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Comment by vdnkh | Hacker News Reader

>Given the choice between a software engineer who has demonstrated incredible abilities in algorithms, or an engineer or data scientist who has demonstrated both some fluency and, more importantly, curiosity on the financial and legal implications of the work that they’re doing, we will always choose the latter.

Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. If you can't do the algorithm dance on the whiteboard you're "not technical enough" - after all, these companies get such a high volume of applicants that there has to be some way to filter them out. Curiosity isn't a measurable metric - it's a "nice-to-have".

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Disagree with you about curiosity being a "nice-to-have".

But something else has occurred to recently about the never-ending discussion on "whiteboarding" and other interview techniques:

What's perhaps wrong about the overemphasis on the "algorithm dance" (be it at the whiteboard, over a website, or over the phone) is that people revert to it because it (at least appears to be) measurable, and can be roughly assessed within a reasonably short timeframe (and more or less reproducibly so), and at low cost/risk to the company.

While more nuanced, and arguably much more valuable skills -- like the ability to manage complexity; being generally ego-divorced, and immune to silly hangups about one's platform or style choices, or those of others; seeing the forest for the trees (but the trees also), generally; not being a jerk; and yes, curiosity -- basically can't be measured in an interview setting, or in any way other than through shared experience on actual work projects. At least not reliably, and certainly not reproducibly.

The old "searching for the car keys under the lamp post, because that's where the light is" fallacy, in other words.

True, non-measurable (or hard to measure) skills and qualifications are still important. I think interviews do give us a certain approximation, but of course not perfect.

My curiosity on the legal implications of the work I was doing almost cost me a job once...

I'm going to have to disagree with you. The "algorithm dance" only demonstrates that you can memorize an algorithm and how to use it to an academic degree. That's it. I've never seen it differentiate between developers to any useful degree and found that it only helps those who are more "fresh" with the specific algorithm knowledge you happen to ask about.

You're distilling what they're looking for into an ambiguous term of "curiosity" which isn't a good representation of what they're looking for. They're looking for someone who can expand their understanding beyond the scope of just development. This is something you can easily get into when interviewing someone.

> The "algorithm dance" only demonstrates that you can memorize an algorithm and how to use it to an academic degree. That's it. I've never seen it differentiate between developers to any useful degree and found that it only helps those who are more "fresh" with the specific algorithm knowledge you happen to ask about.

Indeed. When I've interviewed junior candidates, I gave them a function with some inputs and asked them to produce the outputs. At least this requires them to exhibits some degree of analytical reasoning on something you've never before seen. You'd be surprised how many candidates can't even do that.

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