly no longer existing) which had the best interview process I’ve ever seen. They had this massive programmer test. It was something like 40 pages long, hardcopy, double-sided. With answers needing to be written on the test generally in essay format; no computer allowed (and so no real coding involved; it was all about concepts and not about syntax). It covered everything; math, physics, logic, sound, calculus, hardware, etc. The thing was so long that we estimated it’d take a really strong applicant about four hours to complete the whole thing if they somehow were experts on all the topics simultaneously. We informed the applicants about the test’s length upfront; that it was designed to be a 4 hour test, and that they were only going to get to spend one hour and that we absolutely didn’t expect them to know everything (or even most things) on it. That the point was for them to pick the questions they were most interested in and to only work on those ones. And then we never formally scored the test. Instead, we basically used it as a conversation-starter for the interview which immediately followed the test, using it as a springboard to talk about their understanding and skills and why they had selected to do one section over another, or about particular questions which they’d provided interesting (or problematic) answers to. The “here are a whole lot of questions, answer whichever ones you want, you can’t answer them all and we’re not scoring you on how many you get right” approach always felt kind of ‘fair’ to me in a way that pure interviews or coding questions never did, for me. (caveat: I wasn’t hired using that test; I had been hired as a junior long before, based on my portfolio and a short interview, and the folks who did get hired via taking the test may not have liked it as much as I did. But I loved that it didn’t hang everything on a single gimmick code question the way I’d seen from a whole lot of other companies)
- samatman 4y ago
  Do you mean by hand, with a pen? The least I would do is politely decline such an interview. I would be sorely tempted to give them the choice between letting me use a keyboard or hearing from an ADA lawyer.
  - codesnik 4y ago
    wow. Does ADA lawyer thing work with whiteboard interviews? I'm only half-sarcastic, I hate my handwriting and this makes whiteboard interviews double hard for me.
throwaway09223 4y ago
Interviews often aren't fair. However, they don't have to be quiz-style. When I conduct interviews I simply have conversations to explore subjects as if I were talking about an issue with a coworker. I tell them directly that my goal as an interviewer is to give them an opportunity to showcase something they know so I can say good things about them. I give the interviewee a choice of subjects and I let them change the subject. If the interviewee doesn't know something, I explain it. We work together, as partners, to find their strongest area -- and then we pursue it until we reach a limit. I also tell them that I will keep exploring the subject in question until we run into things they don't know, or that I don't know. I reassure them that I expect to reach a point in our conversation where we just say "I don't know" and that it's totally OK and expected. After the interview, I assess the communication. What did they know? What did they ask? And perhaps most important: What did they learn? Were they defensive about the boundaries of their knowledge, and how did they deal with that? I find I usually have a very detailed understanding about the interviewee's areas of competence as well as their communication abilities. A strong communicator and learner is far more valuable than someone who can recite a few technical details. I think quiz or challenge style interviews are easier. The interviewee doesn't need to be skilled and doesn't need to risk exposing their own ignorance on a subject - often nontechnical recruiters administer these. They can be used to maintain an illusion of superiority on part of the interviewer and company. It's perhaps a similar defensive dynamic as which keeps peer teams from openly interacting and problem-solving, when teams challenge one another with problems rather than opening up about what they know and what they want to know.
- stevage 4y ago
  That sounds like a really useful, interesting, and perhaps even fun technique.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  You are criticizing the "quiz or challenge" style interviews, but you are basically describing a quiz interview. I don't think that most people just expect you to know the answer (like they may in other industries or even government). They expect you to don't know the answer, and then they will try to lead you to it and see your thought process. At least this is my style too.
jimmaswell 4y ago
I'm honestly disappointed that I've never faced an interview with a question like this. I think this kind of test is fun and a good chance to show off liquid thinking skills. I did them for practice for a while in college preparing for the job market but then it just never came up. Solving a toy problem on the fly in a language you're going to be working in seems totally fair and reasonable to me.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

> Does anyone feel as flabbergasted about interviews and tests? Yes. You're at worst the average, at best part of the majority. Almost everyone sucks at interviews and most job hiring processes are incredibly degrading. Feedback is terrible (includes no feedback). Hiring managers are all looking for different things, either subtly or wildly. Onus to get good at interviews is entirely on the individual, not on the company to make the process less of a hellscape. Hiring managers are largely biased, untrained, as are most interview processes. Many aspects of interview processes aren't even grounded in reality. But almost nobody is talking about this as it's just something you "get done" and "bite through" once every N years. Plenty of perfectly capable people fall to the wayside and are told they are the problem. Or worse, you get a bunch of (LinkedIn) thought leaders trying to gaslight everyone into thinking corporate holds the truth and the remainder of us are peasants who simply don't understand.

anothernewdude 4y ago
Devil's Advocate: It's never been as easy to interview with multiple companies as it is now. It's a numbers game, and I would (and have) had interviews purely for practice, or our of curiosity about some companies tech stack. If you make it all about the numbers, suddenly you feel less bad about blowing an interview, or filtering bad ones out early in the process. > not on the company to make the process less of a hellscape. I mean, they do suffer in the long term. Companies after all, are the products of their hiring processes.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

I also need "time and space to think" (and so would most people), but given the choice between someone who needs time and space to think, and someone who doesn't (either works well under extreme pressure or is just that self-confident), who would you choose? Sure interviews are unfair (there are many problems like the one described in TFA, as well as people who just practice the skill), but are there better options?

abirch 4y ago
Contract to hire. My best jobs came this way, but I understand it's not for everyone.
- johnsanders 4y ago
  Yep. No way on earth I would have gotten the job I have if I'd been in the recruiting cattle call.
joeman1000 4y ago
I’d pick the person who can prove themselves capable in their own way. Their tyrannical measure of capability simply rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I should not be pushed aside because I’ve got anxiety issues stopping me from jumping through their fucking little hoop.
- pc86 4y ago
devoutsalsa 4y ago
You should assume that someone who impresses you without needing time to think likely knew the answer already.
sarchertech 4y ago
> but given the choice between someone who needs time and space to think, and someone who doesn't. I’ve worked with people who needed time to think, but at the end of that time came up with better solutions than the people who were quicker. High pressure leetcode tests select for a specific type of thinker who may or may not be good at solving the problems you’re actually hiring them for. > but are there better options I’ve had success pair programming together on a problem you both don’t know the immediate answer to. I’ve also had success with allowing candidates to choose take home assignments. I’ve also had success doing what every other other industry does: trust their resume, ask them to talk me through projects, and talk to references. Then fire them quickly if it turns out they are one of those dreaded fake programmers that everyone is worried about.

rapind 4y ago

It’s fair in that the company also suffers from the wrong talent measurements. That they can get away with such a bad measurement though just shows that there’s a large gap between the costs per and profits per developer.

joeman1000 4y ago
Yeah: they’re literally filtering incredibly talented but shy people and taking people who are good at bullshitting and potentially are talented. It’s really not fair for people who have a lot to offer, just not in a highly anxiety-inducing 5 minute time slot.

pc86 4y ago

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive. This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence. We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each variable going into the equation with which we filter false positives. Layering proxy on proxy doesn't guarantee an increase in the ratio of true positives to false positives. All these variables are costly and subject to diminishing returns. At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. If you're a big corp like MS getting at least a few dozen candidates after initial automated filters, that's one thing. If you're a relative no-name with a handful of candidates and a fat management layer pulling these shenanigans, it's about time we get real and call them out.
- 542458 4y ago
  > At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressure against it. Furthermore, I think a lot of people can attest to working with both very good and bad developers on the same team - so even inside a workplace you see a range of individual productivity.
  - 4y ago

psyfi 4y ago

> Ok, so how are interviews fair at all then? They are not, and no company cares about fairness

mewse 4y ago

I once worked at a tech-focused games company (sadly no longer existing) which had the best interview process I’ve ever seen. They had this massive programmer test. It was something like 40 pages long, hardcopy, double-sided. With answers needing to be written on the test generally in essay format; no computer allowed (and so no real coding involved; it was all about concepts and not about syntax). It covered everything; math, physics, logic, sound, calculus, hardware, etc. The thing was so long that we estimated it’d take a really strong applicant about four hours to complete the whole thing if they somehow were experts on all the topics simultaneously. We informed the applicants about the test’s length upfront; that it was designed to be a 4 hour test, and that they were only going to get to spend one hour and that we absolutely didn’t expect them to know everything (or even most things) on it. That the point was for them to pick the questions they were most interested in and to only work on those ones. And then we never formally scored the test. Instead, we basically used it as a conversation-starter for the interview which immediately followed the test, using it as a springboard to talk about their understanding and skills and why they had selected to do one section over another, or about particular questions which they’d provided interesting (or problematic) answers to. The “here are a whole lot of questions, answer whichever ones you want, you can’t answer them all and we’re not scoring you on how many you get right” approach always felt kind of ‘fair’ to me in a way that pure interviews or coding questions never did, for me. (caveat: I wasn’t hired using that test; I had been hired as a junior long before, based on my portfolio and a short interview, and the folks who did get hired via taking the test may not have liked it as much as I did. But I loved that it didn’t hang everything on a single gimmick code question the way I’d seen from a whole lot of other companies)

samatman 4y ago
Do you mean by hand, with a pen? The least I would do is politely decline such an interview. I would be sorely tempted to give them the choice between letting me use a keyboard or hearing from an ADA lawyer.
- codesnik 4y ago
  wow. Does ADA lawyer thing work with whiteboard interviews? I'm only half-sarcastic, I hate my handwriting and this makes whiteboard interviews double hard for me.

throwaway09223 4y ago

Interviews often aren't fair. However, they don't have to be quiz-style. When I conduct interviews I simply have conversations to explore subjects as if I were talking about an issue with a coworker. I tell them directly that my goal as an interviewer is to give them an opportunity to showcase something they know so I can say good things about them. I give the interviewee a choice of subjects and I let them change the subject. If the interviewee doesn't know something, I explain it. We work together, as partners, to find their strongest area -- and then we pursue it until we reach a limit. I also tell them that I will keep exploring the subject in question until we run into things they don't know, or that I don't know. I reassure them that I expect to reach a point in our conversation where we just say "I don't know" and that it's totally OK and expected. After the interview, I assess the communication. What did they know? What did they ask? And perhaps most important: What did they learn? Were they defensive about the boundaries of their knowledge, and how did they deal with that? I find I usually have a very detailed understanding about the interviewee's areas of competence as well as their communication abilities. A strong communicator and learner is far more valuable than someone who can recite a few technical details. I think quiz or challenge style interviews are easier. The interviewee doesn't need to be skilled and doesn't need to risk exposing their own ignorance on a subject - often nontechnical recruiters administer these. They can be used to maintain an illusion of superiority on part of the interviewer and company. It's perhaps a similar defensive dynamic as which keeps peer teams from openly interacting and problem-solving, when teams challenge one another with problems rather than opening up about what they know and what they want to know.

stevage 4y ago
That sounds like a really useful, interesting, and perhaps even fun technique.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
You are criticizing the "quiz or challenge" style interviews, but you are basically describing a quiz interview. I don't think that most people just expect you to know the answer (like they may in other industries or even government). They expect you to don't know the answer, and then they will try to lead you to it and see your thought process. At least this is my style too.

jimmaswell 4y ago

I'm honestly disappointed that I've never faced an interview with a question like this. I think this kind of test is fun and a good chance to show off liquid thinking skills. I did them for practice for a while in college preparing for the job market but then it just never came up. Solving a toy problem on the fly in a language you're going to be working in seems totally fair and reasonable to me.