Focus on specifics when interviewing | Hacker News Reader

Focus on specifics when interviewing

josephwalla.com

This approach screens out people who have the potential to accomplish but haven't yet - I would never try to interview people like this for a development role, since past experience doesn't necessarily tell me if they can do what is needed well.

I don't think the point is to make them tell you what awesome things they have already accomplished. Maybe they've accomplished nothing. But they've probably got some experience on their resume, or you wouldn't be talking to them. Maybe that's only class projects, but that's enough.

The point is to get them to talk about something they have spent hundreds of hours thinking about. Something on which they are the experts. They should be able to go into detail and tell you what they found interesting. Both of those things are very informative.

I don't think there is such a thing as someone who has the potential but hasn't done it. You should always have some projects you did, even in school, to talk about. If you haven't done any projects then your education is not complete.

Someone who tells you how they solved a bunch of problems in a language and context that is different from the one you're interviewing them for -- is exactly the kind of person you want to hire.

The problems are always different.

If you can't make that conceptual leap (from how they solved problem in a different context to how they would in your context), I don't think you should be interviewing people, honestly. I'm not meaning to be rude, but this is the problem that HR people and "recruiters" have.

> I don't think there is such a thing as someone who has the potential but hasn't done it.

I had an intern once. No coding experience but very eager to learn. That company went under but he's now working full-time as a developer - even transitioned into devops. That's my example of someone who showed great potential but hadn't done it yet. He realized as graduation was approaching that he wanted to do something else and went for it.

To add to this, I have not ever taken a programming class - after 1 1/2 years in software engineering, I became a senior engineer. Previous experience didn't really say much about me except that I took on increasingly difficult problems & roles. I knew everything that was thrown at me though.

Smart people aren't quick to judge largely on the past - they take the baseline that they are looking for, set out to gather evidence for and against it, and assess on whether the criteria is met based on a wholesome picture - the past should be a couple of data points amongst many.

It's unclear if you'd taken on programming projects; if so, it sounds like you would've been able to discuss them in detail.

Even with a class project, if someone was interested enough in the class that they can tell you months later "oh, yeah, this project was interesting, we did it with method x because we'd already studied methods y and z and they weren't as well suited for reasons a, b, and c"—even if those reasons were straight from the lectures—then they're already well ahead of most university candidates I've talked to. Most people mostly forget stuff beyond "oh, yeah, we did it this way cause the textbook said to." Similarly for "what else might you do with that?" type questions.

Now, if you haven't taken any classes, and haven't done any software projects for other stuff, yeah, you wouldn't have anything to talk about. But figuring out if someone who's never touched code before is going to be able to do it well is an extremely hard problem -- that person isn't going to make it past any other interview method I've encountered, either.

How would you approach that candidate?

> How would you approach that candidate?

One approach for me would be to find past success in other areas. Prior interests where they started from nothing, went through the grind of learning, and excelled. Sports, music, art, whatever. What did they gain from that and what is their learning process going forward?

I think that's an important characteristic to have. To have pushed through the process of sucking to being great before and the willingness to do it all over again. It's very easy to avoid this in life.

Shouldn't people at least have school or personal projects they can discuss?

Not always, no. Aptitude !== Experience

It depends.

If they are already mid through their programming career and they haven't accomplished anything yet, you might want dig in and find out why.

That's what I try to do when interviewing programmers. I never make anyone write code, I want to know how they think, what did they pay attention to, and what did they learn from projects they did.

I think this approach is great. It will get you people like me who are passionate about software and building cool things, and in general I feel like these are the people I want to work with. If you have no emotion about things you've worked on, that's a bad thing I think. Any silly coding or whiteboard question I ask is a poor substitute for asking someone to talk about the years someone has spent writing software.

Where this breaks down is in a big company where you just need to hire bodies, and you you already have a few top-notch engineers who can build great things and direct the unthinking, uninspired masses. At this point, you don't even care about a person's github, because it's too much time to go look through it, and that's too bad.

Yep. There's nothing wrong with presenting them with a problem and asking how they would solve it, and giving them constraints as they go. Making them write code is much more challenging because it brings up things irrelevant to their ability to think.... but talking to them about it works because they don't have to break the verbal mindset they are already in.

This is a good strategy and it's one I've employed, but what I've found a lot of the time is that you get nothing from the candidate.

Basically you ask them questions and they give you short, often vague answers. They don't really go into detail or talk at length.

I've found this about a lot of people in general. You can ask them three questions and they will sorta answer one, but never illuminate anything.

I don't know if this is a sign of dim intelligence, or nervousness or not paying attention or what.

But people who are on the ball and great communicators will do much better in this kind of interview than people who are terribly shy-- even though the latter might be a better employee. (spending less time around the water cooler for one.)

This is definitely a problem. I don't think it's a sign of dim intelligence, or even not paying attention. It may be a sign of nervousness, or simply of being an introvert (like myself). They may still be very good people. Part your job as an interviewer is to draw them out enough for you to figure that out.

They may not understand what you're looking for in their answers. Did you tell them when you asked? It was obvious to you, but it may not be obvious to them.

Once I get a few of these answers, I try to ask questions that require more background explanation to respond to. This requires some thinking on your part. If you've seen a project like theirs before, you can ask them how they solved some of the problems that you ran into on your own project. "Did you consider X? What would happen if..." If you are actively engaged and thinking, people will respond to that, much more than if you ask very open-ended questions like, "Tell me about X."

> but what I've found a lot of the time is that you get nothing from the candidate.

Same here. I do interviewing for the company often. And I assume it is a sign of nervousness. Basically I try to be compasionate and if they don't explain enough, I tell them the reason I am asking or give them a chance to talk maybe about another accomplishment or hard project they worked on they are particularly proud of. And in the end it might not be the ultimate deciding factor.

> ut people who are on the ball and great communicators will do much better in this kind of interview than people who are terribly shy

I am extremely shy as well. But I can get really excited about the projects I worked on, or technology topics, in general.

The most important thing to focus on is yourself so you know exactly what you want when you interview people. Too many times I have been dragged in as an interviewer just to make up the numbers (bureaucratic game you have to play within universities) where the real interviewers (the people who actually are doing the hiring) had no idea what they were looking for. Most of the time it seemed to be a pointless exercise; we would chat to everyone and then the real interviewers would just choose the "nicest” appearing candidate.

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