My Worst Phone Screen

http://blog.hirelite.com/my-worst-interview

by nathanh • 15 years ago

53 47 15 years ago

blog.hirelite.com

tptacek5• 15 years ago

A conversation with a recruiter isn't an "interview".

nathanh4• 15 years ago

I just updated the title from "My Worst Interview" to "My Worst Phone Screen" to be more clear.

corin_2• 15 years ago

Ended up less clear for me - I, probably foolishly, was expecting a piece on the screen of a mobile phone.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Not really a phone screen, either. The phone screen happens after the recruiter gives your information to someone you'll actually be working with.

tptacek5• 15 years ago

The case you're making about Hirelite vs. recruiters is a good one, but a conversation with a recruiter isn't a phone screen either. It's just a conversation with a recruiter. It's like calling the negotiation over a used car an "interview".

d0m• 15 years ago

Even thought the phone screen was amusing, I couldn't help but think to myself: Did it really happened? And... when?

While reading it, I felt like it was a cute/short marketing story. So, I wasn't surprised at all to read the last paragraph (Working for hirelite, a better interview process blahblah)

nathanh4• 15 years ago

It wrote the post - glad it was amusing. It happened about 2 years ago while I was at a startup in NYC that was tanking. I was thinking of jumping ship before the eventual collapse. The problems I experienced during this particular job search led me to eventually start Hirelite.

yummyfajitas• 15 years ago

I can believe it. Recruiters are clueless. One of my favorite recruiter conversations (note: recruiter was British):

R: I noticed you are located in Jersey City, but this job is in New York. If you get this job, how long would it take you to relocate?

Me: I'm confused.

R: My client wants people onsite. No remote workers.

Me: I live 15-25 minutes away from lower Manhattan [where the client is located]. I take the PATH train there every day.

R: I see, but my client wants people located in NY. They are quite clear on this. You aren't even in the same state.

Me (having no intention of moving): I'll need to give my landlord 30 days notice.

Just humor recruiters. It's not their fault they have no clue. If they ask you to rate yourself on a scale of 9-10, say "11". If they have no idea of American geography, tell them you will relocate.

brown9-22• 15 years ago

If the recruiter has no clue of geography, or heck is in a completely different country - what are the chances the position they are recruiting for is any good?

brown9-22• 15 years ago

Recruiter: Do you have J2SE?

Seriously at this point, just walk away. Nothing good can come after a question like this.

(Not because of the technology, solely the wording of the question)

corin_2• 15 years ago

Unless the next words uttered are "OK, please use it to demonstrate [...] to us".

csel• 15 years ago

Anytime a recruiter mentions the word 'Rock Star', 'Ninja' etc.

Run or hang up.

megablast• 15 years ago

I was thinking: What, do I have a copy of it that you want to borrow?

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Reminds me of Mrs. Doubtfire. "I am job?"

bherms• 15 years ago

Short interesting post that brings up a good lesson, not for job seekers, but for recruiters. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for those unaware of it, states (paraphrased) that the more competent you are, the less confident you are in your competency. Inversely, the less competent you are, the more confident you become in your ignorance.

Recruiters almost always want to hear someone tell them "I'm the best of the best" in an interview, but generally the only people who think that are middle of the road at best. Recruiters should know this sort of thing and look for the guys that say 6-7 instead of the guy claiming to be the Michael Jordan of computer programming.

arghnoname• 15 years ago

This is true relative to their own ability. A highly competent person may consider themselves to be more skilled relative to average than an incompetent does, but the highly competent person will most likely still be under-estimating his ability and the incompetent over-estimating their ability.

This is critical, because it means thinking you suck doesn't imply that really you are good. A 95% percentile person might think they are in the 60th percentile, and so might a 5% person. Both have the same opinion of themselves.

Another critical point is Dunning-Kruger hypothesized that for highly skilled individuals this effect was due to their lack of awareness about how relatively unskilled others were. When they were given a chance to look at other work they were able to more accurately assess their knowledge.

One possible control is instead of asking individuals how good they are would be to show individuals existing code and ask them how good _it_ is. Dunning-Kruger would suggest that incompetent people would be too ignorant to accurately assess it, and most likely over-estimate its skill, whereas skilled people _are_ able to accurately assess fault in others' work.

rottendevice• 15 years ago

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why an arrogant boss I once had thought he knew how to program.

wesleyd• 15 years ago

That's what a Monty Python sketch of a phone screen would be like.

radicaldreamer• 15 years ago

I literally thought this was going to be a post about phone screen quality or a comparison of smartphone screens.

dpcan2• 15 years ago

Ha! Me too, in fact I've clicked it 3 different times today because each time I wondered why I haven't read about different phone screens yet - then slap my forehead. Apparently I really want to know about the quality of various phone screens.

josegonzalez• 15 years ago

Odd, my browser makes links I've clicked a different color (gray versus black). Are you using lynx, or just a combination of different browsers?

hammock• 15 years ago

The point of dunning-kruger effect is not that there's no correlation- it's just not linear. Studies show there is a tier of most competent people who tend to rate themselves lower than the secondmost tier of competence, who rate themselves higher due to a combination of signaling effects and dunning-kruger ("too dumb to know how dumb you are," or more accurately, "not quite smart enough to know that there is a lot you don't know").

gojomo• 15 years ago

If you know in advance that's the game you're playing...

Do you have J2SE?

Yes. J2SE, J3SE, whatever it takes.

How good are you at programming on a scale from 1 to 10?

11.

You're hired!

dpcan2• 15 years ago

I haven't interviewed for a LONG time, and I'm not sure what recruiting is because I'm quite disconnected with big business practices, but I do believe Interviewing is just Selling yourself), so on a completely arbitrary and imaginary scale, why wouldn't he just say "I'm a 10"? (I know the developer was thinking of a particular scale - but was the interviewer?)

bartonfink• 15 years ago

You don't do that because you aren't sure what scale the asker has in mind when they ask you to rate yourself on a 1-10 scale. If Paul Graham asks me that ?, his view of a 10 is going to be significantly different from some recruiter whose last job was managing a Dairy Queen.

I've handled this by giving my own rating as well as who I think a 10 would be. For instance, I'd say that I'm a 5 but my 10 is someone like Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds - truly world class developers.

yanowitz• 15 years ago

Agreed - answer by first calibrating the scale. Or run screaming, if you can afford to blow off the interview.

Hominem• 15 years ago

That programmer level matrix linked in the article is even dumber than the interview

protomyth• 15 years ago

I am reminded about an incident that occurred during my time in college. A teacher had "determined" that a lot of the class was cheating(1) and decided to grade based on program performance. This led to a lot of sizing up of our fellow students. One worried my friend John and me greatly as he talked and acted as if he were God's gift to programming and was practically giddy with excitement at the prospect of kicking his fellow student's butts.

I am sure he would have said "10" to this recruiter without a second thought.

He handed in his assignment at the same time John and I did. He could not help but tell us about his algorithm to do the graphics faster than anybody else. His explanation led us to believe (and be proven right later) that he had a poor understanding of performance and believe that shorter line count always had better performance(2).

(1) the people he thought were cheating, weren't (2) yes, load time was important, but it wouldn't tip the scale - plus writing to the same byte of memory multiple times doesn't beat an array lookup and one write

siddhant• 15 years ago

If this is the way most recruiters work (by just following buzzwords), why do companies have recruiters? Just curious.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

The sad thing is that the team of developers at the company may have been the most brilliant people you've never worked with. At my last company, we had a very difficult time getting even vaguely qualified people in (I'm no elitist, we're talking folks who literally could not code a for loop). When I looked into the methods used by our internal recruiter to advertise jobs, I was appalled. I can't even imagine how awful his phone screens were.

dotBen4• 15 years ago

For the record I just want to point out that this post is yet-another trojan horse style advert for Hirelite.

They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.

Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the my part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.

Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.

Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see child comment below...

dotBen4• 15 years ago

Oh, and by the way you might be interested to learn that the person who submitted this post to HN is the founder of Hirelite.

He is also responsible for submitting all of the Hirelite posts that have appeared onto HN, which perhaps proves these submissions are purely for self-promotion rather than curated content for the benefit of the HN community:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nathanh

I just want to call this out because it feels to me as though HackerNews is getting played here.

nathanh4• 15 years ago

I try to make sure Posterous attributes them to me (see the end of this post for an example).

If people don't find them interesting, I can stop posting them. I had been under the impression that self-posts were fine. Most of the time, we're trying to be an advocate for job seekers (currently just developers) in a market that is very company friendly.

dotBen4• 15 years ago

Nathan, you're clearly very clever at intentionally writing copy that will pique the interest of hacker news crowd, which presumably is your target audience.

I think where you fall down is that submitting all the articles yourself. It removes a lot of the authenticity from the notion that someone independent to your company thought your post had merit to be on HN. That is also why usually it's frowned upon to submit your own blog posts to HN.

Also the anecdote to pitch ratio of your phone screen post makes it feel to me that the only reason you crafted the content was to be able to make the pitch in the first place.

It all feels like this the discovery of your service is being being done by force not osmosis.

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

It's one thing to self-post.

It's another thing to do practically nothing but self-post, only about a single topic, with links to only a single site -- a site that is selling a product.

mhw• 15 years ago

Oh, that kind of phone screen. For a moment there I thought we might have some interesting discussion about Gorilla Glass.

moldyapple• 15 years ago

It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10, etc.

My Worst Phone Screen

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