Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

A mixed bag. Questions like:

Tell me about your hiring process — how many rounds, how many interviewers? Is there anything special about your interview process I should know? Are coding interviews on a whiteboard or laptop? What resources do candidates have access to while coding? Assuming the process goes well, how long does your hiring process typically take? How long do candidates who are given offers have to decide on an offer?

are perfectly fine, because they're simple and objective, and can be immediately answered by the company (if they have their shit together on any meaningful level). But questions like:

What are you trying to figure out about a candidate in an interview? Why do you think your current process does that effectively? What biases have you decided to accept in your hiring process? Which are you trying to change?

would be a red flag, because really now, it's not like employers have huge swaths of time available to holistically explain the raison d'être of their hiring process and how it got that way. If anything it's the exact opposite -- if they company is successful, then their people have almost no time at all to wax philosophic which each and every candidate about such topics.

So to ask questions of the latter sort strikes me as a bit obtuse.

Companies above garage size literally employ people to answer candidate questions. If the company hasn't invested the time to answer "What are you trying to figure out about a candidate in an interview?" and its recruiters don't have a simple, objective answer, they should stop interviewing and go answer that before they start again.

A simple answer is something like, "We want to figure out whether a candidate can do the work we need them to do. We do that by giving candidates sample work problems which are streamlined versions of problems we've actually solved at the company in the past. People we hire are more likely to still be employed with us than they are at our competitors after a year. We know we don't hire enough women and URMs into technical roles, and we're instituting a rule that at least one woman or URM candidate needs to be interviewed for each open role."

"We want to figure out whether a candidate can do the work we need them to do."

Well, yeah, that's the thing - the answer is (or should be) so self-evident that one wonders if one wonders whether the question is really worth the bandwidth.

So few companies are clear about it in their hiring processes, and therefore wind up hiring for all sorts of skills which have at best weak bearing on actual job performance in most roles (eg. brain teaser memorization) that the answer is, empirically, yes.

Hmm. I have they sense they know do what they want ("a candidate who can do the work") but have but are basically at a loss as to how to deterministically assess that via the standard interview format. Hence the brain teaser stuff.

Not asking these questions is giving a free pass.

I am in favor of asking 'Are questions asked in the interview a true reflection of what I would be doing if I was hired.' If the answer is no, then you have more questions that revolve around 'how they evaluate best-fit'.

The tech interview process is broken and change requires challenging and questioning the status quo.

I agree, the latter batch of questions strike me as terrible things to ask.

> What are you trying to figure out about a candidate in an interview? Why do you think your current process does that effectively?

Unless the interviewer is from HR they probably don't know (or care) much about the answers, and unless you're interviewing for a position in HR, knowing the answers won't tell you much about whether to take the position. So why ask at all?

Questions like these are analogous to bike-shedding - asking about what's most visible to you at that moment, rather than about what's important.

You don't think that the company's algorithm for hiring your coworkers tells you much about whether to take the position? That's almost literally the most important thing I know how to find out during an interview.

> You don't think that the company's algorithm for hiring your coworkers tells you much about whether to take the position?

I don't think that hearing whoever happens to be interviewing me defend their interviewing process tells me much about whether to take the position.

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