[HN Gopher] How to hire engineering talent without the BS
___________________________________________________________________
How to hire engineering talent without the BS
Author : jesalg
Score : 111 points
Date : 2023-03-05 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| Keyframe wrote:
| On a smaller size (company) it's relatively easy: pay well, don't
| oversell the position, send a small assignment representative of
| work and give them ample time to solve on their own OR ask for
| references you can talk to from previous workplaces.
|
| Game changes if you actively contacted someone.. if you're no BS,
| assumption is you know who you contacted and why, hence only
| thing to do, once contact established is not to oversell and pay
| well.
|
| Pay-well can constitue compensation as well as time.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding about the purpose
| of the whiteboard interview. The point is to eliminate, as fast
| as possible, candidates who simply cannot code [0] [1].
|
| You can't do that with a take-home (and I'm against take home as
| the signal to noise ratio is too low) because people will cheat
| and have them done by someone else.
|
| I've heard horror story of a "senior" engineer from "his
| country's top school" being interviewed for a technical position
| by several non-technical managers and HR reps. They only included
| an engineer in the final round, which was basically supposed to
| be rubberstamped anyways. He was then asked to implement
| something trivial like fizzbuzz or wordcount on the whiteboard.
| The candidate then became extremely defensive and tried to argue
| that such task was "beneath him", arguing for a good 15 minutes
| why he shouldn't have to do it.
|
| Then the dev just left the room and said that he used this
| question as a warmup with new hires and it typically takes them
| less than 10 minutes.
|
| Now, a lot of folks do whiteboard interviews wrong. They often
| expect to get the exact implementation of an algorithm they found
| in a textbook and for code on the board to compile. This isn't
| the point of whiteboarding. Doing this only promotes rote
| memorization. A good whiteboard interview should be a toy problem
| that can be solved in several different ways by using different
| strategies or data-structures. The idea is to see how the
| candidate will break down the problem. Is the candidate able to
| formulate test cases, write a simple implementation, verify his
| code and correct the implementation should it fail a test? On the
| more meta side of things is the candidate able to take feedback
| and explain why a certain strategy was chosen? Of course it's not
| representative of real world engineering but it's a good way to
| peek at someone's ability to debug and reason about programs;
| these abilities translate well into debugging and design.
| Especially at the college level, I really can't make any
| assumptions on what the candidates know. I'm not judging their
| knowledge of the standard library of X programming language or
| the framework-du-jour but their ability to learn it fast.
|
| Now the hard part isn't so much to create an interview process
| that works well, but to create a pipeline that feeds into this
| interview process that has a high signal to noise ratio. In my
| experience, the best predictors of a good signal to noise ratio
| was to select for CS fundamentals, good references and offer
| above market comp. The latter is especially crucial now since
| there's no more "local market" to speak of now that remote work
| is a lot prevalent. The "local market's" best devs are working
| for SV firms at SV salaries mentoring SV employees.
|
| [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
|
| [1]
| https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...
| howling wrote:
| > Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote
| (Homebrew), but you can't invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so
| fuck off. -- Max Howell (@mxcl)
|
| If inverting a binary tree means swapping the left and right
| subtrees of every node, I wouldn't want to work with someone who
| can't do that either and Google is definitely right to reject
| him.
| lubujackson wrote:
| That is a fine and common opinion, but just one question: how
| often have you inverted a binary tree at your job? Because
| after nearly 20 years it hasn't come up once for me. I am sure
| for some roles it is a necessary skill but my issue is that
| most of these questions are more or less toy problems that come
| from academia and not business. They are a great test of your
| retention of a data structure class but not super relevant
| beyond that.
|
| I would rather hire an engineer with a strong business or user
| sense - reading between the lines of requests and anticipating
| future issues or uses adds so much more value in a real sense.
|
| To me, these are great entry level questions because it is a
| good baseline for new grads when you have little work
| experience to judge. Past that, it is like making a lawyer take
| a mini bar exam for every new job - a waste of effort if you
| want to hire for specific skills and experience.
| skybrian wrote:
| Sure, but job isn't to write Homebrew either, so it just
| seems like a bad example all around.
|
| (I'm not sure Homebrew is all that well engineered, actually.
| Hard to tell, but I've had trouble with it and avoid it.)
|
| I think what it comes down to is that nobody really knows
| what to interview for.
| howling wrote:
| None, but I have written code that requires more data
| structure and algorithm knowledge than inverting a binary
| tree (at my job).
| ronia wrote:
| The actual work for which you are hiring an engineer is
| building a software product/service, and the Homebrew developer
| has a track record of delivering great results.
|
| Rejecting the guy because he cannot do a whiteboard brain
| teaser is like rejecting LeBron James because he did not make a
| shot at the arcade basketball game.
|
| I'm not saying the guy would be perfect. Comparing him to
| LeBron James might not be a great example. Google might have
| other reasons to reject him.
|
| What I'm trying to say is the current coding interview is a
| really poor mechanism to gauge a software engineer, especially
| when it comes to hiring one with real-world engineering
| experience.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > What I'm trying to say is the current coding interview is a
| really poor mechanism to gauge a software engineer.
|
| People like to say this, but in my experience this is not
| true. It's just that people misunderstand the goal of
| technical interviews and they often are poor at evaluating
| their own skills.
|
| First off, these giant tech companies have _enormous_
| economic incentives to improve their interview processes as
| much as possible. They also do a pretty rigorous assessment
| of the effectiveness of their interview process (Google, for
| example, has publicized some of their data). I 'm not saying
| these tech companies interview processes are perfect, but I
| also have a problem believing they're so fundamentally flawed
| that these companies can't figure out how to fix them given
| the giant economic returns they get for optimizing their
| hiring processes.
|
| Moreover, as some other comments mentioned, many companies
| (and individuals, myself included) believe it is _much worse_
| to hire someone who ends up not cutting it, than missing out
| on a potentially good hire. I can list out all the reasons
| why, but Joel Spoelsky has a pretty famous essay from a
| couple decades ago on the topic that explains it well [1].
|
| Thus, it's not surprising hearing a lot people complain that
| they can do the job, but they aren't good at interviews.
| Because, from Google's/Microsoft's/etc. perspective, they're
| fine with a bit higher false negative rate if they can
| greatly reduce their false positive rate. And my experience
| matches that: I have _never_ seen a candidate who did awesome
| in "whiteboard-style programming questions" who couldn't cut
| it programming-wise (they may have had other issues, but
| "coding productivity" wasn't one of them). Now, I certainly
| believe and have seen that there are some people who aren't
| good at these questions who _can_ do a job well, but there
| are also a ton more people who _can 't_ do the job if they
| can't pass a technical screen, so hiring any of these folks
| means much more risk.
|
| I also think that whiteboard-style coding questions help show
| a quality that is very important to businesses, _even if_
| those questions don 't represent "real world" work. There are
| basically 2 types of people that do well at these questions:
| people who are just naturally smart and have a ton of
| experience to the point that they wouldn't even need to study
| to do well, and people who are of more "normal"
| intelligence/ability, but who can do well if they study a
| ton. Either of those two groups would likely do well in a
| programming role. So often I hear the complaint "I'm a busy
| person, I've got outside responsibilities, you can't expect
| me to spend all this time studying". And that may be true,
| but you'll be competing against people who _are_ willing to
| study, so I don 't think you can fault Google et al for
| favoring people who show a willingness to do more
| preparation.
|
| 1. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-
| guid... "And in the middle, you have a large number of
| "maybes" who seem like they might just be able to contribute
| something. The trick is telling the difference between the
| superstars and the maybes, because the secret is that you
| don't want to hire any of the maybes. Ever."
| photonbeam wrote:
| Most of us havent touched a tree structure since college,
| because there are other, real, problems out there. Trying to
| remember, or rederive it from scratch is slower and error-prone
| and bad for interviews
| regularjack wrote:
| Not knowing how to do something from the top of your head is
| not the same thing as not being able to do it.
| [deleted]
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... but that's an interview. If you cannot, within the time,
| demonstrate any ability, why should you be hired?
|
| The question above, as clarified, is not complicated, nor
| does it rely on memorization or some "trick": anyone
| purporting to be a SWE should be able to write an essentially
| de novo solution to it.
|
| (And in my own technical interviews, there are multiple
| questions, to specifically hedge against any one being "that
| one question a good candidate is going to miss because it's
| just not their day". It doesn't happen: it's either all or
| nothing.)
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| > If you cannot, within the time, demonstrate any ability,
| why should you be hired?
|
| It is more likely that the interview process is broken and
| missing the right candidates, than it is that the
| interviewees are all mediocre. Most interviews are very
| non-inclusive the same way that the main track of school is
| becoming less and less inclusive. Different people need
| different methods to bring out the best in them.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It is more likely that the interview process is broken
| and missing the right candidates, than it is that the
| interviewees are all mediocre.
|
| Here's a thought experiment for you: if the interview
| process is so broken, why hasn't some tech company
| succeeded and become famous for an improved interview
| process, e.g. "Moneyball style"? My guess is because the
| process is _not_ actually that broken, at least from the
| employer 's perspective. I'm sure the interview process
| could be changed to be less regimented and more
| "inclusive", but that's also likely to reduce it's
| predictive power (i.e. you're more likely to make bad
| hires, and from a company's perspective that's almost
| always worse than missing out on a great hire).
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| > if the interview process is so broken
|
| Hiring is guessing. Firing is knowing. If the hiring
| process worked, we wouldn't have layoffs like we do.
| deathanatos wrote:
| The layoffs that I have seen reported have been reported
| as being random. I've been involved now in 3 layoffs
| directly in my career, and 100% of them, the laid off
| individuals were laid off without regards to skill. The
| reporting in the media on layoffs happening elsewhere
| largely matches my experience.
|
| Sure, an argument exists around "you shouldn't've hired
| that many people", but that is different from an argument
| of "the hiring process can't discern good hires". The
| former is a management & long-term planning issue, the
| latter is how interviews are conducted.
| sophonX wrote:
| So hire a baby ? That'll eventually do in 20 years .....
| works, right ?
| sophonX wrote:
| Yeah it's such a basic structure we use in-directly - in
| classes & sub-classes, intellij dependency list on left side,
| using google maps, etc.
|
| How complex is homebrew ? Can no one else replicate it ? Why
| should a company hire for something you did that's simple ?
|
| What are the skills he posses that no one else has ?
|
| Learn your basica dsa stuff for gods sake people.
| onion2k wrote:
| Judging by Google's track record, hiring some people who have
| demonstrated an ability to launch _and maintain_ a piece of
| software would bring a skillset they desparately need. Google
| engineers are incapable of keeping much going for the long
| term.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| Also, I don't believe that 90% of Google engineers use
| Homebrew. I'm not sure I'd believe 9%. Google is a Linux shop
| with its own internal package repo. Even if you're using a
| Macbook to work remotely, you're using it as a fancy terminal
| wrapper to connect to a Debian-based system to do your real
| work.
| dekhn wrote:
| Wouldn't that be a "mirror" operation, while inversion would be
| (I dunno) swapping the direction of the edges?
|
| I went out of my way to avoid homebrew (still do) when I worked
| at google because it would reliably fail to complete some key
| operations in a dag, hence the interest in ensuring developers
| know how to do CS things.
| sophonX wrote:
| There you go ! This comment should be highlighted.
| howling wrote:
| Yeah it's not clear what he was asked. Swapping the direction
| of every edge of a binary tree would result in a DAG that is
| likely no longer a binary tree though.
| virtuous_signal wrote:
| "Mirror" is what this question is generally understood to be
| asking. I don't think swapping the direction of the edges
| produces a tree in general although it would produce a DAG. I
| think "invert" could mean "mirror" or turn upside-down
| depending on the context.
| dekhn wrote:
| Personally, if I were asked this, I would just say "convert
| the graph to a matrix, invert the matrix, and then convert
| the resulting inverted matrix back to a graph", and let
| them try to figure out if that would work for a bit before
| joking "oh come on, preorder traversal with a temp var, do
| you have a more interesting question?"
| karmakaze wrote:
| It would be more leetcode to be given an ordered binary
| tree and asked to reverse it O(N). It's a lot more fair to
| the interviewee to be given the explicit task without
| knowing 'the trick' unless one considers knowing recursive
| functions to be a trick.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| I think something like this works well:
|
| 0. 45 minute homework/prescreen. Provide an (optional) pre-setup
| environment so it's mostly about coding and not about
| building/installing deps.
|
| 1. on-site where you chat about your solution, mostly an ice
| breaker/introduction to the team.
|
| 2. pair-programming to extend the homework or work on a
| simplified but real problem encountered day to day, open book
|
| 3. design review
|
| 4. code review
|
| 5. behavioral / case study
|
| All of these can be pretty objective and don't rely on any
| memorization. All this should be pre-canned so individual
| proctors don't come up with their own questions and you're
| comparing candidates around the same prompts. It's amazing how
| few companies even manage these basic steps. I think most
| importantly the hiring should be done by a committee of actual
| practicing engineers - that means if you have checked in code in
| six months you aren't a vote on the committee.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| Sorry, but take home test as the first step to filter them is a
| big no for me. Why should i waste time on a test before even
| meeting anyone?
|
| 1, 2 and 5 should be more than enough. You get to talk to them
| about their past expertise and even combine it with some design
| discussion, you get a pair programming session and a final
| casual discussion. Why do you need everything else?
| stickyricky wrote:
| Imagine the other side. You're more than likely doing this for
| multiple companies. Plus working your current job. Plus taking
| care of your kids! You have to devote minimum 5 hours per
| interested company. IMO that's ridiculous. I also think its why
| startups skew so young. I don't have the energy to put up with
| it anymore.
| mouzogu wrote:
| Dev for 16 years. The people who do the interviewing are
| themselves different now.
|
| They have different values. Different expectations of what is
| normal or important. "Culture", "team fit" and other bs.
|
| Everything changes. New people come who don't know the past.
| jedberg wrote:
| We need an industry agreed-upon certification exam.
|
| When you apply for a job as a doctor, they don't make you
| demonstrate surgical techniques. They take your board
| certification and ask you questions about what you've done in the
| past, things that went wrong and what you learned from that
| experience, and so on. They just assume you have the technical
| skills if you have the license.
|
| Now, I'll admit that with doctors you are legally _required_ to
| have the license, and we certainly don 't need to go that far. If
| a small startup wants to take a chance on "unlicensed software
| engineers" or even offer to pay for the exam as a job perk (like
| a lot of law firms do for their interns), then great! But I can
| see a lot of time and effort saved if all the big enterprises
| would get together and come up with a national certification exam
| that you take once. Or even better, a series of exams for
| junior/senior/staff/principle, so neither candidates nor hiring
| managers have to waste time on tech assessments.
|
| One of the keys would be making the exam inclusive for
| neurodivergent candidates, people with disabilities, etc. But
| this can be solved.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >We need an industry agreed-upon certification exam
|
| I'd be OK with this if all the answers were just shown to
| various companies so they could see strengths and weaknesses.
| If some company doesn't care about DP or low level OO design
| they can throw out those scores, etc.
|
| I certainly got annoyed in my last job hunt where I had to
| answer some basic whiteboard easy level LC questions over and
| over and over. Thank god I got to skip the Google screen. If
| one more person made me do basic BFS or something I was going
| to freak out. I understand why they asked it, but I had to keep
| coding it over and over and over...
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| We have university degrees which consist of numerous exams and
| we know they don't work to guarantee technical skills. The
| industry changes too quickly for curriculums to keep up, the
| field is vastly too large to cover adequately in one package,
| and testing well doesn't translate effectively to programming
| well.
|
| Why would this hypothetical certification not have the same
| problems?
| scarface74 wrote:
| As someone who has seen my share of "paper tigers" - people
| that either memorize enough to pass a certification or find
| brain dumps online. Certifications are useless and easily
| gamed. This has been true sense at least 2000.
|
| When I was working in the "real world" (I'm in consulting now),
| I could tell the people who just studied for a cert within the
| first 5 minutes of an interview.
| version_five wrote:
| Basically everything about that idea is bad. It will turn into
| a cash grab, encourage pointless gatekeeping, allow some group
| to exert outsized control over a diverse trade, and anyway
| would never get universally adopted. And if it did happen,
| instead of people selectively spending their time to interview
| at companies they want to, they'd be forced to waste their time
| proving whatever the governing body thinks they need to
| demonstrate. Bringing some artificial barrier to entry to
| software development is the last thing the field needs.
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| "If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for
| you, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas
| have to win, otherwise good people don't stay."
|
| - Steve Jobs
|
| I think the real disconnect with the 'inclusive culture' boom
| comes because humans are involved so heavily in the process. The
| _idea_ is great, we want to be fully aware of our internal biases
| and avoid having them color our perception as much as possible so
| we do not shoot ourselves in the foot.
|
| In practice, I have yet to see inclusivity programs at
| corporations be anything more than virtue signaling, and an
| opportunity to exclude others under the guise of "inclusivity"
| _wink wink_.
|
| Remember 'affirmative action'? It's palpably Orwellian that
| inclusivity is newspeak; what we call it now.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| This misses 90% of what I, a startup CTO, find valuable in
| technical hires. What I want to know is: what type of projects
| have you worked on, how did you develop expertise in those
| systems, what level of ownership over your work did you display,
| how well were you able to plan and design the solution to a
| problem, and how did you handle the execution over the X months
| of work to make it go live. Demonstrate expertise, curiosity, and
| ownership. "System design" is like 5% of the work we do, and it's
| important, but putting the designs in motion and driving value
| from them is 95% of our time and that's something we do not
| screen well for. The way that I do this now is a process with a
| soft skills interview, a coding interview, then a "case
| study/system design" interview where I have candidates write a
| system design doc at home for a project they have worked on IRL
| and use that as a starting point for a 45 minute panel convo
| where we review the doc and ask questions about their choices and
| how execution went.
| jarjoura wrote:
| This is the right way to interview, I agree.
|
| You want to see repeatable behavior and a general interest in
| going through the process. If someone takes the time to apply
| with homework and is able to articulate well, it gives you so
| much valuable signal.
|
| Pressure cooker style interviews only reveal someone can remain
| focused under stress and that they studied their leetcodes.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Is that 3 separate interviews for your startup? Or is it done
| in one session? If it is the former you're missing out on lots
| of potential candidates
| gedy wrote:
| I'd love a process like that, however it's much more common for
| companies I've interviewed with to not only not ask that type
| of info, but actively avoid and discourage talking about these
| things.
|
| Been treated in past like I'm avoiding the "important part" of
| solving their quiz and that it's some softball topic.
| jbmsf wrote:
| I agree with the conclusions, though I've seen the structured
| part go wrong, e.g. the interviewer is so dedicated to following
| the structure of the process that they forget about the
| empathetic part. These interviews look more like scripts than
| exploration of a candidate.
|
| So I'd add another criteria: interviewers need to be trained!
| criteriums wrote:
| Singular: Criterion
|
| Plural: Criteria
|
| SCNR
| orangesite wrote:
| Good jobs have friendly practices, bad jobs have awful practices.
|
| I quite like how things work currently. It's easy to tell the
| difference.
| ffssffss wrote:
| It's not a bad post per se but we've been reading similar,
| anecdotal blogs like this about making the interview process
| kinder for decades. Yet the only companies in a position to do a
| rigorous statistical test - large tech cos - stick with the
| traditional, somewhat adversarial whiteboarding process. I would
| even suggest that a strictly technical whiteboarding process can
| be less biased than what the author describes, because you can so
| regularly grade everyone on the same exact rubric. That's tougher
| when "pair programming" or doing a take home.
|
| Also, stop giving take home projects. Bad candidates will cheat
| them and good candidates will not even do them. If one of the
| random startup names listed on the author's site sent me a 12
| hour take home project I would delete the email. Do you think
| they pay twice as much as the bigger company that only makes you
| waste 6 hours doing a whiteboard? I doubt it.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Larger tech cos with very high TC know that they will always
| have a pipeline of more qualified candidates, so a false
| negative has basically no cost to them, whereas a false
| positive has a significant cost. I think the reason that they
| run these processes is because they have a very low false
| positive rate, and so long as that is true, it doesn't matter
| to them how high the false negative rate is.
|
| And I think that smaller companies copy this as a part of the
| tendency to copy large companies without thinking about whether
| the thing they are copying actually makes sense at their scale.
| In this case it can be very damaging, because false negative
| for a startup with a limited pipeline can be very bad.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Also, as far as I know, nobody measures false negatives in
| hiring. How would you even do it? Keep track of everyone you
| rejected, and then 5, 10, and 20 years later check on their
| career? I'd be fascinated to see the results of such a study.
| I'm sure it would be super valuable if you could find some
| kind of pattern where some filter is falsely excluding
| candidates that are actually great.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| Hire a random sample of the candidates you were going to
| reject, and compare performance against the ones your
| process said to hire
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I unironically believe that large tech co's would do
| this.
| ffssffss wrote:
| I think the goal of avoiding false positives is actually more
| important for smaller companies. A bad hire at a startup can
| significantly shorten the company's runway, while a bad hire
| at a bigger company tends to get isolated and managed out
| without doing much harm (except to morale of course).
|
| You're right about the copycat behavior. This goes all the
| way to top of funnel: these small, even trivial-scale web
| application startups just don't have hard engineering
| problems. Many imagine they do, or imagine they _will_ once
| they take off, but the work they 're offering these high
| powered candidates they claim to want to hire is like, wiring
| up CRUD apps and making javascript buttons. It's not
| technically deep work, it's product work. A little humility
| about whether or not your tech startup is truly doing "tech"
| problems would, I think, fix some of the expectation/reality
| mismatch people are having when they complain about how hard
| it is to hire engineers.
|
| And sure, lots of people join Google to work on world-scale
| problems and end up wiring CRUD stuff anyway. But they can at
| least plausibly offer some technical depth (or could anyway,
| perhaps Google's reputation as a great place to develop an
| engineering career has been fading).
|
| (this is not to knock on "CRUD" but to highlight that a
| technical problem solver is an overlapping but not identical
| skillset to someone who can work with a fast moving team to
| quickly and reliably develop product changes)
| fallingknife wrote:
| I agree about the false positives. What I'm saying is that
| false negatives are more costly at a startup because you
| have less of a good candidate pipeline. Passing up on good
| candidates extends your hiring process and may even push
| people to hire someone you otherwise wouldn't have later
| because you need engineers. Google doesn't care because
| they will have 100 more candidates the next day.
| sophonX wrote:
| You should mention, what kind of teams you've worked with and
| what kind of stuff you've built. Every team has different
| requirements and hiring bar. In my previous company the low bar
| caused not so good (able to understand stuff, knowledge and
| connect dots) people be a burden to rest of team. Heck in 2
| years, 4 important people have left the team due to hiring a bad
| manager (has neither tech nor soft skill(s)).
|
| There wasn't growth in that team due to mediocre hiring and
| eventually all the good ones - left to other companies.
|
| My current team is an infra platform and has lot of growth as IC.
| Everyone is learning something in-depth and are explorers -
| rather than blind sheep. The bar here is higher than the one for
| my previous team.
|
| Our team requires you to know about whatever you talk on, not
| just usage but it's internals - why ? That's what we do daily. It
| can be about scheduler, checkpointing, auto scaling, concurrency,
| different data structures & algos, integrating with ecosystem,
| etc.
|
| Even soft skills - like helping others, taking feedback,
| communicating clearly, etc.
|
| Yeah so, mediocre will always be a burden to team.
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| My biggest recommendation is that those working directly with the
| new hire, peers, direct reports, subordinates, counterparts, have
| a vote or veto power.
|
| HR and recruiting relationships are sparse at best.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Have to also have a challenge process. I built an infosec
| talent pipeline for a fintech; stakeholders get a veto but the
| hiring mgr can go back to the veto voter and ask them to dive
| deeper (and possibly perform an additional candidate call) to
| confirm the veto. >1 veto = no hire.
|
| It's working well, and has avoided at least two false negatives
| since implementation within the last six months.
| kortilla wrote:
| Have the "1 veto but hire anyway" cases gone poorly?
| criteriums wrote:
| A scenario in which I can imagine this backfiring is if the
| new hire and the vetoer end up working together. With an
| open mind that could be overcome, as in getting positively
| surprised, but let's be honest, how many people do you know
| who really have such an open mind?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| No, both going great, which means (it appears) I'm
| balancing the org's health and need to succeed with giving
| candidates an opportunity they might not otherwise have
| had.
|
| The purpose of the system is what it does. If desired state
| is not emerging, we must adjust and observe accordingly.
| heldrida wrote:
| Hiring...my partner had an interview booked for a Friday at 5pm.
| The interviewer didn't show up. My partner end up emailing the
| person, whom apologised and then jumped on a 10m call, 10m before
| 6pm. My partner, as I do, spend a lot of time researching the
| company, preparing for the interview, etc.
|
| How many countless stories like that exist?
|
| For example, people messaging for a chat "found your work on
| project X and saw your github account and found about your past
| projects, we are looking for some one like you", then on the day
| "oh sorry to let you know last minute but X and Y happened".
|
| Bunch of time wasters! This is the reality!
|
| Once in the job, it's funny to see who actually does the work.
| Zero contributions for days, etc.
|
| There are a lot of people out there handling these processes and
| they are bad, really bad!
| snozolli wrote:
| Since it mentions the infamous interview challenge, I'll ask: has
| anyone ever "inverted" (i.e. swapped left and right recursively)
| a binary tree in production code?
|
| I can't think of any reason why anyone would ever do this. Just
| navigate the tree in the reverse of your normal direction
| instead.
|
| Why not ask the much more interesting and potentially _useful_
| question of balancing a binary tree? Or do something else
| recursive, if that 's what you're after.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Easier? You usually aren't coding FizzBuzz in production code
| either (although probably more often than inverting binary
| trees.)
| snozolli wrote:
| _Easier?_
|
| What's easier?
|
| _You usually aren 't coding FizzBuzz in production code
| either_
|
| I would say you're constantly coding FizzBuzz. Looping,
| modulus arithmetic, and conditionals are all over the code
| I've written. At least with FizzBuzz you have a test of a
| person's ability to understand a task, break it down, and
| make sure the logic is consistent. With tree "inversion" it's
| not even a sensical request, it's utterly useless, and there
| are countless more interesting and practical ways to test
| understanding of recursion and trees. Knowledge that, I would
| bet, isn't even relevant for 90% of programmers, and if tree
| traversal _were_ relevant then you 'd probably want to jump
| to _way_ more difficult questions (I 'm thinking of the
| Facebook graph, for example).
|
| I agree with the other commenter that it would make far more
| sense to ask questions like "you need to process data of this
| type, what provided data structure (e.g. C++'s STL) would you
| choose?"
| nvarsj wrote:
| It's not really the point of the question. The LC interview is
| basically a standardized test to eliminate bias as much as
| possible. If you prepare, you should be able to solve it.
| "Invert a binary tree" is actually considered an easy problem
| to test your basic knowledge of how trees work and tree
| traversal.
| snozolli wrote:
| _a standardized test to eliminate bias as much as possible_
|
| Uhhhh... It eliminates competent, skilled people who don't
| have the time to memorize the latest cargo cult trends in
| hiring. Look in the article for a glaring example.
|
| _" Invert a binary tree" is actually considered an easy
| problem to test your basic knowledge of how trees work and
| tree traversal._
|
| So would simply printing out a tree, and at least that's
| something a person might actually do.
|
| Tree "inversion" doesn't even make any sense and at this
| point I'm convinced that the cargo cult is choosing it
| because it's the extent of their own understanding of trees
| and somehow sounds extra technical to them.
| nvarsj wrote:
| To be clear, I didn't imply I was agreeing with it. Just
| saying what the justification for this kind of question is.
|
| I agree completely it eliminates a huge swathe of people,
| mostly experienced and older people. FAANG employees, ime,
| are biased towards childless / single people with
| privileged backgrounds.
|
| Tree inversion sounds weird when you hear it phrased like
| that, but in an interview it would be explained with an
| example (just swap the left and right children
| recursively).
| zerr wrote:
| LC interview is biased towards people who are into
| LC/Olympiad/competitive programming or who have enough free
| time and willingness/desperation to grind LC.
| regularjack wrote:
| > Why not ask the much more interesting and potentially useful
| question of balancing a binary tree?
|
| Or even just when would you use a binary tree? Figuring out
| which data structure is appropriate for the problem at hand is
| the hard part, how to implement operations on the data
| structure is easy in comparison, you can just Google it.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| > Or even just when would you use a binary tree?
|
| That seems to be the wrong question though. It seems to be
| jeopardy style "question". You are not asking which data
| structure is appropriate for a problem.
|
| Here is the answer, but what is the problem it solves.
|
| Never in my live have I sat down and said: I don't know what
| problem is I need to solve, but I know the solution is a
| binary tree.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It sounds good but do we have any evidence that this actually
| works? There's so many of these speculative "how to interview"
| posts but it's all just cargo culting.
| t8sr wrote:
| We all want "inclusive hiring culture", "exceptional engineering
| talent" and a frictionless hiring process, but IMO you can't have
| all three. Like them or not, leetcode* interviews actually give a
| chance to people who can't do a home assignment, or come from a
| background that didn't let them have a bunch of code on Github.
| In that sense, it's the more fair way to test people's aptitude,
| and will find exceptional talent from all kinds of different
| backgrounds.
|
| If you still want "exceptional talent", but not algorithmic
| interviews, then you end up biasing towards white guys who have a
| ton of projects to show you.
|
| Actually, I think this should be verifiable. Select some
| companies that we think have exceptionally high bar (you could
| use compensation as a proxy, acknowledging it's imperfect). Then
| classify them based on whether they do "leetcode" interviews or
| not, and check their diversity reports. My bet would be that the
| "leetcode" companies do significantly better.
|
| * Caveat is that companies people think do "leetcode" actually
| usually ban questions that appear on leetcode.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Like them or not, "leetcode interviews" actually give a
| chance to people who can't do a home assignment
|
| Not really--if I don't have time to do an hour-long take-home
| assignment, what makes you think I have time to practice
| leetcode-style questions? The take-home assignment is usually
| testing skills that I actually use in my job on a regular
| basis, so I don't need extra preparation, I just need a block
| of time to sit down and do it.
|
| I agree that expecting people to be able to show side projects
| is a mistake, though I'm not sure why you think that the bias
| there would be racial--I would imagine it would be much more a
| filter that excludes people with families and/or non-computer
| hobbies.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _I 'm not sure why you think that the bias there would be
| racial_
|
| This seems off to me as well. Wealth, and schooling, are not
| relvant here. Just grab an old computer, install Linux for
| free, and off you go.
|
| Loads of free tool stacks, github is free, etc.
| [deleted]
| jesalg wrote:
| As someone who's been around the tech industry for a while, I
| know firsthand all the sausage-making that goes into building a
| great technical hiring funnel. On the flip side, as a job seeker,
| I also know how demoralizing it can be to go through a broken
| hiring process that doesn't accurately reflect your abilities.
|
| With recent layoffs and many talented professionals on the job
| market, I was compelled to write a blog post about how to build
| an inclusive hiring culture and find exceptional engineering
| talent.
|
| If you're involved in your organization's technical hiring
| process at any stage, I encourage you to give this a read. I
| share some best practices for conducting effective interviews and
| improving your own hiring process.
|
| Let me know what you think!
| lcw wrote:
| I think structured interviews can be just as easily biased as
| unbiased. I'm not disagreeing necessarily about being
| structured with your interview practices, but I find this to be
| a grey area with promotions also.
|
| As soon as people figure out the check boxes or the structured
| pointing system they start to check all the boxes, but it
| doesn't necessarily speak to the nuances between individuals
| that make them diverse and both valuable. In fact it can lead
| to a certain type of person people hired or promote, which can
| be on good characteristics, but I find many times turns into a
| "certain type" of person.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is structure can take you so far, but
| you have to be willing to explore a little bit about what makes
| a person special, and that many times means not controlling the
| whole interview, and be willing to have your bias challenged
| through the candidate directing some of it.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| In another comment I was also poking some holes into the
| "structured" comments, what you say above was in my head but
| I couldn't quite articulate it. Well said.
|
| I think checklist interviews miss the mark as you say. You
| may not have a perfect rubric, but I'm not grading students
| on a history exam; I am evaluating them for a role in a given
| position. In the limited time we have to speak, I want to use
| my intuition and experience as an interviewer and engineer to
| rapidly get to where the candidate is strong, and where they
| may have issues.
| dimal wrote:
| Agreed. It's very demoralizing to know that you are extremely
| capable of doing the job, but since you don't satisfy the
| narrowly defined fitness function you're being passed into,
| you fail. But more than that, companies are missing out on
| great people that may simply have a different way of thinking
| that isn't accounted for in their structure.
| realjhol wrote:
| > inclusive hiring culture and find exceptional engineering
| talent.
|
| Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional
| always involves excluding mediocrity
| mikrl wrote:
| No it is not.
|
| You can exclude mediocrity while also being exclusionary on
| other axes.
|
| They are unrelated issues. In fact, I've even heard of
| exceptional people being abused/bullied for belonging to the
| wrong group to the point of being told "you couldn't have
| done that" which itself is an assertion of their supposed
| mediocrity for exclusionary reasons.
|
| Don't assume you need to be bigoted to exclude mediocrity.
| Discriminating, yes, but not _discriminatory_ against groups
| that inclusive hiring policies attempt to protect.
| jbmsf wrote:
| I'm sure that sounded smart when you wrote it.
|
| An inclusive interviewing process does not mean that you hire
| everyone. It means you reduce the weight of people's biases
| as part of identifying who you hire (because people turn out
| to be quite bad at prediction in hiring).
| serverholic wrote:
| That sounds nice and all but the distribution of engineers
| doesn't match population distributions.
|
| This leads to organizational pressure to hire based on
| population distribution. Doing so inevitably means hiring
| based on attributes other than skill.
| jbmsf wrote:
| Fair, but:
|
| - The companies that make an effort get a lot closer to
| population baselines than the ones that just give up.
|
| - Organizational pressures are something leadership and
| management should be steering. I'd rather have hiring
| practices be an explicit choice than something that "just
| happens"
| serverholic wrote:
| [dead]
| ipaddr wrote:
| If the % of woman developers is 10% and management
| creates hiring goal of 50% it detorts reality. It means
| hr has to work harder at filling those female roles which
| often reduce their checkboxes while increasing the
| checkboxes for everyone else. Now you have to leaving
| positions unfilled longer in hopes of finding a candidate
| who matches a gender. You've turned the hiring process
| into a broken mess and require 1000 times more
| candidates.
|
| Let's say you are successful. Let's say a class of
| companies are successful at this strategy. Lets use the
| example of faangs which are desirable places in terms of
| salary/brand. If faangs were successful at this that
| would reduce the % of female developers in other industry
| and assuming faangs are taking the best candidates that
| leaves the worst ones. Which then creates this reality
| where male programmers outclass female developers in
| these other industries. That makes it harder for women in
| general and makes this false impression that females are
| not as good as males.
|
| To help women you really need to treat them equally.
| Trying to reach a goal of unhealthy unnatural % industry
| wide means women will left holding the bag when the music
| stops.
| jbmsf wrote:
| That does sound frustrating, but I think you are
| conflating naive management practices with inclusive
| hiring.
| slt2021 wrote:
| ipaddr is right that he described the actual situation
| with FAANGs scooping up all of high caliber
| underrepresented minority candidates (think black/women
| ivy league comp sci grads with high GPA).
|
| But this also creates a positive feedback loop when more
| and more women decide to switch industries and pursue
| IT/Engineering jobs via bootcamps, college degrees, etc.
| I noticed the number of female candidates in UX/UI,
| fullstack, QA, Data Analytics - has increased in last
| several years.
|
| Partly because the demand is still high for these
| professionals, partly because there is entire cottage
| industry of bootcamps churning out IT specialists en
| masse, partly these diversity hiring practices that
| opened up doors for women
| okaram wrote:
| If you think we have a perfect way to measure (or even to
| define) pure skill I have a bridge to sell you ...
|
| We're always hiring based on attributes other than skill.
| If we're lucky and purposeful, skill becomes a part of
| the hiring process.
| serverholic wrote:
| [dead]
| tomp wrote:
| Employment is, be definition, exclusive. More so for well-
| paying companies.
|
| I hate when companies lie about that, it massively lowers
| my respect for them.
| photonbeam wrote:
| People in general yes, but some particular people become
| reasonably skilled at it if they put effort into it over a
| long time
| jbmsf wrote:
| Sure, but if you are lucky enough to have an entire team
| of interviewers who have this much experience, you're
| probably not having the same hiring conversation that's
| happening in this thread.
| sophonX wrote:
| [flagged]
| sethammons wrote:
| Inclusive hiring practices, in my experience, strive to
| have a diverse funnel whereby under-represented groups
| get to be in consideration, but you still hire the best
| out of the pool. It may take longer to fill that pool,
| but many agree that it is worth it.
| hoverfd wrote:
| Thinking of it in terms of race might indicate more about
| how you view things. As an example, think about how
| frequently throughout history people in power have
| claimed that women "can't handle" the positions of power
| that men had. They cite all kinds of nonsense like
| "emotional" or "hysterical"... conveniently ignoring all
| of the hysterical and emotional men throughout history.
|
| Think about how something like that would affect how
| companies are formed. Things seem much better now, but I
| merely wanted to highlight one of many kinds of biases
| that are actively affecting our society, even if they are
| hard to qualify.
| jbmsf wrote:
| Are you trolling now?
|
| People tend to substitute their biases when evaluating
| skills and knowledge. Some people overcome these biases
| through practice but everyone has them.
|
| It's 2023, this is not new territory.
| whiddershins wrote:
| It would be sad to me to cede the concepts of bias and
| inclusion to only referring to one dimension.
| rfrey wrote:
| Well, _felt_ smart, anyhow.
| romanhn wrote:
| This take assumes a priori that inclusive hiring results in
| mediocrity. Sounds more like a reflection of biases, to be
| honest. Inclusive hiring means expanding your search criteria
| beyond "hire those that look like me, speak like me, have
| awesome education like me, and are basically smart like me".
| It turns out there are plenty of exceptional people outside
| of that narrow band.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > have awesome education like me, and are basically smart
| like me
|
| At least this is meritocracy, the kind of thing that people
| (e.g. eugenicists) can make a serious argument for.
|
| > look like me, speak like me
|
| ...is something that can't be justified except by terrible
| people. Even worse is "likes the same music and movies that
| I do" or "we coincidentally have mutual friends."
| Redoubts wrote:
| > is something that can't be justified except by terrible
| people.
|
| I have bad news for you about the people commenting in
| this thread.
| [deleted]
| thewebcount wrote:
| Super minor language nitpick, but I thought you might want to
| know. There are a couple places where you seem to have mixed up
| empathetic and emphatic. One section is titled "Emphethatic".
| I'm not sure if you were trying to make a portmanteau or just
| misspelled it, but I was confused by it. Other than that, I
| appreciate you taking the time to write up something like this.
| Wish it existed when I interviewed in my younger days. (MS also
| asked me the manhole cover question.)
| jesalg wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback! That was a typo. Just fixed it. Glad
| it resonated with you.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| A lot of the commenters in this thread (and elsewhere on HN) flat
| out refuse to do take-home assignments, live algorithms coding,
| 4+ hours of onsite rounds, etc. Yet every interview I've ever
| done in the last decade+ with FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies
| have always been like this. So where are all you interviewing
| that pays competetively without this "traditional" interview
| loop?
| Balgair wrote:
| I'm in non-FAANG tech (biotech, DoD) and no one does take homes
| or live coding, even for code heavy jobs. Our comp isn't in the
| 200k+ range, mostly due to location, but it's pretty good all
| the same (120k+).
| lolinder wrote:
| > that pays competetively
|
| I think this is the broken assumption--there are a lot of us
| who simply are willing to accept a sub-FAANG wage in exchange
| for a work environment/interview process that we feel respects
| us.
| Redoubts wrote:
| A lot of us aren't gonna leave 5x the wage on the table.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yup, it's all tradeoffs, and my preferred tradeoffs won't
| match yours.
| Redoubts wrote:
| That's a pretty wild tradeoff though!
| lolinder wrote:
| Is it? At my current wage I make enough to pay for all my
| family's needs and retire at 50.
|
| Could I use more money? Probably. But would I be
| _happier_ with more? The research suggests I wouldn 't.
| crabbone wrote:
| Where I'm from FAANG pays the average for the market salary.
| They might be more attractive as a bullet point on the resume
| or because of various other perks (both related to the job
| directly or not at all).
|
| In the world outside HN I _very rarely_ encountered people who
| 'd turn away from any kind of hiring process. Maybe one in
| fifty candidates?.. I don't have the numbers, but I think I
| only met such people twice in my life.
|
| I bailed from interviews for different reasons, but I think
| that homework is a legit way to test someone's skills, so I
| wouldn't mind that.
|
| The reasons I cut the hiring process short in my job hunts were
| most commonly:
|
| 1. Employer is an MS Windows shop. Sometimes it's hard to
| figure this out from the job posting.
|
| 2. Employer requires employees to use company-provided tools
| s.a. code editor, or antivirus etc. In other words, an over-
| reaching IT.
|
| 3. Crazy / not very smart / borderline criminal employer.
| Examples include a guy who had "scrum cards" deck on his desk
| and essentially showed me to the door when I asked if they used
| this stuff for real. Another one who couldn't get my homework
| to run, asked for a Docker image, couldn't run that either,
| asked for a VM image, couldn't run that either...
|
| ----
|
| There's one litmus test I have when interviewing that turned
| out to be surprisingly precise, and I don't know why. I ask
| potential employer if they ever use git-merge. If the answer is
| "no", the company turns out to be intelligent people who are
| nice to work with, and if the answer is anything else, it turns
| out to be dysfunctional in more ways than just infra. They will
| have toxic culture, under-the-carpet skirmishes where each
| department undermines another department, while at the same
| time trying to do as little work as possible.
|
| As you can imagine, unfortunately, I had to take jobs where the
| employer answered "yes" or "sometimes" etc. That's how I know
| :(
| dev_throw wrote:
| We don't want to do it but sometimes we do if it means getting
| to work on interesting things/paid competitively.
|
| I've had interviews with heavy LC and ones where I got plain
| old fizzbuzz and there wasn't much difference in staff
| competence or how quickly we delivered.
|
| If anything, the place with the low bar had more well rounded
| peers I wanted to spend time with after work.
| davedx wrote:
| Personally, either regular tech companies in Europe who tend to
| be more relaxed with hiring ... but also don't pay the same
| astronomical salaries FAANG adjacent companies pay.
|
| Or startups. :)
| franciscop wrote:
| I will do live or take-home algorithms (~1h) and such for any
| company since they are fun and help me practice anyway if I'm
| in interview mode.
|
| I will do take-home assignments (assuming 4~8h of work) or 4h+
| onsite only if I am (quite-to-very) interested in the company.
| This is either the company is famous so I know them well, or
| there was a good interview process and they passed all of my
| questions/no red flags. If I'm on the verge of rejecting a
| company and they ask me for a sudden 4h+ process, sorry but
| not.
|
| I live in Japan so it's been interesting as there's vastly
| different thinking companies, you have from the most modern
| flexible silicon-valley-like company (few, but there are) to
| very traditional ones that might even be confused when you
| reject them (again few, but some). Last time I interviewed I
| told a company I wasn't interested in their offer, only to
| receive an email later telling me they were not interested in
| hiring me. I could guess HR marking me as a no-hire was a lot
| better for that interviewer than marking me as rejecting them,
| but still made me laugh a bit of how much "no, _I_ am breaking
| up with you " it sounded like.
| activitypea wrote:
| I won't do anything that requires more time from me than it
| does for them, simple as that. If they think it's worth it to
| waste 10-20 man hours for a day on sites, that's concerning but
| not disqualifying.
| roflyear wrote:
| Are there any other industries that do this? Do cabinet makers
| ask you to do like a full day of work for free?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Of course.
|
| My buddy just got a job at a high-end cocktail bar as a
| bartender. Part of the interview process was asking him to
| mix a drink.
|
| Gordon Ramsay has talked about how he'll interview chefs by
| asking them to make scrambled eggs.
|
| Actors, even famous ones, generally have to 'read' for roles
| in order to land them.
|
| Musicians interview for seats in symphonies by playing music.
|
| MBAs have to do case studies to land jobs at high end
| consulting firms.
|
| Hell I applied to Taco Bell as a kid and they made me take a
| short math test to prove I knew how to make change.
|
| I could give similar examples for dozens of other jobs.
|
| The cases where you _don 't_ need to demonstrate some skill
| in order to get the job generally fall into a few categories:
|
| - There's some outside certifying body like the Bar, CPA, PE,
| various tradesmen unions, or all the licenses like a CDL.
|
| - The jobs are undifferentiated so the workers are fungible
| (no special skills required).
|
| - Job skill is immediately apparent (less than two weeks to
| know for certain if someone can do the job or not).
|
| - The cost of a bad hire is low so you're willing to eat the
| cost and just cut the workers how don't work out.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I can totally see this: can you whip up a quick breadbox
| while we stand here and comment on your every move? You've
| got to use our toolbox, work with unfamiliar materials and no
| measurements are allowed. You've got one hour. Oh, and we'll
| keep throwing in new requirements along the way.
| rnk wrote:
| I refuse them. If I'm looking for a job I don't have half a day
| for some pointless thing. Interview me in the standard way, a
| few hour long interview, one at least with coding. When I
| interviewed at Microsoft and Google a few years ago, take home
| assignments were not part of the deal.
|
| Last 10 years no take home. Today it's coding something in a vc
| meeting, maybe in a web browser or coding env. Maybe beginners
| do some coding.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Most people on hacker news and most people in tech do not work
| for faangs. These salaries of $250,000 or $200,000 or even
| $150,000 seem unreachable. But these faang salaries have *.
|
| You signup for a new Amazon job. You are a senior developer you
| expect to make $400,000 with the stocks/salary. Your base
| outside of California is 139,000 or 129,000. After year 1 only
| 5% vests.. after year two 15%.. the average employment length
| is 1.5 years. So you end up with $140,000/150,000 for working
| 16 hour days. If you manage to stay 10 years you could
| retire..(you have to because at this point you hate life) but
| they don't want people staying at the same level so you need to
| get a promotion when the 4 year vest up or you will be at your
| base. Getting one takes the right project and is hard and
| requires a breakthrough project.
|
| Most people 95% of developers never worked at a faang and those
| who have, on average worked for 1.5 years. Very few are still
| employed or seeking faang employment. Faangs make popular entry
| level position but very difficult to keep for life but if you
| can survive many years you usually leave the field or create
| your own startup because of burnout. Faang adjacent companies
| can be the worst of all worlds same issues worse pay/upside.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > A lot of the commenters in this thread (and elsewhere on HN)
| flat out refuse to do take-home assignments, live algorithms
| coding, 4+ hours of onsite rounds, etc.
|
| Well, I personally have always refused to do take-home
| interviews but happily will do live coding and systems design
| interviews.
|
| For me it's about respect and power imbalance. A company asking
| me to do work without them putting in equal effort sets a tone
| for a culture I personally don't ever want to be a part of.
|
| Like I find take-home interviews disrespectful.
|
| Time-bounded interviews with an interviewer also there (aka
| FAANG style onsites with 4 hours of interviews) is far and away
| my preferred process, especially if I can do them all at once.
| One problem I've seen in a remote friendly world is companies
| wanting to spread the interviews out over multiple days.
| Redoubts wrote:
| > So where are all you interviewing that pays competitively
| without this "traditional" interview loop?
|
| You see people on HN balk at 500k+ engineering jobs even
| existing, so I think that's your answer.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| While this seemed to start strong, I don't buy into the
| "structured" portion of this blog post. The referenced research
| does not seem relevant to hiring engineers. In fact, the opener
| for the first reference says they researched " 19 male applicants
| for life insurance sales"positions". This is a "mountain" of
| evidence in hiring engineers?
|
| My own interviews have a list of topics I want to cover (non
| functional requirements, data experience, app design,
| infrastructure, etc), so I guess there is some structure. But I
| mostly run the interview based on their own experiences and
| projects they have worked on. So we will focus on applications
| and systems they have worked with in the past. And then I see how
| deep down those rabbit holes of their own system they can go.
| humanrebar wrote:
| If you really want to hire engineering talent, paying above
| "competitive salary" is very important.
|
| It's a bit orthogonal to the concerns in this article, but in
| some ways it's much more important.
|
| What I wonder about is given an org that is able and willing to
| compensate at market clearing rates, how do they get the word out
| well enough to get engineers interested. Because the other big BS
| in hiring is the whole recruiting side of things.
| lapcat wrote:
| What bothers me about tech hiring is that tech companies
| overthink it. To use a housing analogy, they act like they're
| signing a 30 year mortgage when they're only signing a 1 year
| lease. Engineers come and go all the time. At present, tech
| companies are laying off engineers by the thousands. Think of how
| much time, effort, and money was spent hiring those thousands of
| engineers! It's a giant waste. Premature optimization is the root
| of all evil, and that applies not just go writing programs but
| also to hiring programmers.
|
| It's funny how they claim that a bad hire is devastating, and
| they can't rid of them easily, but somehow they can do mass
| layoffs and get rid of a bunch of engineers easily.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I wholeheartedly disagree! It takes months, sometimes even half
| that year for engineers to fully ramp-up on teams and integrate
| into the culture of a company.
|
| Yes, you are expected to hit-the-ground running on day one, but
| no one will immediately operate at their full potential. Even
| with all the shared best practices in the world, the secret
| sauce is the part you have to learn.
|
| As an employer it's very hard to know if the reason for
| someone's uneven performance is due to ramp-up or if they are
| just not a good fit. Without a rigorous interview process, so
| many months would be wasted waiting to get a clear signal on
| that person.
|
| That also doesn't account for complete cultural mismatches that
| cause instability in teams and hurt the impact of your other
| employees.
|
| Another implied reason, good engineers want to surround
| themselves with other good engineers. So knowing its hard to
| get into a company signals to each applicant that the other
| employees there made it through that process.
| lapcat wrote:
| > It takes months, sometimes even half that year for
| engineers to fully ramp-up on teams and integrate into the
| culture of a company.
|
| Maybe that's because companies tend to hire whiteboard-master
| generalists rather than subject-matter specialists who may
| not be great at standardized technical interviews. ;-)
|
| Also, if the company culture is ultra-bureaucratic, maybe the
| company should fix that instead of wasting months on every
| new hire.
|
| Seriously, if a new engineer can't commit code within the
| first week, that's a company problem, not an engineer
| problem. Of course their code shouldn't go directly into
| production, but that's true of any new code. Give them
| something small to start, like some bugs to fix.
|
| > That also doesn't account for complete cultural mismatches
| that cause instability in teams and hurt the impact of your
| other employees.
|
| Technical interviews can't determine this.
|
| > knowing its hard to get into a company signals to each
| applicant that the other employees there made it through that
| process.
|
| I realize that's a signal, but it's not necessarily a good or
| accurate signal. I think it's mostly PR and hype. Reminds me
| a lot of fraternity hazing. Google engineers believe they're
| the best, and some of them may be, but some of them don't
| impress me at all. And as I mentioned, engineers tend to move
| from company to company anyway, so if Google engineers are
| "the best", they're constantly losing the best too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It's funny how they claim that a bad hire is devastating, and
| they can't rid of them easily, but somehow they can do mass
| layoffs and get rid of a bunch of engineers easily.
|
| I hope you realized that this should answer your own questions.
| _Layoffs_ may be (relatively) easy, but firing someone for
| "you're just not cutting it" is much, much, much more
| difficult.
|
| First off, most companies are loath to do large scale layoffs
| unless there are strong economic reasons to do so - many of the
| FAANGs have never had layoffs as big as the recent ones. So if
| your only chance to get rid of bad hires is every 5-10 years or
| so when there's an economic downturn, that's a problem.
|
| But more importantly, while it's generally straightforward to
| fire someone who's flat out bad (as there is usually plenty of
| data to emphasize why they're bad), firing someone for cause
| who is just kinda mediocre is nearly impossible in the tech
| world in my experience. For example, if someone can do the job,
| but say is 50% slower than your average programmer (I've
| definitely seen this), it can be extremely difficult to gather
| enough evidence to fire that person. And it usually sucks for
| everyone involved, because often times these people who are
| slow are hard workers, but they're just not as capable as their
| peers.
|
| One of the reasons you see the behaviors you see in technical
| interviews is precisely because hiring a kinda-OK-but-at-or-
| slightly-below-par is basically the worst kind of hire you can
| make.
| lapcat wrote:
| > firing someone for "you're just not cutting it" is much,
| much, much more difficult.
|
| It's actually not. When upper management is motivated to fire
| people, they get fired fast. Whether that's an individual
| person or a large group of people. We've seen this happen
| over and over. Self-imposed bureaucracy is the only thing
| that prevents fast firing.
|
| > it can be extremely difficult to gather enough evidence to
| fire that person.
|
| You don't need evidence. There's no such legal requirement.
| It's at-will employment.
|
| And I don't want to hear about potential lawsuits. These are
| ghost stories, designed to scare, but ghosts don't exist.
| Show me the lawsuits. Incompetent people who are suddenly out
| of a job don't have the time or money to file frivolous
| lawsuits (which could get them blacklisted from the entire
| industry). The ratio of lawsuits to firings is close enough
| to zero to be negligible, and certainly big tech companies
| can afford to defend themselves.
| notmars wrote:
| As a startup CTO that has done 15+ years of this, I believe very
| strongly that your hiring process relfects deeply on the core
| software belief system you hold on. That's why bureaucratic/non-
| engineering organisation will tend to over-emphasize references
| and tests, big tech will over-emphasize CS40021 style exercises
| and whiteboarding "shame on you", and the rest of us, other
| stuff. My advice for job-seeker: look very deeply why they ask
| things during the process and you will be able to fairly predict
| your future there. Make sure it matches you needs and wants. For
| the process-builder: are you sure those deeply-held beliefs are
| filtering what you need or is it filtering what you _want_...?
| mgl wrote:
| Absolutely agree, and smaller companies can even afford to
| fully disclose their core values and non-technical expectations
| towards the candidates to make sure the process is a win-win
| for both parties.
|
| We update and share these points within the team and applicants
| even before they make the first contact with us:
|
| https://stratoflow.com/our-recruitment-and-onboarding-proces...
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's all nice in theory, but new college grads want to make
| as much as possible. They don't do that by "arguing that
| gravity shouldn't exist". They do that by playing by the rules
| as they exist.
|
| That means "grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG" (c)
| r/cscareerquestions.
|
| I am 25+ years in the industry. But if any new college grad
| asks me for my advice. That's what I tell them.
|
| I definitely wouldn't tell them to take a chance of working for
| any non public company hoping their "equity" may be worth
| something because they heard that early engineers at Uber
| struck it rich.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| deleted too negative, upon refection.
| vore wrote:
| Well, what did you expect?
|
| When interviewing someone, I would still want someone to work
| through a problem live with me to see how they solve some
| problem. I don't care about the end result, I want to see how
| you're getting there.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| deleted too negative.
| vore wrote:
| If someone gave me a ChatGPT answer and nothing else, I
| don't have any way of telling if they're using it to boost
| their productivity or if they're just a complete charlatan
| copy-pasting off of ChatGPT who can't solve anything as
| soon as ChatGPT gets a little wonky. My bet is on the
| latter -- maybe it's my loss, but I would rather they have
| just worked through the problem without ChatGPT in the
| first place so I didn't have to guess which side of the
| spectrum they fell on.
| Zetice wrote:
| This is focused on finding technically skilled engineers, but I
| think you can get a more wholistic (holistic?) view of the person
| by asking them to walk you through their work history, project by
| project, and call a subset of the people they've worked with.
|
| It's more conversational, and you don't have to live in
| hypotheticals.
|
| We all know that skilled engineers will learn whatever skills
| they need to on the job, so less and less am I interested in what
| they can do in the interview pressure cooker.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > the best experiences were when the interviewer wanted me to
| succeed, was emphatic
|
| I assume you mean empathetic. Same word is spelled "Emphethatic"
| later. (I tried finding a way to reach you privately, but your
| site "about" says you have contact methods on the left but, on
| mobile, there is no left...so here will have to do.)
| hitekker wrote:
| In addition to the other comments, the errors you noted is a
| signal that the author didn't have editors/peers who cared
| enough to spot basic mistakes.
| jzombie wrote:
| The next time any recruiter asks me to do a "homework"
| assignment, I will ask them to write me a 15-page essay
| explaining how that homework assignment will actually be used, to
| what extent it will be reviewed, and what criteria it will be
| judged on.
|
| If the comeback remark is something like, "if you really want
| this job," I will reply, "if you really want to hire me."
|
| My current job, I told them that I was too busy to do such a
| thing (and I was), and got hired anyway.
|
| Nobody w/ actual responsibilities in their life should be coerced
| into doing something for free, for someone they do not know.
|
| Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide they
| are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery until
| someone proves they won't completely butcher you? Can you drive a
| car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you decide that's the car
| you want to buy?
|
| Why is it any different in the software industry? Because we just
| clack on our keyboards all day and do nothing?
| dasil003 wrote:
| That's certainly your prerogative, and we all have to draw the
| line somewhere in terms of interviewer demands. Personally a
| reasonable homework assignment (like 2-3 hours tops) is less
| annoying than multiple 6+ hour interview panels stretched out
| over a period of months, which is also very common. At the end
| of the day though, the company decides the hoops you have to
| jump through if you want the job, and you can either take it or
| leave it. FAANGs can get away with onerous processes because of
| the technical brand and outsized comp, but startups and lesser
| known companies who try this are shooting themselves in the
| foot.
| sjs7007 wrote:
| In my experience you still have a 3-4 interview loop on too
| of your take home project.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you
| decide they are fit to represent you, or will you get
| free surgery until someone proves they won't completely
| butcher you?
|
| There's a big difference between both of these industries and
| the software business - if you show up claiming to be a lawyer
| or a doctor and are bullshitting, you're in a LOT of trouble.
|
| If you do that in software, you're probably just back on the
| job market...
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| > Because we just clack on our keyboards all day and do
| nothing?
|
| No, it is because some people have worked at very impressive
| jobs and probably just clack on keyboards all day and actually
| did nothing while there, so when you hire them you learn that
| they actually can't do the job you hired them for. You just can
| not rely on the CV alone.
|
| In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill test.
| If it is not a "homework" then it has to be a whiteboard/live
| coding/system design type of interview and there are a ton of
| problems with this type of skill test as well.
|
| We usually give people the choice which route the candidate
| would like to do. Take a 1 hour interview or a "homework"
| assignment which took me about 1 hour to solve. Which is
| probably best because some people really prefer the homework
| because they get nervous in interviews.
|
| > Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide
| they are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery
| until someone proves they won't completely butcher you?
|
| I do not know how attorneys or surgeons are hired, but my guess
| is that the education side of these jobs lines up much closer
| what is actually needed to do the job (which isn't really the
| case with Computer Science) and that when they claim to have
| done X or Y then it was actually them in court or at the
| operation table and not someone else from their team.
|
| Clients select their attorney based on reputation of the
| attorney or the law firm they work for. For Surgeons it is
| probably similar. If you have the choice you want to go to the
| hospital with the best reputation. If the company you apply to
| already knew your name and reputation beforehand then the skill
| test is probably also not necessary, but that is not usual in
| my experience.
|
| It also probably helps that both of those jobs require a
| Professional License to practice these jobs. Maybe if the
| software industry introduced a Bar Exam then these "homework"
| assignments would not be needed anymore.
|
| > Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you
| decide that's the car you want to buy?
|
| Usually you can. At least in my experience. Not fo 5-8 hours of
| course, but long enough to know.
|
| If you know of a better way to hire people: I would be happy to
| listen.
| jdjdndnnddd wrote:
| > In the hiring process there has to be some kind of skill
| test.
|
| No there doesn't. There isn't one for the CEO is there?
| sethammons wrote:
| How many CEOs have you interviewed to run your company? How
| did you conduct the interview? Do you think that same
| interview is appropriate for a developer?
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| The fact of the matter is that without the skill test there
| are way too many people that are incompetent and you have
| to have some way to filter those out.
|
| I do not know how it works with CEO positions, but I am not
| hiring CEOs. I do hire software engineers and would like to
| work with competent people.
|
| If you know of a better way then I would like to hear it.
| jzombie wrote:
| An interactive whiteboard / live coding session is by far
| greater than any homework assignment, in my opinion.
|
| W/ an interactive session, you get instant feedback (either
| verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are expecting.
|
| With a homework assignment, it's hard to determine which path
| to optimize for.
|
| If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better if
| that were more of a "probationary employment" type scenario,
| perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only imply that
| both parties actually have skin in the game.
|
| Even better, for helping me judge if it's a decent fit? Show
| me some code you're using in production so that I can code
| review it on the call. Surely it's not all hyper sensitive.
| en4bz wrote:
| Whiteboard coding almost always devolves into leetcode
| which also requires at home study. You're going to be
| spending evenings and weekends coding something in either
| case.
| jzombie wrote:
| That part is understandable. Perfecting your craft
| requires many hours of hard work and dedication, and you
| can never know everything.
|
| For me, I work on a lot of open-source as side projects,
| so there's always the coding "something" factor.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| I work on the matching engine of a stock exchange. So it
| kind of is fairly sensitive, but I get what you mean.
|
| > interactive session, you get instant feedback (either
| verbally or via emotional cues) into what they are
| expecting.
|
| For some people, like myself, that is a nightmare scenario.
| I do not do well in these type of sessions. Which are also
| not even close to reflecting the real work we do. There are
| absolutely no meetings I go into that I can't prepare for
| [1] and there are absolutely no meetings where I have to
| solve a problem on the spot.
|
| Being on the autism spectrum also means "emotional cues"
| are pretty lost on me.
|
| There is also the fact that interviews have to be during
| normal working hours. Some people prefer to do a "homework"
| assignment which they can do in an evening or weekend.
|
| This is again why we provide the choice. Not everyone is
| the same and prefers different interview and assessment
| routes. Both types are useful for different people.
|
| > If a homework assignment is necessary, it would be better
| if that were more of a "probationary employment" type
| scenario, perhaps at a very reduced amount of pay, to only
| imply that both parties actually have skin in the game.
|
| Really? You would refuse a "homework" assignment, but would
| agree to "probationary employment"? The later just sounds
| like WAY more work on both sides.
|
| We have discussed something like this in the company I work
| for, but came to the conclusion that it just is way too
| much work. Getting the contracts in place and working out
| the insurance and tax implications and all that. It just is
| way too much work to do legally, because it would be the
| same amount of work to just hire them. However: we can't
| just hire everyone.
|
| Maybe if you are already a freelancer beforehand then we
| could work something out that way, but in the jurisdiction
| I am in not every software engineer is ready to accept
| freelance contracts. It is a simpleish process to do, but
| not everyone does and those that do don't apply for full
| time positions.
|
| [1] You can "prepare" for interviews, but more in a scatter
| shot approach studying all the interview questions that
| could possibly be asked. That is not what I mean. There is
| no meeting I am going into where I do not know the precise
| topic that the meeting is about.
| jzombie wrote:
| I have been caught off-guard by coding tasks in the
| middle of an interview that I thought was more geared for
| casual conversation, and it's not always a comfortable
| feeling, but sometimes it can prevent either party from
| wasting a lot of time.
|
| However, I've also been a few hours into a homework
| assignment thinking that I could probably go down some
| rabbit-hole to try to perfect something that I may have
| been struggling with, and sometimes can't determine the
| appropriate stopping point.
|
| The "probationary employment" would be more like, I don't
| know, a gift card, or something, vs. something formal.
|
| That way, if I totally bombed out in some assessment, no
| big deal, here's something for taking the time to apply,
| and maybe I could use the card to buy a book.
|
| Now, I get that companies aren't giving gift cards away
| to all of their interviewees, so this type of thing would
| only come after at least the first round of interviews,
| etc.
|
| More often than not, a non-interested company will often
| not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment, and it
| generally feels like a waste of time.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| Yeah, that is what I mean when I say that either way has
| problems with them.
|
| I had someone try to implement a whole relational
| database when the interview task was just to read from a
| CSV file and provide a REST API to the contents of said
| file using any tech stack. Impressive for sure, but
| unnecessary time wasted.
|
| > The "probationary employment" would be more like, I
| don't know, a gift card, or something, vs. something
| formal.
|
| We discussed something like that in the company. Mainly
| because someone asked to be paid for the time spent on
| the "homework" assignment. We came to the conclusion that
| there is no real legal way for us to do so. We probably
| spent more money on discussing the possibility of paying
| the candidate then what 1 day of work would have cost us,
| but the cost wasn't even the issue.
|
| With an in person interview there was maybe a chance.
| Inviting the candidate out to the exchange, giving a tour
| of the trading floor and then paying for transportation,
| lunch, dinner and hotel would be no problem.
|
| Though interviews are online now as we are a "remote
| first" company anyways.
|
| We just can't pay for work without a contract, insurance,
| tax and background checks in place. We can however ask
| them to complete a test. Which is what the "homework"
| assignment is.
|
| > More often than not, a non-interested company will
| often not even tell why they didn't pass the assessment,
| and it generally feels like a waste of time.
|
| It sucks. It just is that nothing positive can come from
| providing feedback and you open yourself up for a
| lawsuit.
| roflyear wrote:
| Then fire those people. It's an easy solution.
| d_e_solomon wrote:
| It's extremely intensive to onboard a new employee; and
| extremely disruptive to onboard a new employee and then
| immediately fire them. It's also very demotivating to the
| existing team.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| I would say it's a lot more disruptive to leave someone
| incompetent on the team and let everyone else make up
| their work instead of building a solid team.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| We would like to know who is competent before we hire them.
| The point is that we do these types of tests so that we
| don't hire them in the first place.
|
| We can't hire everybody. I can't hire 20 people (then fire
| 19 of them) for the 1 position in the 8 Person team I want
| to fill. That can't work.
|
| Just hiring someone and then firing them 2 weeks later is
| expensive as fuck. We can't just do that until we find
| someone actually competent.
|
| Your "easy solution" is only easy if you don't think about
| it at all.
| boplicity wrote:
| > Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide
| they are fit to represent you
|
| I agree with your point overall, but I do have to say that it
| is very common for lawyers to give free consultations with
| potential clients, often offering very useful advice. This is
| something I've benefited from more than once, actually.
| emb-fit wrote:
| Yes and developers often give free advice in interviews.
| However attorneys are not writing contracts for free to get
| jobs.
| ikrenji wrote:
| i got a really good job off of a homework assignment so this is
| a hard disagree for me. of course mileage might wary
| chrisdbanks wrote:
| I don't pay $200,000 a year for a car. If I were going to then
| I'd like to test drive it for 5-8 hours. An ideal test drive
| should help both sides understand what the future relationship
| will be like. That saves time and disappointment on both sides.
| You'd like to date someone before you marry them wouldn't you.
| I would always be happy to pay for a test drive though. If
| you're not willing to offer a test drive then you'll also
| probably miss out on some great relationships in your life.
| jzombie wrote:
| Fair point, though nobody is obligated to pay a year's salary
| to a candidate that didn't work out.
| ikiris wrote:
| Have you ever run a business or paid employees from your
| budget?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide
| they are fit to represent you, or will you get free surgery
| until someone proves they won't completely butcher you?
|
| These are bad analogies because both have extremely extensive
| tests that are not only unpaid but the tested pays a small
| fortune for.
|
| If development had the same no one would be asking you.
|
| >I will reply, "if you really want to hire me."
|
| It's not about hiring _you_ it's about trying to prevent hiring
| the wrong person which is extremely expensive in time and money
| and takes weeks to figure out.
| jzombie wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, however, I think that a lot
| of the criteria used in these homework assignments can
| instead be worked out via some conversation to judge the
| depth of knowledge and culture fit.
|
| I've passed tech interview challenges only to fail the
| culture fit because I thought it would "be so easy" after the
| tech challenges.
|
| And I've passed culture fits only to fail the homework
| assignments.
|
| In one circumstance, not realizing that a separate recruiter
| was sending me to a company I had previously interviewed
| with, I've also seen previous work that I did in a homework
| assignment, given to me in a different homework assignment
| with a "what improvements and features would you add to this
| solution?," when the original homework assignment was the
| same task. That was a major blow, and gave me feelings they
| were using some of that work internally.
|
| I get that it's extremely expensive in time and money to hire
| the wrong person.
|
| On the other end, it can also be extremely expensive in time
| and money to not be extremely selective of whom you want to
| work for.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| lmao do I understand correctly that you were given code
| that by chance you yourself happened to have written and
| were asked "how can this piece of crap be improved?"
| jzombie wrote:
| It had work in it that I put in before, but it wasn't
| entirely all mine, nor did it have all the original work
| I put in the first time.
| vba616 wrote:
| >Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you
| decide that's the car you want to buy?
|
| This is a perfect analogy.
|
| I went to a Chevy dealer once, asked if I could test drive a
| car and _they wouldn 't even let me take it off the lot_. I was
| allowed to trundle around the rows of cars at walking speed
| with a salesman in the passenger seat.
|
| I went to a Honda dealer, and they let me take a test drive
| with a chaperone, but only around a short designated loop of
| streets "for insurance reasons".
|
| I went to a Mazda dealer, and the salesman said he was busy and
| tossed me the keys and said have fun.
|
| An acquaintance went to a Subaru dealer, and took the car they
| were considering home overnight.
|
| You a Chevy.
| version_five wrote:
| Going further off topic, it amazes me how cagey some dealers
| can be about test drives. Same as you, I've had some just
| toss me the keys, without even wanting to see my drivers
| license, and that makes an infinitely better impression than
| wanting to come with me or wanting to talk about my needs
| first. I don't understand why it's not standard.
|
| I think it's more up to the individual dealer than a policy
| of a given brand
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It's sometimes useful if the salesperson can tell you
| things about features of the car while you're driving, but
| usually I know more about the car than they do.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Insane. You've got to at least test drive on a highway.
|
| Some years ago, a Nissan dealer offered to let me take a
| high-end crossover home for the night without any prompting.
| Ended up buying it. Would buy again from that dealer if I
| were still in that area.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| If it's insured, it's no skin off their nose.
|
| Gestures of goodwill go a long way in sales, that's why
| people love to pay for coffee or lunch when out with
| potential customers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Will an attorney give you free legal advice until you decide
| they are fit to represent you
|
| All but one new legal engagement I've entered into started with
| a free consultation. (The only one that didn't was a
| straightforward real estate transaction where I knew the lawyer
| for years beforehand.)
| 6510 wrote:
| > I will ask them to write me a 15-page essay
|
| I have my own list of questions. If they answer all of them I
| have a pretty good idea if I'm the guy for the job. The most
| wonderful part is figuring out if it is an employer is looking
| for initiative or obedience. If you are running a sheep farm it
| can be very exciting to see initiative.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| "Can you drive a car for free (for 5 - 8 hours) until you
| decide that's the car you want to buy?" Yes. It's called a test
| drive. I think the longest I've seen is a free 48 hour test
| drive with an online e dealership, but free all day test drives
| are the norm in the UK. Similarly most lawyers will give you a
| free consultation. I think you have a highly distorted view of
| reality, how other professions operate, and of your own worth.
| throwway234321 wrote:
| My primary programming languages are not allowed in leetcode
| interview sessions so a lot of the challenge is remembering how
| to use Ruby or Python on the spot, and also to think
| imperatively.
|
| Lot of my thinking is based on visuals and emotions -- It's
| challenging for me to transcribe to English on demand and it
| interrupts my process -- it's somewhat like painting.
|
| I always shine on take-homes since I'm allowed to be my authentic
| self. I'm enabled and have the full capacity to do my rituals,
| routines, and quirks.
|
| Admittedly, this means I won't succeed in cooperative
| environments like pair programming. I'm better off left to my own
| devices.
| hello_moto wrote:
| And the adventure to fix the issue of ENG interview saga
| continues...
|
| "Process is broken" continues to be the theme where no parties
| agree whether a basic algo or leetcode or takehome is sufficient
| yet continuously reject professional designation.
|
| Folks, keep in mind that at the end of the day, you are hiring a
| person, not an object with a bunch of methods.
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