Incompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us.
Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.
Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.
Even if a candidate didn't know that modulo even existed they could still get the remainder with simple division and subtraction. Modulo might be slightly different depending on the language, but for fizzbuzz that's not important and most likely not what you're expected to know in such an interview question. And while it is not the most common operator it is still one of the most basic ones and present in all languages you'd use during a job interview.
And they'd probably fail some interviews for doing so.
> And while it is not the most common operator it is still one of the most basic ones and present in all languages you'd use during a job interview.
This is true, but I also expect some otherwise-competent programmers would fail a test that expected them to remember the specifics of bitwise operators or bitshifting. It's been years since I've needed to use any of the three in a paid job - they're just not very common in my day jobs, whereas they crop up a lot in side projects.
Not in the sense of missed a bit of punctuation, but rather in the sense of “couldn’t get started with anything that vaguely smelled like an answer, didn’t understand the type system of the language they claim 5 years of experience with, etc”.
I’ve probably interviewed fewer than 400 candidates in-person and maybe 200 of those would be senior ICs. To have more than a percent of them be utterly incapable here is a signal that there are candidates out there taking their best half-court buzzer-beater shot to try to land the prize. If you’ve done 100 first round in-person interviews and never run into someone that causes you to check up on how the phone screen happened, your screening processes work pretty well.
Is it possible that these candidates are capable programmers in daily work? Sure, it’s possible, but I’d bet against it.
* We used to ask a candidate to average an array of ints. It’s a question that was designed to tease out whether the candidate would discuss/inquire about overflow, what the return type should be, etc. After a couple years, we realized that candidates would stumble on the loop and sum more than anywhere else and we got more signal/minute from asking the vastly simpler summation question. Candidates who could fluently write the loop usually knew about overflow and the fact that the average of ints isn’t mathematically an int but that many times an int is what you want and can discuss the reasons.
I still wonder if we couldn't remove most of these games though if we improved our hiring, onboarding, and firing processes in other ways than just trying to make a better hiring filter. Accidentally letting in someone wholly unsuitable for the job shouldn't be a big deal if 1) you can detect that like in the first day, or at least first week 2) the amount of damage they can do before detected is small 3) they actually start very soon after the decision to hire is made 4) you can fire them immediately after deciding a mistake was made and they don't work another day.
Startups can handle this better already and I think is reflected in a lot of them still doing more casual "single lunch conversation" style interviews before a "welcome aboard, see you on Monday" decision. For big cos, work will have to be done on getting away from the mentality of "it's ok if you're not contributing much of anything for the first x days because onboarding" where x is high (I've seen over 30), and firming up access controls (no facebook style all-access of new hires (or anyone if possible) being able to just query the production db and access the private messages of exes or whoever), and removing the "ok you're hired, see you in x weeks" policies where new hires can only start after a significant delay or all on a certain date for whatever reasons, and only getting rid of someone through a long and drawn out PIP process... Maybe it can be done some day.
As a hiring manager or interviewer, I’m not their fiduciary, but when facing a risky hire, I wish there was a way to let the candidate make a more fully-informed choice without the knowledge that we think it’s a high-risk offer influencing them negatively in any way.
Right now, they interview and get an offer or don’t. If they get an offer that we think is high-risk, they have no reasonable way to know that.
Things like, "How do you feel about stretching your skills in the work force?" "What do you do when you make a mistake at work?" "How do you handle a situation where you feel out of your depth?" Etc.?
I know I would take that as a signal not to go for it if I wanted to retain stability in my life.
It does give me some ideas to consider when we extend the offer (as @Jach's sibling comment also suggests).
I've been fortunate (or not) that the hiring decisions I've played a part in have all been non-urgent with no struggle to find more candidates, so in the face of risk the org could afford to wait. The moral hazard you describe is interesting though. I don't think I would worry about it, as you say the hiring side isn't their fiduciary, and you don't necessarily know that their current situation is all that stable. I might try and assure myself that even if things don't work out, they're unlikely to be put out on the streets, since if they got past us (even with our "risky" assessment) they can probably get past someone else quickly enough, and possibly even go back to where they left depending on how stable it really was.
I'd consider being honest with them about the risk if an offer is extended. If I were on the receiving end, I'd prefer to be told before I accept something along the lines of "Honestly we're a bit unsure how well you'll adapt to our work [because of risk factors x], but we see your potential and think you'll rise to the occasion. We hope you'll come join us!" I don't think having my risk factors pointed out would affect me negatively at all, even if I think they're BS things the company shouldn't worry about, though I can see it possibly affecting the company somewhat negatively in that they're potentially giving the candidate who all-in-all they think is worth taking a chance on an extra reason to decline (and thus they'll need to continue searching which sucks). Whether that decline happens really depends on the candidate. With that information they might conclude/agree it's too risky to leave their current role for you right now, or they might actually be motivated to do better and start proving themselves right from the start especially at a company that is so forthcoming about such things. And they might fail, but at least they leave with the knowledge of what went wrong, and even if what went wrong wasn't an identified risk factor they still have your list of risk factors (some possibly valid, some BS, some that can be worked on, some that can't) that other companies might be looking out for to have for future interviews.
But the cost is actually minimized already by rejecting in the interview. Just like finding a bug while writing unit tests is cheaper than QA finding it after you make a build, even if QA does so in the first hour of testing.
So in hiring, there are costs companies pay to avoid a bad hire, and costs that result as a consequence of bad hires -- which they mostly can only estimate because of bad hires getting through anyway, everything on the consequences side is formally probabilistic. You can think of it as hiring-filter-costs + P(bad-hire) * consequences-of-bad-hire. So yes, if P(bad-hire) is 0 because of your amazing hiring filter, then you'll never have to pay for the consequences-of-bad-hire. And supposedly, increasing hiring-filter-costs should decrease P(bad-hire), though over time we've found many practices that don't actually do that, and smarter companies have stopped doing them.
My thinking boils down to we can and should reduce hiring-filter-costs (which I want to think of as including opportunity costs and negative externalities on the whole industry, but it's not necessary), but fear prevents even experimenting at many places because there's an idea that any reduction will increase P(bad-hire) too much, and consequences-of-bad-hire are too large. So, why not focus more on identifying and lowering the consequences-of-bad-hire? Do that, and we'll also be able to lower hiring-filter-costs even if they increase P(bad-hire), which they aren't guaranteed to do anyway.
The biggest problem when hiring people with experience though, and why the probation style is pretty rare in the direct form I think you're thinking of, is that it's going to filter out the best people -- just like many other too onerous hiring practices filter them. They're just not going to put up with it when they have much better options. For Europe to the extent such a practice works at all is probably related to how universal it is for employees and employers to have a symmetric long period of notice of termination/notice of quitting that often ends up being at least a month if not 60+ days. In the US, every state is at-will, you can leave at any time and be dismissed at any time (within the bounds of certain legal protections, paranoid risk of violating which has driven larger companies to an insane PIP-style process of nudging someone out the door over a period of months). I think US companies and employees both should continue leaning in to that more as an advantage.
They may only represent 2% of the population, but they are a much larger % of candidates searching for jobs. If you think about it a bit, you'll see why.
Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer.
Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so many basics of CS who have finished degrees, bootcamps, or have been employed in those roles for years.
Doctors simply aren't able to get accreditation or employment with the same ease as software developers.
If you're going to demand that you be treated as an honest estimator of your own abilities beyond doubt don't be surprised if that ends up eliminating opportunities for people who are trying to break into the field without those credentials that put their abilities at a near certainty.