6 ms·

It's an interesting problem. Before I started interviewing I expected to get a ton of really good candidates and have trouble being selective for lack of being

It's an interesting problem. Before I started interviewing I expected to get a ton of really good candidates and have trouble being selective for lack of being able to find anything wrong. Boy was I off the mark. The number of people who don't pass the fizzbuzz test is quite high. I think if we tried to give the "sleeper" candidates a break we'd let in so many bad ones we'd quickly get overwhelmed.

tptacek 12y ago
We thought so too. But the (nearly) resume-blind process we settled on quickly converged on a nearly all sleeper candidate pipeline; in several years, we hired I think just 2 people that had our field on their resume. We didn't just retain all those candidates: we were knocked on our asses by how well they performed. Recruiting is two problems: outreach and qualification. We did novel things on both fronts. For this thread, I just want to be pointing out: the changes we made to qualification were critical, instrumental, fundamental to our success. Most of our best hires could not have happened had we qualified candidates the way we did in 2009, and the way most firms do today.
- brational 12y ago
  I have a close friend that joined matasano about 2 years ago. While a good chunk of the readership here is familiar with some of those changes, I think your knowledge is an example of where the 'lessons learned' should be shared as widely as possible. I'm no marketing expert but if someone can find a way to make some of your ideas go viral that would be great for the industry.
- lawnchair_larry 12y ago
  Can any of this be attributed to salary negotiation or "better" options being available to those already established in the field, such that a large commitment seemed unnecessary to them? For those who were established, where did they drop out of the pipeline and why?
superuser2 12y ago
FizzBuzz is easy iff you are aware of the % operator. I only know how to test for divisibility (cleanly) because I looked it up in the course of doing Project Euler. I could easily see there being developers who worked exclusively on non-mathy business logic and never had to test divisibility, which would explain floundering on FizzBuzz. (Then they should be able to reset counters every 3 and 5 iterations or something, but that's a tad more involved than the canonical solution and might be regarded by some interviewers as incorrect.)
- x0x0 12y ago
  Are you a js engineer? It's hard to imagine someone could write c, c++, java, python < 3, or probably c# without cleanly understanding the modulus operator, because System.out.println("" + 3/4); (or the moral equivalent) prints 0 in all the above languages. Every developer gets bit by integers performing integer division.
  - mattmanser 12y ago
    Uhhh, the mod operator is not the solution to that problem though. In reality you'd only use a mod operator if you were doing things like sorting into 4 columns or doing an operation on every 3rd thing. And it's not a concept that is introduced at school. Now I try to think of it, I think I only picked up mod when I was learning rounding in my first language and the man page happened to mention modulus at the same time.
    - x0x0 12y ago
      The mod operator isn't the solution to that problem, but that problem shoves integer division in your face. If a dev sees that and isn't curious enough to understand there is a division operator and a remainder operator, just like when you studied fractions in 3rd grade, I don't know that I want to work with that person. And every dev should have hit the remainder operator at bare minimum when they had a long running loop and wanted to print a status every kth operation, eg for(int i=0; i < 100000000; i++){ // some operation if(i % 100000 == 0) printf("** operating on count %d\n", i); } or when processing a big file, printing every k lines; or when running a slow operation, printing every k seconds; or ...

tptacek 12y ago

We thought so too. But the (nearly) resume-blind process we settled on quickly converged on a nearly all sleeper candidate pipeline; in several years, we hired I think just 2 people that had our field on their resume. We didn't just retain all those candidates: we were knocked on our asses by how well they performed. Recruiting is two problems: outreach and qualification. We did novel things on both fronts. For this thread, I just want to be pointing out: the changes we made to qualification were critical, instrumental, fundamental to our success. Most of our best hires could not have happened had we qualified candidates the way we did in 2009, and the way most firms do today.

brational 12y ago
I have a close friend that joined matasano about 2 years ago. While a good chunk of the readership here is familiar with some of those changes, I think your knowledge is an example of where the 'lessons learned' should be shared as widely as possible. I'm no marketing expert but if someone can find a way to make some of your ideas go viral that would be great for the industry.
lawnchair_larry 12y ago
Can any of this be attributed to salary negotiation or "better" options being available to those already established in the field, such that a large commitment seemed unnecessary to them? For those who were established, where did they drop out of the pipeline and why?

superuser2 12y ago

FizzBuzz is easy iff you are aware of the % operator. I only know how to test for divisibility (cleanly) because I looked it up in the course of doing Project Euler. I could easily see there being developers who worked exclusively on non-mathy business logic and never had to test divisibility, which would explain floundering on FizzBuzz. (Then they should be able to reset counters every 3 and 5 iterations or something, but that's a tad more involved than the canonical solution and might be regarded by some interviewers as incorrect.)

x0x0 12y ago
Are you a js engineer? It's hard to imagine someone could write c, c++, java, python < 3, or probably c# without cleanly understanding the modulus operator, because System.out.println("" + 3/4); (or the moral equivalent) prints 0 in all the above languages. Every developer gets bit by integers performing integer division.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Uhhh, the mod operator is not the solution to that problem though. In reality you'd only use a mod operator if you were doing things like sorting into 4 columns or doing an operation on every 3rd thing. And it's not a concept that is introduced at school. Now I try to think of it, I think I only picked up mod when I was learning rounding in my first language and the man page happened to mention modulus at the same time.
  - x0x0 12y ago
    The mod operator isn't the solution to that problem, but that problem shoves integer division in your face. If a dev sees that and isn't curious enough to understand there is a division operator and a remainder operator, just like when you studied fractions in 3rd grade, I don't know that I want to work with that person. And every dev should have hit the remainder operator at bare minimum when they had a long running loop and wanted to print a status every kth operation, eg for(int i=0; i < 100000000; i++){ // some operation if(i % 100000 == 0) printf("** operating on count %d\n", i); } or when processing a big file, printing every k lines; or when running a slow operation, printing every k seconds; or ...