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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

I obviously can't speak toward your experiences, but on the flip side I've never been surprised to find out someone can't code their way out of a paper bag after having a technical conversation with them.

I have of course met candidates who don't know even the most basic constructs in a language they're supposedly expert in. But none of them were able to "talk the talk", especially when probed directly about problems they've run into and how they've solved them.

I want to be clear I'm not discounting your experiences and I'm also not trying to say you suck at interviewing or anything like that. What I am trying to say is that my own experience tells me there must exist questions that reliably expose this kind of candidate.

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Do you happen to score as "intuitive" on Myers-Briggs?

I'm idly wondering whether that's why I believe I'm pretty good at interviewing people just by talking with them.

Maybe, many of the people who are capable programmers or software engineers, but who insist that they can't tell anything about a person's ability to code without, say, a Leetcode hazing, are just wired a little differently, and not picking up on all the signals the same way?

Studies has shown that unstructured conversations has 0 correlation with on the job skills, if you just ask questions and go with the flow of the conversation it is extremely unlikely that you actually learned something important.

More likely is that you got biased from that conversation and that bias colors your later evaluations of them. A lot of people are biased like that, studies shows that, maybe you are one of the very few that would be the exception of these studies, but it is unlikely, much more likely you are among the large majority who overestimate how well they can read people in free form conversations.

And interview is generally the opposite of unstructured conversation.

The person talked about unstructured interviews though, those used to be very common until they studied it and realized unstructured interviews just finds people you like and not good people.

If you haven't prepared a set of questions and focus on those questions instead of letting the conversation flow then the interview is just a "do I like this guy" test.

I guess we read that completely differently. I don't see anything about an unstructured interview in his comment. He points out that he's good at interviewing by just talking to them. I read that as opposed to making them jump through hoops doing leetcode or exercises.

Maybe it's me, but I'm not sure someone who interprets coding interview as "hazing" can make an authoritative judgment on other people's skills and motivations.

Anecdotally, I was in a fraternity many years ago and we were warned that forcing new recruits to perform tasks that aren’t the responsibilities of being a full-member could be viewed as “subtle” hazing.

Not that I necessarily agree but I could see how someone might argue that a coding interview that doesn’t test the actual duties of the position might also be “subtle” hazing.

well, then don't do a coding interview for someone who won't be coding. am i missing something? if the job is java, then any coding test on java should be ok. if they are going to be learning a new language, then testing in an already known language should also be ok.

Au contraire, I think those that recognize the farce for what it is are better suited to evaluating objectively, rather than cargo culting the process cribbed from more bullshit artists from faang and others.

no, i think people can be very good at talking and technical depth without being able to code very well at all

perhaps you just overestimate your interviewing skill

Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience. I would not base anything substantial off of it, you might as well use TeenVogue personality quizzes since they're just as effective (shorter too).

I will say learning to interview is a skill like any other, I have no doubt the person you replied to was not born into the world understanding the nuances of technical questions and what heuristics to use to determine validity. Just like yourself.

> Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience.

The inventors' theories were unscientific. But MBTI traits correlate moderately to strongly with Big 5 traits. And reliability is comparable to Big 5 when the traits are treated as scales like nearly all MBTI tests. Claims reliability is low come from treating the traits as dichotomies and any variation as failure. The same methodology would make Big 5 look unreliable.

But I agree interviewing skill is learned.

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