Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

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> How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?

OP said "just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer", for which leetcode is useless.

Communication skills, organizational skills, hell, even general knowledge isn't covered by leetcode-like interviews.

Personally, speaking as someone who doesn't like but has to interview potential hires, I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

> If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested

I think this is a naive perspective. If there is any takeaway from the recent wave of layoffs, it would be that company wide decisions may be driven by factors that have no relation with actual financial performance. Google could have kept all these engineers and still make an absurd profit.

The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

They clearly don't help to evaluate organizational skills, but no one said you should only have these interviews. I'm guessing no company does only leetcode-style interviews, at least I don't know of any.

> I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

You could only evaluate this correlation among people who did pass your leetcode interviews and were thus beyond a certain bar, unless I'm missing something. The question is whether selecting according to this bar is useful, but it doesn't look like you evaluated this. Or did you do leetcode interviews and just hired anyone regardless of how they performed in them? I agree with you that beyond a certain bar, the signal becomes lesser. But being able to tell whether a candidate can write a for loop is a pretty strong (anti-)indicator for many SWE jobs.

> The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

I agree that there's probably some of that. But companies are made of people, and if so many are still doing that decades now after they started and don't see a competitive advantage in switching, maybe it's the best they've been able to come up with, given their constraints. Again, there's real money to be made for those coming up with an alternative that'd scale and perform better.

> AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

I want to specifically address this because communication can make or break teams. The kind of communication that you describe - conveying objective information - is not enough to build a well-functioning team. One of the most important questions, IMHO, is how do your teammates disagree with one another, especially on issues that don’t have a clear right answer? If you don’t probe for the answer to that question, then you’re hiring with a huge unknown.

There’s no way to know if Mrs. leetcode master X is a team player based on these kinds of interviews. She could come in and destroy a team with her personality. Granted a socially adept person can fake a pleasant personality during a few hours of interviewing, but the rare great interview processes will at least force a mini disagreement or few and gauge the candidate’s response.

This begs the question though: how do you evaluate communication skills better than this to encompass what you miss on technical discussions? It's easy to look like a team player in an interview setting where disagreements are low-stakes and theoretical. People do prepare for these behavioral interviews, there are whole sections in the same old reference book used for leetcode interviews. I honestly doubt people can tell between a well-prepared candidate from one that's a genuine team player before actually working with them.

I also want to reiterate the point that I don't know of any company that solely uses leetcode-style interviews, so they do tend to evaluate some kind of communication skills in another one.

I would hope no company relies solely on leetcode questions, but the common understanding was that Google was, at least in the not-so-distant past, among big tech companies, the closest to that style.

The weight that a company allocates to communication skills can also be measured on a spectrum. What I suggested in the comment to which you responded may be considered extreme by engineering interview standards, but the more you can probe an engineer’s communication style during an interview, especially in an adversarial conversation, the higher confidence you can have in their interpersonal compatibility with your team.

It’s one thing to answer questions about behavioral characteristics, which can be prepped. It’s another to induce the behavioral characteristics you’d like to test and see them for yourself. That’s a lot harder to fake.

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