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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

Given the current state of tech interviews, they have more or less become like standardized tests, such as SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE... with guides, cheat sheets and perhaps neighborhood coaching institutes on the horizon with instructors who have cleared tech interviews in FAANGs.

Are we going to see tech recruitment become more and more like college admissions where a top score in the interview is just one of the criteria and no longer sufficient to get a job?

Perhaps next is asking people to write essays regarding career, goals, why they want to work their, extra curricular etc..

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Y'know, as someone who went to a very competitive public school, there were a particular brand of driven, studious kids who knew exactly how to paint along the lines, play the game, and get into the college of their choice. They understood the precise combo of grades, extracurriculars and essays to get into a "good" school.

I definitely see some of those kids doing the same tactics to get into a "good" company. The steps are slightly different but the philosophy is the same: grind Leetcode, participate in tech clubs and take bullshit jobs juuust long enough to get an internship, get said internship and parlay it into a return offer. Put your head down, play the game and reap the rewards.

I mean it's all a game as much as it sucks. One of my best friends in high school was a salutatorian because the school didn't wait grade. She took zero AP classes and very few honors classes. She knew what she was doing.

Friends in college took less challenging majors to boost GPA for med school (business admin, environmental policy, etc) to boost grades and there core classes were easy so it gave them more time to focus on med school pre-reqs.

It has been and always will be a game. Few things in this world come down to meritocracy because the way we socialize and the way we interview does not beget that in absolute terms.

Tech did a better-than-most job as a meritocracy for while, but I believe those days are done. Most areas f tech are too mainstream with too much obvious money at stake.

I don't understand why you are discrediting people who are taking the better path to med school. Work smarter, not harder.

There is also short game vs long game. For example, if you cheat on a test without learning the material. You might win the short game, but if that material was important and you need it later you're losing the long game. That said, if the material was just fluff and no one really cares. It's actually smart just to cheat and get by.

People who take the easy way or cheats to get around bureaucracy will do the same thing after you hire them at the job. They will do things like avoid password salting for your database unless you explicitly tell them to do it etc.

In other words, I don't want to hire "smart" people, I want to hire intelligent people who take pride in what they do and don't try to take shortcuts to make their lives easier at the expense of others.

That's how most kids get into prestigious universities. Rarely, if ever, do kids just "stumble" into HYPS or Oxbridge, out of sheer intellectual power and luck.

If you want to get into those schools, you gotta know how to game works, and practice specifically for that match.

I went to a school like that, and the majority of my classmates were from upper-middle to upper class families that had poured money into their education since they were young, with the specific goal of getting them into top schools.

Yeah, that's unfortunately the thing, when you start throwing in a ton of different criteria / measurements. The people that know how the system works, will study to maximize those points.

My honest opinion is that you kinda of end up with smart people that are very good at test-taking, but may not be the best people when presented a set of problems with non-obvious solutions, or any guides or road maps on how to solve the problems.

Part of the problem is how little time one has to prepare for college. If we encouraged people to apply to college after a few years of adult life, I have a feeling the playing field would be a little better. But instead we expect kids to gain the credentials of much older adults while going to school and getting fantastic grades. Unless you understand the game going in, it's too easy to slip up and fall behind. Even then, you don't have time for mental health or sleep.

You're absolutely right, unfortunately here in the Bay area it's those kids winging it and getting in.

You joke, but I've seen several applications where I've been asked questions like "What achievement are you proudest of?" and "How would you contribute to the diversity of our team?".

Also cover letters cover some of this.

Actually, I wouldn't mind a standardized test like the GRE, where a good score might actually keep your resume from getting thrown out immediately.

Maybe I stand alone in feeling this, but I don't see those questions are absurd during an interview. Especially at smaller startups, where early hires are going to be interfacing heavily with the majority of other employees. Maybe this should be filed under things that comprise "culture fit", but I also think it's different than that.

I think it's a little odd to ask directly. If you are evaluating an interviewee for "culture fit" as in your example, would you directly ask them "how would you fit into our culture?" or try to evaluate their thought processes, demeanor, etc to determine it for yourself?

Perhaps it's just the context from which this conversation arises and it wouldn't strike me this way otherwise, but asking these questions directly feels a bit too much like college application boilerplate to me.

If a team wants to prioritize a diversity of perspectives, I feel the team should spend the interview trying to understand my perspective, analyze how that compares to their own perspectives, then synthesize the answer to the question themselves rather than just adding a "How will you contribute to a diversity of perspectives?" question.

If there were a standardized Programming GRE, it will end up increasing the competition for jobs thanks to the future Kaplan/Princeton/local training centers. What would companies do then? Start another layer of programming interview on top of this programming GRE. Eventually, we will reach a point where companies don't trust such GRE scores.

Bright high school students are vastly oversupplied compared to seats in elite colleges. Graduation rates are in the high 90s. There are many more than 5,000 kids who can handle the workload; which 5,000 you pick is arbitrary.

Engineering competence is not even slightly oversupplied compared to useful engineering work. Project failures, incompetent people, and systematically incompetent orgs are still very much alive at the most selective tech employers. There are real business needs to hire better engineers.

Replace high school students with engineering graduates and elite colleges with elite employers in your first para.... And see..

Elite employers are nowhere close to getting all their projects done successfully or with reasonable quality. The subset of engineering graduates who can do that is small.

Admission at Georgia Tech has spoken on this online. Per their analysis, they can definitely differentiate the top 30% of applicants from the rest and it makes a difference in performance. Within the 30% they have found no differentiator that significantly impacts their academic performance.

So they have a full 30% of their applicants qualified to be there but they have to narrow it to 1%. Whatever method they choose must have the appearance of meritocracy, abide by laws and regulations, be resistant to corruption, achieve goals other than academic performance such as culture, volunteering, and sports, and so on.

I think the same must be true for companies. At some point in the elimination process everyone is technically qualified, so they might as well hire someone "because we like his face". But that's demoralizing and corrupt so they invent some criteria that on its face seems useful, even though it's truly not.

Every person you hire is technically competent? So every system you build on or integrate with is high quality? Every architecture choice you have to live with is a good one? Every bug report you file is investigated well? Every coworker's code is a joy to read, and their reviews of your code and designs are insightful? Every person on your team is capable of the most difficult work in its pipeline? Every system you and your business could think to want is within your engineering team's capabilities to build quickly and operate well?

You have something really special there; hang on to it. People dream of working at a place like that. And have fun taking over the world, because with a team like that, you will.

Maybe I didn't phrase it well. Georgia Tech of course has students who perform poorly and fail so their point wasn't everyone is good enough.

Their point was after getting to the top 30% there's really no signifier of who's going to fail or how much they would succeed. After a certain level of basic qualification it's essentially random to them.

So those people of course will get through the hiring process. The issue is whether you actually have a model to filter them out at hiring. Since a workplace Utopia as you suggested doesn't exist yet, I suppose no one has that model yet. So picking the top 0.01% is essentially randomness because as far as we can tell the top 30% are all the same.

It's actually that you aren't qualified to say who's competent. The CEO can't hire a tech competent CTO and that multiplies down the line. In the absence of a tech savvy judiciousness they fall back on fluff like "devops culture fit" and "growing the team" to be like "silicon valley culture". Hundreds of recruiters will sell them that story (those recruiters are really in the PR industry) and you end up with incompetence all around except everyone has become good at selling their own incompetence as the highest form of tech savvy. Most prevalent in older enterprisey firms.

Even worse, engineering management is desperately in short supply. However the beauty competition nature of the project and vendor selection process is the root cause of failure imho. And that's not fixable in tech, in fact, the problem is so meta (and metastatic) that only the PG recommended "end-run" to provide value to end users can cut through the BS.

I was against the algorithm tests or something more like exams before.

Until I interviewed a lot of people with my colleagues during these years. Interview processes are highly biased based on the knowledge of the interviewer's background and value, or even mood.

Some interviewers are too sloppy on interviewing, asking ill-defined questions, demanding answers they want, or just in a hurry and wanting to go back to work. I often feel bad and angry for interviewees - they spent time and patience preparing themselves carefully, then was treated very casually. It isn't fair at all.

I hate to say that, although standardized tests are bad, they are better than the most nowaday interviews.

I went to a Cal State, and I recall in the last few years Google has taken professors to their campus and pretty much preach Cracking the Code Interview. So it looks like schools are already making that their standard. I have yet to see what classes look like but I could see there being a required technical interview course you have to take in order to increase school’s numbers on where their alumni work.

That would be Stanford CS9 : https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/

> This course will prepare students to interview for software engineering and related internships and full-time positions in industry. Drawing on multiple sources of actual interview questions, students will learn key problem-solving strategies specific to the technical/coding interview. Students will be encouraged to synthesize information they have learned across different courses in the major. Emphasis will be on the oral and combination written-oral modes of communication common in coding interviews, but which are an unfamiliar settings for problem solving for many students.

There's a YC company that's literally making a standardized test for programmers: https://cspa.io/

They trademarked the words "Core Exam"? That seems like a rather generic term.

I really hope this fails, something I have never wished for any other startup.

At least personally in my hirings I'll never use or trust anything like this.

There are so many things wrong with this approach that I'm kinda speachless as to where to start.

Please do start? I'm kind of curious what you'll say because it's not at all obvious to me that it would be a bad idea.

I'll try - a few thoughts:

Software engineering is part knowledge and part application of knowledge (problem solving) and part ability to acquire and apply new knowledge. We remain current in our jobs and roles by making sure we're constantly learning. Interviews should be part testing of knowledge, but a lot more discussions to evaluate problem solving and ability to acquire & apply knowledge.

Also, knowledge in many cases becomes stale if not used. If I learn a new language/framework but don't use it in a project immediately, I'll forget almost all of it. I may learn react via books/tutorials, get a great score in the test, never use it and/or forget it by the time I get a job based on the score. Am I a good hire?

Given that it's not clear as to what problem such a test will solve and moreover it's unclear as to the long term impact of such a test. Is this just for initial filtering, or will become an actual hiring criteria?

If graduates from colleges are expected to take such a test to prove something, then what is the value of the work these grads did in their colleges? How is a score in these taking in regards to the work students do in colleges?

Some people are better test takers than others. An a good interviewer is able to probe and work with the person. So such tests may end up discriminating, not on purpose of course, against bad test takers if they become the sole filtering mechanism. People may have to take tests again and again till they get a good score. An effort, which in no way helps in their job per se but is simple an additional burden.

The only potential place where I can see some value for such a test if to evaluate the coding camp folks, since different coding camps have different quality. However, even there, it's unclear how this will pan out.

>I may learn react via books/tutorials, get a great score in the test, never use it and/or forget it by the time

Thats one of the point of programming test, there are tons of framework/language out there, every company might use different language/framework, a standardize test streamline the interview process, make it easy for you to interview in many different company.

>Given that it's not clear as to what problem such a test will solve

It very least shows that you are care enough for the job that you willing to prepare time to prepare for it.

>Some people are better test takers than others

Sure, life is never fair, but for those who are worse test takers then it just mean you have spend more time and effort to practice it.

> Thats one of the point of programming test, there are tons of framework/language out there, every company might use different language/framework, a standardize test streamline the interview process, make it easy for you to interview in many different company.

As you said, they're very different. The thing is it might not be possible, as the technology develops and diverges, to have this one standardized test.

> It very least shows that you are care enough for the job that you willing to prepare time to prepare for it.

It applies to grinding leetcode as well, so not really related here.

> Sure, life is never fair, but for those who are worse test takers then it just mean you have spend more time and effort to practice it.

It can't be like, because some people are just not good at being tested, sorry, we don't want to work with you. They're of different purpose.

But the basic/fundamental like algorithm and data structures are still the same.

Yes just like grinding leetcode, is at least shown that you are willing to put the effort.

If you are someone who just not good at being tested then well you have to make it up with some other skills. For example being a really2 good domain expert that the company seek for you instead of the other way around or having excellent networking(as in relationship) skills.

Why do you think it would fail? Curious about your reasoning

Having a way that coders can avoid doing these types of coding problems over and over seems like a positive. Companies that aren’t interested in the approach could not use it.

Most companies today are already using a version of this that is way less respectful of applicant time.

But you’re speechless, so I guess there are strong points on both sides.

This is my thinking too. Having to prove, over and over, that I understand how linked lists and binary search trees work is just tiresome. Doing it once and then being able to refer to a trusted credential that certifies it would be a blessing.

I understand nobody is going to hire on the strength of one exam. Every job is a little bit different and some of them call for particular skill sets. That's fine. By all means ask questions tailored to the job at hand. But let's find a way to skip the really generic questions.

It would be a blessing, but I don't have any reason to expect its coming. I mean, I proved I understand how linked lists worked in my freshman year (well arguably earlier in HS CS classes) along with many other people who were enrolled in a CS or related (mine was CE) degree. Why can't I just point to my degree and never have to prove myself on that stuff again?

The issue is trust. No one trusts degrees anymore, and for very good reasons. I don't see any way for something else that relies on the same sort of credentialism to avoid corruption and lose trust unless it's measuring fairly static and not-very-gameable attributes like height or IQ (see: Wonderlic for basically IQ testing in a way that complies with laws against IQ testing..).

Where this gets particularly ugly is that even though no one trusts degrees anymore, they're still very popular, and some employers still require them anyway (or at least make it very hard to even get an interview without one). If a new "trusted credential" gets popular enough, or even a set of them, they'll eventually lose their trust, but because at some point they were popular people will still sink time into them and so the time cost we're inflicting increases when it'd be better to just get serious about hiring and tell smart and interested 18 year olds to just come start working already.

I like your thinking around the trust issue.

It's a totally different matter between hiring new grads, and non new-grades. cspa.io seems only to target new-grads. But as you said, it's replacing one degree system with another similar, but maybe evenly good/bad system.

Judging from the people I work with (FAANG). I would say that this screening is successful, if someone truly awful got in, then there's still PIP. But those are relatively uncommon.

The next step is back channel reference checks

except there is no standardization at all.

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