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Comment by mog_dev | Hacker News Reader

Technical interviews are useless and its normal that their victims fight back

I heavily disagree with this. Technical interviews are great if done correctly.

Or do you think that technical interviews hold such trait that is always present, that you can label all of them useless?

I think they’re useless unless they touch some part of the domain you’re howling to work in.

Why do they need to touch the domain? The point of generic interviews is to find smart people who can learn any domain.

I’m using the term domain very broadly here, I apologise.

What I mean is, if the job your applying for is mostly about working with implementing 3rd party APIs IMO it makes sense that your tech test represents that to some degree.

Can you understand basic documentation.

Can you use data structures.

Can you write tests and understand what actually needs to be tested.

Can you handle exceptions.

Do you try and get the entire resource?

Believe it or not I’ve joined a team in the past who owned a service where no one knew what pagination was.

Bonus points if you demonstrate that you understand what a transaction is.

And I forgot to add, can you design a sensible database schema.

Can a candidate talk about those simple concepts?

Now, would I be able to do a tech test based around domains in machine learning? I would have to do a lot of research first!

I think a better option is to have a system in place where companies hire them for a month or so then after that period you choose whoever made a better impact. And before you say it will be costly, most companies can afford it, especially if it will lead to a better outcome. That way they get tested on the actual systems and not just some useless questions from the internet.

As someone with a job I'm not giving up my job security to take a job that might go away after 1 month. Doesn't matter how much more it pays - I need income every month to pay rent!

That’s a fair point, maybe the proposed system can be adjusted for a 2hours a day then. The point is to test that person on the systems rather than just QA style.

Sure, that's costly for employers, but it's also costly for the candidates.

If you're planning to have N candidates do this when you only have 1 position, you're disrupting the others' lifes so much. It's like one of those chef competition shows. You better pay these people at least 6 months salary to show up for this.

Plus, do you really have the supervisory system in place to have N new hires and evaluate their impact after 1 month. Do you have the work for them to do? Or are they all going to independently work on the same project?

I ask a useless question in interviews, but asking every candidate the same question lets me calibrate the candidates as well as improve how I present the question so we can get to the problem solving and programming skills I want to see. Some questions are worse than others, and I hope mine is less worse; I've had several people tell me they enjoyed working on my question, although I also had a candidate refuse to work on it and ask for another question (which I didn't have, and I was the last interview of the day, so I returned the balance of his time and walked him out)

"Victims"

This just makes it much worse for the industry that is already weeding out frauds or those that claim / lie about their achievements without backing them up when asked very technical tests.

I would say the online technical interview solutions like leetcode, hackerrank, etc are losing their worth given they can be easily cheated but you are just cheating yourself in the on-site interview.

If you don't like technical interviews then what the industry needs is proper and formal certification process akin to the medical, legal, and engineering fields. In the absence of some outside resource to validate that a person has the basic fundamental skills, then you have to ask questions to determine if the applicant knows any of those skills.

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