Ask HN: Why not replace technical job interviews with yearly standardized exams?
Wouldn't this eliminate cheating (due to question reuse), shorten interviews, and save money?
The exams mean very little. They are easy to study for and tell almost nothing about a candidates performance, just knowledge. If we wanted to go this route, we'd be using GPAs to differentiate candidates, but that rarely seems to be a factor today.
A standardized exam result won't give me any of this information/experience. I'm going to be especially suspicious with people who have a perfect score, experience has shown me that the best engineers often (not always) don't have great academic results, while those who had perfect results often can't function well independently in a real-world unstructured environment.
Great! Then you're not one of those interviewers with "the one true answer" in mind.
> I care about how they're thinking about it, how they react to my hints, how they act when they are stuck, if they ask for help or not, if they try to cover up what they don't know or that they made a mistake or are open and honest about it and treat it as an opportunity to learn
Then again, maybe you're one of those interviewers with "the one true thought process" in mind and the luck to have double-majored in Computer Science and Psychology, so you have the ability to understand how people think.
Not sure why would I need a psychology degree? I'm not doing a psychological evaluation, I'm looking for a good engineer that will fit in the team and company.
That's what you say, but in practice it's a guaranteed way to engage in discrimination at multiple levels using personal biases that are not present in a standardized test.
How will a result from a standardized test tell me that their approach to engineering matches ours, and that they will fit in with their future team and company?
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-sele...
in other words it benefits cultures heavily into all kinds of olympiads from age 5 on… i will not elaborate further as you know what i mean.
Let's start with the latter: the problem is that not every company wants exactly the same developer profile. Acing a standardized exam means that you are really good at what the exam is testing. But because you excel at leetcode interviews really does not mean that you are the best fit for most companies in the world. Maybe this company will want somebody with experience in a specific framework ("we have a Qt mobile app", "we work with Laravel", "we write firmwares", ...), that company will want something with domain knowledge ("we need someone who understands the medical domain", "we need someone who understands maritime navigation", ...). You can't standardize that. For the small parts you could standardize, it exists: a CS degree, "5 years experience as a dev", etc.
For the former, it seems to me that it is already pretty much standardized. When you interview for FAANG companies, you need to read a lot about the interview process and prepare it like you would prepare an exam. If you are super ready for the interview at Meta, you are also super ready for Google. It is some kind of standard already. Maybe the FAANGs could team together to share the exams, but the economy would be marginal (otherwise they would have done it).
Such tests would be gamed in multiple ways. Or cheated. Or corrupted. Or info dumped...
So I would gladly higher a friendly and open average skilled SWE than some aloof technical genius who is going to be likely regarded as an asshole to the rest of the team.
If I was forced to higher based on test scores alone, I’d opt to quit that role…because that to me would be a recipe for failure.
We can agree that no one wants a true ass, but I don't understand why some aloof technical genius needs to automatically be regarded in that way. It looks like the connection is in your mind.
Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue.
…Or it could just be long experience. I have seen these kind folks sink teams and products. If my goal is to make what I am managing successful, why would I hire personality types that historically have proven to impede success in my experience? Believe me, the type I am referring to usually comes out in interviews.
>Moreover, it obvious to me that your goal is to use up VC funding, not to generate revenue for the company. An average SWE isn't going to do the special work required to generate revenue.
No, my job is to build successful teams and products. To do that i need to find compatible people to get the job done. An asshole rockstar might get me 75% there then prevent me from achieving the final 25% because they can’t work well with others. A cohesive team can get me to 100%. And…not all rockstars are assholes, so I choose to find the wheat and discard the chaff.
Frankly I am extremely skeptical of your belief since you don't even seem to want to distinguish an ass from a hero.
How someone talks during their technical job interview should be seen as equally important to the content of what they say during it. Will there be an oral component of your exam?
Are there different exams for different languages/technologies and industries? How many exams do I have to take?
Do people cheat on the yearly standardized exams in place (that are used, for university entrance, for example) now?
Do hiring companies tend to believe that their needs are very similar to other hiring companies? How much faith would they put in such a standardized exam?
this limits people’s mobility as they are then glued to a set of company specific skills
There is lots of education that can’t happen that companies have to fend for themselves and create materials to teach.
70% of learning is informal learning, outside of the classroom.
The master/apprentice model has existed for so long for a reason.
Learning the work is best done beside experience.
companies need to educate you on the job. that will never change and it is unreasonable to demand you already have all skills ready to go. but that is where we are in the US….
it is also crazy that you need to copy paste job requirements into your CV role per role. a resume or CV is something you make ONCE. but i guess HR drones are too dumb to read so that is where we are.
Reality for the many might be somewhere in the middle, off to one side.. there’s academic organizations with billions not pushing it off into organizations with millions to deliver what students paid tuition for.. relatively speaking?
Companies don’t always have to hire graduates to educate them on the job. Profession and career development so important but a part of the work.
It’s a skewed tech reality distortion field where tech companies compete by playing defence to tie up labour so others can’t grow… that results in those pesky mass layoffs. Repeatedly.
Organizations very well may take over educating the workforce and leverage it like salarymen in Japan, low pay for lots of hours and stability. Not sure if I like that either.
Or maybe they’ll just take the demands for remote work locally and let it be a global market.
In the scenarios where a company is paying to educate you .. for free .. in addition to paying you a salary.. to learn? That you’ll become more valuable with, not necessarily give back or create value greater than what you’ve been paid, in addition to you paying an academic institution money to learn.. often under debt is.. sound?
The gap between academic degrees and the workforce is generally increasing without cherry picking small groups as exceptions.
Historically, Universities that taught you how to think didn’t have STEM. They consciously moved from liberal arts into into stem for the funding opportunities.
Most of all I believe everyone has a right to learn and access opportunities to improve their life. The above doesn’t sound like it’s meant to speed that up.
Happy to learn from other perspectives.
In my long experience, the type of questions that will be on this test will quickly morph into a "Marketing Type Test".
In IT, changes happen so quickly, the tests will be out of date as soon as they are written. So as time goes on, you end up being quizzed about marketing instead of real IT terms.
Plus you will need many tests, one for admins, support, development. As a final note, I can also see these tests end up being about methodologies like Agile instead of real Tech.
One piece is naming sure the assessments and competency assessors have competency.
You could get reasonably far with a core set of skills and competencies and then add company specific ones.
The FAANG-style leetcode nonsense is deluding people into believing that selects for the right engineers. It doesn't. It is flawed and only works for factory-style companies to do a bare-minimum job while hiring.
Conversely, if other people who think and are told they're doing their jobs well but we have evidence that they aren't, what does that say about me doing my programming thing?
I don't understand. Are you suggesting that the corporation that sets these rules actually measures, and cares about refining these processes?
Because they absolutely don't care about the quality of the process as long as the quantity targets are met.
Sounds like a business opportunity:
https://education.oracle.com/java-certification-benefits/cer...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/browse/
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-developer-ass...
"Save money"? This would make money.
Just think how much businesses would pay to keep their employees' credentials current!
You could also charge exorbitant fees for training, books, and videos people would use to prepare for the exams.
Maybe you could even setup a school business built on teaching people stuff for all the exams and then give them an "everything" certificate after they took all the exams the school had?
Oh, wait.
Consider also the typical engineering "which thing should we buy" matrix, which is often thinly masked biases of the author and arguing points against other views from the team. Consider also the rationalizations in design docs ("why we should make it like this") that barely seem to cover up the designer's favorite methods and tools that are actually driving things. We spend a lot of time/energy trying to seem logical when we're fundamentally not.
There are a lot of programmers who like being part of a special club and want to manage who gets in. It’s couched behind meritocracy, but I think it can be boiled down to gate-keeping.
this was supposed to be how it works but then some indian dude came along and made a platform and then some woman wrote a book and got in a HR decision making position in a FAANG and destroyed the value of everyone’s degrees by introducing coding interviews you can only pass if you grind them
Development teams benefit from both self taught and university taught developers.
Self taught developers bring a different perspective.