Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

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> a really Hard Problem

I've heard senior recruiters express skepticism about candidates who say they're into "Hard Problems." Experienced engineering managers usually hear that phrase when you're looking for a lifestyle and you don't really care what the application is.

For example, "I have no qualms that your business arbitrages nonconverting clicks from bots and sketchy web traffic (i.e., 99% of the Internet) into Google AdWords revenue, using up a Google customer's ad budget until the customer has barely made a profit... You see, I'm into Hard Problems. Besides, bots don't click twice! It must be real traffic!"

It turns out that junior people on the interview team care a lot more about Hard Problems and the stories in these books than senior people do. And you'd never want your hiring pipeline run by junior people.

In my opinion, Google's focus on Hard Problems has robbed academia of all the sincere Hard Problems people. Then, they've ruined the interview process for everyone else, ironically with the book How Google Works, convincing CEOs that they should be asking about C.S. fundamentals and Hard Problems totally unrelated to their Actual Problems.

To me the funny thing is the small companies with 2-3 developers hiring like they are google with interviews over the course of weeks, with google/amazon-like gauntlets. You aren't google, you aren't paying google-level salaries, why are you pretending you are.

That said, I happen to like problems in general... not necessarily "hard" problems, but just new problems. I also like working in new domains... I mean what other industry of work allows you to work in education, aerospace, banking, security and marketing in a decade and a half.

> To me the funny thing is the small companies with 2-3 developers hiring like they are google with interviews over the course of weeks, with google/amazon-like gauntlets.

Hmm. Arguably small operations need to be more stringent if they are deciding who will make up the next 25%-33% of their engineering workforce. At small companies one bad hire can really poison the well.

True, but they'd probably be better with a hire/fire fast attitude than draw out the interview process... Interviews take time away from the people doing the interviews that can be spent doing other things... do you really want to allocate more than half your company for weeks vs. getting stuff done.

I mean, have a trial period of a week or three... That will tell you far more than a gauntlet interview process with a lot of false negatives.

A 3 week trial period is a far longer than an Amazon interview sequence.

For one person.. not for a few dozen... It's easy enough to pick the apparent best from the available pool much faster.

Also, there's the cost of existing staff in interviews... if you only have 2-3 devs, and you're keeping them all in interviews with multiple candidates, you're not getting work done.

For me, as a CEO, hire/fire fast is definitely more costly than a well-designed interview "gauntlet"

Before starting my own company I was a bar raiser at Amazon. Interviews were not supposed to last weeks (though many did and there were internal metrics aimed at driving interview to offer cycle time down).

I'd much rather spend a few hours per interviewer per candidate getting a solid candidate than hiring, onboarding, training, learning the candidate is a poor fit, and ultimately going through the not-fun-for-anyone firing process.

High turnover isn't worth the lost productivity from other employees or the hit to morale. On top of that, while learning whether or not the candidate will make it through the trial, you're burning precious cash.

Learn how to interview and teach your people how to interview. It will save you heartache and money.

But do whiteboard exercises that consist of concepts that someone is unlikely to ever touch really count for the quality of code one is likely to output?

Especially when many of those concepts necessitate code that is less than discoverable, well documented and easy to follow?

""I have no qualms that your business arbitrages nonconverting clicks from bots and sketchy web traffic (i.e., 99% of the Internet) into Google AdWords revenue, using up a Google customer's ad budget until the customer has barely made a profit."

Can you explain what this business model is and how the arbitrage works? Is this SEO gaming? Thanks

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