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I have worked with a few Secretly Terrible Engineers over the past couple of years. One of those was hired before we had instituted any kind of standardized tec

by lambda 12y ago

I have worked with a few Secretly Terrible Engineers over the past couple of years. One of those was hired before we had instituted any kind of standardized technical screen, another was senior enough that we decided to skip the technical screen (and regretted that decision later), and a third passed the technical screen but was unable to get anything done, in large part because he spent most of his time on Reddit and HN. That of course indicates that passing a technical screen is not a guarantee of success, but it does seem to be at least one good filter. Our technical screen consists of 6 questions on a few different topics, and is designed to probe a variety of different areas. I consider it fine if someone fails one or two, as I don't expect someone to be strong in all areas; some people may be really good at actually coding, but not know what big-O notation is, or someone may be fresh out of college and so not have much hands on experience yet but if they do well at the algorithms and data structures questions it indicates they were paying attention and absorbing their classwork. But people who don't know the big-O complexity of basic operations on basic data structures they use every day, and can't put together a coherent class hierarchy for modelling files and directories, and don't know how to interpret a system call that they see in a stacktrace, don't know what TCP is, and can't write a simple program on demand with access to Google, StackOverflow, in any language they want, using any tools they want, are definitely going to be more work to bring up to speed than they are going to be worth. And I've talked to people who have degrees in CS and several years worth of experience who have failed every one of these questions.

bkeroack 12y ago
If your technically astute hire spent too much time on HN or Reddit, it sounds to me like you failed to engage her with interesting work.
- lambda 12y ago
  No, we gave him plenty of interesting work. And as we discovered, the above described interview was actually a fairly low bar; when faced with problems slightly more challenging, he would fall apart and give up in frustration. And he was very touchy, so wouldn't accept help when he hit those kinds of situations; he would just spend all of his time reading Reddit and HN instead of getting the help he needed. He was essentially impossible to work with. We had overlooked his personality quirks when hiring him, as we didn't want filter out someone who was technically sharp but was simply personally quite weird, but it turns out that in practice we just could not work with him.
- lgas 12y ago
  That's possible, but it's equally possible from the information given that she (*he as it turns out) was just lazy and unmotivated or was in some other way actually the problem. Both types of people exist in great numbers.
mattmanser 12y ago
Mainly because a lot of the things you just listed are incredibly stupid requirements. If I spent my life doing ruby sites that save basic data into a mysqldb, why does it matter whether I use sometching that takes 100,000 operations or 10,000 ones, when the web page still opens in 0.5 vs 0.51 seconds? Or who gives a damn about system traces when I can put echo's in a PHP page and just view source? Who gives a fuck about TCP when the browser abstracted that all away? And when you say write a program, you clearly mean a console app, which again, unless you've written one, which junior programmers may never have done because someone else always wrote the helper & utility apps, it's pretty daunting the first time if you don't even know about main. Which suddenly makes it pretty easy. Imagine asking a front end developer to make a console app in their interview. You do a particular type of programming. You seem to want to judge everyone else by your niche without understanding that a lot of the skills you list as essential are actually almost completely irrelevant to huge swathes of programmers. And they haven't learnt about them, because they don't need them.
- ac2u 12y ago
  They're really really not stupid requirements. The poster you're replying to isn't narrowing to a niche, he/she is simply trying to catch a red flag. You're right to be concerned that there are many interviewers who will climb way down the ladder of abstraction to their own particular niche and then crucify a candidate. But this isn't one of them. The poster even explained that it was only really a negative if all were wrong. I use a similar process as a quick pre screen. Sailing through all questions allows us to proceed at a relaxed pace. Having nothing to say for one or two questions tells me nothing (it could easily be a fault of my question rather than the candidate). But no coherent answer to any question? Red flag.
  - lambda 12y ago
    Exactly. I've had several candidates that I have passed who on the TCP question have said "I don't know, networking is not my strong point." That's great! Knowing when you don't know something and should just move in is a real strength. As long as someone does fine on most of the rest of the questions, having one or two gaps in knowledge is not a problem, I can tell from the other questions that they'll be able to pick it up if they need it, or ask for help when they need it.

by lambda 12y ago

bkeroack 12y ago

If your technically astute hire spent too much time on HN or Reddit, it sounds to me like you failed to engage her with interesting work.

lambda 12y ago
No, we gave him plenty of interesting work. And as we discovered, the above described interview was actually a fairly low bar; when faced with problems slightly more challenging, he would fall apart and give up in frustration. And he was very touchy, so wouldn't accept help when he hit those kinds of situations; he would just spend all of his time reading Reddit and HN instead of getting the help he needed. He was essentially impossible to work with. We had overlooked his personality quirks when hiring him, as we didn't want filter out someone who was technically sharp but was simply personally quite weird, but it turns out that in practice we just could not work with him.
lgas 12y ago
That's possible, but it's equally possible from the information given that she (*he as it turns out) was just lazy and unmotivated or was in some other way actually the problem. Both types of people exist in great numbers.

mattmanser 12y ago

Mainly because a lot of the things you just listed are incredibly stupid requirements. If I spent my life doing ruby sites that save basic data into a mysqldb, why does it matter whether I use sometching that takes 100,000 operations or 10,000 ones, when the web page still opens in 0.5 vs 0.51 seconds? Or who gives a damn about system traces when I can put echo's in a PHP page and just view source? Who gives a fuck about TCP when the browser abstracted that all away? And when you say write a program, you clearly mean a console app, which again, unless you've written one, which junior programmers may never have done because someone else always wrote the helper & utility apps, it's pretty daunting the first time if you don't even know about main. Which suddenly makes it pretty easy. Imagine asking a front end developer to make a console app in their interview. You do a particular type of programming. You seem to want to judge everyone else by your niche without understanding that a lot of the skills you list as essential are actually almost completely irrelevant to huge swathes of programmers. And they haven't learnt about them, because they don't need them.

ac2u 12y ago
They're really really not stupid requirements. The poster you're replying to isn't narrowing to a niche, he/she is simply trying to catch a red flag. You're right to be concerned that there are many interviewers who will climb way down the ladder of abstraction to their own particular niche and then crucify a candidate. But this isn't one of them. The poster even explained that it was only really a negative if all were wrong. I use a similar process as a quick pre screen. Sailing through all questions allows us to proceed at a relaxed pace. Having nothing to say for one or two questions tells me nothing (it could easily be a fault of my question rather than the candidate). But no coherent answer to any question? Red flag.
- lambda 12y ago
  Exactly. I've had several candidates that I have passed who on the TCP question have said "I don't know, networking is not my strong point." That's great! Knowing when you don't know something and should just move in is a real strength. As long as someone does fine on most of the rest of the questions, having one or two gaps in knowledge is not a problem, I can tell from the other questions that they'll be able to pick it up if they need it, or ask for help when they need it.