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Comment by andrewprock | Hacker News Reader

For the most part these interviews are not meant to evaluate the quality of a candidate, rather they are meant to evaluate candidate interest.

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That’s not remotely true. (Source: have administered hundreds of these interviews)

IIRC, the published results were that above a certain bar, there was no predictive value to interview results. Having interviewed many dozens of people, and been in dozens of interviews, I can confidently say that the current standards of technical interviews do not screen for quality, but interest.

The whole point of having someone study typical problems to the point where they can solve them in 30-45 minutes is not to demonstrate quality at the job. Rather it is to have them signal that they are interested in doing the things they need to do to get hired. Those types of problems are outside the scope of software engineering, and getting good at them requires a significant investment in time.

Yes, they will reduce the rate of false positives somewhat, but greatly increase the rate of false negatives.

> the published results were that above a certain bar, there was no predictive value to interview results

What I said is not exclusive to this research. These types of interviews are not great, but there's no other "accepted" way and a lot (most?) companies are afraid to try new stuff because making a bad hire is very expensive.

> they will reduce the rate of false positives somewhat, but greatly increase the rate of false negatives.

In addition to what I just mentioned above, the companies that invented and stick to this style of interviewing are well aware of and don't care about the false negatives. Their desire is to reduce false positives and they have a mile long line of willing candidates behind that person if they get a false negative. When you interview at Google/Facebook/etc, your recruiter will tell you that a lot of people don't pass the interview the first time. And if you don't pass, they'll reach out to you again in ~6 months to see if you want to try again.

The companies that use these interviewing processes that don't have a large pipeline of candidates are doing themselves a huge disservice IMO. But kind of like "nobody got fired for hiring IBM"..."nobody got fired for copying Google".

So it was actually my interest which they thought was "not consistent enough" across 6 interviews? :P

By proxy, yes.

If you were interested in the job, you would do enough studying to become "consistent enough" across 6 interviews.

That seems like a facile way to blame any non-hire outcome on the candidate not being Machiavellian enough.

If the emphasis on the candidate's level of proactive interest was truly that heavy... how do you explain recruiters? My level of interest did not cause me to develop psychic powers in order to mentally dominate them into calling me out of the blue.

<<Command: You do not believe Terr_ has psychic powers.>>

But why would one skip over brilliant engineers who are not so desperate? What the desperation brings to the table for the employer and why is that so important?

You need a certain fraction of people willing to just do the required work without complaining -- there is only so much schlep a person can tolerate; certain factors like marriage, children, a mortgage, sick parents, and sense of duty can raise the amount someone can handle. There probably aren't enough slots internally to accommodate the others. Compliance is a very useful trait for employees to have, obviously it falls on a spectrum.

I'm EXTREMELY interested in finding a new job at literally any company outside of my own. Maybe interviewers don't think I'm interested enough when I can't crank out a 100% correct and optimized algorithm in 15 minutes? /s

Are you in NY, perhaps?

I have a couple of leads for you if so.

I am in NY, can you send me your contact info?

You'll need to put your contact info in your HN profile's About field, as the email field is hidden to normal users.

>evaluate candidate interest.

As well as screening for social class/culture/values fit. FAANG companies don't want nonconformist people outside of the kool-aid bubble regardless of their abilities.

How does being able to implement standard algorithms and solve programming problems screen out "nonconformist people outside of the kool-aid bubble regardless of their abilities"? These interviews are designed exactly to evaluate ability, in contrast to loosey-goosey "tell me about a time..." culture fit questions where the interviewer can apply their own biases and reverse engineer a justification for whatever hire/no-hire decision they want?

They appear to be evaluating the ability to learn and apply knowledge of previous published works on imperative algorithms. But, as far as I can tell, they aren't testing for much ability beyond this. Where are the questions for logic, formal methods, semantics, mathematics of program construction, functional programming etc? Such theory is much more useful for designing APIs and gluing components together, something I imagine most Google engineers spend the majority time doing.

You mean like the time my CTO said to me concerning the billing system for a telco subsidiary I looked after "this had better be right otherwise we are both out of a job"

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