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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

> The risk that they will be humiliated at some point during the interviews.

As a candidate, this has happened far more often than I care to admit. I don't take it personally: having worked at many corporations, I know that its usually not any kind of personal animosity or judgement, its just work politics. But the fact remains that it does happen.

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It happens to me very often but I blame it on circumstances. I typically interview at companies that have started a data science team with one guy fresh out of a Master’s or a PhD, who think that his dissertation topic if the end-all of data science, so they will quiz you insistently on scaling issues of a rare alternative to random forest. “I’m sure that with 20 minutes look at the literature, I could answer your question.” doesn’t cut it. Neither does “I’m happy to talk about the implementation details of my PhD on clustering large scale social graph rapidly.” or “I’m interviewing for a leadership position; I’d love to talk to you about my managerial habits.” It tends to feel like a relief.

How do you feel about questions about principles? They may look like “Are you familiar with regularization in machine learning and why it’s used?”

Oh, by far that’s the more reasonable interview.

That’s actually how I test an audience when I speak in public (I might be a bit more specific, like “should you regularise your data before a PCA?”): I ask the question, those who have an opinion, I brand them as “in the know” and I introduce a gesture towards them; and the others, I say that my talk isn’t technical, but I re-use both gestures when making that distinction again.

A friend of mine had a brilliant equivalent when talking about data engineering, saying “And we never had any problem after that.” https://youtu.be/ZaAbOKNWGA8?t=210 A group at the back burst out laughing and you can see him re-use them later.

It happens and it happens a lot more than it used to.

And at some point it becomes a significant deterrent to the prospect of starting a new job search.

It’s happened to me. I’m terrible at the whiteboard in these situations. I have a severe disdain for whiteboard sessions. I’m an experienced engineer, but I’m likely to fumble at the whiteboard.

When I’ve interviewed candidates I make it a point to talk about something they’ve worked on and drill down into it. If they need the whiteboard to convey something, that’s great. We’re having a conversation and I’m not giving them a test. I’ll ask about potential optimizations and/or improvements, but I try my best not to make things adversarial. This has worked out really well. The best conversations have resulted in great hires in my experience.

I think this is a good point. As someone who also fumbles a bit if you put me at a whiteboard and start asking esoteric algorithm questions.

So when I am hiring someone for my team, I ask them about projects they are familiar with, and drill down into those. Puts them at ease and you pretty quickly get to know if they are talking out of their ass or not. Then after we get through that, if things are going well, I'll bring up the kinds of problems we're working on and see if it piques their interest.

+1, I've been hired like this many times and hired people to my team in exactly the same way - discuss the projects on resume in detail.

The algorithm quizzes that are so popular these days are just dumb.

Strong agreement. There's really no need to make the process anywhere near as adversarial as it usually is (by default) these days. Equivalent (or actually much better, in my subjective view) insights can be gotten by purely collaborative, explorative routes of interaction.

All it takes is a little bit of creativity and empathy.

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