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Comment by AlexTWithBeard | Hacker News Reader

Talk to the person and you will (1) hear a lot of bullshit and (2) filter out a ton of good but not really silver-tongued candidates.

P. S. I hate coding interviews.

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I've found that it's relatively easy to figure out if someone is bullshitting. It just takes some work on your end by researching the candidate's application a bit deeper, thinking about relevant questions beforehand, and then drilling down during the conversation. I've hired 'non-silver-tongued' candidates this way, as well as filtered out people who were bullshitting. The key is to actually have a conversation, instead of just letting them produce canned stories and responses.

But, yes, this is more work on the recruiting side.

As a side note, I totally get it why large organizations would use Leetcode though. It does help filter out false positives if you're willing and able to bear the cost of passing on many good candidates.

Yep. I've found that you can give someone enough rope to hang theyself. If you let them explain their processes and ways of working, most of the bullshitters will out themselves :D

Right and it becomes your job to spot bullshit and bring people out of their shell. It’s not easy to do that, but who said hiring was easy!

Technical interview might not bring people out of their shell but sure helps filter out bullshit.

Does it though? Often times all it tells you is that this person probably saw this question before.

While it's probably diminishing returns at discerning the levels of ability, it's very reliable at filtering out complete bullshitters.

Yes, it does. It shows that they at least shown an interest in this kind of thing.

it only shows that the person has an interest in solving leetcode problems, though

If you hear bullshit, then that's easy: you filter out such people.

Not really silver-tongued candidates? Well, what's the problem? Unless you are looking explicitly for silver-tongued candidates, you should ignore this "trait".

You can also ask them programming questions when you talk to them.

"What is a binary tree" will filter out most of the bullshitters.

None of this stuff is rocket science. We have a responsibility not to be lazy when interviewing people.

this is 99% of interviews in literally every other field ever.

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