4 ms·

I have a long-winded blog post about this very subject awaiting some polish. I've done my fair share of interviews. I still don't like them. I've narrowed it d

I have a long-winded blog post about this very subject awaiting some polish. I've done my fair share of interviews. I still don't like them. I've narrowed it down to basically two things: 1. There is a lot of highly subjective, mystical advice about what "works," in a technical interview and what doesn't. Big problems, small problems, trivia, puzzles, white-boards, no white-boards... hardly any of it is thoroughly studied and built on solid theory. It's all conjecture and personal bias. 2. How the candidate is feeling and where their head is at on the day of the interview matters. I can go on about cache alignments, bus errors, segmentation faults, C++'s lack of order in evaluating function arguments, why template class declarations must exist in the same compilation unit as the definition, why CLOS is amazing and the computation model of recursion is brilliant (or at least why I think so). Yet on a bad day I can (and have) botched perfectly trivial, benign problems. However at the end of the day you need some sort of process. I just think that the current practices are not good enough. It seems to me that companies are probably turning away perfectly fine candidates without realizing it. There's pros and cons to every approach I suppose. But I still think trivial problems are dumb.

suresk 14y ago
I agree that the hiring situation in our industry is less than ideal. The irony is that, for all of the data we use and tools we make for others, our hiring practices often rely on few tools, limited data, and lots of gut feelings about what is important. Take the process of advertising a position and moving candidates through the hiring process - the tools there are almost universally crappy and haven't made a lot of progress in the last decade. Also, as far as I can tell, very few companies attempt to record any kind of data about how candidates are hired and how they subsequently performed on the job (even tracking job performance is a tough problem) - and it certainly doesn't exist industry-wide. There is a ton of money in this area - why hasn't there been much progress? Is it because it is an unsexy problem, or is it because it is genuinely impossible?

suresk 14y ago

I agree that the hiring situation in our industry is less than ideal. The irony is that, for all of the data we use and tools we make for others, our hiring practices often rely on few tools, limited data, and lots of gut feelings about what is important. Take the process of advertising a position and moving candidates through the hiring process - the tools there are almost universally crappy and haven't made a lot of progress in the last decade. Also, as far as I can tell, very few companies attempt to record any kind of data about how candidates are hired and how they subsequently performed on the job (even tracking job performance is a tough problem) - and it certainly doesn't exist industry-wide. There is a ton of money in this area - why hasn't there been much progress? Is it because it is an unsexy problem, or is it because it is genuinely impossible?