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Comment by myrandomcomment | Hacker News Reader

So I was always very upfront. I told the candidate you will not get the answer. This is so I can see how you attack a problem. All the candiates had a background in the subject matter. The question was not on subject matter not tied to the job.

Overall we found that the way we did this interview was very successful. At one point we lowered the bar and hired a bunch of people and they were all gone in six months. On the other hand those that were successful with the question and problem solving did very well and are still there. Some of those people I hired even work with me at my new startup.

Also I do not understand your comment about schools. Yes in K-12 there is a lot of pass / fail but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved. The interview was designed to test that, not if you memorized how to do a binary tree search.

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"but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved"

I went to college for Computer Science and while there was definitely a larger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving than in high school and grade school, testing (which is the closest to a school equivalent of a job interview) still ultimately boiled down to you either knew the material or you didn't. Testing was virtually never a conversational process during which I could ask the test-giver questions to get at a deeper problem, so ultimately very different than these problems where the "tester" (interviewer) doesn't actually expect you to solve them during the "test" (interview).

My comment has nothing to do with the experience of LEARNING in USA schools, but rather TESTING in USA schools (including the vast majority of colleges).

FWIW, as an older experienced software developer, I now excel at the sorts of interviews you are describing, but when I was younger and just out of school I was terrible at them. Not because I was a bad developer/engineer then, but because of anxiety brought about by being asked about things outside of my element, because I just wasn't used to that having never been exposed to it. Based on lots of conversations with other developers, I don't believe I am alone in having this difficult adjustment period with software interviews when first starting out as a professional.

It is entirely possible your process works fine for you because it is one of those ones that is unlikely to produce false positives, which is what you really want to avoid, but I'm sure there are also some great developers just out of school that totally bomb your interviews while they would do great at the actual job.

If you can hire enough developers to allow those false negatives to exist, then that's no skin off your back but your anecdote about having to lower standards suggests that maybe passing on some of those false negatives was detrimental at least in the short term.

So the I had a conversation once with the VP of Engineering about this. He an amazing brilliant and kind man. I basically asked if we could maybe hire top 2% vs the goal of top 1%. His answer was pretty interesting (and I am paraphrasing). "I can ID the top 1%, I do not know how to tell the deference between the reset (i.e. is this person top 2% or top 10%)."

We did have this issue of hiring quickly and as I said at one point we lowered the standards. No one from that group made it. We did try. The cost of those hiring mistakes on productivity and just time spent was not worth it even if it meant we passed over someone that was a good candidate.

To be fair it was not all cut and dry. Personal recommendation for someone you worked with in the past could override any interview issues. There was atleast one time where a candidate was rejected by some of the interviews but got hired anyway because of this and it worked out.

When I started the team was around 30 and made of veterans of various other companies. We all hand family and the goal was to get it done right and go home. Age ranges were around 30-40 for the core team at this point. We recruited heavily from collages at BS/MS level and within a year the the number of people in their 20s was more then the older folks, so we must have been able to do something right for the new kids in their interviews.

The one thing I have learned is hiring is so much an art as well as a scince. Google has published tons of data on their hiring practices and success rates. Most of it is pretty interesting as the things you think matter turn out not to be the key to those that were successful.

> I told the candidate you will not get the answer.

I've had an interview like this. I said thanks for your time and walked out of the room.

I'm not interested in being told problems are unsolvable, I'd really prefer to work in a culture where there's a growth mindset. Even if a problem is unsolvable for me right this second, would it not be within the realm of possibility that with more experience or with a couple other folks on a team, I could solve it?

The problem is not unsolvable. I though I said that. Sorry if that was unclear. It is just caused by something that is pretty far down the stack which you would never know unless you have seen the problem. Once again this was to see if the canidate could think and problem solve. How far down could they get? Could the test for the obvious answers? If they got stuck and I gave them a hint could they go further? I would look at the background on the resume and say "so you worked with X before right? So you know how X has this behavior? This is similar."

There was no arrogance here. The job REQUIRED critical thinking and problem solving. Resumes are generally bullshit and unless you have a major public project were this quality is shown how do you test for it?

The first person hired that had to answer this question and go through this was me! I did not get the answer. I got real close. I am really glad I did. That job changed my life. The quality of the people I got to work with was a complete eye opener and made me want to do better and frankly made me a better person.

The company is now worth ~11B or so and everyone made money and was well cared for.

The question isn't posed as unsolvable. It's posed as being unreasonable to solve fully in a short interview setting. If someone gives you a challenge and says "I don't expect you to solve this in an hour" and your reaction is to walk out, then you're unprofessional and likely the interviewer will be happy you left.

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