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The article spends most of its time criticizing interview techniques that focus on knowledge of particular facts, which is fine - I agree that's generally not a
by mockery 12y ago
The article spends most of its time criticizing interview techniques that focus on knowledge of particular facts, which is fine - I agree that's generally not a good predictor of job success. But somehow the article concludes that since bad interviews can exclude good candidates, there's no such thing as a truly bad candidates.
The existence of bad interview techniques at some companies doesn't preclude the simultaneous existence of bad candidates in the market.
Yes, good people can fall through the cracks, and otherwise-talented people may not be good at being interviewed. Those are unfortunate realities that you should be aware of and vigilant about if you're involved in hiring. But there are also bad candidates out there, and they're capable of doing a huge amount of damage (anyone who has worked on even a medium-sized engineering team can verify this) so the ugly truth is that being conservative with hiring makes a lot of sense.
- pekk 12y agoWhy is asking about particular facts considered a reliable way of finding bad candidates?
- azernik 12y agoIt is not. That's the point of the comment you're replying to. There exist good interview questions, where you give lots of facts to the candidate and make it clear that they can ask if they don't remember the order of arguments to reduce(). (In fact, a good way to put them at ease is to admit that you don't remember either, and are just looking up the documentation :-P ) But if, given those bare facts, they can't write a legible and correct binary search even over multiple iterations, or reason about O() complexity of an algorithm they either just implemented, or just came up with, they are probably an STE. In my experience, these people fall into one of two categories: new graduates who just barely scraped through their college classes, and people misrepresenting their past jobs in QA or product management as programming experience. (That isn't to say that non-CS-majors shifting into coding can't be great engineers - I know several! But when interviewing one, you can't make the assumption of basic competence, and it's a red flag if they play up their non-programming work rather than talk about actual coding experience/studies.)