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Comment by adreamingsoul | Hacker News Reader

Check your premise.

It sounds to me that an assumption is being made because they didnt meet the expectations within a fixed time period. The danger with this is that this is not a real world scenerio of how two people would approach a task or problem. It’s also important to recognize that everyone is different with regards to how they process information. Stress has a real biological effect on how the brain processes information, and who doesnt feel stressed during an interview.

I’m somewhat autistic and struggle to process verbal information. But I try not to share that with people because I choose not to be labeled by it. It’s unfortunate that in our society that we have to conceal things like that.

All of us could be better at trying to understand people around us and accepting them for who they are instead of scrutinizing them for what they are not.

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Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers. No project has an unlimited budget, so no one gets unlimited time in the real world.

"Plan to throw one away." This was one of the major thesis statements of The Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks. It's one of the hallmark texts on software development. I don't disagree with what you are saying - that we need to be cognizant of time and money - but there is a scary shift happening in software where more emphasis is put on time-to-market above all else, where we are boiling the frog of consumer expectations. Millions of people lose their personal financial information in a hack, and the entire population just shrugs their shoulders. I'm left wondering if this would be the case if we put less emphasis on continuous production deployment, and more on the care and quality of our processes and systems.

> Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers.

Not if the fixed time period is 45 minutes with an interviewer looking over your shoulder.

Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures. The scenario here sounds like it's as relaxed and simple as you can get without it being so easy it tests nothing. Are you assuming the interviewer always yells like he's Sam Kinison?

> Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures.

Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

> Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting.

So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break.

> Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't even close to "writing an app from scratch". It's not even theoretical - just look at all the people who make it past these interviews. I doubt they would call it "writing an app from scratch". Could you try any harder to misrepresent things here?

> So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break.

Though it is clearly a simple problem, I've not had to reverse a list in any of the code I've written in the past 20 years. So I am not 'familiar' with the problem. I think I'd be able to solve it pretty quickly under normal work circumstances (even crises), but as many have said here already, working on something you've never done before with three strangers looking over your shoulder is a whole other dimension.

Many here and elsewhere have related the 'brain lockup' effect. Take me as another data point. It's real and it totally wrecks the interview for the interviewee and the interviewers, who lose out on a potentially good employee.

> Though it is clearly a simple problem, I've not had to reverse a list in any of the code I've written in the past 20 years. So I am not 'familiar' with the problem. I think I'd be able to solve it pretty quickly under normal work circumstances (even crises), but as many have said here already, working on something you've never done before with three strangers looking over your shoulder is a whole other dimension.

What's your point? You just want to repeat what everyone else has already said? And how low do you think the bar should be? What would be reasonable questions that actually still separate people who can code from people who can't, since reversing a list is too hard according to you?

> It's real and it totally wrecks the interview for the interviewee and the interviewers, who lose out on a potentially good employee.

Or they hire someone else who might actually be just as good or better. It's not like companies have an unlimited number of open positions.

I was responding to the words I quoted from your post. I was not aware that somebody had already made the point that even apparently simple problems may not be 'familiar' to all candidates.

It doesn't have to be 'familiar'. A fair bit of the point is to judge your problem solving skills, not your memorization skills.

For sure. I never said all interview questions have to be 'familiar'. I'm not the same guy you were talking to earlier.

> And how low do you think the bar should be? What would be reasonable questions that actually still separate people who can code from people who can't, since reversing a list is too hard according to you?

I'm not saying anybody should lower any bars. Just don't immediately fail somebody who struggles with a simple problem. Don't just automatically declare them incompetent. Help the candidate be the best version of themselves. It's in your best interest as an employer. Try to figure out ways to make your interview atmosphere as realistic as possible. Some of these people who choke on trivial problems may have aced the same test on a better day.

> Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't even close to "writing an app from scratch".

It also isn't even close to "solving a real-world problem". Wow, look, I reversed this list and the conversion rate on our sign-up page went up 200%!

> Could you try any harder to misrepresent things here?

It looks to me like you are the one misrepresenting things.

> It also isn't even close to "solving a real-world problem".

It's not supposed to be the same thing. It's supposed to test your coding and problem solving abilities, in the limited time you have. What better alternative can you come up with? It's easy to just complain...

> It looks to me like you are the one misrepresenting things.

Hah, yeah right. If it makes you feel better, sure.

I worked with people who were hired with "can you do the job?" test and with people who were hired by "everything is wonderful, you are a special candidate that we just talk with" test.

The second group universally cannot perform under production pressure.

No projects are budgeted to 45 minutes. The real world scenario for such limited time is debugging in production issues. It is a completely different scenario. The people who jump in are mostly those who are familiar with the services or application that are showing issues, those who have a clear understand of the architecture of the company, those who have skills on their tech stacks and know where to look at and how to analyze, etc.

"Solving a problem within a fixed time period is the best real world scenario for programmers"

The funny thing is an artificial examination style setup totally freezes me up. I'm a valued contributor and write original technically non-trivial code day in and day out.

The last time I did an interview a few years ago my brain completely locked up. The interviewer was very polite, and it could have not have been any less stressful situation. Yet, somehow my brain knew I was in an interview, and it was time to lock up all that valuable technical information ... somewhere where my conscious mind could not access it.

Which is really weird. Usually at work the occasional unexpected stress put's my brain on turbo-charge, and ... it's so beautiful to experience it, everything has perfect clarity, I know what needs to be done and I just do it so much faster than regularly.

My "on-interview" brain is complete opposite of my "million-euros-are-at-a-risk" brain at work. I have no idea why.

> It sounds to me that an assumption is being made because they didnt meet the expectations within a fixed time period.

Of course, you have a limited amount of time to interview people. Please let me know when you figure out how to give someone an infinite amount of time to answer questions during a 1 hour interview.

> The danger with this is that this is not a real world scenerio of how two people would approach a task or problem.

That doesn't mean it's not a reasonable way to test basic skills. It's even too easy to test that by itself. What good alternative do you have?

> All of us could be better at trying to understand people around us and accepting them for who they are instead of scrutinizing them for what they are not.

How exactly would you structure a 1 hour interview so that it's not, "scrutinizing them for what they are not"? Or are you just having fun being preachy here?

I realize that you’re doing the best that you know how given the time pressures you have as an interviewer. There is no perfect answer to this problem.

Here’s the thing though, you are “leaving money on the table” when your interview process deselects great programmers because of a mistaken belief that Test A is a good proxy for developer talent. When HN developers are telling that Test A is a bad proxy for developer competence, perhaps, just perhaps, you might consider trying to improve it with the advice given.

The upside of being able to accomodate developers who “lock up” in stressful interviews, is that you now have access to great developer that are (according to your competitors) “impossible to find”.

A lot of that's true or might be true, but how do we improve things?

> you are “leaving money on the table” when your interview process deselects great programmers because of a mistaken belief that Test A is a good proxy for developer talent.

That's true for any non-perfect interview process at any job. The problem isn't that people don't know this, it's that it's hard to accurately measure who's good.

> you might consider trying to improve it with the advice given

Hah, as if the advice is something amazing! Which of these pieces of advice could we use that wouldn't make things worse in some way and also have a chance of being accepted by existing coworkers and managers? There's some great pie in the sky ideas, but nothing without serious issues.

> Pete Holiday, an Engineering Manager at CallRail in Atlanta, used to use homework as part of job interviews before realizing that he was ruling out good candidates. Some told him they didn’t have time for homework. Others may have never gotten to that point. “It’s way more inclusive to just have someone come to the office and talk to them,” Holiday said. “You’re not counting on them having time, or a computer at home. We have candidates with sick family member, single parents. Without the homework we can cast a wider net.”

So is homework worse than whiteboarding onsite? Who do we believe, some article or the crackpots here?

I wasn’t referring to the in-office vs. take-home aspect, just the “stress test” nature of the white boarding test. (And I was admittedly unclear about that in my post and I’m sorry.)

Think of ways you can de-stress the candidate while extracting useful information. Ideas:

1. Have them bring something they wrote with them and describe it in the interview. A lot of developers will “come out of their shell” when they start explaining something that they worked on.

2. Show them some code and have them explain it to you. I had a manager open a C book once and had me explain some code.

3. Pair program on a problem that the interviewer doesn’t know the answer to. This situation is a lot more like a true work situation.

One thing I would say is just talk through problems with candidates as simple as that sounds. Try to grok how they think through software problems. Nothing mind-blowing there, but what I'm saying is how someone codes fizz-buzz tells very little...or to me this is like hiring a driver by taking them out to a parking lot and doing doughnuts. If you can fathom the idea that they can drive a car (at all) it seems like it is much more enlightening to hear about how they organize a schedule, clients they have picked up, problems they have solved...how they react and comment to situations you pose to them,etc. I guess the key here is to do this conversationally, and not like you're grilling them. Or you have to be a good question asker and a good listener..but if you are, or can become one, I 100% believe you can get the information you need in a humane and efficient manner. But even as I type this, I'm wondering if the ability to read people is why this so hard for software interviewers...or maybe it's for lack of that simple skill that our industry has resorted to silly proxies like fizz buzz, etc.

> One thing I would say is just talk through problems with candidates as simple as that sounds. Try to grok how they think through software problems. Nothing mind-blowing there, but what I'm saying is how someone codes fizz-buzz tells very little...or to me this is like hiring a driver by taking them out to a parking lot and doing doughnuts.

That's what people do, or should be doing, along with the whiteboarding. I don't think anyone just has them do fizzbuzz and that's it, like you seem to be implying. That won't even fill an entire interview slot.

> it seems like it is much more enlightening to hear about how they organize a schedule...

Sure, and that's also something you ask about, but that doesn't weed out the people who can talk the talk but can't really program, who do exist.

> But even as I type this, I'm wondering if the ability to read people is why this so hard for software interviewers...or maybe it's for lack of that simple skill that our industry has resorted to silly proxies like fizz buzz, etc.

I think it's because people want real evidence of skill, which is pretty easy to detect via whiteboard in most cases, not just the interviewer's gut feeling.

For the most part, we can read someone's fizzbuzz solution easier than we can read people.

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