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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

It continues to surprise and frustrate me that as an industry we continue to highly prize proxy signals for engineering skill, when engineering skill is so directly measurable.

Why even bother with measuring things that are N-degrees removed from actual engineering, when you can just get people to engineer things?

I know others on HN have been hammering this point home for years, but until something changes it deserves to be repeated ad nauseum: work samples work samples work samples work samples.

Stop with the trivia questions. Stop with the contrived algorithms questions. Ask people to design systems, ask people to defend their designs, ask people to write real runnable code that directly relates to the work they will be doing at your job, ask people to review a real piece of code written at your company, ask people to critique real design produced at your company. Anything but what we're doing right now.

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It's not that simple.

Many good engineers, especially those who aren't young men, don't have existing work samples they are able to share. Perhaps, by choice or otherwise, they have a personal life that does not allow them to write code for free. And their employers won't allow them to share work code.

And many good engineers are not willing to spend an unpaid weekend writing code auditioning for a job they aren't yet sure they want.

And, as you know if you've ever worked with a disruptive colleague, or had customers, engineering in a team for a product is much more than just writing code.

> don't have existing work samples they are able to share.

This, at least, should be fixable.

Don't work at places that won't let you talk about your work and demonstrate your competence.

I don't think that's always possible. What if you worked for Healthcare or Security or Finance, where there are strict laws for keeping code/design private?

What are examples of such laws? There are laws allowing prosecution if you break agreements, sure, but the agreements themselves are what can be fixed by encouraging the market that they're incorrect.

In the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_Act_1989

That seems targeted at .gov employees, which is a little different.

That's not what a work sample is.

A work sample is a (usually, hopefully) standardized piece of work you request from all candidates that mirrors the actual work they'd be doing on the job.

There's no reason a work sample needs to be so onerous that it costs you a weekend. What people forget when this comes up for discussion is that interviews are work. In fact, they are themselves onerous work, since they require you to be on-site and intensely engaged in ways you don't have to be to do the actual work of a job.

A work sample, on the other hand, can be done from your home, with a beer next to your laptop if that's how you roll.

The notion of audition work has definitely been abused in our industry. People get work samples that aren't standardized. They get work samples that are later ignored. Work samples don't have objective scoring rubrics. Some annoying companies assign new features for their products as "work samples".

Done carefully, though, with objective and predictable grading and calibrated to offset in-person interviewing time, they're superior to any process we have.

As I said, many good engineers are not willing to spend unpaid time auditioning for a job they aren't yet sure they want, doing work they can't reuse, by taking a formal standardized test.

It may in fact be a better hiring practice in terms of its ability to predict job performance. But you will _lose good candidates_.

And in particular, you will lose experienced candidates. You are embedding biases toward younger (and therefore less experienced) male coders in your hiring practices if you require what is, from their point of view, free work. (You can see the biases in your "with a beer next to your laptop" remark, for example.)

You updated your comment after I replied to it, and so I updated mine.

Source: I ran a work-sample recruiting process for the largest software security company in the US (after it acquired my startup, which was one of the top 5 in the US), and our process most definitely was not biased to younger workers. Work samples drastically improved diversity.

Edit

You've edited your own comment again, which makes you very hard to respond to. If you want to rebut anything I've written so far, can I ask you to copy it into a reply to this comment?

Sorry, new commenter, unfamiliar with the etiquette of the edit button. I'm done.

I agree with you somewhat, but couldn't you just as easily replace "unpaid weekend writing code" with:

- unpaid weekend updating resume

- unpaid weekend practicing algos

- unpaid weekend browsing job sites

just as easily? I don't think asking job seekers to be interested enough to give a work sample is an undue burden. If that filters out people playing the numbers by applying to every opening...is that such a bad thing?

It depends on how far along the interview process you've gotten to with a potential employer and if this is a step away from being hired.

If the potential employer is asking for code samples up front, I think that's a bad sign. Let us talk about the work environment, expectations of the position, and then we can focus on my tech skills.

It's a problem of scale. Spend half an afternoon skimming through CtCI (shouldn't need much more as a seasoned developer) and you're good for N number of job interviews. I'll take that rather than spend 4*N hours on take-home problems in addition to time spent on-site.

If I spend a weekend updating my resume, practicing algos, or browsing job listings, then that time is useful for all jobs I'm applying to and interested in.

If I spend my weekend on a work sample assignment, it's only applicable for that one company which might very easily not give me a compelling offer or be somewhere I'd want to work.

At this point, I'll only do work assignments if I'm already very familiar with the company and have reason to suspect they'll give me a compelling offer.

I'm an experienced engineer (10+ years) and I would favor this process way more than the current algorithm/DS interview. It's the algorithm/DS interview that really favors young graduates. They already have an advantage because college knowledge is still fresh in their minds. And they often have the free time to grind leetcode for months. Experienced engineers often have families or other priorities and free time is hard to find.

Usually the work sample is something simple that doesn't take longer than a day or two. Many interviews that don't do work samples can go on longer than that and accomplish nothing. I was hired after doing a work sample that took a day. I was still paid for my work, irregardless of being hired. The work sample wasn't "standardized", just a typical task one of the other developers would have done otherwise. So I would encourage any employers reading to try this process out--it's better for both parties.

>You are embedding biases toward younger (and therefore less experienced) male coders

Younger maybe, but where does the male part come from?

Less likely to have personal obligations to others, e.g. family. Less likely to feel social pressure to do time-consuming emotional labor outside of work.

How is the standard interview process, which often requires candidates to submit to multiple rounds of in-person interviews, sometimes even requiring travel, better than a process that people can do mostly from their homes?

As an applicant, I'd be all for going the work sample route, but only if it's paid for and if it were used in lieu of the typical face-to-face hazing session rather than in addition. I notice more and more companies are asking for work samples (or "homework assignments" or whatever they want to call them), but they just pile it onto their already onerous process.

The major pain point in interviewing (at least for me) is the massive time sink for a very small chance of success. I'm spending a few hours on the application, then a few more doing phone screens, then a weekend doing a work sample, then I blow a VACATION day (which has monetary value and of which I have only 10 per year), and at the end of it all who knows what my odds even are? Multiply that by, lets say 10 companies per year, and: I've invested 31 days of my life, have no vacation left, and I still may end up with nothing.

I think paying for interviews is problematic for a bunch of reasons.

On the other hand, I agree wholeheartedly with people who reject "homework assignments" layered on top of a standard interview process.

The onus is on people who want to take advantage of work samples to:

* Ensure that the time they're asking of candidates is offset by lowered time demands elsewhere

* Ensure that they're using the work samples objectively, so that people aren't asked to do coding work as part of a crap-shoot application process.

The process we used at Matasano and NCC was less demanding than typical job interview processes. The challenges were simple and self-contained, and when they were completed we could tell you with a decent degree of confidence whether you were likely to be offered a job at your (shortened) on-site interview.

> I still may end up with nothing

What do you end up with if you filter out companies that ask for work samples?

1 additional free weekend for every one I don't do.

I'd definitely say that if a company is handing out work product assignments that take an entire weekend, it's somewhere you don't want to work.

Honest question:

I'm the tech lead for a startup with just a handful of programmers. I'm interested in hiring someone who can help us come up with well-architected, novel solutions to the problems that we're already solving. The issue is, we're solving them in a way that turns out to be pretty difficult to maintain and change. I'd like a totally new, fresh approach that takes the lessons we've learned and creates something that's much easier to write fixes for, much easier to extend with new features.

I need someone who doesn't just build on top of existing, well-defined codebases/APIs. I need someone who has the ability to engineer a complete, well-rounded, extensible codebase/API himself.

It would seem to be remarkably difficult to test for this ability. Even work samples that can be done in the short time period you describe wouldn't be able to test for this ability.

Short work sample tests don't need to be simple work sample tests. One of Matasano's work samples required candidates to reverse-engineer a binary protocol, build their own client for it, and then use that client to find vulnerabilities. If you had no aptitude or experience with that problem set, finishing it would take a very long time.†

Ultimately the problem you're really describing is the challenge of hiring people you don't really know how to hire. If you know very well how the role you're hiring for is supposed to function, you should be able to generate challenges within whatever constraints your candidates have. If you don't know very well what the capabilities of that role need to be, no interview process is going to work reliably for you.

† (we didn't care, by the way: if you did well with that work sample, it mattered very little to us whether you were prepared when you started it).

"build on top of existing, well-defined codebases/APIs." is not necessarily easier than "engineer a complete, well-rounded, extensible codebase/API himself."

I think these are two different skills. Some programmers are better in building on top of existing codebases, some programmers are better in build things from scratch.

maintaining vs starting.

I don't mean to propose that people spend their off hours writing work samples - that's unreasonable for all the reasons you've given and more.

What I mean to propose is that we dramatically alter the current on-site interview process used by most companies.

Instead of 5-7 interviews, consisting of 5-7 independent but ultimately equally contrived algorithms questions on a whiteboard, use the several hours you have the candidate to produce real, working code that reflects the work that your company does.

Which is to say, this requires no more time commitment than the existing interview processes at typical tech companies.

If the work your company does is deeply algorithmic, this will be reflected in the work sample produced via this process. If the work your company does is more heavily UX-oriented, this will be reflected in the work sample produced, also.

Instead of "over the course of a full-day on-site round of interviews, candidate produced several short snippets of hand-scrawled code solving various CS textbook problems, which we will now use to infer general engineering ability"...

... you can say "over the course of a full-day on-site round of interviews, candidate designed and produced a module of code that does [X small thing that company does], which can be assessed with the same rigor and methodology we already apply to our existing work and employees"

While I agree that a focus on "work samples" is inappropriate, I must emphatically agree with the parent's broader point.

The way companies in this industry conduct interviews and measure performance is like an aerospace engineering company testing candidates for satellite engineering on their understanding of the Standard Model (physics) or group theory or some such. There's too narrow a focus on what is required of an engineer in the software industry.

You are allowed to pay somebody for a work sample.

I actually like the current interviewing approach... and I feel like we are a silent majority. I think whiteboarding / coding algorithm and design problems is pretty fair and reflective of engineering skill.

You're the overwhelming majority, which is frustrating, because the method you're advocating for empirically and clearly does not work well.

according to some random people on the internet?

How is whiteboard coding reflective of engineer skill? At what time, during any job you've had, have you needed to instantly write code on a whiteboard, in front of peers, in a matter of minutes. Almost by definition, it's not reflective of engineering as actually practiced in a job.

I'm a far bigger fan of at-home coding exercises. Yes, I know, some people get annoyed at these because they think you're asking them to do free work in their spare time. But what other way is there to test people's coding under circumstances that most adequately mirror those of an actual job. E.g. they have a (relatively) unlimited amount of time, they have access to Google, their IDE, etc.

I'd much rather see what someone can come up with, in response to some novel problem, based on a couple of days programming, than what they can hack out on a whiteboard based on thirty seconds of thinking. The former seems closer to what coders are actually required to do, day on day.

> At what time, during any job you've had, have you needed to instantly write code on a whiteboard, in front of peers, in a matter of minutes.

Well, constantly, actually. Although I'm thinking of designs and snippets rather than actual functions. I guess it depends on what you're asking people to whiteboard during the interview. I agree that asking people to whiteboard qsort is silly, but walking through design alternatives with occasional code snippets to illustrate implementation options is a pretty basic skill.

> based on a couple of days programming

Either your company is very well-known and very attractive to candidates, or this is going to incredibly restrict your candidate pool.

I think smaller work samples are a great idea, I think code reviews are a great idea, but asking for two days sounds like a bit much, especially early in the process.

Although I'm thinking of designs and snippets rather than actual functions.

But that's the thing -- at whiteboard interviews, they don't ask you to produce "designs and snippets". They make you write actual working classes and functions.

> At what time, during any job you've had, have you needed to instantly write code on a whiteboard, in front of peers, in a matter of minutes.

Fairly regularly. Like when I'm explaining to someone how something works after they've asked me about it.

You regularly have to instantly write code for a problem from undergrad CS coursework on a whiteboard, and for which you haven't necessarily been involved in working on, in a constrained time with your job hanging in the balance?

I'm skeptical.

?? it's not something that's hard to do, it's like the foundation of my career. I use the principles all the time. my whiteboard /verbal / code solutions are based on that.

Using the principles all the time is different from regularly reimplementing CS textbook trivia under conditions in which your job is on the line. Where do you work, that you have to constantly re-invent the wheel over and over again under such constraints? I'd consider such a job to be hell. Not hard, just tedious and uninteresting to the point of pain.

I'd also not consider it to be an engineering job. What you describe seems to me to be more like a CAD technician job at an engineering firm.

No. You just changed the question. Even most whiteboard interviews don't meet your newly narrowed criteria. I just meant to state that I regularly write code on a whiteboard in my real work. You could argue it's time constrained too. At least as much as it would be in an interview.

How do you think that? I think myself a decently productive engineer and I always loathed the fact that I have to study for most of my interviews. Study things that I have almost never used in my actual engineering career. In a situation nothing like actual engineering work.

My favorite interview process (given by the company I currently work at) consisted of one coding prescreen that wasn't terribly difficult, one session where I simply talked with two engineers about past projects I worked on, and then one higher level architecture problem that involved pseudo-code but not some esoteric algorithms.

That interview process, I think, is way more representative of my actual day-to-day work than any algorithm interview I've done. It deemphasizes the ability to figure out / reguritate previously memorized tricky algorithms on the spot (when do you ever need to do that during the work day?) while emphasizing the ability to communicate how and why you make decisions.

Which is an incredibly important part of engineering, way more important than whatever skill whiteboard algorithm interviews test.

The current approach has a huge false negative rate. It keeps out the bad apples but hugely favors marking a lot of good/great apples bad as well. The time invested to study for these interviews is quite onerous in itself. So, I'll say I'm not a fan of the approach.

That being said we do use the method where I currently work to interview. However, the problems are not some made up situation or a test of data structures/algorithms but a set we've encountered in real life.

From what I've heard the whiteboard method isn't really popular with many companies today either but everyone is sticking to it until some other alternative which avoid false positives presents itself.

It is reflective of skills at internalizing and applying undergrad (and sometimes graduate) level academic trivia in a familiar context. The interview process you and other "silent majority" members think is effective at measuring engineering skill is not, actually.

I really wish you and so many of your colleagues would spend a few weeks with engineers in the physical science engineering disciplines. What we do in this industry is a farce, with respect to engineering.

I like it... because I'm good at it, so it's easy for me. However, I get no idea of what working at the company is like (beyond what can be gained from asking directly), and the company gains no information about my suitability for that particular job, since they're assessing me on exactly the same criteria as every other job.

What's ironic to me is that a lot of people are going to see this video and just start using programming contests as a negative proxy signal for engineering skill.

I am currently reading "hackers: heroes of the computer revolution" and it seems like this culture of optimizing algorithms ("bumming") comes from the extremely early days of programming, when people were laying the groundwork for all the basic functionality of CS.

Well it's not just that -- algorithms do matter, and a very small number of programmers do move the needle in this industry through their ability to shine in that area.

But the vast majority of the time -- that's not what your company needs at all. You need someone who's smart and reliable, and more to the point, believes in your mission. And who will go in and do all that far from algorithmic, highly unglamorous stuff that keeps your business from going underwater, day in, day out.

But of course - those skills are difficult to evaluate in a short amount of time. So instead companies go for a skill that can be "measured".

A skill like -- you guessed it -- algorithms.

according to who?? like there are people who post stuff like this all the time, but it's just the anecdotes of a small population. companies have tried many different techniques and this is currently working the best. no top notch engineer is going to do a 8 hour take home test for every interview

companies have tried many different techniques and this is currently working the best.

Is it, now? The best thing you can say about is probably "it seems to kind of, sort of work" -- at the cost of burning through a whole lot of candidates, and their presumably worthless time.

no top notch engineer is going to do a 8 hour take home test for every interview

Yup, take-homes suck, also. But that doesn't mean that complementOf(8-hour-take-home) is the right answer, either.

And with a work sample, how do you know:

1) how well they work with others?

2) how long it took them to come up with the solution?

3) if they actually came up with the solution themselves

1) how well they work with others?

Whiteboard sessions don't tell you that either. Only whether they got lucky, and you picked a problem they already know (so they can breeze through the solution in front of strangers with confidence). Or if they can at least suck it up, and pretend they enjoy this nonsense for 45 minutes (or 4-6 hours, depending how crazy your company is about this stuff) to get a job.

2) how long it took them to come up with the solution?

Does it matter? Really now. What matters on the job is did you go the last mile, think about the corner cases and pitfalls, and make sure your solution was cleanly coded and documented for the next guy or gal. Not whether you solved that silly HackerRank problem in 35 minutes as opposed to 45.

3) if they actually came up with the solution themselves

This one's pretty simple to sniff out, actually: "So I'd just be curious, why you did X here and not Y?" There's pretty much no way a bullshitter can answer that question.

Totally agree, and if someone does not have code they can share, they have no passion for programming. Therefore no job with me.

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