8 ms·

it’s not a good thing to refuse to hire older people and most older people do not pass leetcode without significant grinding

• randomgiy3142 2y ago
  Yeah my first response to 99% of these kind of interview questions is why? I look at ROI and how working code impacts budget and investment. It pains me to say it but the biggest companies out there have horrible code in COBOL that frankly doesn’t make sense to change it over. Similarly bug squashing usually is how did it pass QA/static analysis/dev ops.
• saagarjha 2y ago
  I don't think replacing an interview that fails older people that instead fails younger people is a good solution.
  • lmz 2y ago
    I thought the point of affirmative action was that being unfair is ok if it is to compensate for a prior unfairness.
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      We don’t typically do affirmative action by picking interview questions that make things harder for some candidates as opposed to others, though. We consider some questions to be easier for, say, men to answer (“tell me about a time you were asked to demonstrate leadership”) but we seek to remove that bias rather than asking questions that solely focus on things that can only be answered by those who experienced bias (e.g. “tell me about a time you experienced racism that affected your work” is not likely to be an interview question).
  • lapcat 2y ago
    What do you think is a good solution?
    • bluGill 2y ago
      Number one: there is research on how to interview find it and read it. All comments I've seen here give no indication that the commenter is even aware of it. I'm aware the research exists, but I have not read it (my company trained me in interviewing, and the class mentioned research but I haven't checked to see if it is the latest research that I'm trained in) If the above doesn't answer your question, then different questions for different levels. You should know if you are hiring a junior, mid, or senior engineer. (you may have different levels), and ask them different questions.
      • lapcat 2y ago
        > If the above doesn't answer your question You misinterpreted my question, because I was asking what saagarjha thinks, not what anyone else thinks.
      • b20000 2y ago
        one thing I found interesting is the observer or hawthorne effect. in short, people perform differently when observed doing a task. this means that simply by observing people while they are coding, you might make them perform differently, and come to a conclusion they are not able to code, while if you did not observe them, they might have done well. the reasoning is that it's ok to pass on excellent candidates. as a business owner I find that a real problem. I would prefer the best, not just people who had time to grind leetcode and rapidly crank out solutions to standard problems you can find online. i think it would be better if interviews erred on the side of caution and preferred to let people through especially if they have experience. you can always fire them if they don't perform. there is no job security in the US anyway.
        • sqeaky 2y ago
          It is my experience that caution during the hiring process means skipping on possibly excellent people to accidentally prevent hiring a dud. There are plenty of both on the job market most of the time. In practice firing people is hard at most companies, even if there are no laws protecting people in an individual situation. In principle it can be easy but generally a manager who is in a position to evaluate performance doesn't also usually have unilateral authority to fire someone. And a technical manager telling someone that this person can't code or is disruptive on a team often can't communicate that to the managers with firing authority. This can be out of hesitance, budget concerns, or legitimate communication skills on either parties count. So the hiring practices that most of the companies I have worked at tend to skip on possibly excellent candidates in preference of definitely excellent or at least definitely decent candidates. This is mostly about risk aversion then gain maximization.
• strken 2y ago
  I agree. It's not a good idea to refuse to hire either young or old candidates. It's also not a good idea to refuse to hire experienced or inexperienced candidates. These candidates have, as groups, different characteristic strengths and weaknesses. You need to give them multiple tests to see those. Leetcode is not a good test, but you do have to test a new grad on something, which might mean a vaguely leetcode-adjacent test like "go print this json tree of directories to the console then tell me what you did in your third year of uni".