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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

The standardized exam could include computer programming under time pressure.

When I'm doing an interview, I really don't care much about the code being written; I don't even care if it runs, is correct on some percentage/point scale or whatever else like that. 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, etc.

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.

> I really don't care much about the code being written; I don't even care if it runs

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.

There isn't one true thought process. I'm usually surprised by the various different ways people can approach a problem. What I want to know is whether they actually do think about the things that matter in software engineering such as complexity, readability, maintainability, scalability etc, the specific approach isn't important.

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.

> I'll 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, etc.

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.

As I said in another comment, most of the best engineers I ever hired had bad grades or no grades at all - they didn't care about that and spent their time building real things instead. And on the other hand, some of the worst people I ever hired had perfect grades. Of course, this is not universal, and there is a large space in between - but I just can't agree with any usefulness of such tests. Real world engineering is totally different from any standardized tests..

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?

True, but using standardized tests for hiring is legally perilous in the USA. Employers can incur serious liability if they use a test which has a disparate impact on a protected class, and they can't prove that the test is directly relevant to the job.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/employment-tests-and-sele...

You don't care about ranking in the International Olympiad in Informatics?

If anything a candidate caring too much about that is a warning flag. Competitive programming is a very different thing from writing software which is actually intended to be useful, and the approaches used for winning competitions are very bad for code that isn't going to be thrown away immediately afterwards.

Interesting curiosity, but it says nothing about their ability to function in a real world software engineering organization - so we're going to be coding on the interview anyways. The interview is really not just about the coding skill itself, that's actually the much less important part of it.

optimizing for people who do competitive programming means you optimize for education culture where repetitive practicing of a routine is important in contrast to education cultures where careful thought and planning and critical thinking matters more.

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.

I honestly can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it is. But no, I don’t really see how it would translate to being a high performing employee. Probably most of all, I don’t have the relevant context to know what sort of an achievement or skill any ranking could represent. I’ve never heard of this before this comment, so if you were like… 6th in the world or something, it’s hard to consider it impressive when 99.999% of the population has never even considered competing in it.

This is exactly how you filter out careful thinkers. Put them under some arbitrary time pressure. They'll fail time and time again. Then you'll be stuck with clever yes men who can't see the big picture.

Yep, that's me. I'm the guy who asks about the requirements then asks additional questions about the edge cases. Basically, I attack the business system before I build the technical system. Any flaws in the business system would manifest in the technical system, so might as well discover them first. Then I fail the interview because I'm slow.

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