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Comment by headhunter | Hacker News Reader

Good problems, yes. But effective interview tools? I thought we were moving away from arbitrary puzzles during technical assessments.

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I don't know. The wordplays, yes maybe, but the "build a chat" one is pretty interesting. What kind of buffer will you use, how do you handle errors, how did you test, which socket library did you use and why can tell a lot about how you work alone with clear but not well-defined objectives.

Chat is fine in scope and definitely achievable. But I’d rather whiteboard instead of doing these silly homework assignments.

These are "do on your time before you even request an interview", much less troublesome format than "in an interview".

Even more troublesome, IMO. This as a gate to interviews leads to a really uninclusive hiring process.

Please state the alternative.

The act of dissecting a candidate's qualifications and mapping them to what a company is searching for is always going to come off as appearing to be uninclusive to one group or another unless you are naive to believe every single human being contains the same skill set, current ability, and potential.

How is this uninclusive? I'm not arguing, just want to understand your analysis.

All of these seem to require a significant investment of time before the interview process gets kicked off, which is uninclusive because it biases the hiring process against candidates whose time outside of the office is consumed by taking care of their children. (Stereotypically, it’s borderline age-ism too because candidates in their 30s and 40s are much more likely to have children compared to people in their mid-twenties.)

>All of these seem to require a significant investment of time before the interview process gets kicked off, which is uninclusive because it biases the hiring process against candidates whose time outside of the office is consumed by taking care of their children.

You have to be kidding me. It also is biased against people whose time is spent playing video games or who do nothing at all.

Some jobs are meant for people at a certain point in their career. Sometimes you don't get to have everything at the same time.

People like you would argue it would be better to shut down hospitals than let doctors work long hours because those long hours might make women not want to do the job.

people who cannot spare the time are not the same group as people who choose recreation instead.

Some jobs are meant for people at a certain point in their career.

That should be determined by their employability, not the state of their personal life.

People like you would argue

No they wouldn’t; strawpeople don’t argue anything, they just fall over.

It filters out anyone without a few hours/days/a week to spend interviewing at your company (those without access to good hardware at home, those with familial or other after hours commitments, etc)

> uninclusive

Isn't that the point of a hiring process?

It depends on how you want to understand language.

The point of a hiring process is to exclude candidates that are legitimately not suitable for the role.

A reasonable contextual interpretation of the grandparent comment is that the hiring process will end up excluding suitable candidates for illegitimate reasons.

Whether they should have to slavishly spell this out in a message board comment is a hot topic.

They should, because otherwise they're just virtue signalling, not making an argument.

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