Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

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I find it interesting that in the span of 3 comments it’s gone from “this company is only looking for the best of the best” to “beggars can’t be choosers”.

I’m of the opinion that if you are a company having trouble hiring people (everyone other than google/amazon) you should not copy their interview process.

There are great developers out there that do not do well in these interview environments, who are not worse than those who do well in them.

If you are going for a high power attorney partner job at a big firm they do not ask you to recite obscure case law. Id you are a master carpenter they do not ask you to build a cabinet using a hand lathe.

IMO provable previous work experience if a candidate has it should trump conceptual knowledge spewing, and interviews that ignore experience and give the same theoretical knowledge quiz as they do a new grad are shooting themselves in the foot. And I think everyone knows it, but most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do.

Tut most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do.

Yup, that seems to be it.

As if there's some "secret sauce" to interviewing that all the other shops know except their own.

The truth is you just don’t know, and you have to go off of hunches - the google panel rejects on hunches all the time, regardless of the systems they put in place to minimize it.

Yup - the hunch factor isn't a "bug"; it's absolutely intrinsic to the process. Not only is fundamentally irreducible - you wouldn't want to completely remove it from the process, even if you could.

So I guess the problem with objective-seeming (and often just simply gratuitously hard) "filter" questions like those suggested here is that their real purpose seems to be give the process an appearance of objectivity - "We had a guy in here, his code samples looked great, and he talked a great game and all -- but would ya believe, he totally froze on that Lego robot puzzle question! What a poser!" -- when of course it's never going to be anything of the sort.

Yes and this logic is essentially "if it works for a publicly traded company that has 25,000 full time engineers then surely it's the right approach for our start up of 25 people total."

Whether it actually works for those companies (beyond a placebo-like effect) is open to question.

But the bigger point is that - even assuming for the sake of argument that these questions actually do "work", on some leel - they've become such a huge fad that people are just adopting them solely on the basis of authority, without intrinsically understanding why these questions work, or more importantly, how to interpret candidates' responses to them

In other words, they're just following a script. I wouldn't say quite it's on "blind faith", per se (because the companies do have some reputation). But it's not much better than blind faith. Such that this precious quote of yours, from just a few days ago, seems quite apt here:

This practice of blindly adopting ideas just because they work for Google needs to stop.

> I find it interesting that in the span of 3 comments it’s gone from “this company is only looking for the best of the best” to “beggars can’t be choosers”.

Why is that weird? The "beggars" I was referring to are people looking for jobs, not employers, so those actually seem like things that would go hand in hand, since if all companies only want the best of the best there will be many people without a job. Thankfully it seems like companies all have a different idea of what the "best" is so I am still employed

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