Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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Employers rightly want that.

No they don't. Employers heard that Google asks questions like these, and Google is worth eleventy skrillion dollars, so if we ask the questions Google asks we'll be worth eleventy skrillion dollars too!

In much the same way, last decade everybody knew Microsoft asked riddles, and Microsoft was worth more money than anyone could imagine, so obviously asking riddles is the way to end up worth more money than anyone can imagine.

It's basically this comic, but implemented in tech interviews instead of in schooling:

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3978

Meanwhile the only reason these things seem to "work" for Google et al. is that they get so many applicants they can afford to turn down huge numbers of perfectly intelligent, perfectly-qualified people who might not do so well on an algorithms pop quiz. And at the same time they've made the process easy to game: you can literally get books of Google-style interview questions, study them, and then pass tech interviews without the underlying knowledge/experience the questions are allegedly selecting for.

I just wonder which company will be the next big breakout hit and what irrelevant thing they'll do in interviews that everyone will hurry to nod their heads and sagely agree with as a great indicator of the kinds of things "employers want".

I'd like to hear how you interview candidates and what has been your success? The process could certainly be improved since we have very little time to really know the candidates.

From what I have heard of my friends at work actually doing interviews, they mostly focus on finding out how much does their candidate lie on their cv :)

I.e: "So you want to join our product security team and say that you know xml. How would you go about finding an exploit in an app that you can get to parse an xml file?"

And I have heard several stories from several people doing interviews, where the candidate failed this sort of question particularly badly :)

So simple questions in vein of "I see you tell us you know x, that might help you solve problem y we deal in our team often, how would you do it?"

Not parent but my current employer has an interview process that I find fairly efficient.

During the hour-and-a-half or so of interview, I was asked to do a few things:

1. explain my technical background, projects I've worked on 2. explain one project in depth, from entry-point to client 3. discuss future features of that project 4. let me implement one feature in that list while they go have some coffee 5. show off my new feature!

Even though the technology I used was not the technology they use, I think my employer wanted to see how well I communicate technically, how well I understand, and how fast I can put things together. He seemed to like the fact that I had a lot of failed iterations and Googled to get through snags.

Another interview process I was quite fond of had me working on one of _their_ pet projects; looking through their code base, identifying possible improvements/features, and implementing those improvements in a new git branch.

Of course, that process may not work with EVERY technical interview, but my bet is that practical interviews like these are more likely to show an employee's technical prowess than a person simply memorizing algorithms. While I agree that there is a place for algorithms, it should not be the focus of an interview.

We provide applicants with a small coding exercise (one they do at home) that compels them to find a good, clean and algorithmic approach to a problem, shows how they organize and understand abstract concepts, and whether or not they consider testing when writing code.

The example is a checkout register at a store.

They submit their example, and we review it, make notes, and when they come in, we go over it and talk about it. What we look for is the code itself and also how they explain their decisions along the way.

We find that this really paints a very vivid picture of the candidate, far more than white boarding exercises, stand behind them coding exercises or trivial bs questions.

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