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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

> Someone who is capable of learning what's needed to do well on a technical interview has demonstrated a fairly high level of competence, and is (relatively) unlikely to be a really bad hire.

Sure, as long as their only role is repetitive coding tasks that require limited amounts of broadening their experience beyond the DS&A trivia places like Facebook require.

However then Facebook ends up with stuff like their iOS app ("iOS can't handle our scale"), which had a lot of (probably) very talented CS folks putting together an app that was pure garbage (from an engineering and usability perspective).

The filter limits the applicant pool to that set of people uninterested in solving problems outside the scope of a CS textbook. Capability has little to do with it.

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> The filter limits the applicant pool to that set of people uninterested in solving problems outside the scope of a CS textbook.

The only way this would be true is if being good at textbook CS makes you bad at solving other problems. I'm assuming you don't actually think that, 'cause it's kind of crazy.

Even giving the benefit of the doubt and assuming you mean that the filter makes the pool less likely to contain good problem solvers, it's hard to see where this idea is coming from. In my experience, being good at one sort of problem solving makes someone more likely to be good at other sorts of problem solving. The correlation between skill in problem solving across domains is weak sometimes, but it's definitely not negative!

The only way this would be true is if being good at textbook CS makes you bad at solving other problems.

The way the typical interview process works, basically, is "we have a list of 6-12 algorithms we will ask about; if you have memorized implementations of them, and certain key phrases to identify which one to regurgitate on command, you pass the interview".

This is then touted as a test of "CS knowledge" and "problem-solving ability".

Tech interviewing is Goodhart's law in action.

Note I wrote "uninterested" not "incapable." There's a clear anti-engineering bias in software development, and one way that bias is exhibited is by a narrow hyper-focus on the minutiae of DS&A trivia.

> Sure, as long as their only role is repetitive coding tasks that require limited amounts of broadening their experience beyond the DS&A trivia places like Facebook require.

While those "trivia" problems are part of the process for big companies, they are far from the entirety of it. Especially for industry candidates, plenty of other aspects of the interview process focus on broad experience and engineering principles.

I have no reason to believe that CS abilities anti-correlates with broader ability/experience. In fact, I'd posit that performance on algorithm problems correlates well with general intelligence, which correlates well with performance across the job.

Things like the FB app is really a function of the amount of code and developers working on it at once.

Amount of code is a function of the number of engineers. It's a social organization issue & a big company issue more than anything else. If facebook removed the algorithms part of their interview through a time machine, the same issues would of still cropped up.

Also in backend & foundational infrastructure stuff where you go make compilers and base foundational libraries, you do tend to use those algorithmic things once in a while. You use stats in analytics & data science and you math in ML and other initiatives. FB isn't just CRUD construction workers after all :p

A friend just went through the hire process at FB for iOS.

It actually was very practical. According to him it was more or less stuff we do every day, with one generic, programming puzzle of sorts.

Hey, I'm actually about to go through the FB iOS interview process and would really appreciate some insight/help from your friend if they have time. Thanks!

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