Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdevlin | Hacker News Reader

I once had a phone interview wherein I was required to write some code and then read it to the interviewer (character by character!) over the phone. I asked him whether it would make more sense for us to use etherpad (this was maybe five years ago), but he said no.

View on HN

Have you ever had a productive phone screen? I think they might all be evil.

Yes, I recently had two productive phone screens, as a candidate.

The first one taught me a bit about the company and team, and gave me a good impression of the interviewer (the hiring manager), which then led to me doing a work sample. (Without the phone screen I don't know if I would have sunk several hours into the work sample.) I ended up getting an offer but not taking it.

The second one also gave me a good impression of the company, team, and interviewer (a senior engineer) and led to me doing an full day of interviews. Which led to me accepting an offer. The one used Collabedit in addition to the phone.

I know they're not perfect, but it's much cheaper to talk on the phone for an hour than to fly someone in for face-to-face interviews. Given way more resumes than resources for in-person interviews, I'd rather narrow the field using phone screens than narrow the field based solely on what's in the resumes.

I saw the part in your article about work samples, and I agree that they're great, but they are significant work for the candidate. So I think it makes sense to do have some kind of phone call first, to see if there's enough mutual interest to make it worth the candidate's time.

There's a semantic gap getting in the way between us. Phone calls with candidates: very good. See "Warm up candidates" in the post we're commenting on for my thoughts about that.

A phone screen is a call whose purpose is to select out candidates. It's a call whose outcome can be "stop talking to this developer". They're very common, and I think uniformly evil.

Understood. I know that at least my second example was a phone screen: if that interviewer didn't like me, the interviewing process would have ended.

I don't know how you avoid that. If you have 1000 candidates per open position, you probably can't afford to do in-person interviews with all of them, or even all the ones with decent-looking resumes. What's the alternative to phone screens? An automated remote work sample system, maybe?

The whole point of work-sample tests is to minimize time wasted on subjective interviews, and to collect objective facts instead. You definitely don't want to do thousands of in-person interviews! Interviews are terrible.

I haven't. I think they are pointless at best.

This particular phone screen was probably the most nervous I've been during any interview ever. Predictably, it was enough to disqualify me.

For full time devs? Rarely. For interns? Absolutely. We had many applicants whose programming experience was closer to web design, and weren't conversant in basic data structures. I don't think it was inherently evil to tell them to come back next year, after they've taken a course in algorithms.

Be carful not to forget reading off a semi-colon. Syntax counts!

Just imagine if it were a whitespace sensitive language like Coffeescript.

"Newline. Tab. Tab. Tab. Tab."

Heh. "Wait, was that 'Tab. Tab. Tab.' or 'Tab. Tab. Tab. Tab.'?"

A Lisp would be nasty, too. "... Close paren. Close paren. Close paren. Close paren. ..."

"newline, indent one tab beyond the previous line."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com