Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> what exactly is the better alternative?

When people ask this question, they almost always mean, what's the alternative to one kind of testing that's still a test?

Nobody seems willing to accept the answer that interviews shouldn't be tests. The demand for testing assumes the idea, the self-fulfilling prophesy, that 99% of programmers can't program. If you start with that assumption, then you'll always end up wanting some kind of test. But it's such a bizarre idea that programmers are uniquely incompetent among all professions in the world.

We know that interviews, not just programmer interviews but interviews in general, are poor predictors of performance. The best predictor of future performance is past performance. In other words, experience.

Our industry is also insanely afraid of the proverbial "bad hire". It's a pervasive mental illness. There's a failure to recognize that perfection is unattainable, and mistakes are a fact of life. Look of professional sports: they spend vastly more time and money on talent evaluation than tech, and yet pro sports teams get talent evaluation totally wrong all the time! Bad draft picks, bad trades, bad contracts, etc. They just accept it, deal with it, and move on. Nobody has the perfect programmer hiring method, and nobody ever will. It's a crapshoot. And just because a programmer "can program" doesn't mean they're not a bad hire. They could still write buggy, overengineered code, they could be a bad teammate, they could be a sexual harasser, or have any number of other issues. Or they could leave for another jobs a few months after getting hired. There's no way to guarantee a good hire.

It's a mistake to turn hiring into an "algorithm". It's not a programming problem, it's a human problem. Programmers are humans, not robots, and they're not going to perform robotically in interviews. The only way to truly know is to give someone a chance. They may unpleasantly surprise you, but they may also pleasantly surprise you.

I'm with you that there is way more to being an effective developer than just being able to write code. I feel very strongly about that.

But that's not a compelling argument against doing coding assessments in interviews, I could see it as an argument in favor of also having behavioral questions.

>it's such a bizarre idea that programmers are uniquely incompetent among all professions in the world.

There's no standardized licensing for our profession. The closest thing we have really is Computer Science degrees which, as the article this thread is about points out, doesn't churn out job ready programmers unless they're also doing independent study.

Evaluating on past performance alone would be impossible. What if this is to be their first job? What if their previous job won't tell you anything other than "Yes this person worked here" because they're scared of getting sued?

If you're relying on a candidate's self description of their past performance you've just switched out selecting for people who can perform under pressure to selecting for people who are good at bullshitting/charming.

To become a lawyer, you have to sit for a very intense and stressful exam that you took two extra years of schooling for. There are similar processes in place for becoming a doctor, after even more schooling and forced on the job training.

Some form of assessing coding skills is going to happen just like some form of skill assessment happens with any knowledge worker job. It'll just either happen during interviews or eventually through some kind of certification process.

The example you gave of professional sports is odd to me- Yes, they have to deal with it when they make bad hiring choices just like most organizations do but they still clearly feel that it's worth the effort to be very selective in their hiring process.

There is an opportunity cost to "giving someone a chance" - even if you moved to a very permissive system where it's easy in, easy out people still have to onboard that employee and go through the process of firing them. If a simple coding assessment had revealed they can't even complete very basic tasks it would avoid taking up company resources.

This isn't a defense of forcing someone to write perfect code on a whiteboard, I just think it's absolutely valid to ask someone to write code in an interview setting.

> There's no standardized licensing for our profession.

Most professions have no licensing. Doctors and lawyers are the exception, not the norm. This is because doctors have your life in their hands, and lawyers have your freedom in their hands. But usually an App Store app won't kill you or send you to jail. Moreover, licensing is not actually standardized! Every state in the United States has its own different licensing requirements. There are no national or international standards. It's a local government issue. Every time people bring up licensing, they miss these basic facts.

> What if this is to be their first job?

Obviously entry-level jobs and/or internships would hire differently. The crazy thing about software engineering is that they have fresh college grads and 10 year veterans in the same applicant pool for the same jobs! This should never ever happen.

> selecting for people who are good at bullshitting/charming

We already do this to some extent, because "leetcode" tests are bullshit. Anyway, this is just the insane paranoia of the tech industry. Yes, there are liars out there, but it's ridiculous to treat every job candidate like a criminal, guilty until proven innocent. Even our legal system has more respect for people. Remember, hiring is a two-way street: you have to convince the candidate to agree to work for you. Treating the candidate like a liar is not a good first impression. Imagine if you tried that method with dating — you'd never get a second date! You know, there are a lot of bad bosses in the world. I would argue there are more bad bosses than there are bad programmers, because programmers get promoted to management without having any experience or training for management. How about we have job candidates grill the interviewer? If you think "whiteboarding" is bad, then the hiring manager can do a take-home test given by the candidate. ;-) Nothing worse than getting hired by a bad manager.

> they still clearly feel that it's worth the effort to be very selective in their hiring process

I never said companies shouldn't be selective in their hiring process. I actually think they're too unselective in their hiring process. It's a waste of everyone's time to do a whole bunch of "screening" interviews of basically everyone who applies. Instead, companies should only interview the top candidates based on experience and skills, and spend most of their time trying to evaluate those few top candidates.

I would have less objection to doing coding as part of the hiring process if coding tests weren't used so ruthlessly to screen out candidates. Maybe it could be the final step before hiring someone. (Even there, you wouldn't use a "FizzBuzz" test, those just dumb.) But hardly any company uses coding tests in that way. Mass testing of candidates is nothing more than a test of performance anxiety. Mass interviews are just begging for some trivial matter to decide who gets hired.

Let me put it this way: if hiring is based mainly on the interview process and not on the résumé, then it's precisely the bullshitters/charmers you were worried about who will get hired, because those are the kind of people who are best at interviews. And the ability to grind on LeetCode doesn't make you a good programmer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com