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That's an interesting approach. In an interview, you generally drive the discussion a certain way to gather data points for your rubric. Wouldn't this happen in

That's an interesting approach. In an interview, you generally drive the discussion a certain way to gather data points for your rubric. Wouldn't this happen in your case? If yes, how is it different from an interview? Otherwise, how do you evaluate candidates who solve the problem but don't seem to communicate much about it.

tptacek 3y ago
Nope! It's complicated. We put a lot of effort into deprogramming candidates before the simulation (we call it a "workday"). If you join the Slack channel for a workday and wait for us to ask you questions, almost nothing will happen. The candidate drives, apart from the brief we provide at the beginning of the session. The rubric heavily draws from what questions the candidate asks, and which topics they choose to zoom in and spend time on. It's interesting; I warn candidates that studying for it ahead of time (for instance: for a long time our workdays were all based on a block storage problem) puts you at a disadvantage, by robbing you of good questions to ask. It's not a big disadvantage, but interview-style preparation isn't doing much to help you either. I'm always reluctant to talk too much about the workday process, in particular because the more I describe it the less chill it sounds. In reality, it's you joining a Slack channel with an engineer from our team and just shooting the shit about something we're (in the simulation) planning to build. A lot of what that challenge is evaluating is communication. We're an all-remote company with team members in virtually ever time zone; being able to work out in the open in the environment we've created is important. I think our workdays are a pretty quirky feature of our process. You could instead do a scripted interview, where everybody gets precisely the same questions or prompts. The big thing we do with the workday that I think everyone should clone is: deliver the interview over Slack, and don't allow the person delivering the interview to grade it; instead, have someone else grade from the transcript. It was like a light went off (on?) for us when we figured out to stop having workday participants offer performance feedback about candidates. (One thing you immediately get from it is a process to iterate on the quality of your staff delivering the workday/interview; you can immediately see which team members click with candidates and which don't, and then nudge people in the right direction. It is wild to me that people do free-form interviews without this kind of iteration system in place.)
- afpx 3y ago
  I love that high-profile people like you are taking risks and innovating with hiring. Thank you. I'm hoping to see some change in the industry. There are probably a lot of high-performing people who have little motivation to go through the normal interview process.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    In fairness, there are people who show really well in the "conventional" interview-driven process that aren't super motivated to go through ours. We come close to achieving a free lunch, but still only approach it asymptotically.

tptacek 3y ago

Nope! It's complicated. We put a lot of effort into deprogramming candidates before the simulation (we call it a "workday"). If you join the Slack channel for a workday and wait for us to ask you questions, almost nothing will happen. The candidate drives, apart from the brief we provide at the beginning of the session. The rubric heavily draws from what questions the candidate asks, and which topics they choose to zoom in and spend time on. It's interesting; I warn candidates that studying for it ahead of time (for instance: for a long time our workdays were all based on a block storage problem) puts you at a disadvantage, by robbing you of good questions to ask. It's not a big disadvantage, but interview-style preparation isn't doing much to help you either. I'm always reluctant to talk too much about the workday process, in particular because the more I describe it the less chill it sounds. In reality, it's you joining a Slack channel with an engineer from our team and just shooting the shit about something we're (in the simulation) planning to build. A lot of what that challenge is evaluating is communication. We're an all-remote company with team members in virtually ever time zone; being able to work out in the open in the environment we've created is important. I think our workdays are a pretty quirky feature of our process. You could instead do a scripted interview, where everybody gets precisely the same questions or prompts. The big thing we do with the workday that I think everyone should clone is: deliver the interview over Slack, and don't allow the person delivering the interview to grade it; instead, have someone else grade from the transcript. It was like a light went off (on?) for us when we figured out to stop having workday participants offer performance feedback about candidates. (One thing you immediately get from it is a process to iterate on the quality of your staff delivering the workday/interview; you can immediately see which team members click with candidates and which don't, and then nudge people in the right direction. It is wild to me that people do free-form interviews without this kind of iteration system in place.)

afpx 3y ago
I love that high-profile people like you are taking risks and innovating with hiring. Thank you. I'm hoping to see some change in the industry. There are probably a lot of high-performing people who have little motivation to go through the normal interview process.
- tptacek 3y ago
  In fairness, there are people who show really well in the "conventional" interview-driven process that aren't super motivated to go through ours. We come close to achieving a free lunch, but still only approach it asymptotically.