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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Why bother with this style of interview where the candidate is under extreme time pressure and isn’t allowed to use any of the research tools they would normally use in their job? What is this controlling for?

It barely made sense when these were conducted in person, and it’s completely inane over video meeting.

Instead of grilling people, talk to them. Give them meaningful take-home exercises that you can discuss together during the interview. If they can explain the decisions they made and discuss alternatives and trade-offs, that’s a much better indicator of job performance than pretending to invent a leetcode party trick algorithm in 10 minutes.

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Live interviews control for wasting the candidate time in a way that take home exercises don't.

Both the candidate and the interviewer need to take time out of their day for the interview. If it's an in-person interview, the candidate also takes travel time etc, which could be more disruptive.

But it takes almost no time to give a take home problem, so there's potential for a significant assymetry in time spent between candidate and employer.

Huh? I've done take-home problems and they've been fine. I'll take it 100% of the time over live coding.

Sure, if *you* did them they might have been fine. One really important thing the interview needs to screen for is the qualifications of the person actually trying to be hired, and not their buddy doing the work instead.

I am really glad I don't live in your world where interviewing is such a profoundly low-trust activity. I feel sorry for interviewers where that's a legitimate concern.

I mean, dude, take a look at what we were originally discussing -- an app on github that helps you cheat on live interviews in Zoom.

FWIW, I've interviewed almost a hundred candidates in the past couple years and I think the number of candidates that I thought might be cheating are in the 3-5% range. It's fairly low, but if the take-home was the main thing that determined whether the candidate was hired, I wouldn't take that 3% chance.

I let candidates use the Internet (except AI tools) during coding interviews. All I care is if given a problem can they do the necessary research to solve it. It usually involves making them use a library which they are not already familiar with. This is more than enough for most of the programming jobs.

I think this is a continuum:

I let candidates use X during coding interviews.

I've personally seen this evolve over the past 20 years

Whiteboard --> Text editor --> IDE --> ...?

Maybe "AI Coding Assistant" is next.

Well yeah, it is really bad, which is why I have no qualms with this project.

If a company wants me to do some leetcode crap I decline the job.

I agree but a big problem remains. How do you make it scale for 100k applications?

Filter people out by requiring them to count the number of s's in sensational.

Employing someone is renting their labor.

How do you find an apartment rental in a large city with thousands of options?

You can’t expect to visit them all. And you certainly can’t come up with increasingly bizarre torture tests for landlords to pass (“I might rent from you if you can answer enough trick questions about tenant law within 15 minutes”).

To find the apartment, you probably sample enough of the options to form a picture of what’s available, and then make a decision knowing that you didn’t have perfect information but you had to move ahead. The same applies to hiring.

Except landlords have almost all the power, just like the job gatekeepers. A landlord gets to choose who rents their property so they aren’t under any obligation to answer your questions, they’ll just find a renter who doesn’t ask questions. When you have all the power it inevitably gets abused which is exactly what we’ve been seeing in rental with things like real page.

That’s kind of my implicit point. Employers don’t want to think of themselves as renters. It’s offensive to their unquestioned self-image as being the ones who hold the cards and deign to interview candidates.

But if you can give up on those worthless power games, you can have a hiring process that’s better for both parties.

How many jobs have you got? 1000?

How about you hire the first 1000 people who seem competent, and then tell everyone else you've filled the roles?

If you have literally hundreds of applicants and don’t have a process you are confidant provides a strong scoring function you should just randomly hire 1000.

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