3 ms·
I find a simple realignment would solve a lot of this interview angst: Interviewers seem to interview on the premise that they need to find out what the candida
by jerf 2y ago
I find a simple realignment would solve a lot of this interview angst: Interviewers seem to interview on the premise that they need to find out what the candidate can't do. But this is not useful. I can tell you what they can't do. To a first approximation, the answer is "everything". I am an experienced and skillful developer, yadda yadda yadda, and I've never touched React, have no game development experience, have never written kernel code, haven't touched matrices since school, have only dabbled in embedded development as a hobbiest, etc. etc. etc. Make a list of all the things I can't do and I look like an idiot. The list of possible things is too long.
The goal of an interview is to find out what the candidate can do.
If you interview someone, and they "fail all the questions we asked", it is not the candidate who has failed... the interviewer has failed. You ran an entire interview and all you know is what the candidate can't do. You have learned virtually nothing. The questions must be adjusted to what the candidate can do. Only for the absolute worst candidates should you ever exit an interview saying they failed at everything. (Sadly, such candidates do exist. For instance, consider the recent stories about AI fraud. If your level of programming skill is "I have ChatGPT", I'm going to have a hard time scoping a question down to you.)
If I had asked this question in an interview, or a related one, I would have stepped the problem down until the candidate could pick it up. (Odds are I'd have started lower and worked my way up anyhow.) If the candidate then sort of finds their footing and once going can start folding in the other requirements as we go, great. Who sits down and designs a system for all twelve adjectives ("reliable", "concurrent", "redundant", "runs on a Z80") we want anyhow? One can not help but design a system one adjective at a time, with the others only kept in mind to make sure we don't back into a corner. There's no reason not to interview that way too. (And I tell the candidate this is what we're going to do, so hopefully they don't feel like I'm out to get them or experience requirements whiplash without knowing why I'm doing this.)
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoYes this, and to further this, the "can't do" thing that you measured is in fact extremely partial and incomplete: you've measured that the developer can't write an algorithm on a whiteboard with a felt tip marker in front of a stranger they just met. You don't even know if they can't write the algorithm. Just that they can't do it there. Is that important to you? Maybe it is for some people. As a person who has been in team lead and hiring capacity before, it is not for me. I trained for interviewing at Google twice, but never really chose to give interviews despite that being a highly pressured part of the job because I could not philosophically vibe with that process. But what some people who have adopted this process are missing is that Google etc does this only because they are swamped with resumes and have their pick of bazillions of quality engineers. They don't care about false negatives, more false positives. Startups and smaller companies should care about false negatives. It's hard to find and retain good people. Smaller companies need to aggressively find and cultivate good people to make good teams in order to be/stay competitive -- and that means accepting a diversity of ways of working.
- OnionBlender 2y agoI'm glad whiteboard interviews are dead now that everyone does "virtual" on-site interviews. When I interviewed at Google, I requested a laptop because writing on a whiteboard all day hurts my hand. Every interviewer complained about me using a laptop.
- Paul-Craft 2y agoWhat, exactly, was the substance of their complaint(s), if any? Was it just that you made them do their job in a way different from how they are used to?
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoThe "point" of the whiteboard interview is to see how you think and converse and interact around your coding process, not (necessarily) how accurate/good you are at writing the code. You could write pseudocode that can't compile, and as long as you can explain the algorithm and talk about its complexity you could "pass" (in theory) Screening interviews do take place in a shared doc or other editor, I believe.
- Paul-Craft 2y agoI'm sorry, I don't see how that relates to what I was asking. To be clear, I agree, I just don't understand why you chose to write this in reply to what I wrote.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoThe complaint of the interviewers would (likely) be that they want to see the candidate go through the whiteboard process, because of the reasons I gave. It's just part of the process. Writing in an editor takes away their ability to probe that process. Don't get me wrong I think it's silly, but
- 2y ago
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago> Who sits down and designs a system for all twelve adjectives ("reliable", "concurrent", "redundant", "runs on a Z80") we want anyhow? Wait, is Z80 seriously something that you want/design for?
- Paul-Craft 2y agoSounds more like a case of "arson, murder, and jaywalking," applied for its rhetorical effect, to me. :-) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJa...
- belmarca 2y agoI just (barely) failed an automated interview by some company who posted on the last Hiring thread. Their approach was interesting but they definitely measure the wrong thing IMO. They were looking for senior Python devs yet assumed that every senior Python dev knew X, Y or Z Python API/feature by heart. I failed a single question, precisely one where I wasn't familiar with the particulars and couldn't "figure it out" live due to the nature of the platform. I've worked on a Python interpreter (not CPython) for many years now, I just never used that particular module (because we do it differently in our implementation). I suppose businesses try their best, but aren't always measuring what they think they are...
- itronitron 2y agoRelated to not knowing everything, there's also this mal-assumption that if the candidate doesn't know something simple (and obvious to the interviewer) that they will never be able to figure it out on their own.