Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

This puzzle based interviewing system is a complete mess. How did it get to this?

The Big N companies have way more applicants than jobs; By my count these companies employ only about 2-3% of developers in the US, and a big chunk of those come from overseas.

So, to the extent that smart people want to work with other smart people, rather than just anyone who can get the job done, they introduce a completely arbitrary bar that is hard to clear in addition to all the normal job requirements. This leads to lots of people being overqualified for their jobs.

I have no explanation for smaller companies doing this, except to ape the big guys.

> I have no explanation for smaller companies doing this, except to ape the big guys.

That's the sad thing really. What works for the big companies don't necessarily work for the small ones.

Big companies can afford a lot of false negatives.

It's because they're not programming tests, but IQ tests with CS concepts as their medium. They want smart people so they test for it the best way they can (i.e. in ways that won't run afoul of employment laws).

Which IMHO is bad. They should be programming tests.

I think its reasonable for the likes of google and facebook to consider the most important trait of their hires to be their intelligence. Even if most people at these companies are really just CRUD developers, you never know who the next big idea will come from. Consider how many products came out of google that were side projects of one of their engineers. Hiring smart people is an investment in these companies' future.

The problem is when the random nothing-but-CRUD companies/startups think they need google-caliber engineers.

I totally agree. I'm interviewing someone tomorrow morning, and I plan to give them a simple finite state machine problem in C. Full open book (i.e. access to the web), and they're free to compile and run as many times as they want. You’d be surprised how many candidates can't implement something as simple as fizzbuzz.

Google doesn't use those anymore.

"A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

Puzzle based interviewing isn't that common. The only places that do that are out of touch. Most technical interview questions for in person interviews are word problems in the form of a requirement.

Algorithmic problems are not puzzles..

They are puzzles, if some spent many years coming up with solutions for them. Surely if you know the solution for the puzzle, it's easy. But if you don't - you won't be able to solve it in reasonable time. So what is the point of the interview? To know if you memorized tons of puzzles in advance?

Civilizations spent centuries coming up with what we now know as basic arithmetic. The point is now that people have done it, it is easy.

Civilization spent years coming up with what we know as programming libraries.

No one asks historical foundations of arithmetics during basic math exam. You don't need to know how to multiply roman number.

Puzzle - (noun): a game, toy, or problem designed to test ingenuity or knowledge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com