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Hey, Anshuman here. Just came across this. Can't agree with you more. I'd change the process if it was up to me. However, building a new process, I guess, wil

Hey, Anshuman here. Just came across this. Can't agree with you more. I'd change the process if it was up to me. However, building a new process, I guess, will take a lot of time with the same set of experiments happening again. Its highly unlikely that it will be adopted immediately everywhere else. This is more of a quick fix to the process till something better comes along. There are a lot of things that are broken here. The huge gap between the university curriculum and the real world industry needs shouldn't exist in the first place. Which is what our longer term vision is. Watch out for more :)

jkyle 11y ago
I hear you. It just sparked a pet peeve of mine as an interviewer and employee. ;) I suppose it's easy pointing out flaws without offering solutions. I think one possible solution would be a system where potential new hires were given real world problems under real world working conditions. Today, people often study for months to "pass" the interview tests. Generally taking up many hours of multiple interviewers time. Instead, if a potential candidate were given a sufficiently unique and difficult problem and a time window to complete it representative of the desired work output it would provide a much better idea of what kind of employee they would be. - Did they complete the job earlier than the given time, but turned in sloppy or a less than ideal solution? - Did they eat up the entire allotted time, but turn in truly stellar work? - Best of all, turned in early, unique solution with good, commented, test driven code and asking for another problem? And really who cares if they had to review their algorithms or operating systems book to do it? That's why we keep them on our shelf. I'd say for sufficiently hard, and original, problems I spend 80% of my time with my nose in a book or reading papers and 20% engineering a solution....unless I'm doing it day in and day out. After that, it's mostly about personality and team fit. Bring them in to do some white booarding (full access to resources) and work with the team, make sure they aren't smoke and mirrors. Then make a call. edit For example, take your ops guy. Best interview I've ever seen for ops is to throw them in a broken sandbox environment, give them root & tell them to fix it, and walk away.
jkyle 11y ago
> The huge gap between the university curriculum and the real world industry I'm not sure I agree with this though. "Real world" is very different from company to company, domain to domain. It also changes dramatically in just the few years required to attain a degree. I've always viewed universities as providing the foundation and discipline needed to adapt to any of those situations rather preparing or trying to guess at the needs of any particular one.

jkyle 11y ago

I hear you. It just sparked a pet peeve of mine as an interviewer and employee. ;) I suppose it's easy pointing out flaws without offering solutions. I think one possible solution would be a system where potential new hires were given real world problems under real world working conditions. Today, people often study for months to "pass" the interview tests. Generally taking up many hours of multiple interviewers time. Instead, if a potential candidate were given a sufficiently unique and difficult problem and a time window to complete it representative of the desired work output it would provide a much better idea of what kind of employee they would be. - Did they complete the job earlier than the given time, but turned in sloppy or a less than ideal solution? - Did they eat up the entire allotted time, but turn in truly stellar work? - Best of all, turned in early, unique solution with good, commented, test driven code and asking for another problem? And really who cares if they had to review their algorithms or operating systems book to do it? That's why we keep them on our shelf. I'd say for sufficiently hard, and original, problems I spend 80% of my time with my nose in a book or reading papers and 20% engineering a solution....unless I'm doing it day in and day out. After that, it's mostly about personality and team fit. Bring them in to do some white booarding (full access to resources) and work with the team, make sure they aren't smoke and mirrors. Then make a call. edit For example, take your ops guy. Best interview I've ever seen for ops is to throw them in a broken sandbox environment, give them root & tell them to fix it, and walk away.

jkyle 11y ago

> The huge gap between the university curriculum and the real world industry I'm not sure I agree with this though. "Real world" is very different from company to company, domain to domain. It also changes dramatically in just the few years required to attain a degree. I've always viewed universities as providing the foundation and discipline needed to adapt to any of those situations rather preparing or trying to guess at the needs of any particular one.