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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for?

It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you're using FizzBuzz to judge whether people are competent.

Programmers aren't stage performers, but companies treat interviews like auditions. Anyone with "performance anxiety" is assumed to be incompetent, which is silly. The tech interview/audition is unnatural and very different from normal work.

It's been shown by researchers over and over that interviews test for anxiety, not skills, but interviewers refuse to listen. https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

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We all know interviews are unrealistic. But nobody knows an alternative way of testing a candidate in few hours.

> nobody knows an alternative way of testing a candidate in few hours

Why test? Seriously, why are interviews tests?

Everyone seems very worried about incompetent job candidates, but what about incompetent colleagues and managers? We act like interviews are one-way when in fact they're two-way, and the candidate needs to decide if they actually want to work for the potential employer. Does the candidate get to test the interviewers? Nobody wants to work with incompetent colleagues, and especially not an incompetent manager, which is the worst.

There are a lot of incompetent engineering managers, and indeed I would estimate that engineering managers are more likely to be incompetent than engineers, because engineers are frequently promoted to engineering managers despite having no background or training in management.

It's ok though, I'll let the manager do a take home test in their spare time.

When you say "test" are you referring to technical coding challenges in the interview process? An interview is essentially a test, regardless of whether it contains a whiteboard coding assignment, a presentation, or even just a conversation. At the end of the day an interview is designed for a company to decide whether or not they should extend an offer to a candidate and (hopefully) for a candidate to learn about the company before potentially accepting an offer. The point of this process is for both parties to decide if they would be a good fit together. They are literally "testing" each other.

Could tests be the least worst option? Onboarding is expensive. Contract to hire may be the next least bad solution, assuming one doesn't require the new person months to get up too speed.

Interviews are definitely two way.

That's why instead of complaining that companies don't interview the way you prefer them to ("interviewers refuse to listen"), you should just let them be the "incompetent" teams that you believe them to be, so that you can tell whether they're "incompetent" and decide to take an offer from a company that does things the way you like.

Then everyone is happy!

> That's why instead of complaining that companies don't interview the way you prefer them to ("interviewers refuse to listen")

This is a misconstrual. The point was that interviewers refuse to listen to scientific studies that show interviews test for anxiety rather than skills.

> Then everyone is happy!

Not when the whole industry cargo cults on audition-style interview tests.

Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too.

Sometimes candidates prefer rigorous interviews because it means the people inside the company all made it through those same hoops.

> Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too.

My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all.

Also, I've heard of many cases where certain candidates are allowed to bypass the normal interview rounds, or get coached on the company's interviews, or get "softball" questions during those interviews, if the company wants to hire that person for some reason no matter what.

Moreover, there's no guarantee that the current interview process is the same as the past interview process, especially for older companies. (Think Apple, for example.) Certainly the founders of a company never went through the process, and probably the initial employees didn't either. The founding of a company is almost always "informal", and only later is a more "rigorous" process imposed on newcomers.

> My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all.

Of course they do - their entire experience with the company prior is the "manager test".

A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems.

> A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems.

This is a straw man. It doesn't happen, and nobody believes that it happens.

What does happen is that people who are good at engineering get promoted to engineering management, but writing code and managing humans are two entirely different skills.

In fact it's especially true in companies with "rigorous" entrance exams that engineers employed by the company have focused on the coding aspect heavily in the past, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pass the exams. So their people skills would have tended to be neglected or ignored entirely.

You're missing the point.

When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable.

Sure, you might claim (as you seem to have, as a strawman) that before the promotion the would-be manager was merely an engineer with no management duties, but that's not exactly how things work. Sometimes it happens like you describe, but often the person being promoted gets assigned some light management or leadership duties before they take on the role officially. At any rate, the higher management already knows more about the would-be manager than any candidate you can interview in a 8 hour period.

> When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable.

What makes you think that people higher in the management chain are any better at managing people or even care about that aspect? Many tech companies were founded by college kids who were programmers and had no background or training in management. They were thrust into their roles by the circumstances with no preparation.

It seems like people are living in a hypothetical magical utopia in these comments instead of reality. We all know that managers are incompetent. We're experienced it. You can find endless engineers complaining about it. Why are we denying the truth here?

That's a different thing.

Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. The chain of replies was an attempt to refute that.

If your claim is that (for some companies) managers are less competent because that's how it has been forever, then the sample logic can apply to engineers in the company. It's not that I dispute the conclusion, but the reasoning doesn't hold because it doesn't differentiate the two cases.

> Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted.

My original claim was "engineers are frequently promoted to engineering managers despite having no background or training in management". This doesn't have much to do with interviews for engineering managers, though I did note sarcastically that there's no real "FizzBuzz" equivalent for managers.

Engineer to engineering manager is effectively a career change. Programming skills are different from people skills. It's important for an engineering manager to understand programming, but there's much more to the job. How many of them got management degrees in college rather the computer science degrees? How many of them were "managing since I was 13 years old" as opposed to "coding since I was 13 years old"? (You don't actually need to do either since you were 13 years old, but I think you get the rhetorical point.) Even if the "most qualified" of the current engineers get promoted to manager, that doesn't mean any of the current engineers are actually qualified to be a good manager of people rather than machines.

That makes more sense. It can be argued that there's no "absolute scale" for management competency though, and relative competence is the only measure you can hope to make.

It doesn’t work, but we’re going to do it anyway.

Science.

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