[HN Gopher] Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try a...
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Even when you do succeed, sometimes it pays to try again
Author : imartin2k
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-07-01 08:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (timharford.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timharford.com)
| immigrantheart wrote:
| Side topic, I think the question "give me an example of when you
| resolved a difficult challenge at work" and the like is the most
| bullshit part of job interviews.
|
| Bullshit questions get bullshit answers. Majority of people
| bullshit their answers on that type of questions. Pretty much
| majority of the job interview coach tells us to bullshit anyway,
| or embellish our mini accomplishments to the point it is not
| distinguishable from bullshit, and say "hey it is not lying".
| Sure, but the answer is worthless anyway and don't tell anything
| about a candidate.
|
| I'd take Leetcode any day.
| stephendause wrote:
| I don't think there are only two alternatives: "bullshit"
| questions or Leetcode. For example, you can ask the interviewee
| to review code, design a system with them, or ask them to
| describe, in detail, the technical aspects of a project that
| they worked on. I think these are less prone to bullshit
| answers but are not as contrived as Leetcode (though I do think
| Leetcode has its place).
| pcl wrote:
| I think that anyone who's been around the block in an
| operations or customer support role in a tech company will
| likely have some really good answers to that sort of question.
| If someone asked me that question, I'd probably start with "oh
| boy, where to start!" before bringing back memories of
| production incidents.
| [deleted]
| mjr00 wrote:
| I disagree. The answers to these situational questions say a
| lot about a candidate, and their importance is often
| underestimated by inexperienced interviewers, IMO.
|
| In this specific question, a few things I'd be looking for are:
|
| * Was the candidate proactive in resolving the challenge? Many
| people just complain when they run into hard problems and
| expect someone else to pick up the slack.
|
| * Did the candidate learn something, or step outside of their
| comfort zone? This could be as technical as "I had to learn how
| this legacy codebase's build scripts worked" or "I had to
| research postgres' MVCC implementation" to something as
| nontechnical as "I had to schedule a meeting across 10
| different departments and get agreement on changing an internal
| process."
|
| Coding challenges are just one piece of the puzzle. I've
| previously made hires who were great at the coding part but
| gave weak answers to situational questions and they ended up
| not working out; they were excellent coders but would never
| really push anything forward beyond whatever tickets were
| assigned to them. By that I don't mean "they didn't work 60
| hours a week," I mean that they never wanted to take the time
| to think about the current state of how things were done and
| come up with ways to improve the situation. This type of
| developer would probably be fine in a larger organization, but
| when you're hiring a senior dev for your 20-person startup, a
| hire like this can be a disaster.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I think OP point is that everyone a bit skilled at
| interviewing knows what you are looking for in the answer and
| will craft you a solid retelling of something which didn't
| actually happen.
|
| Don't get me wrong it's a good skill to have. You want people
| who understand what's expected of them and can craft you a
| solid story. It's just that there is better question to ask
| if you want to test for that.
|
| > "I had to schedule a meeting across 10 different
| departments and get agreement on changing an internal
| process."
|
| That's a good exemple. I don't interview developers but I
| have seen similar situations happen in plenty of interviews.
| You are telling me you have the pull to get a large cross-
| departments meeting organised and enough political savviness
| to get internal policy changed but are now interviewing to be
| a developer. I would find that strange and have a ton of
| follow-up questions.
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| All that can easily be bullshitted a hundred times easier
| than any leetcode-style question. I am not saying "just use
| technical questions" but you are extremely naive as a
| interviewer if you dont think candidates will MASSIVELY
| overstate the importance and magnitude of their
| accomplishments. Hell, politicians do it all the time, we can
| notice that they are lying and they still do it. My
| experience indicates the better you are at this (there is a
| grayzone between outright lying and exaggerating) the better
| you will do, specially in big organizations when you can
| "hide" behind lawyers of bureaucracy and other employees.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| You can turn this question into BS, and provide a BS answer,
| but the correct way to respond is not to focus on the scenario
| (there are only a few themes anyway) but use it as an
| opportunity to share your values, perspective and strategy.
| This says a lot about the candidate, especially if the
| resolution failed. Even if you think LC is more representative
| of the type of work you'll end up doing, it's probably not
| assigned in discrete packages every day for you to complete;
| there's a lot of the softer "difficult challenge" stuff around
| it. If you're only optimizing for LC you're tackling the part
| of the job that will be commoditized by a global workforce and
| even machines first.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| > the correct way to respond
|
| You actually said it out loud, oopsie!
|
| The problem is, if I would share my true personal values,
| true personal perspective and true personal strategy, I
| become vulnerable and I open a discussion that I cannot
| expect to end well. Thus, instead I share my "business"
| values, which is to say bullshit, because they are in a quite
| different ballpark than my actual values.
|
| Of course the problem can be instantly solved by changing the
| definition of the word "problem" to exclude the mental and
| moral hassle of maintaining two complete personas.
| (`s/hassle/amazing opportunity/`) At which point business-you
| can honestly talk about your business-values, and private-you
| about your separate private-values.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "...and I open a discussion that I cannot expect to end
| well".
|
| Why do you believe this is the case?
|
| Do you believe your values are far outside the norm?
| rexpop wrote:
| Certainly I can't bring up my penchant for unionization
| in a job interview, nor would I dare bring up my values
| as an ethnic minority: I don't want to face avoidable
| prejudice.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| That's fair. In my question, I was think more about the
| Enron/REDACTED scenario commented on below - so thank you
| for the nudge.
| musingsole wrote:
| Except there are companies/roles where those values would
| be just fine if not desired.
|
| The assumption that all gigs have a rigid culture they're
| selecting for and programming for is defeatist.
|
| If those things are your values -- and not just
| contrarion reactions -- why would you hide and compromise
| them instead of finding a role that matches who you are
| and what you want in the world? It's not often entire
| industries are privileged enough to behave this way, but
| it has certainly been the case with SWEs
| hinkley wrote:
| I am cursed to be about eight-ten years ahead of the
| industry on development philosophy. Half the stuff I was
| begging people to do in 2005 was de rigeur by 2015.
| People who are trying to catch up with the last things
| they weren't early adopters for don't want to hear about
| the next three things after.
|
| And they sure as hell don't want to hear about how much
| of our difficulties with software come down to self
| delusion and misplaced optimism. Or how that new tech is
| old tech with a coat of paint and how it only lasted four
| years last time.
|
| I don't often win this argument until after something
| really bad happens and everyone is looking for a deathbed
| conversion. Until then I'm just some weirdo street
| preacher. So no, I'm not going to share all of my
| opinions with people I just met. Unless I'm specifically
| trying to fuck with them.
| rexpop wrote:
| > win this argument
|
| Sounds like you've an abrasive personality. With
| emotional intelligence as lacking as yours, it's no
| wonder you think you've figured out the next three
| generations of cutting edge technology -- you've left
| many requirements on the floor!
|
| Try solving for problems as though other people actually
| have rich internal lives (and that their ostensibly petty
| hangups actually matter), and you'll discover that the
| technology industry is much more difficult than you
| think.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Sounds like you've an abrasive personality.
|
| Well if that ain't the voice of experience then I don't
| know what is.
|
| Most of what makes Scrum successful today is that they
| are doing half of XP, and not necessarily calling that
| out. Kent Beck published the first XP book in 1999, and
| people were still arguing - energetically - about
| adopting aspects of that book in 2010.
|
| Google's secret sauce was based on an algorithm that was
| 28 years old at that point (and yet never came up in any
| of my classes).
|
| It's not invention that limits us. It's adoption.
|
| Howard Aiken clearly understood this:
| Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your
| ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's
| throats.
| deanCommie wrote:
| You really missed the point there. Being ahead of your
| time isn't a compliment. It's a failure to find the
| meaningful connective tissue between where people are and
| where you want them to be.
|
| It's good to set an ambitious north star - far beyond
| what people think is realistic or possible. But then you
| actually have to help them get there, both
| technologically, and psychologically. Otherwise, you
| might as well be waiting around for teleportation to
| become a reality and then claim "I've been begging people
| to teleport to save time since 2005, but they just
| weren't listening".
|
| Of course this is not required. Most people don't do
| this, and are able to have a happy and productive career
| not moving the state of the art forward, but just
| following what's already out there. But you don't get to
| claim both being a brilliant innovator ahead of the
| curve, misunderstood in your time, if you're not able to
| convince anyone of your vision.
|
| Back to your original post: It's totally OK to have
| different personal values and business values, unless
| you're a founder/CEO, at which point those become one and
| the same. Every company has it's own set of distinct
| business values (likely influenced by THEIR founder/CEO).
| So long as you're an employee, you can figure out how you
| can adapt your values to the needs of the company (or try
| - maybe successfully, but probably not - to change
| theirs).
|
| It's not a failure to recognize that you prioritize
| different values in different circumstances. It doesn't
| make you dishonest, any more than it makes you dishonest
| by behaving socially one way with your friends of 20
| years, and a different way at dinner the first time you
| meet a girlfriend's parents.
| insightcheck wrote:
| Out of curiosity, could you share some examples of
| standards that you were prescient to?
| awillen wrote:
| Username checks out.
| willhinsa wrote:
| If I was applying at let's say Enron or [REDACTED], I
| wouldn't exactly be comfortable giving my opinion of
| their business model according to my values. I mean,
| that's why I don't work at any of the [REDACTED]
| companies, but to each their own.
| Jensson wrote:
| Problem is that the question optimizes to hire the most toxic
| of people: great social skills but no morals. You are
| probably better off not asking it at all, every such hire
| will destroy parts of your culture and make it look like it
| was someone else's fault making them harder to fire than any
| other kind of toxic employee.
| Fiahil wrote:
| I don't ask this question a lot, but when I did, it was mostly
| as a nice starter to get started on a drill-down interview on
| that specific topic. The candidate is giving me the topic, and
| I would just dig into it and ask them to describe their
| approach and how it would change given certain constraints.
| Being able to lay out options in a mece-way (mutually exclusive
| and completely exhaustive) comes handy.
|
| I believe it's also a very difficult exercise if you didn't
| experienced the problem solving yourself.
| otikik wrote:
| That was my expectation when I started interviewing candidates
| for a post, but I was surprised to find that most of the
| candidates didn't seem to have that one prepared. It really
| seemed they honestly struggled and had to meditate the
| question. (They were very technical people and were expecting
| technical questions)
| drewcoo wrote:
| It's called a behavioral question.[1] Many interviewers do it
| wrong. I even had a "job coach" swear to me that it was ok to
| ask hypothetical questions. So it may seem like BS because your
| interviewers don't know what they're doing.
|
| It's not possible to detect skilled liars with these questions,
| so if you're one of those, answer however you like. If you're
| one of the rest of us, tell an actual story about you - the
| point is to get to know you.
|
| Also, use the STAR method[2]. Some interviewers look for those
| explicit steps. And some interviewers don't know what to look
| for, so it can help for you to be explicit about each of those
| stages by name.
|
| [1] https://resources.careerbuilder.com/recruiting-
| solutions/bes...
|
| [2] https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/STAR-method.htm
| hamiltonians wrote:
| the vast majority of ppl who apply to a good paying job will not
| make it to the interview stage though
| hinkley wrote:
| This fact was a minor irritation to me until someone pointed
| out the ways you can discriminate against people with these
| processes. We really do need to be better about these arbitrary
| interview techniques. The off the cuff stuff tends to be very
| biased, and it takes a long time for most of us to notice that
| maybe hiring ten people who think exactly like I do was not my
| smartest decision. If indeed they ever work it out at all.
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