4 ms·

This is such a huge indication of the horribly sad state of interviewing and hiring programmers. The current process results in hiring people that are awesome

This is such a huge indication of the horribly sad state of interviewing and hiring programmers. The current process results in hiring people that are awesome at interview quiz questions, but can't sit down and do the actual day-to-day work.

humannature 13y ago
says the bitter guy who got rejected by google
jarjoura 13y ago
It goes without saying that solving algorithm questions are only a part of the interview process. Candidates are also judged on culture fit and design skills.
- derwiki 13y ago
  'Culture fit' -- the wild card that lets you reject any candidate.
  - JackMorgan 13y ago
    The idea that culture fit is just a catch-all for personal bias and -ism's recently occurred to me, and kind of freaks me out. Right now I think there are three things I'm most looking for in a quality Sr candidate: restless learning, pair programs well with my team (we do it on all production code), and focuses on solutions not problems. I'm afraid though that "culture fit", especially around pair programming is just a way for me to cop out on someone I don't like, but I can't prove it.
    - derwiki 13y ago
      It's a slippery slope if you ask me. If you don't like them, you might not be able to work well with them. What's more unfair -- adding someone to the team who will cause problems because they're qualified -or- rejecting someone who is qualified because your 45 minute evaluation is, "they're not a good fit"? I don't know the answer. But I do know that it's a lot harder to fire a bad fit than to never hire them to begin with. I expect this to bite me as ageism in ten years, when a 23 y/o Stanford grad will be aghast that I don't spend my evenings playing with MeteorRails.js.
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    A nebulous description of a vitally important quality - someone who your existing team won't hate. It's one-sided to claim that people only use it to unfairly reject candidates. Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.
    - frostmatthew 13y ago
      > Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment. I'm not sure that shows up in hours of interviews either...especially when most (all?) of that time is spent on "technical assessment"
      - 02 13y ago
        It filters out the people whose ego won't let them take the test.
        krainboltgreene 13y ago
        And people who don't think tests are a good start to a relationship between an employee and a company. And people who are getting better offers at better companies. You'll never know.
        normloman 13y ago
        You mean it filters out people with too much self respect to jump through hoops to get a shitty start up job.
  - analog31 13y ago
    'Culture fit' could be a vicious circle: The more mono-cultural your team becomes, the harder it gets to hire the most talented people. And if everybody just happens to be looking for the same 'culture,' companies that have fallen into that trap end up with higher recruiting and wage costs.
  - throwwit 13y ago
    I've learned to be wary of the "Talk about some recent topics in the news" type questions, politics & issues can be surprisingly divisive.
d23 13y ago
Before actively looking for my second job, I really had no idea how to interview folks effectively. After going through the process many times over the last month, I've come to the conclusion that there were essentially 3 good ways to evaluate me: 1) Give me a take home problem. Granted, a couple of the companies that gave me these problems clearly didn't know how to interpret what I gave back to them. One of the comments I got back actually offered as a criticism that my code looked "too sparse." But if you actually have the ability to make sound judgments, this seems to me to be the ideal way to judge a candidate. No one is coding over the phone (ever) or with someone watching over their shoulder even most of the time, so if you reject someone just because they can't perform under such pressure, you're going to have a lot of false negatives. 2) Ask a breadth of questions. One of the other interviews which I excelled at was a series of 20 questions that asked me about things ranging from what happens when a browser makes a request to a server, to what a CDN was, to what the difference between UDP and TCP was. This was only a small part of the range of what was asked, but the fact that I was able to speak with confidence on most of the issues showed that I had a strong foundation of knowledge. They also asked my confidence in each area before asking me the questions, which I imagine helped them gauge whether I was down to earth enough to even recognize the things I didn't know. 3) Ask a depth question. Drill down deep into a specific problem that the interviewee seems comfortable enough in. For this one, it could be entirely theoretical, such as how one might build a particular system to solve a problem. The key is that you want to dig into why they make any particular choice along the way. You should look for someone willing to say "I don't know about X, I'd probably look for the reference to learn if there's a data structure to solve Y" if you end up getting too deep. That being said, not all personalities will understand that this is okay during an interview, as by the same token, a selection of interviewers won't understand that this is a sign of strength, not weakness.

humannature 13y ago

says the bitter guy who got rejected by google

jarjoura 13y ago

It goes without saying that solving algorithm questions are only a part of the interview process. Candidates are also judged on culture fit and design skills.

derwiki 13y ago
'Culture fit' -- the wild card that lets you reject any candidate.
- JackMorgan 13y ago
  The idea that culture fit is just a catch-all for personal bias and -ism's recently occurred to me, and kind of freaks me out. Right now I think there are three things I'm most looking for in a quality Sr candidate: restless learning, pair programs well with my team (we do it on all production code), and focuses on solutions not problems. I'm afraid though that "culture fit", especially around pair programming is just a way for me to cop out on someone I don't like, but I can't prove it.
  - derwiki 13y ago
    It's a slippery slope if you ask me. If you don't like them, you might not be able to work well with them. What's more unfair -- adding someone to the team who will cause problems because they're qualified -or- rejecting someone who is qualified because your 45 minute evaluation is, "they're not a good fit"? I don't know the answer. But I do know that it's a lot harder to fire a bad fit than to never hire them to begin with. I expect this to bite me as ageism in ten years, when a 23 y/o Stanford grad will be aghast that I don't spend my evenings playing with MeteorRails.js.
- mbillie1 13y ago
  A nebulous description of a vitally important quality - someone who your existing team won't hate. It's one-sided to claim that people only use it to unfairly reject candidates. Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.
  - frostmatthew 13y ago
    > Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment. I'm not sure that shows up in hours of interviews either...especially when most (all?) of that time is spent on "technical assessment"
    - 02 13y ago
      It filters out the people whose ego won't let them take the test.
      - krainboltgreene 13y ago
        And people who don't think tests are a good start to a relationship between an employee and a company. And people who are getting better offers at better companies. You'll never know.
      - normloman 13y ago
        You mean it filters out people with too much self respect to jump through hoops to get a shitty start up job.
- analog31 13y ago
  'Culture fit' could be a vicious circle: The more mono-cultural your team becomes, the harder it gets to hire the most talented people. And if everybody just happens to be looking for the same 'culture,' companies that have fallen into that trap end up with higher recruiting and wage costs.
- throwwit 13y ago
  I've learned to be wary of the "Talk about some recent topics in the news" type questions, politics & issues can be surprisingly divisive.

d23 13y ago

Before actively looking for my second job, I really had no idea how to interview folks effectively. After going through the process many times over the last month, I've come to the conclusion that there were essentially 3 good ways to evaluate me: 1) Give me a take home problem. Granted, a couple of the companies that gave me these problems clearly didn't know how to interpret what I gave back to them. One of the comments I got back actually offered as a criticism that my code looked "too sparse." But if you actually have the ability to make sound judgments, this seems to me to be the ideal way to judge a candidate. No one is coding over the phone (ever) or with someone watching over their shoulder even most of the time, so if you reject someone just because they can't perform under such pressure, you're going to have a lot of false negatives. 2) Ask a breadth of questions. One of the other interviews which I excelled at was a series of 20 questions that asked me about things ranging from what happens when a browser makes a request to a server, to what a CDN was, to what the difference between UDP and TCP was. This was only a small part of the range of what was asked, but the fact that I was able to speak with confidence on most of the issues showed that I had a strong foundation of knowledge. They also asked my confidence in each area before asking me the questions, which I imagine helped them gauge whether I was down to earth enough to even recognize the things I didn't know. 3) Ask a depth question. Drill down deep into a specific problem that the interviewee seems comfortable enough in. For this one, it could be entirely theoretical, such as how one might build a particular system to solve a problem. The key is that you want to dig into why they make any particular choice along the way. You should look for someone willing to say "I don't know about X, I'd probably look for the reference to learn if there's a data structure to solve Y" if you end up getting too deep. That being said, not all personalities will understand that this is okay during an interview, as by the same token, a selection of interviewers won't understand that this is a sign of strength, not weakness.