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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> If you're using an interview that bares 'little relevance to an employee’s day-to-day work' and that requires dedicated prep to pass, then what you're doing is optimising a process for finding people who will tick boxes and jump through meaningless hoops.

You mean all those jobs requiring college degrees? Or is that different somehow? The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal even if they are partly irrelevant or tedious, and interview prep has nothing on 4 years spent full time, and on top of that you have to pay for college.

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> The main reason is that difficult tests has positive signal

They provide a signal, but I don't think the evidence suggests that it's necessarily a positive one. "Can you play Czardas on the tuba" is a difficult task that would provide a strong hire/no hire signal, but that doesn't mean it would be a good signal to use when looking for developers.

The big tech companies themselves admit that a bunch of their employees are not sufficiently competent [1]; clearly, current hiring practices are suboptimal. Just because a test exists doesn't mean it's valid.

> You mean all those jobs requiring college degrees

There are many jobs where high performance doesn't require a college degree, and for those jobs, requiring a degree is again an exercise in box-ticking that should be replaced with a more meaningful measure. There are also jobs were significant education in the topic is important, and a degree provides better evidence of that that many other things, so can be a useful signal.

We know that tech hiring is broken, but whenever it's criticised, the people invested in this system get outraged. "What do you want us to do, just hire everyone?" etc. No one is saying - or has ever said - that assessing applicant competence is a bad idea, just that assessing the ability to rote learn is not the best use of time when hiring developers.

The current system is not the only way, and for an industry that prides itself on being filled with problem solvers and hackers, it's bizarre to me how much people rest on the idea that the existing system is imperfect but present, and so should be left alone.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-meta-girds-fier...

Maybe it is not the best system, but isnt it at least relatively fair and transparent in compare to "having luck on interviewer's stack/xp"?

Why would that be the only other option? That's exactly the same kind of hoop-jumping, perhaps even a little more honest.

This is exactly what I was talking about above. The solution for a known-to-be-broken system isn't another known-to-be-broken one, and it isn't keeping the broken system because it's already in place.

Development isn't about rote memorisation or slavishly repeating past mistakes. Knowing the Voight-Kampff algorithm doesn't make you a good developer, nor does claiming 20 years of experience with a decade-old technology, nor does being the CEO's nephew. All of those things provide (at best) a totally irrelevant signal.

What if we used better methods? Ones that actually assessed and evaluated the skills/traits necessary to do the job well? Ones that couldn't be gamed as easily by "grinding". I'm not saying there's globally-applicable silver bullet just waiting to go, but there are definitely avenues to explore.

One process I went through quite recently asked me to bring along a single line of code I'd written - any language, any project. Then we had a conversation about it: what it actually did, how it fitted into its context, why I'd written it like that. It provided me with an opportunity to show my understanding, and for the interviewer to probe particular areas they were focused on. I enjoyed the process, and I could see how it was providing relevant information to them.

Again, it's an imperfect process, but I think there's potentially a lot of mileage in 'talking to developers' when hiring them, with any number of different twists. At the very least, we should be experimenting and trying to find a fit-for-purpose process.

The question I have in regards to your suggestion is, how scalable is it ? Can/could it be applied to a FAANG-sized company ? I'm not rejecting any of your points, its just that every time someone critiques the current hiring practices they fail to provide an alternative system that does not introduce other problems (the first and most notable one is scalability, but there are many others)

I think a conversation is eminently scalable. If an organisation cannot devote 30 minutes to checking if someone they're about to hire is at all competent, then that organisation has much, much bigger problems than hiring.

The current process also requires dedicated employee time to administer, after all - this takes no more time, involves less employee prep, and (crucially) might be valuable.

YMMV but in college I learned lots about

- having to work together with assholes towards a common goal

- how sometimes you can cram for a deadline, but sometimes you can't

- how, often, how well you do is just politics and networking

Obviously fuck everything I learned about however pushdown automata worked. That's not relevant to my career now. All the above still is.

The automata class I took years ago has been one of the more relevant to my career.

TBH I was struggling to come up with a class that was relevant enough that I recalled it, but not relevant enough that I never used it ;). It's been a while since I graduated, so I probably suppressed a lot of memories about courses like Advanced Partial Differential Equations.

Meanwhile I learned about SQL, statistics, product development, industry best practices, algorithms both optimal existing ones and designing new ones, data structures both how to make one and what makes good ones, and how operating systems are designed and function. Specifically, I wasn't just shown a vague example in a twenty minute youtube video, I was made to demonstrate my knowledge in projects and tests that were designed by an intelligent domain expert and educator to separate the wheat from the chaff and often did just that.

I use most of that every single day, and I'm basically a web app developer. Can you learn how to program from learning yourself? Sure. Einstein taught himself calculus, but that doesn't mean most people can adequately teach themselves difficult subjects.

Writing a for loop might not be a difficult subject, but understanding what makes a for loop slower than another method, or why maybe you don't need to loop at all if you engineer things differently is an entirely different thing.

>interview prep has nothing on 4 years spent full time

that's just the problem with these interviews. It's kind of obvious that a fresh grad who prepares for 2 weeks for those whiteboard interviews will completely outclass known most productive programmers and engineers in the world (take whatever example you want, I would name someone like John Carmack) who takes the test fresh and unprepared. The modes of thinking and toolboxes required are just entirely different.

That should tell enough about the quality of that style of interview if you are using them for anything other than to weed out people who can't code at all in a phone screen.

> a fresh grad who prepares for 2 weeks for those whiteboard interviews will completely outclass known most productive programmers and engineers in the world (take whatever example you want, I would name someone like John Carmack) who takes the test fresh and unprepared

This extreme take is highly unlikely. World class programmers are typically extremely good in maths (and possibly have an active interest in it)/algorithms, and problem solving in general. In addition to J.Carmack (who is definitely very good in linear algebra and problem solving), another random example is F.Bellard (who calculated the largest known prime, and most digits of pi). L.Torvalds is surely extremely good with algorithms, S.Wozniak with problem solving (given his extremely good design skills in electronic engineering); another one that comes to my mind is P.Bonzini, with his 40 GB/S fizzbuzz :)

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