Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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So you ding candidates for lacking an ability (carrying a time-bounded conversation with a stranger who is judging them for a new job) that has nothing whatsoever to do with what they'll actually be doing on the job, and this is something you're happy to tell us?

Job interviews are hostile. In fact, they're one of the most hostile experiences most of us have to deal with. I watch candidates in face-to-face interviews very carefully now, because this is a problem I am studying, and when you stop and consider candidates not as gamepieces but instead as human beings, you'll be amazed at what you notice. For instance, a majority of the candidates I've sat down with in interviews have, subtly but noticeably, been physically shaking.

Job interviews are like a game of Jeopardy! where one of the players is being filmed and broadcast on live television and the other player is playing from their couch and has been given an answer book, and the poor televised shmoe is judged on the same curve as the person on the couch.

So I think you are reading way to much into the comment. It was more meant to probe an expert for his approach to sussing out viable teammates or employees.

If I as someone interviewing for a QA role ask them a question such as 'Tell me about the QA work you are most proud of.' And they spend the next 20 minutes not talking about anything QA related it's a red flag. And an important data point to me when doing a retro with my peers. Perhaps that recent scenario is a reflection of the folks my company is able to attract in this area.

Conversely, if I am interviewing with you and I ask you, what's the most interesting thing your team has done and how did you help them accomplish it.' And you go into great detail about a deep area in your field that's part of the product your team works on its useful and important information when I need to make a decision. However if you are only interested and talking about me, my technical (or lack of - I know very little about security) understanding and you brush off conversational attempts to gain information that will help me judge the book by its cover it's usefully info when I need to make a decision.

I am not sure why your tone was so hostile? I did not mean to imply anything by my question. I am merely looking for other ways that people have found works for them.

Assuming two candidates are both qualified to perform a job, and one of them gels and converses with team (aka gets along with), then that person should get the job. The best teams get the best work done, and good teams have amazing communication - also assuming that everyone on said team can actually do the work without bring the others down. A good teammate is a multiplier on total team productivity and efficiency - like in sports and the military. Everyone wishes it wasn't the case, but talent alone doesn't cut it.

First, you're assuming that the interview process reliably distinguishes between "qualified" and "easy to talk to", but in practice not only do engineering interviews not do that, but in confounding the two they also drastically over-weigh the "easy to talk to" attribute.

Second, you're assuming that the way a candidate interacts with your team in an interview is an accurate representation of how they'll gel with the team down the road. Some of the shyest people I've interviewed have gone on to be the ones I actually end up talking to all day. Part of that is because interviews are hostile and make people shy, and part of it is that different people take different amounts of time to open up to strangers.

Finally, you're describing the "gut check" interview process used by almost every engineering team since the 1990s. We have evidence for how well that process works. Answer: not well.

As an aside: the idea of hiring candidates based on how well team members "get along" with them is repellant to me, as is "culture fit", since they're basically ways of making sure you have a team full of people who listen to roughly the same music, drink roughly the same beer, play roughly the same X360 games, and like roughly the same technology stacks. But that's an emotional argument; the real argument is that it doesn't work.

The ability for people to gel doesn't guarantee any of the following: listening to the same music, drinking roughly the same beer, playing the same games, and liking the same technology stacks. What I am arguing for is the part after someone's ability to accomplish the work and be creative has been shown. I think you underestimate how many people actually have the smarts and creative ability to do just about all software engineering tasks.

I think I do the opposite: I think I value candidate potential more than you, because you propose screening based on how cordial or fluent a single interview with their prospective team is, and I don't buy for a second that you get a realistic picture of how well someone will communicate or gel with that team in the course of a single adversarial interview.

How many tech interviews are one session long anymore (especially for the good ones)? Like I said in my post above this one, I'm arguing for the point after candidate potential has been acknowledged. If you know a candidate can do his/her potential job well - then I think good team fit is the obvious next step. If nobody wants to work with a potential candidate - then it will clearly be a detriment to a team (short term and most likely long term as well).

I think the problem is that everyone on HN thinks things are binary, when practically every scenario in this universe is not. You can't just eschew potential team fit because you want a rigorous hiring process that depends only on candidate qualification. The opposite holds true as well. Here are the two things you need for an awesome team:

1. A team that works well with each other.

2. Individuals on the team can do their job.

I don't know how you get the same music and beer from that, but preferring the same technology stacks may have a value in the team. Less time spent arguing religion = more time spent doing actual work.

>>> the real argument is that it doesn't work.

It's not an argument, it's a statement. It would become argument if it would be supported with something that is not of equal weight with the contrary claim "no, it actually works quite well". Everybody has their anecdotes, do you have more than that?

Let me understand you completely before I respond.

Is your argument here that conventional engineering job interviews...

(the sort where candidates interview with a series of engineers from the team all of whom ask different sets of questions and seek to gauge from their answers previous accomplishments, working style, technical competence, and team compatibility)

... are generally an effective way for teams to screen candidates?

Yes, it generally is. In my experience this is proven by the fact that close to 100% of working engineers are hired that way, and tech industry didn't collapse yet. But if you have better way, that is provably more efficient - I'd be very interested to hear about it (of course, if you're interested to tell me).

Ask any developer if they've ever had the experience of hiring someone who blew them away in an interview and turned out to be either completely ineffective or, worse, slapdash and incompetent on the job. Then, ask how long that poor-fit developer managed to remain on the job before being shown the door.

Or, ask an engineer how many times over the course of their career they've worked with "worthless" teammates, or people who should never have been hired. I've worked across a decent slice of the industry these past 19 years, and from what I can tell, this story is universal.

Another strong piece of evidence on my side is software quality, or the pervasive lack thereof.

Another piece of evidence is fizzbuzz.

Another piece of evidence is the (harmful) trend of demanding that candidates work on a contract-to-permanent basis as part of the recruiting process; what is this other than an attempt at work-sample testing that also happens to exploit candidates and repel the best of them?

I agree with you that close to 100% of working engineers are hired this way. But that doesn't prove anything; it's just as likely, perhaps more likely given the evidence, that what it shows is that development teams can ship marketable software despite terrible inefficiencies.

If you think that conventional hiring does a good job of selecting effective and competent programmers to the median ISV (and note here I'm stipulating ISVs, the best-case scenario for your argument, not line-of-business software teams at F500s), fine. I don't feel like I know a lot of smart engineering managers who are comfortable with the predictive power of their interview systems.

It's interesting that you bring up sports and the military as examples. I suspect that neither of those emphasize team interviews to determine cultural fit to anywhere near the extent that the tech industry does.

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