Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm appalled by some of the stories being shared in this thread; smug interview panels pressure-cooking candidates as they try to whiteboard obscure CS gotchas is a system perfect only for assholes and masochists.

I've now run three tech companies and hired dozens of developers by having really intense, thoughtful conversations with them. I asked them to tell me war stories and encouraged them to share insights on how they solve problems.

I only rarely look at code, because it's self-evident when you're talking to someone that is passionate about programming + intellectually curious-to-hungry + an interesting person who demonstrates empathy and seems like someone you'd want to spend 7-9 hours a day with.

I hire like I'm trying to form a rock band: I don't tell them what to play, I give them permission to show me what they've got.

Here's the thing: the more we, as a class of developers, put up with these devolving interview processes, convince ourselves that this is somehow our failing and our inability to FizzBuzz in six languages with a sharpie and people watching... the more we allow it to be considered okay, and the more normal it will be to expect this nonsense.

I know that being cash-starved sucks, but you know what? If you walk into an interview and they bust out the markers and ask you to start sorting, I sincerely hope that we can collectively find the strength to laugh at them and politely tell them that you'd never waste your time at a company that insults your craft.

Find your pride and tell them why they missed out. If they want to understand what just happened, tell them to take you for a drink. If they are dicks about it, you really didn't miss out on a damn thing. I promise you that.

Amen, 100% this. Same methods here, same success rate.

I just had a long conversation this afternoon with a friend who manages a tech recruiter team and she was telling me how frustrating it is working for cash-strapped early stage startups who pass on perfectly talented & experienced candidates open to taking a salary hit - because they, in their inexperience, cannot fathom how to interview without subjecting candidates to a series of dehumanized and impossible puzzles that are only solvable by people who have dedicated themselves to puzzle solving.

Meanwhile established companies with deeper pockets, such as banks, scoop up these candidates to do humdrum back office software work because they use tried and true interviewing methods.. like talking to candidates.

I attribute most of the issue to inexperience on the hiring managers' part and pressure to hire only the "best of the best" from leadership. Coupled with developers' personal insecurities, lack of education on the fundamentals of management, echo chamber noise around code test culture and the incessant desire of engineers to abstract away any human elements of their work, the process has devolved into a toxic mess when it comes to recruitment and interviewing.

Hopefully the situation can be fixed at some point. But until then, I'll keep on scooping those 10xers by trading war stories over the phone, thank you very much...

Most companies I talk to do this: we talk, they ask questions, I tell about a couple of projects, I ask questions, they tell about their company.

Some want me to do an assessment, which is fine. But it's at home on my own dev machine, and not on some whiteboard.

I generally like these take-home assessments. The best had me write a game board in React on which you could place obstacles, and an adapted A* algorithm to find the shortest path through it. That was really fun. I'd never done something like that.

Holy fuck I'd work for you in a heartbeat.

From my perspective on interviewing and talking to lots of dev's, I take at least some of the horror stories with a grain of salt. I've seen some "pressure cooker" scenarios really just be interviewers who were not very good at interviewing. Conversely, I've gone deep in conversations with a developer on how BS interview questions are, and while imaging some crazy graph algorithm or something they come out with "Yeah they tried to get me to implement a Set" (at a high level, in Javascript). That's not a challenging or obscure problem, this person simply lacked technical depth and was jumping on the bandwagon.

Which is all to say, I can agree in general with obtuse CS problems being a bad proxy. But I think asking someone you are hiring to write code all day to write code as part of the interview is reasonable, and at this point I'd be suspect if I were interviewing somewhere and they _didn't_ ask me to write at least _something_.

What's the point of reimplementing a set though? It already comes with the language, and the language's implementation is probably miles better than what you'd come up with anyway.

I'd be more interested to know whether the candidate knows what a set is, and how it differs from an array or an object, and when might it come handy. But reimplementing what already comes with the language? A waste of time, and (hopefully) not representative of the work they'll be doing day to day.

Just went through an interview today that is exactly in the style as you describe it. Gels with my ethos perfectly. I really value this kind of approach.

-->I hire like I'm trying to form a rock band: I don't tell them what to play, I give them permission to show me what they've got.

I liked this approach of hiring.

Bingo. The reality is many people have no idea how to interview, so they fall back on the only thing they know: test taking in school, and studying for the test.

You don't want to just ask them to tick boxes, because first off some'll lie to you, and second, the dunning-kruger cases will lie to themselves. Can they communicate? Can they solve unseen problems? Can they do so comprehensively and rigorously? Do they know how to maintain a project for many years?

An interview method that can't tell the passionate hackers from the posers and pencil pushers is worthless.

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