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Comment by kurtreed | Hacker News Reader

The fact that a service exists to make you better at interviews implies that interviews don't evaluate competency. If interviews evaluated competency then the way to get better at interviews would be the same as the way to get better at software development (books, projects, etc.). I feel like improving my competency is worthwhile but improving my interviewing is rent seeking.

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I couldn't agree more. Most interviews assess your ability to interview well, not do the job well. Stanford even run a class on the software engineering interview! I'm currently working on a product to help companies to build realistic interviews, and I'm seeing some other startups focus on this too, so hopefully it will become a thing of the past.

The Stanford course, for the curious: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/

The product we're working on: https://devscreen.io

Great implementation for solving a problem that is often discussed, but never executed.!I have always thought that paired programming works better than whiteboarding.

Do you have any reference clients? Would love to interview at such companies.

Pair programming has been my most successful and least stressful way of interviewing. I can display all my skills in a short amount of time and, most important to me, in a realistic and fun way.

I don't feel so pressured when I interview through pair programming which helps a lot to showcase my normal self.

It's easy to display your technical skills (and any gaps in it), soft skills (such as communication, perseverance, thought process, etc.), problem-solving skills and so on.

I'd much rather spend a 5-hour interview just pairing with different people than going through rounds and rounds of whiteboarding. Whiteboarding makes me feel like I'm a lab subject, being prodded in different directions while the experimenters take notes on their clipboards. It's extremely artificial to evaluate any real-life scenario.

Got a typo for you: https://devscreen.io/solutions/candidate-experience

>By choosing DevScren, you send a clear signal to candidates

Best of luck to you!

Everything needs to be sold. Being good at what you do may or may not get you some local reputation, but you won't get as far as you could without being able to make people aware of yourself and your abilities.

Is it "rent seeking" to film a TV commercial for your plumbing business or to work on your online marketing skills? It probably doesn't make you a better plumber. It probably makes you more money and may even bring in opportunities you wouldn't have had access to that could lead you to develop skills.

> Is it "rent seeking" to film a TV commercial for your plumbing business or to work on your online marketing skills?

Could be, depends

I'm not sure if "rent-seeking" is the right term to describe it, but an inevitable thing about your hypothetical plumber is that while he may be making more money, his new customers are getting a worse for the price (ads are expensive) plumber.

He will gain market power in his local market though, which could lead to his expansion and the closing of his least successful competition, bringing down area plumbing wages and allowing him to scoop up bad and inexperienced plumbers at a discount.

After that, we don't have to worry about his skills because he isn't working as a plumber anymore. He'll instead be paying bad plumbers bad wages, and keeping all the profits for himself. His desire will be to lower prices while expanding advertising, so the only variable to be played with is plumbers' wages vs. profit margins. He could then make high wage offers to the more skilled plumbers working for his competition in order to kill them off, and each time another independent shop dies, more of the wages will be shifted to profits.

Eventually, the market is served by the same set of plumbers as before (or likely fewer because some will leave the profession or the area), working at lower wages, but charging higher prices, whose excess goes directly to the shrewd marketer plumber. That's when our plumber enters local politics.

Maybe it is rent-seeking.

Wouldn't that depend on how much the plumbing business engages in actual plumbing business to drive success vs. how much it engages in marketing to drive "success"?

I've certainly seen both kinds of businesses before.

> The fact that a service exists to make you better at interviews implies that interviews don't evaluate competency.

I don't think so - it just means that your competency can be hidden, and it's possible to make it more visible to the interviewer.

For an extreme example if I go into an interview and remain mute, then I won't pass. If you teach me that I have to speak then I would do better in the interview. My technical competency hasn't changed between the two interviews.

What you said doesn't contradict what I said.

But it does kind of explain why an employer might pay them to offer candidates mock interviews -- it makes the not-mock more predictive.

Read the definitions of recall and precision. Interviews focus on precision at the expense of recall. That doesn’t mean interviews don’t evaluate competency. It’s just that not every competent candidate can pass.

Well I meant interviews don’t perfectly evaluate competency, there's certainly a correlation. Oh, and "read" the HN Guidelines.

> The fact that a service exists to make you better at interviews implies that interviews don't evaluate competency. If interviews evaluated competency

The only interpretation of this statement I can’t think of is “interviews do not measure competency.” That’s not true. They do, but the bias for high precision instead of high recall. That is, it’s better to pass on a competent person than to hire an incompetent one.

Regarding the guidelines, I’m not sure what you mean. One of the guidelines is to assume good faith, however.

I'm not sure why I'm jumping in to defend interviews, but... this merely proves that interviews are not perfect at evaluating competency. Suppose that the result of a typical interview is X% determined by competency, and (100-X)% determined by other factors. It could be possible to provide a service that helps you quickly improve the "other factors". And yet if X is large enough, interviews might still be of some value for evaluating competency.

I don't think it's that interviews don't try to evaluate competency, but that the process has become relatively homogenized and it has allowed new incentives to come into play that target interview taking development rather than skill development. It may also be that companies use most of the interview process primarily as a weeding out of candidates, and then when you get to the final X number of candidates, it becomes a toss up essentially.

To be fair, even if interviews were perfect and exactly measured software development skills, that wouldn't stop enterprising entrepreneurs (/s) from offering services to help you prep for them anyways

Same with all arbitrary low pass filters SAT, ACT, GRE. Interviewers are trying to measure competency but the only way you could possibly know for sure is have the gift of prophecy so they have to rely on proxies. But in a competitive job market where everyone is top tier the game stops being "just go in and present yourself honestly" but "study and practice giving off all the right signals because the margins are tight."

Of course they don't directly evaluate competency. Just like a math test doesn't directly evaluate the ability to do math (real math, as done by mathematicians - not schoolwork). The hope is that you can evaluate some other thing that's positively correlated with the desired property and is easier to measure.

But you can study for the interview just like you study for the test.

Unfortunately the high paying jobs are only looking for people good at interviews, everybody is doing leet code now

It’s just shitty licensure at this point. A service like this is no different than a exam prep course, in spirit. Except unlike other professions, we get to take our medical boards / bar exam every time we talk to another company.

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