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>So you've never taken an exam in your entire life? You missed the context where we're talking about a professional setting. >And that's already way more forg
by learc83 12y ago
>So you've never taken an exam in your entire life?
You missed the context where we're talking about a professional setting.
>And that's already way more forgiving than any exam I ever took in school.
You took exams in school were the professor was looking at what you were writing the entire time? Your exams were in front of several people on a whiteboard?
>To me, that means they either really aren't nearly as talented as they think they are, or they won't be able to deal with the pressure of the job anyway.
And you'd be wrong. I've worked with very talented programmers who are absolutely terrible at interviewing. The problem is you're biased by your experience. You are probably good at this kind of interview and you are probably a good programmer, so you assume that any good programmer must be a good interviewer.
I know for a fact that these 2 processes are orthogonal. Books like cracking the coding interview exist because it is possible to practice and game the system. I've met just as many people who are good at interview questions, but are terrible software engineers, as I have people who are bad at interviews and are excellent software engineers.
The fact is that our current hiring processes are broken. Other professions don't conduct interviews like this. Go talk to some mechanical engineers who've been working for 10 years and ask them if they interview like this. Newspaper writers work on deadlines, but they don't have to write an article on the spot while someone watches them type.
Studies have constantly shown that work sample tests are really the only form of interview that shows real predictive power (that and general intelligence tests). The closer you can make the work sample to real work, the better. Finding the nth item of some arbitrary sequence in 15 minutes while someone watches your every move is not close enough to real work to have much predictive power.
>So what, if I hire you and at some point need you to hotfix something in, is that unfair?
If you're regularly giving me life or death tasks that I have 15 minutes to solve, I don't want to work there. I'm also probably very familiar with the domain, and it's not some artificial problem that I may have never seen before. But more than that, why don't you see the difference between a hotfix and an artificial situation where someone who already knows the answer is standing there watching your every keystroke, and judging your value as a programmer?
There are better ways to interview programmers. Here is one:
Pair the candidate with an interviewing engineer, give them an hour or two to solve a problem as a team. The interviewer isn't an adversary; their job is to assist the candidate like they would if they were working on a real problem.
Repeat this process if necessary.
Get everyone together and talk about past projects the candidate has worked on. Have the interviewers evaluate the candidate, and make your decision.
You know whether the candidate can code, and you've removed the adversarial nature and unnecessary stress from the interview process. Most importantly, you got to see them work in a much less artificial environment that's closer to what they'll be doing day to day.
- nilkn 12y ago> You missed the context where we're talking about a professional setting. I didn't miss it. I just don't see why it's relevant. Why does your ability to handle that situation differ so greatly depending on whether it's an academic or professional setting? > You took exams in school were the professor was looking at what you were writing the entire time? Your exams were in front of several people on a whiteboard? Well, when we give technical interviews we let the candidate sit at a desktop and we don't particularly pay much attention to what they're doing. We definitely don't just stare at them. I know that at some popular companies like Google they may use a whiteboard and they might (but might not) pay more attention as you write your code. I don't really advocate that. I know that's not always the case, though; I interviewed at Palantir once, for instance, and one of the interviewers ignored me completely until I was ready to present my solution. That said, in school there were in fact a few occasions when I had effectively an oral exam. There also were occasions when I needed to do some work on a chalkboard in front of several people (if not the entire class). There were some occasions when I even needed to deliver a 45 minute highly technical presentation to the class and that doubled as an exam. > Other professions don't conduct interviews like this. Go talk to some mechanical engineers who've been working for 10 years and ask them if they interview like this. Well, my roommate's a chemical engineer at a major oil company. For his current job, he had to give a presentation to the entire interviewing team about his technical work at previous internships. It's not an exactly isomorphic scenario, but I'm sure they paid a great deal of attention to every single thing he said. Lawyers have to take the bar exam, which I imagine is easily just as hard as an interview at Google. It might trigger social anxiety less, but that won't last long -- by the nature of the profession, you'll be in front of the court eventually. Doctors have to take similar exams, equal in difficulty (if not greater), plus they are observed extremely rigorously during labs and clinical work. > If you're regularly giving me life or death tasks that I have 15 minutes to solve, I don't want to work there. It's not that regular of an occurrence, but it would be a sort of big deal if you were totally unable to act in that sort of situation. There would be a limit in what sorts of projects you would be given. "Life and death" is an exaggeration, though. It's not any more life and death than a 15 minute quiz. > Pair the candidate with an interviewing engineer, give them an hour or two to solve a problem as a team. The interviewer isn't an adversary; their job is to assist the candidate like they would if they were working on a real problem. Are you suggesting that you can perform well when you have someone helping you, but you can't when you don't? Or is it just an issue of social anxiety?