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Comment by tytytytytytytyt | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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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