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We can't judge another programmer's abilities in a 60 minute interview

207 points by passenger 7y ago

MikeTaylor 7y ago
Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these. And interview is not the be-all and end-all of recruiting: of course it isn't. But I'm seeing a pendulum swinging a long way in the other direction now, and a lot of people talking as though interviews are worthless. They're really not.
- sidlls 7y ago
  Except for extreme outliers it is not clear that it's possible to tell with much confidence in either case. Why do you think it's possible to have such high confidence in one case but not the other?
  - terryschiavo22 7y ago
    Because if you can't FizzBuzz, you definitely aren't going to be able to pick up the codebase in a satisfactorily short amount of time. If you come in in gross clothes and swear, you're not going to fit the company culture. If you're rude to your interviewer, you're not likely to be less rude to your other coworkers. etc.
    - DougWebb 7y ago
      Two of those things is not like the other.
      - sonnyblarney 7y ago
        They are all in the same category when you consider basic professionalism. Working is getting along in a social environment, not just coding.
    - dba7dba 7y ago
      I agree about FizzBuzz. But how often do interviewees showing up with gross clothes, swear, or be rude to interviewer? I'd say almost 0?
      - jerf 7y ago
        "I'd say almost 0?" It's definitely higher than that. It is a pretty easy thing to avoid, you'd think, but some people fail.
      - bpyne 7y ago
        Funny that this was brought up. I agree fully that it's rare. But...a friend of mine was "den mother" for graduate students in a top 20 comp sci program. The students were often doctoral candidates but could also be MS students doing a thesis. A large part of her job was prepping them for interviews with companies like Google, MS, Oracle, etc. Here are a few gems she had to remind/inform them of. "Yes, you have to shower the day of an interview." "It's never acceptable to pull out your lunch and eat in the middle of the interview, please don't do it again." "Yes, you have to wear something other than the shirt you slept in."
        perl4ever 7y ago
        If I was going to an interview with a company like that, I would want to know - will they reject me if I wear a suit? If so, what is safe to wear?
        simplyluke 7y ago
        Will they reject you for that? Probably not. Would a lot of employees of tech companies (particularly west coast) interpret it as a lack of familiarity with the industry? Probably. Jeans and a button down or a button down and slacks seems pretty standard in my experience.
        bpyne 7y ago
        It depended on the company. MS interviewers came in khaki slacks and buttoned down shirts. Google came in jeans with lots of ink and piercings on display. Part of my friend's responsibility was to give feedback to the interviewers. Her students were passing over MS to go to Google, despite MS offering significantly more for a salary. Their interviewers asked her for feedback to figure out why. She had to politely say that Google was seen as cooler. (The cooler impression wasn't just the image gained from the interviewers, it was the problems Google was trying to solve. But, the interviewers added to the company's image of "coolness".) She held this position probably a decade ago and left after a few years. Things may be different now.
    - sureaboutthis 7y ago
      I've been programming for 35 years and I can't fizzbuzz cause I don't know what it is. Yes, I've heard about it before cause it's mentioned on forums, and I even looked it up once, but I always consider such things childish. (I honestly don't remember anything about it.) Ask me about an algorithm and I'm there but don't play games with me. EDIT: Just looked it up. Yep. A game. Now compare that to my years of accomplishments and you'll say asking me to write fizzbuzz childish, too.
      - bvinc 7y ago
        Fizzbuzz isn't a trick questions that you have to have heard of. It's designed to be an EXTREMELY easy question, answerable by anyone with even a basic knowledge of programming. It's not a game. It's a way to weed out people that don't know anything. If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.
        sureaboutthis 7y ago
        I never said it was a trick question. Where did you and the other guy come up with that? It may be easy but you would have to explain it to me if you were interviewing me. After looking up what it is, as I said I did, yes, I could do it easily but don't ask me to code your game "fizzbuzz" as if I would know what it was.
        MikeTaylor 7y ago
        No-one remotely confident would ever fail a candidate for not knowing what "fizzbuzz" means. But any competent interviewer would fail a candidate who, having have "fizzbuzz" explained to them, could not implement it.
      - CJefferson 7y ago
        You wouldn't be asked to "fizzbuzz". You would be asked to write an extremely trivial program, which would take you about 3 minutes. Also, if you have guaranteed years of experience, fizzbuzz isn't for you. However, a suprisingly large number of applicants who can write an impressive looking CV can't write it.
    - sidlls 7y ago
      I cannot recall the last time I interviewed someone for a position other than intern who could not at least muddle through a FizzBuzz problem. I'm talking hundreds of candidates. The likelihood of a "lucky streak" as long as that if "can't FizzBuzz" is common (i.e. not an outlier) is small. Usually when I dig into a person claiming "can't FizzBuzz is common" the result is I find what they're calling "FizzBuzz" is nothing of the sort, but is actually a more tricky data structures or algorithms problem.
      - toast0 7y ago
        I've gotten enough candidates who can't FizzBuzz to say you can expect to get at least a couple in a group of 100 candidates. More or less depending on what screening you do before interviews. There is definitely a second line above the simple FizzBuzz many more candidates would have a lot more trouble with two nested loops.
      - Corrado 7y ago
        Several years ago I asked a potential programmer candidate what their favorite operating system was and they replied "MS Office". I couldn't end the interview quickly enough.
      - itsdrewmiller 7y ago
        I have to assume you are doing some kind of very strict resume screening or your application form is behind a puzzle or something - I 100% guarantee if you post your job broadly and interview everyone who applies you will have a very bad fizz buzz rate (and probably go insane), and I believe that if you do filter but try to keep an open mind to non-traditional backgrounds you will have a pretty significant fizz buzz fail rate. (I too oversee the screening of hundreds of candidates out of thousands of applicants.)
- ignoramous 7y ago
  And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview process if not everything was broken, surely? Refs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 (On Secretly Terrible Engineers). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 (How Not to Hire a Software Engineer).
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. In my experience working with a couple of wildly different companies who prided themselves on "culture", it's largely just "don't be a dick". It's still important though.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit. The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.
    - sanderjd 7y ago
      If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  How would you know if you failed in identifying someone as not being able? You wouldn't hire them so you wouldn't know when you were wrong
  - xhrpost 7y ago
    Yes, to some extent you have to accept that you could end up passing on some candidates whom could have turned out to be good employees. Couple thoughts though: 1.) It's still only in hindsight that you could say something like that (ie. "wow that person really did turn out good") 2.) If you're still hiring good employees at a decent rate, does it matter? Short of being 100% efficient (which is an inappropriate goal anyways), you'd only need to address this if you were somehow not hiring anyone or hiring way below industry pace
  - twblalock 7y ago
    Hiring a bad person is worse than passing on a good person. You have to optimize your interview process to account for this, and that means you will almost certainly pass on some good candidates.
- skookumchuck 7y ago
  An awful lot of programmers have very high and entirely unjustified view of their programming abilities. I'm sure they find the hiring process weeding them out to be very frustrating.
  - throwaway55554 7y ago
    And then there are those of us who, even with an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, feel incompetent.
    - skookumchuck 7y ago
      Yes, I know about impostor syndrome. I know a few who've confessed to me they suffer from it - and I sure prefer to work with them than the delusions of grandeur types who waste my time.
  - dev_throw 7y ago
    This would be more applicable if the interviewing process had any correlation with on the job expectations. Working on a job also requires: 1. Communication about expectations with team lead, PM and other stakeholders, vetting requirements, and pushing back where necessary. 2. Writing tests that cover as many edge cases as possible (This actually takes just as long as coding a feature if done right) 3. Understanding the pipeline and release cycle, and being able to build new hooks 4. Look at stack traces to debug application crashes. This usually involves debugging code that other people have written. 5. Review other engineer's merge requests, and communicate in a emotionally aware manner. A leetcode/hackerrank type interview does not test any of these skills. If I work on improving these skills that make me an amazing engineer, it does not get me far in a typical interview, hence my frustration with their "weeding".
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  > You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. > But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong.
  - lgessler 7y ago
    > These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.
    - MikeTaylor 7y ago
      Exactly. You want to know, roughly, something like "is this candidate in the top 10%?". You might conclude "She seems to be at about the 85th percentile, give or take 10%", so she might be in the top 10% of might not. But you might conclude "He seems to be at about te 50th percentile, give or take 10%", in which case you're not interested. There is a fundamental asymmetry here.
  - voxl 7y ago
    It's hilarious to me that your name is BinaryIdiot and your post is a false dichotomy.
larrik 7y ago
It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.
  - pkroll 7y ago
    "Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.
    - mjevans 7y ago
      If I want a lot of OK sushi I go to a place I trust for that. It's mediocre, but priced accordingly; and thus has good value for the money.
- dba7dba 7y ago
  I just read someone talk about job post on linkedin with over a thousand applications. Are people on linked in truly mediocre that not one out of a thousand can fill the position?
  - lukejduncan 7y ago
    I think many companies don't have exactly 1 job posting for 1 seat. For example, I've seen large tech companies have a single "Backend engineer" req that is used for every backend engineering role in the company (or org). So the pure number of applicants in a LinkedIn job post may be misleading.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
sagitariusrex 7y ago
Still relevant: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring
- acct1771 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- tbirrell 7y ago
  I'm going to speak with a potential employer quite differently than I will with a friend. Trying to artificially move yourself into that category is not going to work and will just make me even less sure of the process. At least with a standard interview format I know what the interviewer wants. If you flip that on me and put me in a position where I have no idea whats going on, it's not going to end well.
EliRivers 7y ago
No worries. There's always that probationary period in which either party can recognise it's not a match and either do something about it, or just give it up. How long will it take you to decide? A week? Two weeks? A month?
- mental1896 7y ago
  It's not a "no worries" situation if you just left one job for another only to find out the culture isn't a good fit.
  - joker3 7y ago
    Particularly if you relocated.
    - commandlinefan 7y ago
      Had that happen to a co-worker once. He moved (on his own dime) from Chicago down to Dallas, then got let go just three months later. He wasn't even bad, he just wasn't performing at the level I guess they wanted him to. I never imagined back when I was in school that programming, of all professions, would be as cut-throat as it is.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    That only matters if you think it's possible for the people doing the hiring to be fallible, which...is not a given in this industry.
- monksy 7y ago
  For most companies it's the first 90 days.
- pkaye 7y ago
  The problem is these people will have quit their previous job and maybe moved.
LeicaLatte 7y ago
Of course we can. Its just that we can't do it right.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rsweeney21 7y ago
Post author here: My new company helps companies fill contract software positions. We're a lot like a recruiting or staffing agency, but trying to do it in a new, less spammy way. It's been REALLY frustrating working with hiring managers. I used to be one of these frustrating hiring managers so I guess I had it coming. I had a hiring manager tell me that he can tell in the first 15 min of an interview if someone is a great engineer or not. I remember thinking the same thing. I felt like I had this special intuition that I had developed over the years. That's just total BS. There is NO WAY you can know that and you don't have a "special gift". I don't have a great solution yet, but for senior engineers I've come to trust previous work experience the candidate has much more than my gut, my culture fit questions and my stupid coding questions. We had a hiring manager that was looking for a strong back end engineer turn down the engineer that built the search backend for yelp because he didn't like his answer to "how would you program the code in an elevator." So my new company Facet (www.facetdev.com) is basically built around helping senior engineers, with strong experience building products at scale, find contract work.
- rsweeney21 7y ago
  Also, for the curious, the post has had nearly 1.5M views so far. This is the first time I've ever experienced anything I've posted go viral. It's been interesting to watch the acceleration over the past few days.
- ronilan 7y ago
  I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but... Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag. And... I’m none of those. So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though... I think you got the observation right. The solution, no so much so.
  - rsweeney21 7y ago
    Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers. Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.
llamataboot 7y ago
I'm interested in where the break-even point is. With some interview processes now stretching over 15-20 hours or even more, it seems at some point the process is not helping make a better decision and just demanding extra resources from both the hiring company and the interviewees.
starpilot 7y ago
This is why onsite rounds last 4-7 hours instead, while speaking to 5-10 engineers.
hours-ofmy-life 7y ago
Great, so is this justification for 8 hour marathon interviews that pile the bullshit higher? I bet it is.
segmondy 7y ago
You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentation? do they test their code? are they a great team player? how creative are they? Due to time constraint of an interview, someone might be more sloppy than usual. Their might be the interview stress which is different from regular work stress, interview stress can impact their communication, etc. But if we focus plainly on technical skills, you can flush that out in 60 minutes. I'm a hiring manager, and I have never failed in hiring someone who didn't have the required tech skills. Technical ability I can always hit spot on, the tough one is determination and soft skills. Some of the folks I took chance on, who displayed terrible soft skills during interview turned out to be champs, communicate great, work hard, etc. A few that were very eloquent during interviews were a disappointment, sloppy in development, poor communication in practice, etc. People also grow, so someone that was a bad fit/interview for you, could in a few years grow and become great. Potential is also difficult to spot.
- ken 7y ago
  > You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...] You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".
  - taormina 7y ago
    > Can this person code at all? How well? He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.
    - enraged_camel 7y ago
      The distinction is meaningless. No company wants someone who can merely code (as determined by their ability to solve fizzbuzz-type stuff). They want someone who can code well.
alkonaut 7y ago
We can’t. But we also can’t interview people for weeks. So we do one hour and we go with our gut feeling. It’s a terrible way to hire, possibly the worst, except for all the other ones.
bdcravens 7y ago
The underlying assumption is that Daniel would have been a great fit. Can this be assumed? Even as a good engineer, his claim to fame is founding the Prime Air team. Would there have been a "What started as an idea over coffee with Gur..." moment at Netflix? Would he have just become a random developer instead? Worth nothing that Daniel actually went from Microsoft to Amazon after not being hired at Netflix, so perhaps he would have similarly churned at Netflix. This really isn't your typical "but whiteboard interviews suck!" situation. (not to say that they don't ....)
thtthings 7y ago
It's more accurate to say that the current format of asking algorithm questions is not the best way to judge programmers ability. All it tests is how much has the programmer memorized for the interview and not really how he codes in the real world. But i dont see this changing as most interviewers have been through the system and are likely average programmers themselves.
0x445442 7y ago
One of the biggest issues is the industry as a whole operates on a completely different hubris level. I don't think any of my professional references has ever been contacted with the purposes of gaining significant insight into my prior accomplishments or to get information about what it was like to work with me. Nope, all we need is some fancy data structure and algorithm knowledge and a white board to find that great candidate. And those that do care about past accomplishments seem to be more interested in public Github repos. However, it's my guess there's some sort of inflection point because I doubt Pike or van Rossum did any white board problems when they were hired at Google. My guess is their interviews were much closer to the way the rest of the world, the world outside software development, conducts interviews.
mjevans 7y ago
Maybe making the 'extended interview' process more formal would be a good thing. Formally have an internal 'contract' worker process where anyone they might want can be hired in to a trial pool, and projects can bring in the trial worker for small things quickly (maybe writing unit tests, or a fresh set of eyes, etc). Every month review performance, make a decision to offer job as X, keep on for another month, or let go. As a different part of this, alternating weekends might also be a more focused part of this, let someone that ALREADY has a job have a similar trial process on just some weekends, maybe with a more remote-work focus.
- phonebanshee 7y ago
  Why in the world would anyone be interested in doing this? Companies are competing for talent, not the other way around.
  - kadoban 7y ago
    Because there are people out there looking for work. It's not trivial for all programmers to find a job. I am in particular really awful at the entire applying and interviewing process (except funny little algorithms problems, I can kill those). It's a stressful, amorphous blob of everything I hate. What the parent of your comment describes sounds a lot like a specific kind of contract-to-hire, which if it's done well can be really effective. I get to show off that I can actually develop software well, a company gets to judge me on more than just an hour (or maybe a day) of questioning. Unfortunately it can be pretty exploitative if done wrong. It's easy for it to become an unending period of low-paid work where you're just hoping that one day it'll turn into a real job.
nocitrek 7y ago
I conduct the technical part of interview in my company. There are many candidates which charm our director and HR. They recite the buzzwords flawlessly and their resumes are top notch. When they come to technical part of interview, they charm us as well. Until they start coding. We ask two easy coding tasks (one programming, one data science) and so many candidates have issue with transfering algorithm they conjured on the spot into code; or are unable to solve problem on abstract level (and not hard-code the values for problem given to them). It is not uncommon that we identify sweet talkers which would have negative productivity for the company (meaning we would spend more time/money into fixing their code than they would bring value). I am firm believer that software developers must pass technical part of the interview.
movax 7y ago
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate noted for his work in judgment and decision making, stated in an interview earlier this year that interviews are terrible at choosing the best candidates. Unfortunately, he didn’t articulate alternatives.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  The alternative is certainly the big problem. The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.
  - SeanAppleby 7y ago
    I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole. We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market. Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.
andrewstuart 7y ago
I am both a recruiter and a highly experienced developer and software designer. I once sent one of the very best programmers I know for a job interview. I have met a small handful of outstanding programmers in my > 30 years in IT and this guy was in the top five, near the top. I had personally worked directly with him for 5 years and he was unquestionably one of the most talented programmers there is, and a nice guy, easy to get along with and great to work with. Incredibly productive, and capable of the most incredible feats of software development. The client interviewed him and said ....... no thanks. There you go - I have just explained everything you need to know about technical recruiting. Give it some thought - the more you think about it, the more it reveals the deepest truth about YOU and your software hiring processes. NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you. If you want to know what happened after that - I called the CEO who I knew quite well and essentially said to him "What the fuck are you doing? I sent you one of the best programmers there is - and I know this from first hand personal experience over five years - and your interviewers rejected him?". They employed him because of that and he became their chief technical architect pretty quickly.
- apple4ever 7y ago
  > NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you. I disagree. Maybe not immediately, but I’ve definitely picked the wrong candidate when I had two other better candidates in hindsight.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  Why did they reject him the first time around? As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks?
  - andrewstuart 7y ago
    >> Why did they reject him the first time around? Because most people do a really bad job at technical interviewing and selection - there's so much to say about why it would take a book to explain it all. BUT importantly - everyone thinks they do a great job at interviewing and selection. >> As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks? I'm not sure I understand the question. Is it saying "recruiters send any old person for a job in the random hope they might get it, how often do you do that?". I don't do that. I try to find the right person for the job, I look for people who are smart and get stuff done and I send people who I think are going to contribute something meaningful to a company. I use my technical expertise to try to understand the candidates level of technical experience, and I articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate to the employer.
gumby 7y ago
I feel that the best we can do is "does this person look good on reference and/or paper? Then if so, in the phone screen and then interview: is there any reason to believe the stuff on paper might not be true?" (that latter happens a surprising amount). Also: "is this person a jerk?" though you have to account for the awkward things someone might accidentally say when they feel they're in a high-pressure situation.
vram22 7y ago
It's interesting that some people find that many so-called "programmers" cannot write FizzBuzz (see links in post, apart from a fun FizzBuzz version in Python): FizzBuzz in Python with nested conditional expressions and a generator expression: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-nested.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-...
julienreszka 7y ago
Sometimes I think we would be better off hiring people on the spot at random. In France we have a legal maximal 4 months trial period for employees so... This gives enough time I think. https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643
- phonebanshee 7y ago
  In the United States we basically only have trial employees. There's nothing at all like French job protections.
  - julienreszka 7y ago
    Really? Is that in all states? So hiring someone should be at least as easy no?
baconmania 7y ago
What's interesting is that most thoughtful people in the industry agree that our conventions around interviewing make for an almost hilariously arbitrary hiring process, but very few large software orgs have actually changed the way they hire.
combatentropy 7y ago
Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio. I could talk to someone for hours and still misjudge whether I would enjoy coding on the same project with them. Show me reams of code that they wrote, and I will know immediately. It's too bad that usually isn't possible.
stunt 7y ago
It really depends. When you are hiring senior programmers, don’t set the bar very high, then you can filter out majority of bad applications in a 60mins interview. For both hard skills and soft skills. Then you need to spend more time for the remaining ones to find the right people.
stratigos 7y ago
I am approaching 1.5 decades as an employed software engineer. Interviewing culture seems to change a little over the years, but usually in other wacky directions that leave me feeling entirely disengaged from the industry. I also very much love my vocation, though it alone is not enough to keep me enduring through the insanity of technical interviews , "cultural fit" assessments, and the violence of linear reductionism. Articles and discussion threads like this are pretty much the only reason Im willing to interview at all (and thus remain in the industry). So thanks for sharing, Im glad to know other people are aware of how bonkers this is. The long version takes years of explaining. The short version is: I am highly allergic to cognitive dissonance.

207 points by passenger 7y ago

Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these. And interview is not the be-all and end-all of recruiting: of course it isn't. But I'm seeing a pendulum swinging a long way in the other direction now, and a lot of people talking as though interviews are worthless. They're really not.

sidlls 7y ago
Except for extreme outliers it is not clear that it's possible to tell with much confidence in either case. Why do you think it's possible to have such high confidence in one case but not the other?
- terryschiavo22 7y ago
  Because if you can't FizzBuzz, you definitely aren't going to be able to pick up the codebase in a satisfactorily short amount of time. If you come in in gross clothes and swear, you're not going to fit the company culture. If you're rude to your interviewer, you're not likely to be less rude to your other coworkers. etc.
  - DougWebb 7y ago
    Two of those things is not like the other.
    - sonnyblarney 7y ago
      They are all in the same category when you consider basic professionalism. Working is getting along in a social environment, not just coding.
  - dba7dba 7y ago
    I agree about FizzBuzz. But how often do interviewees showing up with gross clothes, swear, or be rude to interviewer? I'd say almost 0?
    - jerf 7y ago
      "I'd say almost 0?" It's definitely higher than that. It is a pretty easy thing to avoid, you'd think, but some people fail.
    - bpyne 7y ago
      Funny that this was brought up. I agree fully that it's rare. But...a friend of mine was "den mother" for graduate students in a top 20 comp sci program. The students were often doctoral candidates but could also be MS students doing a thesis. A large part of her job was prepping them for interviews with companies like Google, MS, Oracle, etc. Here are a few gems she had to remind/inform them of. "Yes, you have to shower the day of an interview." "It's never acceptable to pull out your lunch and eat in the middle of the interview, please don't do it again." "Yes, you have to wear something other than the shirt you slept in."
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        If I was going to an interview with a company like that, I would want to know - will they reject me if I wear a suit? If so, what is safe to wear?
        simplyluke 7y ago
        Will they reject you for that? Probably not. Would a lot of employees of tech companies (particularly west coast) interpret it as a lack of familiarity with the industry? Probably. Jeans and a button down or a button down and slacks seems pretty standard in my experience.
        bpyne 7y ago
        It depended on the company. MS interviewers came in khaki slacks and buttoned down shirts. Google came in jeans with lots of ink and piercings on display. Part of my friend's responsibility was to give feedback to the interviewers. Her students were passing over MS to go to Google, despite MS offering significantly more for a salary. Their interviewers asked her for feedback to figure out why. She had to politely say that Google was seen as cooler. (The cooler impression wasn't just the image gained from the interviewers, it was the problems Google was trying to solve. But, the interviewers added to the company's image of "coolness".) She held this position probably a decade ago and left after a few years. Things may be different now.
  - sureaboutthis 7y ago
    I've been programming for 35 years and I can't fizzbuzz cause I don't know what it is. Yes, I've heard about it before cause it's mentioned on forums, and I even looked it up once, but I always consider such things childish. (I honestly don't remember anything about it.) Ask me about an algorithm and I'm there but don't play games with me. EDIT: Just looked it up. Yep. A game. Now compare that to my years of accomplishments and you'll say asking me to write fizzbuzz childish, too.
    - bvinc 7y ago
      Fizzbuzz isn't a trick questions that you have to have heard of. It's designed to be an EXTREMELY easy question, answerable by anyone with even a basic knowledge of programming. It's not a game. It's a way to weed out people that don't know anything. If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.
      - sureaboutthis 7y ago
        I never said it was a trick question. Where did you and the other guy come up with that? It may be easy but you would have to explain it to me if you were interviewing me. After looking up what it is, as I said I did, yes, I could do it easily but don't ask me to code your game "fizzbuzz" as if I would know what it was.
        MikeTaylor 7y ago
        No-one remotely confident would ever fail a candidate for not knowing what "fizzbuzz" means. But any competent interviewer would fail a candidate who, having have "fizzbuzz" explained to them, could not implement it.
    - CJefferson 7y ago
      You wouldn't be asked to "fizzbuzz". You would be asked to write an extremely trivial program, which would take you about 3 minutes. Also, if you have guaranteed years of experience, fizzbuzz isn't for you. However, a suprisingly large number of applicants who can write an impressive looking CV can't write it.
  - sidlls 7y ago
    I cannot recall the last time I interviewed someone for a position other than intern who could not at least muddle through a FizzBuzz problem. I'm talking hundreds of candidates. The likelihood of a "lucky streak" as long as that if "can't FizzBuzz" is common (i.e. not an outlier) is small. Usually when I dig into a person claiming "can't FizzBuzz is common" the result is I find what they're calling "FizzBuzz" is nothing of the sort, but is actually a more tricky data structures or algorithms problem.
    - toast0 7y ago
      I've gotten enough candidates who can't FizzBuzz to say you can expect to get at least a couple in a group of 100 candidates. More or less depending on what screening you do before interviews. There is definitely a second line above the simple FizzBuzz many more candidates would have a lot more trouble with two nested loops.
    - Corrado 7y ago
      Several years ago I asked a potential programmer candidate what their favorite operating system was and they replied "MS Office". I couldn't end the interview quickly enough.
    - itsdrewmiller 7y ago
      I have to assume you are doing some kind of very strict resume screening or your application form is behind a puzzle or something - I 100% guarantee if you post your job broadly and interview everyone who applies you will have a very bad fizz buzz rate (and probably go insane), and I believe that if you do filter but try to keep an open mind to non-traditional backgrounds you will have a pretty significant fizz buzz fail rate. (I too oversee the screening of hundreds of candidates out of thousands of applicants.)
ignoramous 7y ago
And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview process if not everything was broken, surely? Refs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 (On Secretly Terrible Engineers). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 (How Not to Hire a Software Engineer).
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  > company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. In my experience working with a couple of wildly different companies who prided themselves on "culture", it's largely just "don't be a dick". It's still important though.
- scarmig 7y ago
  And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit. The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.
  - sanderjd 7y ago
    If it were only true or false negatives complaining, that would be one thing. But lots of the complaining also comes from true positives. I've gotten every tech job I've interviewed for since college, and have usually been quite successful in the companies I've worked for. I think all of those interviews were evaluating me on the wrong metric. They evaluated something I also happen to be relatively good at - I have a CS background and I'm ok at contrived little programming problems - but I believe the companies just got lucky that I'm actually even better at the kinds of things that are important in my work - problem analysis, solution design, consensus seeking, teamwork, communication, writing, debugging, research, detail orientation, automation, process definition, etc. etc. etc. - none of which has any real overlap with writing little code snippets.
thatoneuser 7y ago
How would you know if you failed in identifying someone as not being able? You wouldn't hire them so you wouldn't know when you were wrong
- xhrpost 7y ago
  Yes, to some extent you have to accept that you could end up passing on some candidates whom could have turned out to be good employees. Couple thoughts though: 1.) It's still only in hindsight that you could say something like that (ie. "wow that person really did turn out good") 2.) If you're still hiring good employees at a decent rate, does it matter? Short of being 100% efficient (which is an inappropriate goal anyways), you'd only need to address this if you were somehow not hiring anyone or hiring way below industry pace
- twblalock 7y ago
  Hiring a bad person is worse than passing on a good person. You have to optimize your interview process to account for this, and that means you will almost certainly pass on some good candidates.
skookumchuck 7y ago
An awful lot of programmers have very high and entirely unjustified view of their programming abilities. I'm sure they find the hiring process weeding them out to be very frustrating.
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  And then there are those of us who, even with an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, feel incompetent.
  - skookumchuck 7y ago
    Yes, I know about impostor syndrome. I know a few who've confessed to me they suffer from it - and I sure prefer to work with them than the delusions of grandeur types who waste my time.
- dev_throw 7y ago
  This would be more applicable if the interviewing process had any correlation with on the job expectations. Working on a job also requires: 1. Communication about expectations with team lead, PM and other stakeholders, vetting requirements, and pushing back where necessary. 2. Writing tests that cover as many edge cases as possible (This actually takes just as long as coding a feature if done right) 3. Understanding the pipeline and release cycle, and being able to build new hooks 4. Look at stack traces to debug application crashes. This usually involves debugging code that other people have written. 5. Review other engineer's merge requests, and communicate in a emotionally aware manner. A leetcode/hackerrank type interview does not test any of these skills. If I work on improving these skills that make me an amazing engineer, it does not get me far in a typical interview, hence my frustration with their "weeding".
BinaryIdiot 7y ago
> You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. > But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong.
- lgessler 7y ago
  > These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.
  - MikeTaylor 7y ago
    Exactly. You want to know, roughly, something like "is this candidate in the top 10%?". You might conclude "She seems to be at about the 85th percentile, give or take 10%", so she might be in the top 10% of might not. But you might conclude "He seems to be at about te 50th percentile, give or take 10%", in which case you're not interested. There is a fundamental asymmetry here.
- voxl 7y ago
  It's hilarious to me that your name is BinaryIdiot and your post is a false dichotomy.

larrik 7y ago

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.

rightbyte 7y ago
Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.
- pkroll 7y ago
  "Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    If I want a lot of OK sushi I go to a place I trust for that. It's mediocre, but priced accordingly; and thus has good value for the money.
dba7dba 7y ago
I just read someone talk about job post on linkedin with over a thousand applications. Are people on linked in truly mediocre that not one out of a thousand can fill the position?
- lukejduncan 7y ago
  I think many companies don't have exactly 1 job posting for 1 seat. For example, I've seen large tech companies have a single "Backend engineer" req that is used for every backend engineering role in the company (or org). So the pure number of applicants in a LinkedIn job post may be misleading.
- perl4ever 7y ago

sagitariusrex 7y ago

Still relevant: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

acct1771 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tbirrell 7y ago
I'm going to speak with a potential employer quite differently than I will with a friend. Trying to artificially move yourself into that category is not going to work and will just make me even less sure of the process. At least with a standard interview format I know what the interviewer wants. If you flip that on me and put me in a position where I have no idea whats going on, it's not going to end well.

EliRivers 7y ago

No worries. There's always that probationary period in which either party can recognise it's not a match and either do something about it, or just give it up. How long will it take you to decide? A week? Two weeks? A month?

mental1896 7y ago
It's not a "no worries" situation if you just left one job for another only to find out the culture isn't a good fit.
- joker3 7y ago
  Particularly if you relocated.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Had that happen to a co-worker once. He moved (on his own dime) from Chicago down to Dallas, then got let go just three months later. He wasn't even bad, he just wasn't performing at the level I guess they wanted him to. I never imagined back when I was in school that programming, of all professions, would be as cut-throat as it is.
- rhizome 7y ago
  That only matters if you think it's possible for the people doing the hiring to be fallible, which...is not a given in this industry.
monksy 7y ago
For most companies it's the first 90 days.
pkaye 7y ago
The problem is these people will have quit their previous job and maybe moved.

LeicaLatte 7y ago

Of course we can. Its just that we can't do it right.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rsweeney21 7y ago

Post author here: My new company helps companies fill contract software positions. We're a lot like a recruiting or staffing agency, but trying to do it in a new, less spammy way. It's been REALLY frustrating working with hiring managers. I used to be one of these frustrating hiring managers so I guess I had it coming. I had a hiring manager tell me that he can tell in the first 15 min of an interview if someone is a great engineer or not. I remember thinking the same thing. I felt like I had this special intuition that I had developed over the years. That's just total BS. There is NO WAY you can know that and you don't have a "special gift". I don't have a great solution yet, but for senior engineers I've come to trust previous work experience the candidate has much more than my gut, my culture fit questions and my stupid coding questions. We had a hiring manager that was looking for a strong back end engineer turn down the engineer that built the search backend for yelp because he didn't like his answer to "how would you program the code in an elevator." So my new company Facet (www.facetdev.com) is basically built around helping senior engineers, with strong experience building products at scale, find contract work.

rsweeney21 7y ago
Also, for the curious, the post has had nearly 1.5M views so far. This is the first time I've ever experienced anything I've posted go viral. It's been interesting to watch the acceleration over the past few days.
ronilan 7y ago
I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but... Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag. And... I’m none of those. So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though... I think you got the observation right. The solution, no so much so.
- rsweeney21 7y ago
  Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers. Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

llamataboot 7y ago

I'm interested in where the break-even point is. With some interview processes now stretching over 15-20 hours or even more, it seems at some point the process is not helping make a better decision and just demanding extra resources from both the hiring company and the interviewees.

starpilot 7y ago

This is why onsite rounds last 4-7 hours instead, while speaking to 5-10 engineers.

hours-ofmy-life 7y ago

Great, so is this justification for 8 hour marathon interviews that pile the bullshit higher? I bet it is.

segmondy 7y ago

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentation? do they test their code? are they a great team player? how creative are they? Due to time constraint of an interview, someone might be more sloppy than usual. Their might be the interview stress which is different from regular work stress, interview stress can impact their communication, etc. But if we focus plainly on technical skills, you can flush that out in 60 minutes. I'm a hiring manager, and I have never failed in hiring someone who didn't have the required tech skills. Technical ability I can always hit spot on, the tough one is determination and soft skills. Some of the folks I took chance on, who displayed terrible soft skills during interview turned out to be champs, communicate great, work hard, etc. A few that were very eloquent during interviews were a disappointment, sloppy in development, poor communication in practice, etc. People also grow, so someone that was a bad fit/interview for you, could in a few years grow and become great. Potential is also difficult to spot.

ken 7y ago
> You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...] You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".
- taormina 7y ago
  > Can this person code at all? How well? He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.
  - enraged_camel 7y ago
    The distinction is meaningless. No company wants someone who can merely code (as determined by their ability to solve fizzbuzz-type stuff). They want someone who can code well.

alkonaut 7y ago

We can’t. But we also can’t interview people for weeks. So we do one hour and we go with our gut feeling. It’s a terrible way to hire, possibly the worst, except for all the other ones.

bdcravens 7y ago

The underlying assumption is that Daniel would have been a great fit. Can this be assumed? Even as a good engineer, his claim to fame is founding the Prime Air team. Would there have been a "What started as an idea over coffee with Gur..." moment at Netflix? Would he have just become a random developer instead? Worth nothing that Daniel actually went from Microsoft to Amazon after not being hired at Netflix, so perhaps he would have similarly churned at Netflix. This really isn't your typical "but whiteboard interviews suck!" situation. (not to say that they don't ....)

thtthings 7y ago

It's more accurate to say that the current format of asking algorithm questions is not the best way to judge programmers ability. All it tests is how much has the programmer memorized for the interview and not really how he codes in the real world. But i dont see this changing as most interviewers have been through the system and are likely average programmers themselves.

0x445442 7y ago

One of the biggest issues is the industry as a whole operates on a completely different hubris level. I don't think any of my professional references has ever been contacted with the purposes of gaining significant insight into my prior accomplishments or to get information about what it was like to work with me. Nope, all we need is some fancy data structure and algorithm knowledge and a white board to find that great candidate. And those that do care about past accomplishments seem to be more interested in public Github repos. However, it's my guess there's some sort of inflection point because I doubt Pike or van Rossum did any white board problems when they were hired at Google. My guess is their interviews were much closer to the way the rest of the world, the world outside software development, conducts interviews.

mjevans 7y ago

Maybe making the 'extended interview' process more formal would be a good thing. Formally have an internal 'contract' worker process where anyone they might want can be hired in to a trial pool, and projects can bring in the trial worker for small things quickly (maybe writing unit tests, or a fresh set of eyes, etc). Every month review performance, make a decision to offer job as X, keep on for another month, or let go. As a different part of this, alternating weekends might also be a more focused part of this, let someone that ALREADY has a job have a similar trial process on just some weekends, maybe with a more remote-work focus.

phonebanshee 7y ago
Why in the world would anyone be interested in doing this? Companies are competing for talent, not the other way around.
- kadoban 7y ago
  Because there are people out there looking for work. It's not trivial for all programmers to find a job. I am in particular really awful at the entire applying and interviewing process (except funny little algorithms problems, I can kill those). It's a stressful, amorphous blob of everything I hate. What the parent of your comment describes sounds a lot like a specific kind of contract-to-hire, which if it's done well can be really effective. I get to show off that I can actually develop software well, a company gets to judge me on more than just an hour (or maybe a day) of questioning. Unfortunately it can be pretty exploitative if done wrong. It's easy for it to become an unending period of low-paid work where you're just hoping that one day it'll turn into a real job.

nocitrek 7y ago

I conduct the technical part of interview in my company. There are many candidates which charm our director and HR. They recite the buzzwords flawlessly and their resumes are top notch. When they come to technical part of interview, they charm us as well. Until they start coding. We ask two easy coding tasks (one programming, one data science) and so many candidates have issue with transfering algorithm they conjured on the spot into code; or are unable to solve problem on abstract level (and not hard-code the values for problem given to them). It is not uncommon that we identify sweet talkers which would have negative productivity for the company (meaning we would spend more time/money into fixing their code than they would bring value). I am firm believer that software developers must pass technical part of the interview.

movax 7y ago

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate noted for his work in judgment and decision making, stated in an interview earlier this year that interviews are terrible at choosing the best candidates. Unfortunately, he didn’t articulate alternatives.

apple4ever 7y ago
The alternative is certainly the big problem. The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.
- SeanAppleby 7y ago
  I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole. We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market. Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.

andrewstuart 7y ago

I am both a recruiter and a highly experienced developer and software designer. I once sent one of the very best programmers I know for a job interview. I have met a small handful of outstanding programmers in my > 30 years in IT and this guy was in the top five, near the top. I had personally worked directly with him for 5 years and he was unquestionably one of the most talented programmers there is, and a nice guy, easy to get along with and great to work with. Incredibly productive, and capable of the most incredible feats of software development. The client interviewed him and said ....... no thanks. There you go - I have just explained everything you need to know about technical recruiting. Give it some thought - the more you think about it, the more it reveals the deepest truth about YOU and your software hiring processes. NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you. If you want to know what happened after that - I called the CEO who I knew quite well and essentially said to him "What the fuck are you doing? I sent you one of the best programmers there is - and I know this from first hand personal experience over five years - and your interviewers rejected him?". They employed him because of that and he became their chief technical architect pretty quickly.

apple4ever 7y ago
> NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you. I disagree. Maybe not immediately, but I’ve definitely picked the wrong candidate when I had two other better candidates in hindsight.
danieltillett 7y ago
Why did they reject him the first time around? As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks?
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  >> Why did they reject him the first time around? Because most people do a really bad job at technical interviewing and selection - there's so much to say about why it would take a book to explain it all. BUT importantly - everyone thinks they do a great job at interviewing and selection. >> As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks? I'm not sure I understand the question. Is it saying "recruiters send any old person for a job in the random hope they might get it, how often do you do that?". I don't do that. I try to find the right person for the job, I look for people who are smart and get stuff done and I send people who I think are going to contribute something meaningful to a company. I use my technical expertise to try to understand the candidates level of technical experience, and I articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate to the employer.

gumby 7y ago

I feel that the best we can do is "does this person look good on reference and/or paper? Then if so, in the phone screen and then interview: is there any reason to believe the stuff on paper might not be true?" (that latter happens a surprising amount). Also: "is this person a jerk?" though you have to account for the awkward things someone might accidentally say when they feel they're in a high-pressure situation.

vram22 7y ago

It's interesting that some people find that many so-called "programmers" cannot write FizzBuzz (see links in post, apart from a fun FizzBuzz version in Python): FizzBuzz in Python with nested conditional expressions and a generator expression: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-nested.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-...

julienreszka 7y ago

Sometimes I think we would be better off hiring people on the spot at random. In France we have a legal maximal 4 months trial period for employees so... This gives enough time I think. https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643 https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643

phonebanshee 7y ago
In the United States we basically only have trial employees. There's nothing at all like French job protections.
- julienreszka 7y ago
  Really? Is that in all states? So hiring someone should be at least as easy no?

baconmania 7y ago

What's interesting is that most thoughtful people in the industry agree that our conventions around interviewing make for an almost hilariously arbitrary hiring process, but very few large software orgs have actually changed the way they hire.

combatentropy 7y ago

Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio. I could talk to someone for hours and still misjudge whether I would enjoy coding on the same project with them. Show me reams of code that they wrote, and I will know immediately. It's too bad that usually isn't possible.

stunt 7y ago

It really depends. When you are hiring senior programmers, don’t set the bar very high, then you can filter out majority of bad applications in a 60mins interview. For both hard skills and soft skills. Then you need to spend more time for the remaining ones to find the right people.

stratigos 7y ago

I am approaching 1.5 decades as an employed software engineer. Interviewing culture seems to change a little over the years, but usually in other wacky directions that leave me feeling entirely disengaged from the industry. I also very much love my vocation, though it alone is not enough to keep me enduring through the insanity of technical interviews , "cultural fit" assessments, and the violence of linear reductionism. Articles and discussion threads like this are pretty much the only reason Im willing to interview at all (and thus remain in the industry). So thanks for sharing, Im glad to know other people are aware of how bonkers this is. The long version takes years of explaining. The short version is: I am highly allergic to cognitive dissonance.