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

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6528766848526278657

by passenger • 7 years ago

207 148 7 years ago

MikeTaylor3• 7 years ago

Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company.

But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these.

And interview is not the be-all and end-all of recruiting: of course it isn't. But I'm seeing a pendulum swinging a long way in the other direction now, and a lot of people talking as though interviews are worthless. They're really not.

sidlls2• 7 years ago

Except for extreme outliers it is not clear that it's possible to tell with much confidence in either case. Why do you think it's possible to have such high confidence in one case but not the other?

terryschiavo222• 7 years ago

Because if you can't FizzBuzz, you definitely aren't going to be able to pick up the codebase in a satisfactorily short amount of time.

If you come in in gross clothes and swear, you're not going to fit the company culture.

If you're rude to your interviewer, you're not likely to be less rude to your other coworkers.

etc.

ignoramous• 7 years ago

And yet the discussions on the candidate post-hiring interviews mostly revolves around whether they confirm to the company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not. The world would be a better place if people started accepting the fact for what it is: There wouldn't be so much despair around the tech interview process if not everything was broken, surely?

Refs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166501 (On Secretly Terrible Engineers).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19541617 (How Not to Hire a Software Engineer).

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

company/tech/what-have-you 'culture' which, imo, is simply a euphemism for ageism, in-group bias, prejudice, hubris, and one-upmanship more often than not.

In my experience working with a couple of wildly different companies who prided themselves on "culture", it's largely just "don't be a dick".

It's still important though.

scarmig2• 7 years ago

And yet when a company tries to reduce a candidate to a consistent set of objective criteria as best it can--meaning, the ability to understand programming problems and solve them in a structured interview--people get upset because it doesn't account for the "big picture" of the candidate and unfairly excludes people who'd otherwise be a great fit.

The reality is that any interview procedure is bound to have some false positives and some false negatives, and there will always be people who see themselves as false negatives (correctly and incorrectly) who'll complain loudly about any procedure.

JeremyBanks2• 7 years ago

Heh. The last couple time I've seen a candidate rejected for "poor culture fit", it was because the candidate themselves demonstrated ageism or racism.

thatoneuser• 7 years ago

How would you know if you failed in identifying someone as not being able? You wouldn't hire them so you wouldn't know when you were wrong

xhrpost• 7 years ago

Yes, to some extent you have to accept that you could end up passing on some candidates whom could have turned out to be good employees. Couple thoughts though: 1.) It's still only in hindsight that you could say something like that (ie. "wow that person really did turn out good") 2.) If you're still hiring good employees at a decent rate, does it matter? Short of being 100% efficient (which is an inappropriate goal anyways), you'd only need to address this if you were somehow not hiring anyone or hiring way below industry pace

twblalock• 7 years ago

Hiring a bad person is worse than passing on a good person. You have to optimize your interview process to account for this, and that means you will almost certainly pass on some good candidates.

skookumchuck4• 7 years ago

An awful lot of programmers have very high and entirely unjustified view of their programming abilities. I'm sure they find the hiring process weeding them out to be very frustrating.

throwaway55554• 7 years ago

And then there are those of us who, even with an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, feel incompetent.

dev_throw• 7 years ago

This would be more applicable if the interviewing process had any correlation with on the job expectations. Working on a job also requires: 1. Communication about expectations with team lead, PM and other stakeholders, vetting requirements, and pushing back where necessary. 2. Writing tests that cover as many edge cases as possible (This actually takes just as long as coding a feature if done right) 3. Understanding the pipeline and release cycle, and being able to build new hooks 4. Look at stack traces to debug application crashes. This usually involves debugging code that other people have written. 5. Review other engineer's merge requests, and communicate in a emotionally aware manner.

A leetcode/hackerrank type interview does not test any of these skills. If I work on improving these skills that make me an amazing engineer, it does not get me far in a typical interview, hence my frustration with their "weeding".

BinaryIdiot• 7 years ago

You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company.
But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success.

These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse.

The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong.

lgessler• 7 years ago

These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse.

Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.

voxl• 7 years ago

It's hilarious to me that your name is BinaryIdiot and your post is a false dichotomy.

larrik• 7 years ago

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

rightbyte• 7 years ago

Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.

pkroll• 7 years ago

"Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.

dba7dba2• 7 years ago

I just read someone talk about job post on linkedin with over a thousand applications. Are people on linked in truly mediocre that not one out of a thousand can fill the position?

lukejduncan• 7 years ago

I think many companies don't have exactly 1 job posting for 1 seat. For example, I've seen large tech companies have a single "Backend engineer" req that is used for every backend engineering role in the company (or org). So the pure number of applicants in a LinkedIn job post may be misleading.

perl4ever2• 7 years ago

Maybe hundreds could, but only one of them was having a really good day on the day of the interview. Which is why candidates have to do so many interviews and companies have to interview so many people.

glitchc2• 7 years ago

If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution.

Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. Why do we devalue the grunts? They are the bedrock of every organization.

It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, and people need jobs, so why do we denigrate them so?

Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge, especially when the domain is not fundamentally exciting (e.g. finance, geology).

pytester2• 7 years ago

Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint.

In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly.

It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental,

Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess).

Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge

It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.

tensor• 7 years ago

The truth is that everyone actually hires mediocre people, otherwise we wouldn't get so many comments about mentor people on teams and performance reviews would look very different.

That said, very few people think of themselves as average. Just looking at the comments here on hacker news, everyone feels they are the A players and if they aren't selected for something it's because management sucks or they aren't understood, or some other excuse.

We could all stand to be a hell of a lot more humble.

decebalus1• 7 years ago

I always burst out laughing when I hear this. Mostly because the people saying it assume that themselves are not mediocre but good/great people.

Reminds me of the anecdote when a Google hiring committee in Kirkland was tasked to judge each other's original (anonymized) interview feedbacks and everyone failed everyone else.

hadsed• 7 years ago

I think a lot of responses to this are missing something unsaid here: a single interview day for someone doesn't always give them a chance to be their best selves. That's ok but you do what you can given this fact. The whole thing is about being risk adverse with who you bring on to the team. This is the right thing to do because bad hires are exceptionally costly. It isn't a judgment on the candidate's innate value as an engineer, it's about a single sample of the "is this person a good fit for our team" function, which is different!

sagitariusrex• 7 years ago

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

acct1771• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing this.

tbirrell• 7 years ago

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

EliRivers• 7 years ago

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

mental1896• 7 years ago

It's not a "no worries" situation if you just left one job for another only to find out the culture isn't a good fit.

joker3• 7 years ago

Particularly if you relocated.

rhizome• 7 years ago

That only matters if you think it's possible for the people doing the hiring to be fallible, which...is not a given in this industry.

monksy• 7 years ago

For most companies it's the first 90 days.

pkaye• 7 years ago

The problem is these people will have quit their previous job and maybe moved.

LeicaLatte• 7 years ago

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

rsweeney216• 7 years ago

Post author here:

My new company helps companies fill contract software positions. We're a lot like a recruiting or staffing agency, but trying to do it in a new, less spammy way. It's been REALLY frustrating working with hiring managers. I used to be one of these frustrating hiring managers so I guess I had it coming.

I had a hiring manager tell me that he can tell in the first 15 min of an interview if someone is a great engineer or not. I remember thinking the same thing. I felt like I had this special intuition that I had developed over the years. That's just total BS. There is NO WAY you can know that and you don't have a "special gift".

I don't have a great solution yet, but for senior engineers I've come to trust previous work experience the candidate has much more than my gut, my culture fit questions and my stupid coding questions. We had a hiring manager that was looking for a strong back end engineer turn down the engineer that built the search backend for yelp because he didn't like his answer to "how would you program the code in an elevator."

So my new company Facet (www.facetdev.com) is basically built around helping senior engineers, with strong experience building products at scale, find contract work.

rsweeney216• 7 years ago

Also, for the curious, the post has had nearly 1.5M views so far. This is the first time I've ever experienced anything I've posted go viral. It's been interesting to watch the acceleration over the past few days.

ronilan• 7 years ago

I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but...

Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag.

And... I’m none of those.

So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though...

I think you got the observation right. The solution, no so much so.

rsweeney216• 7 years ago

Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers.

Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

sanderjd3• 7 years ago

Thank you for this. You have the right problem statement. I hope you can solve it! I suspect it will be a tough battle, but it sounds like you have no illusions about that. Best of luck to you!

neonate2• 7 years ago

I read this in your HN profile: "Facet is a marketplace for hiring ex-Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc devs." Doesn't that mean you're excluding everyone who wasn't chosen by the very hiring managers you're criticizing, at an elite list of companies?

touristtam• 7 years ago

Are you selling the technology here? I honestly thought that since you are dealing with humans dealing themselves with other humans, you ought to have some of those humans specialist (sociologist, psychologist and other humans specialist) to help you help them.

I have written in what I hope will come across a humorous, but this is extremely reminiscent of the early days of the 5 Eyes where the US was trying to sell this to its close western allies as a way to replace investment in human resources going forward by buying into technology. And surely the technology side is tremendous these days, but it hasn't eliminated the need for human resources. We are dealing with human through those systems (technological or organisational).

llamataboot• 7 years ago

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

starpilot• 7 years ago

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

segmondy• 7 years ago

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base.

What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentation? do they test their code? are they a great team player? how creative are they?

Due to time constraint of an interview, someone might be more sloppy than usual. Their might be the interview stress which is different from regular work stress, interview stress can impact their communication, etc. But if we focus plainly on technical skills, you can flush that out in 60 minutes.

I'm a hiring manager, and I have never failed in hiring someone who didn't have the required tech skills. Technical ability I can always hit spot on, the tough one is determination and soft skills. Some of the folks I took chance on, who displayed terrible soft skills during interview turned out to be champs, communicate great, work hard, etc. A few that were very eloquent during interviews were a disappointment, sloppy in development, poor communication in practice, etc.

People also grow, so someone that was a bad fit/interview for you, could in a few years grow and become great. Potential is also difficult to spot.

ken• 7 years ago

You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. [...] What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? [...] do they write great documentation? do they test their code? [...]

You answer in the affirmative, but then go on to clarify that you're excluding 95% of the job. I would simplify this to say "no, you can't".

taormina• 7 years ago

Can this person code at all? How well?

He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.

Data_Junkie• 7 years ago

Thank you.

ravenstine• 7 years ago

The thing that gets me about coding challenges restricted to such a short time frame is that what might seem like a simple problem can actually be pretty nuanced. This gets even more tricky when the interviewers encourage you to be "creative", which can be interpreted as meaning that one should try to be less conventional with how they code, which may mean they address an issue in a less than pragmatic way.

Last year, I interviewed with a well-known media company, and they gave me a take-home coding challenge which was essentially about building a notes application in Rails that philosophically replicated a file system; notes could exist in any part of a hierarchy of directories, but no same file could exist in multiple directories at once.

Seems pretty simple, right? Anyone with a fair amount of experience with Rails would probably whip up some models for folders and notes, folders would has_many :folders and has_many :notes, and notes would belong_to :folder, etc. A solution along those lines would probably have sufficed for the coding challenge, as it would demonstrate knowledge of Rails.

But I couldn't just leave it there. That kind of solution would have been extremely crappy in a situation where there is a huge amount of notes in deep directories. After a few hours of careful thought, I came up with a solution similar to how Amazon S3 works, where directories are really just keys in a database and the stored files(or notes in this case) are the values of those keys.

My solution had the advantage that directories and their files could be queried through simple string matching, meaning that queries scale linearly with deep and complex directory structures rather than exponentially. The only case where things might be less optimal is during directory renames, in which case all sub-directories and files would have to be found and updated, but I considered that a compromise since renames happen less often than reads and writes.

They liked my solution enough that they flew me out for an on-site interview, and they said that nobody else came up with that solution.

Would I have come up with that solution if I was given 60 minutes and had someone looking over my shoulder? Probably not. Such limitations prevent taking time to think and letting the mind ponder, which is valuable.

If that challenge was done in 60 minutes, they would have assessed that I knew Rails but probably wouldn't know how I actually approach problems.

jonnycoder• 7 years ago

Great example. I was doing a sudoku solver for practice recently and I spent a lot of time thinking and writing small functions, to the point where I was done but without implementing backtracking (for hard puzzles). I believe readability is a top 1-2 trait and my solver code looked fantastic. I don’t think I could do that under stress of an hour interview.

apple4ever3• 7 years ago

Potential is also difficult to spot.

I think that’s true, but I also think that hiring managers rarely try to look for it.

I was on an interview, and one of the reasons I didn’t get the job was because in my current position I manage a “small team.” That team is 5 people. They had 8 people to manage. I understand that each extra person adds extra challenges, but 8 is only a little bigger than 5.

sushisource• 7 years ago

I think you can filter out people who suck in 60 minutes. I think there's little chance you can differentiate between "competent" and "good+"

joshuak• 7 years ago

What's your false negative rate?

neonate2• 7 years ago

How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes

That's clearly what the OP was saying.

bdcravens• 7 years ago

The underlying assumption is that Daniel would have been a great fit. Can this be assumed? Even as a good engineer, his claim to fame is founding the Prime Air team. Would there have been a "What started as an idea over coffee with Gur..." moment at Netflix? Would he have just become a random developer instead? Worth nothing that Daniel actually went from Microsoft to Amazon after not being hired at Netflix, so perhaps he would have similarly churned at Netflix.

This really isn't your typical "but whiteboard interviews suck!" situation. (not to say that they don't ....)

thtthings• 7 years ago

It's more accurate to say that the current format of asking algorithm questions is not the best way to judge programmers ability. All it tests is how much has the programmer memorized for the interview and not really how he codes in the real world.

But i dont see this changing as most interviewers have been through the system and are likely average programmers themselves.

0x445442• 7 years ago

One of the biggest issues is the industry as a whole operates on a completely different hubris level. I don't think any of my professional references has ever been contacted with the purposes of gaining significant insight into my prior accomplishments or to get information about what it was like to work with me. Nope, all we need is some fancy data structure and algorithm knowledge and a white board to find that great candidate.

And those that do care about past accomplishments seem to be more interested in public Github repos.

However, it's my guess there's some sort of inflection point because I doubt Pike or van Rossum did any white board problems when they were hired at Google. My guess is their interviews were much closer to the way the rest of the world, the world outside software development, conducts interviews.

mjevans2• 7 years ago

Maybe making the 'extended interview' process more formal would be a good thing.

Formally have an internal 'contract' worker process where anyone they might want can be hired in to a trial pool, and projects can bring in the trial worker for small things quickly (maybe writing unit tests, or a fresh set of eyes, etc).

Every month review performance, make a decision to offer job as X, keep on for another month, or let go.

As a different part of this, alternating weekends might also be a more focused part of this, let someone that ALREADY has a job have a similar trial process on just some weekends, maybe with a more remote-work focus.

phonebanshee2• 7 years ago

Why in the world would anyone be interested in doing this? Companies are competing for talent, not the other way around.

kadoban• 7 years ago

Because there are people out there looking for work. It's not trivial for all programmers to find a job. I am in particular really awful at the entire applying and interviewing process (except funny little algorithms problems, I can kill those). It's a stressful, amorphous blob of everything I hate.

What the parent of your comment describes sounds a lot like a specific kind of contract-to-hire, which if it's done well can be really effective. I get to show off that I can actually develop software well, a company gets to judge me on more than just an hour (or maybe a day) of questioning.

Unfortunately it can be pretty exploitative if done wrong. It's easy for it to become an unending period of low-paid work where you're just hoping that one day it'll turn into a real job.

nocitrek• 7 years ago

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

alkonaut• 7 years ago

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

movax• 7 years ago

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

apple4ever3• 7 years ago

The alternative is certainly the big problem.

The other big problem is not even giving an interview to a great candidate based on things like a resume and possible a cover letter.

SeanAppleby• 7 years ago

I feel like this is the much more complicated and secretly much worse problem, not just for businesses, but for society as a whole.

We lean on heuristics like pedigree, both corporate, which is reflexive on having already past a hiring filter before, and academic, which is ludicrously expensive, both in time and money, is itself largely reflexive on having been born into high socioeconomic status, and seems to have dubious value outside of providing an easily digestible signal to get past these filters constructed in the labor market.

Maybe if we could design a better interview system and more accurate and precise cheap signals for who to throw into that (expensive to scale) pipeline, we could save young people from having to start their lives 4 years later and behind the starting line, reaping the productivity gains of the labor market gaining those extra 4 years and a wider pool of talent, while also creating more socioeconomic mobility spread more widely across society.

andrewstuart5• 7 years ago

I am both a recruiter and a highly experienced developer and software designer.

I once sent one of the very best programmers I know for a job interview.

I have met a small handful of outstanding programmers in my > 30 years in IT and this guy was in the top five, near the top.

I had personally worked directly with him for 5 years and he was unquestionably one of the most talented programmers there is, and a nice guy, easy to get along with and great to work with. Incredibly productive, and capable of the most incredible feats of software development.

The client interviewed him and said ....... no thanks.

There you go - I have just explained everything you need to know about technical recruiting. Give it some thought - the more you think about it, the more it reveals the deepest truth about YOU and your software hiring processes.

NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you.

If you want to know what happened after that - I called the CEO who I knew quite well and essentially said to him "What the fuck are you doing? I sent you one of the best programmers there is - and I know this from first hand personal experience over five years - and your interviewers rejected him?". They employed him because of that and he became their chief technical architect pretty quickly.

apple4ever3• 7 years ago

NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you.

I disagree. Maybe not immediately, but I’ve definitely picked the wrong candidate when I had two other better candidates in hindsight.

danieltillett2• 7 years ago

Why did they reject him the first time around?

As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks?

andrewstuart5• 7 years ago

> Why did they reject him the first time around?

Because most people do a really bad job at technical interviewing and selection - there's so much to say about why it would take a book to explain it all. BUT importantly - everyone thinks they do a great job at interviewing and selection.

> As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Is it saying "recruiters send any old person for a job in the random hope they might get it, how often do you do that?".

I don't do that.

I try to find the right person for the job, I look for people who are smart and get stuff done and I send people who I think are going to contribute something meaningful to a company. I use my technical expertise to try to understand the candidates level of technical experience, and I articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the candidate to the employer.

rsyring• 7 years ago

NO-ONE - no-one ever thinks they make the wrong call when they reject a candidate - including you.

At least for me, a "no hire" does't mean that I'm convinced the developer wouldn't be a good fit. In fact, I'm pretty sure my team is likely passing on some good developers that just don't look that way given the limited time and options we have to evaluate their skills and overall "fit."

But, we try to follow Joel Spolsky's suggestion of turning any "maybe" into a "no", so this reality is an accepted trade-off in the model that informs how we hire.

mattrp• 7 years ago

I’ve seen this so many times as well where candidates under sell themselves or key accomplishments never get brought up. Even Elon Musk in the most recent Autonomy day had to say to Karparthy “introduce yourself and don’t be bashful.” Even then, I’ve noticed, I’ve noticed that people don’t “hear” things until a second or third conversation. The idea that you can absolutely hear everything a candidate has to say in 60 minutes is just unreasonable. At the same time, I think you did the right thing: you helped your client make a better decision but not letting them rely on a first look exclusively.

andrewstuart5• 7 years ago

You assume that the reason the guy did not get the job is that candidate undersold themselves.

It is mostly the responsibility of the technical interviewers to determine if the candidate is suitable.

otabdeveloper2• 7 years ago

Sounds like this guy was overqualified for the position. (Probably asked too much money, too.)

The fact that the candidate went on to a non-programming position confirms.

In any case, it was the strings you pulled that let the guy get promoted.

andrewstuart5• 7 years ago

All your conclusions are wrong.

He wasn't asking too much money.

He wasn't overqualified.

He took the job and did programming.

Why you assume lead architect means not programming is not something I know.

I didn't pull strings to get him promoted.

But all your conclusions illustrate why technical recruiting is so broken - no-one ever has any problem justifying outcomes after the fact and making up stories to match their own reality.

ramblerman• 7 years ago

This is all pretty hyperbolic. And NO-ONE applies to you too, you are vested in the belief your candidate is a genius, especially when you pulled strings to get him in.

As long as you are thinking in absolute truths, you are missing the point imo. There is a set of good candidates for a given moment, and context, and the idea is to increase the percentage picked from that pool. The cost of missing someone from the good pool is also far smaller than picking a bad candidate.

Anecdotes of rock stars, and 10x programmers just further muddy the waters. Because those guys are the 0.1% and will be fine either way.

gumby• 7 years ago

I feel that the best we can do is "does this person look good on reference and/or paper? Then if so, in the phone screen and then interview: is there any reason to believe the stuff on paper might not be true?" (that latter happens a surprising amount).

Also: "is this person a jerk?" though you have to account for the awkward things someone might accidentally say when they feel they're in a high-pressure situation.

vram22• 7 years ago

It's interesting that some people find that many so-called "programmers" cannot write FizzBuzz (see links in post, apart from a fun FizzBuzz version in Python):

FizzBuzz in Python with nested conditional expressions and a generator expression:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-...

julienreszka2• 7 years ago

Sometimes I think we would be better off hiring people on the spot at random.

In France we have a legal maximal 4 months trial period for employees so... This gives enough time I think.

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1643

phonebanshee2• 7 years ago

In the United States we basically only have trial employees. There's nothing at all like French job protections.

julienreszka2• 7 years ago

Really? Is that in all states? So hiring someone should be at least as easy no?

baconmania• 7 years ago

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

combatentropy• 7 years ago

Portfolio, portfolio, portfolio.

I could talk to someone for hours and still misjudge whether I would enjoy coding on the same project with them.

Show me reams of code that they wrote, and I will know immediately.

It's too bad that usually isn't possible.

stunt• 7 years ago

It really depends. When you are hiring senior programmers, don’t set the bar very high, then you can filter out majority of bad applications in a 60mins interview. For both hard skills and soft skills.

Then you need to spend more time for the remaining ones to find the right people.

stratigos• 7 years ago

I am approaching 1.5 decades as an employed software engineer. Interviewing culture seems to change a little over the years, but usually in other wacky directions that leave me feeling entirely disengaged from the industry. I also very much love my vocation, though it alone is not enough to keep me enduring through the insanity of technical interviews , "cultural fit" assessments, and the violence of linear reductionism.

Articles and discussion threads like this are pretty much the only reason Im willing to interview at all (and thus remain in the industry). So thanks for sharing, Im glad to know other people are aware of how bonkers this is.

The long version takes years of explaining.

The short version is: I am highly allergic to cognitive dissonance.

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

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