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Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light.

I've been interviewing for the last couple of weeks and I agree with this. Being a "good" human being, i.e. candid, humble, kind, friendly, seems to be valued a lot more than what I thought before.

At the end of the day is people working with people, and the more humans that interactions can be, as opposed to a rigid, dry act, the better.

At least, that gives an idea of the company and if it's a fit for me.

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Can confirm as a senior engineer at a FAANG. I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits but being ok technically, and recommended people for hire with not the best technical skills but with excellent non-technical/leadership traits.

Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped.

> I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits

I'm not an expert, but this can be a really slippery slope to implicit bias creeping in to your hiring decisions, especially if these traits are outside of your area of interview/expertise.

I bet physical appearance plays into whether someone's perceived this way too.

The "culture fit" interview which is standard in tech companies today is nothing but an avenue to introduce whatever bias the interviewer wants with no oversight, no explanation.

This isn't necessarily true. You can have rigor around your value/culture fit questions. In our process, we require strong reasons for both yes and no decisions (especially for culture fit). If an interviewer says no "because X" we look for similar signal to have shown up in other parts of the loop (performed by different people). If only one interviewer sees a signal, we are careful to analyze it for bias.

I can see how it can do just that, but I explain our "culture" as best I can before evaluating candidates against it.

Example: My workplace has a great deal of change, bordering on ambiguity. We need people who can deal with that and thrive in that environment. So, my interview questions aim to find out if the person is going to thrive in an environment where they might have to find their own way, or if they are the kind of person who likes to take directions and stay in a specified lane.

In this case, adaption to change is part of our culture - you're either a good fit or you aren't.

This assumes that your soft skills evaluations are more colored by implicit bias than your technical evaluations. Everything is colored by bias, it's just different kinds of bias. And stuff being inside your area of expertise is no defense against bias. You might subconsciously assume someone doesn't know certain technical things and simply not bother to ask the question.

Eh, seems to me some minefields have a lot more mines in than others.

"Did their solution to FizzBuzz coded within 20 minutes produce the correct output?" has far fewer mines than "did they communicate clearly throughout?"

I think reaching the correct solution is one of the least important parts of a technical interview.

I've interviewed candidates who will write the equivalent of enterprise level fizz buzz [0] and get to a correct solution, and candidates who will write much simpler code, but not quite solve the problem (it's a longer problem than fizzbuzz). I feel like I get better signal off the latter, as we can spend more time discussing their ideas, Vs writing boilerplate.

[0] https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Not selecting or evaluating for soft skills is worse than potentially slightly increasing exposure to implicit bias.

Furthermore, I would bet that in the long run, selecting for soft skills helps drive down real observed implicit bias. (People with better soft skills are probably better at managing their own implicit biases.)

> especially if these traits are outside of your area of interview/expertise

I think determining whether the candidate is kind of a person that I would like to work with in one team should be everyone's area of interview

In some cases you are effectively screening out senior engineers that have pretty much reached their plateau. They won't learn anything new and they don't want to learn anything new.

There's a difference between 10 years of experience and 10x one year of experience.

I'm honestly unsure if you're advocating for ageism or for people with many short-stint positions.

Neither.

What I meant is that I've met senior engineers who were senior by virtue of having spent a long time in the industry but not because they were any better than a fresh grad.

Also that some seniors simply stopped learning at some point, which is pretty bad for the majority of dev roles. They won't learn for the new role and push whatever they used at last N roles because that's all they know.

It's def a slippery slope, but all of hiring is bound by implicit bias. If random people are evaluating random people against a set of subjective metrics, you're always going to get _some amount_ of bias in your decision making.

In reality, I think a surprising amount of bias goes into "tech screening", maybe even moreso than evaluating "soft skills." If you're asking random engineers at your company to conduct tech screens, the odds that those engineers are emotionally and mentally reflective enough to be fair and bias-free in the questions they ask and the solutions to those questions are very low. This is why so many places struggle with tech interviews that feel like debates. Engineers dislike candidates that do well on the tech portion of the screen because those engineers feel it is a competition that they must "win". I've seen this time and time again at FAANG and non-FAANG. Random engineers from a team should not be assessing candidates, pretty much ever.

You'll probably end up with some good looking staff with excellent teeth. People always like pretty people.

Or these days, possibly the people with excellent webcam setups?

almost on the same lines, if you feel like interviewer doesnt care about you -

"Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped."

Although this is welcome to hear, it's not something a candidate can count on reliably nor something they can really control. After all, a candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another.

Versus just being able ace through leetcode problems - that's a more objective criteria a candidate has more control over.

Personal anecdote. I interviewed at a FAANG, got rejected. They actually offered feedback, and one of the key reasons I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem.

Fast forward a year, I retry. I take the above feedback to heart, and refrain from asking too many questions. I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions".

Clearly they want you to demonstrate a working knowledge of binary search.

Yeah, but you gotta sort your shit out first.

> candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another.

> I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem.

> I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions".

It sounds like they didn't like you _personally_. If the rejection reason wasn't due to technical or behavioral mismatch but a fake reason like the ones above, it's the often the problematic "Airport test" (ie. They don't want to be stuck in an airport with you"reason).

And to be clear, I think it's wrong to reject candidates because you personally can't think of "being friends" with them. It's unfair to both the candidate, but also the company as it misses out on great engineers.

Not being an asshole, being able to help teams work together and not be assholes to each other, and having okay technical skills is my true value proposition.

I have had opposite experiences. Many of my interviews were straight evaluations on technical ability, many of which I failed.

Amazon in particular, I had told the interviewer that my day-to-day was in C#, but they continued to ask rigorous javascript questions, of which I could explain most of the answer, but failed to find the very specific javascript answer they were looking for. As a result, I was blocked by Amazon from any further interviews for one year. (And at the time, incredibly disheartening in my job search...)

Did you apply for a C# or javascript job?

IIRC, entry-level developer, including javascript. I don't believe I applied to any jobs that were strictly javascript.

I accept the failed interview, but this doesn't explain why I was banned for failing a technical interview. Amazon is a big place.

The most scarring interview experience I've ever had was with Amazon, when I was very young, where they exhibited a similar amount of not listening to me at all and evaluating skills that I never claimed to have.

Ultimately Amazon is too big and too popular to listen or care to candidates. They're going to do whatever they're going to do, regardless of what you say, and that'll naturally filter out a ton of candidates.

>evaluating skills that I never claimed to have

Interesting thought. I had an interview experience a few months ago that went fairly poorly and it was in large part because the interviewer pressed me on topics that I forwardly stated I was not well versed on (microservices). I ejected from the interview process afterwards because of my displeasure with the interviewer. He was not someone I wanted to work with in the long term.

It happens all the time. The last time I was looking for a new job, I interviewed at a bigger tech company in my area (SF based though). In the first screen I was open about not having recent JVM experience and 0 experience with JVM optimization/tuning. The hiring manager said it was no big deal and they hire and train people that are new to that space all the time. I was then given a take home challenge that required Java. Then, during the technical assessment, all of the questions were around JVM optimization. I just kind of laughed and skipped a lot of questions until the interview ended, where I emailed the hiring manager withdrawing from further interviews.

Interviewing suck. Sometimes it to them, not you.

Very similar experience at a consulting firm. No Matlab on CV. At interview

- do you use Matlab? "No".

- show me where the errors are in these Matlab code samples.

hard to respect an attitude like that.

With regards to the “block”- my understanding at most companies is that if you don’t pass the interview, but still had some positives, they’ll tell you to try again in a year.

I recently had a technical interview where I stumbled the whole way through, but I kept my attitude lighthearted, asked plenty of dumb questions, and am pretty sure I even said "Oh, geez, I'm an idiot" at one point. They acknowledged that I was a weak candidate, but they liked me enough to extend an offer amounting to a 33% salary increase over my current job--and with an additional 33% bump after 6 months if I can prove that I am actually not so much of an idiot. :)

Humility and earnestness can go a long way. A big ego never helps.

That doesn't seem to apply at FAANGs. I had some positive interviews where I went out of my way to build some rapport and it got a lot of smiles but no offer. It definitely worked at the completely not FAANG company that I work for now. I think I'm probably better off this way.

That is a good point. The company is certainly no FAANG, but those aren't quite my cup of tea, so I am grateful for that.

FAANGs are a different beast altogether. Especially at the IC level, it is 99% technical, given a normal-human-being-behavior. Then, technical the way they (individual interviewer and company) evaluate it and you don't know about, since I had a few interviews in which I was confident I did a very good job (I am not a junior...) and they got back with a rejection on technical grounds.

One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough.

> One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough.

That's terrible behavior from the interviewer. Did you try raising this with your recruiter?

The decision is already made, there is no point, nobody is going to backpedal on anything. I remember saying: "I don't get it", but she was clueless about the interview itself. It was a company in LA with a ghost.

If I liked other people I'd met well enough I'd give that feedback (politely and without assigning blame), not to change their mind but just to let them know.

The one moment I know went wrong was when I couldn't remember the name "trie" and the interviewer just wrapped up and left 15 minutes early. And I still had 3 more sessions that day.

It's because they thought you memorized the problems and solutions. Next time if you get something you know, feign ignorance and just stumble through it naturally.

It seems that it depends on the interviewer. I nailed 3 out of 4 of the rounds for a FAANG job earlier this year, but absolutely bombed the system design question. I was offered one more interview round to redeem myself (didn't know they did this). Did so-so on the extra round but ended up having a fun conversation about surfing after the interviewer pointed out my surfboard in the background. I have no way of knowing but I'd like to think that my personality got me the job considering my poor performance towards the end.

I would say it doesn't apply to most medium sized or larger tech companies, or even most medium sized or larger non-tech companies that have formalized leetcode-based hiring practices.

You can come off as the most awesome person to work with, but they'll typically reject you if you can't solve the leetcode problems to whatever minimum standard they're expecting.

its easier to train someone up in technical skills than to untrain them from being a dick

I've learned that the hard way!

That explains a lot of the shitty software lately. Just joking. No, not really.

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