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Comment by delphinius81 | Hacker News Reader

Once you have an engineering job, a typical project tasking involves: some team design discussion, some engineering research, some work, some review, more work. The requirements are either known upfront, or determined as a team.

I do not understand why interviews are not conducted in this manner. Pick some arbitrary idea and have the candidate work with the interviewer to design something, then let the candidate do a little implementation research/design, review with the next interviewer, wipeboard code and review some part of the project with next reviewer. Have a coffee break at some point to get to know the person. Treat the interview process like a normal day at work.

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That's a good idea but logistically is hard, both requiring the interviewer to spend considerable time on site as well as costing your own employee's time.

It might work well for a small company especially with a small number of candidates but it doesn't really scale, unless you are a really big company (googleish size) that can dedicate so many resources to the interviewing process.

Doing design and research takes time, you can't do it in 30 min, you can't also ask someone to spend 8 hours interviewing, and if you have 10 candidates you can't spend half a man month or more on interviewing them either.

I've seen some companies that "interview" by contracting candidates for 1-3 days of work and paying them for it, but it really only works on positions where you hiring effectively interns/fresh graduates, but as most candidates especially those who end up in the face to face phase are currently employed you can't really do that.

I dunno, I've personally spent on average half a day (3-4 hours) with on-site interviews as a candidate. When on the other side of the table, it's been about the same (~3 hours). With a tractable enough problem, I think you can fit it into a half-day. You could also begin the design/research process as part of a phone screen, have the candidate further prepare on their own time, and then present/discuss as part of the on-site, along with the more in-depth technical stuff.

After you've run this process enough times, your interviewers will have a good grasp on the various solutions and technical problems. Most people's training on how to interview comes from how they themselves were interviewed - which was probably poorly done. Improve the interview process and you can train people to be better interviewers just by being interviewed. :)

"I do not understand why interviews are not conducted in this manner. "

It truly is crazy.

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