My spiciest take on tech hiring

https://www.haskellforall.com/2024/06/my-spiciest-take-on-tech-hiring.html

by UncleOxidant • 2 years ago

54 80 2 years ago

tptacek3• 2 years ago

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

cageface• 2 years ago

Do you do this on-site? If not how are you sure they did the work?

PhasmaFelis• 2 years ago

The one place I interviewed that did this had me email my program for them to run, then come in and answer questions about it and describe which parts I was proud of, which could use improvement, etc.

throwaway42668• 2 years ago

Just have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.

ido• 2 years ago

You’re not but it already reduces the sample size by a lot. There is no 100% effective way to detect liars. I’ve been a hiring manager in multiple companies (including currently) and fortunately for me they were so far rare (maybe because Germany isn’t attractive enough as a job market for programmers to get the bulk of people putting a lot of effort into fraudulently getting a job).

Either way it is customary to start new hires with a 6 month probation, and their long term contract only kicks in after that. That’s long enough to detect if someone is incompetent (I’ve had to fire people during their probation when finding out they weren’t actually capable altho I don’t think they outright lied).

Liquix• 2 years ago

maybe a balance can be struck? audition/take-home to select potential candidates, a follow up interview with each to confirm they wrote the code and are a good team fit.

tptacek3• 2 years ago

Are we doing more spicy takes? I'll give you one: this is just not a thing. Unless you're operating at a very large scale, I think you can simply ignore this problem.

If your team is at all well run, and your work-sample testing mirrors the team's work, it's not a very good scam to run: it'll be immediately obvious on the job.

We thought we'd put some energy into this back in 2021, and we have yet to reach a point where thinking about this makes any sense (except for tech writers, where spotting GPT is maybe somewhat useful).

busterarm13• 2 years ago

I had a great experience with work-sample testing once until I had to work with the founder's wife who was an absolute nightmare to work with and was forced to sit in on zoom calls with the investors just because they wanted to be face to face with who they were paying for. It was only then that I realized that my performance didn't mean shit and I was playing an optics game.

The problem isn't the process. It's just like dating. Everyone is lying and pretending to be their best self. Hiring process can't fix that -- you fix it by making employing people and taking employment low risk. Give a generous evaluation period and the option to take walk-away money/severance.

You can never see how terrible a company's culture truly is until you've been there 3-6 months.

ramesh31• 2 years ago

Rule #1: Never work for the person who cuts your checks.

sublinear5• 2 years ago

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

busterarm13• 2 years ago

In practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months.

Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

Similar to what is discussed in the article, this basically optimizes for the most desperate candidates who can't get a job straight out of the gate. For starters, very few people would leave a good, full time job for a contract-to-hire position.

dumbo-octopus3• 2 years ago

How many talented folks in the field will accept that kind of job insecurity? If my offer is between 500k+ TC or “do work for us until we feel like commitment and maybe you’ll be on your ass in the street doing all this interview bullshit in 12 weeks; maybe you’ll get an offer better than the competition — but probably not because we’ll be in a position of negotiating strength knowing you probably don’t want to interview again”, I know damn well which one I’m taking.

Especially because I was given just that choice a few month back.

foobiekr2• 2 years ago

What senior person wants to do this?

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

That's the problem with so many attempts to "correct" hiring. Especially for more senior roles, the best people you want to hire usually already have jobs, or they have a pick among different companies. Make the hiring process too onerous and you end up selecting for the most desperate people.

I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.

LVB2• 2 years ago

I’ve never tried it, but it doesn’t sound terrible. As I approach 25 years in industry, what does sound terrible is more rote studying for interviews, and I don’t mean just leetcode. The idea of just giving the work a go in situ, and we either like each other or not, sounds sort of refreshing should I find myself job shopping.

flappyeagle• 2 years ago

Plenty

freeone3000• 2 years ago

In lieu of a regular interview? And if I get paid? In a heartbeat.

tptacek3• 2 years ago

I don't care. We hire resume-blind.

wglb• 2 years ago

I did it when I had over 40 years experience. It was a blast.

I've since used that method when I was a hiring manager, both for technical roles, and even a Manager of Compliance. Was extremely successful, both for us on the hiring side, as well as two very good hires.

wink• 2 years ago

I suppose you've heard this argument a lot, so the short version: Can't compensate people in many countries, and probably some other legal problems when they are still employed, so what are they supposed to do? Take a vacation day? Does it even still count as an interview if you're doing real work?

I'd love this, because I have a feeling I'm better at working with people than whiteboarding, but realistically unless I'm on furlow or out of a job it seems really hard to pull off, especially if it's longer than one day, even if I ignore the compensation, which would not be a pet peeve of mine, but I've heard it as a valid argument from others.

kasey_junk• 2 years ago

A common hack around this is to donate the “compensation” to a charity of the persons choosing.

zippox• 2 years ago

Priors and bias is exactly why you want MORE interviewers though.

glumreaper• 2 years ago

Addressed directly in TFA:

"Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a "neutral" process that they will likely disregard/overrule if it contradicts their personal preference.

That doesn't mean that I think this sort of interviewing bias is good or acceptable, but I also don't think drawing out the interviewing process corrects for this bias either."

s17n• 2 years ago

Yeah this part didn't make any sense to me - is he claiming that later interviewers will be heavily biased by talking to previous interviewers? If so, I think that's probably not as strong an effect as he's claiming, and its also easily correctable by just having interviewers not talk to each other.

I do agree about the "you only need 15 minutes" part, but the solution there would seem to be replacing four hour long interviews with four 15 minute interviews, rather than with 1 hour long interview.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

Exactly! Google famously did 8-10 interviews during their startup stage and they absolutely hired rock stars who helped them lay the foundation for Google's $2T company.

People who haven't build sustainable, profitable organizations typically have no clue about hiring. Sure, they may be able to hire well for their little project. But, if you care about the culture of the company and how you want to shape it, you almost want all of your current members to have a say in the new member

outop• 2 years ago

They hired rockstars because back then, all the rockstars wanted to work for them. The only focus of their hiring process was how to reject the 'B' candidates. They knew they would get enough 'A's applying that they couldn't avoid hiring a bunch.

For most companies, including Google as a more mature company, the dynamics are different. You might be quite happy to hire candidates who weren't top of their class but who are going to be easy to work with and get stuff done. And you want to make very sure you don't either reject or turn off the (maybe small number of) outstanding performers who want to work for you.

Google IMHO completely fail at the latter these days. A solid A student who knows how to present themself and really wants to work at Google will be hired. A genius with an unconventional educational background probably won't be.

CommieBobDole• 2 years ago

This is a mayonnaise-spicy take as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that I agree with it entirely.

Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags.

Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't suspect from the resume or the interview, they're probably good enough at hiding them and more interviews aren't going to help.

throwawayUS9• 2 years ago

In the AI/ChatGPT world that we are in, cooking up a neat resume is not that hard. But I agree, you are going to interview someone who did at least that part good, and worked a little hard to prepare for it.

denkmoon• 2 years ago

Cooking up a neat resume has never been hard. Templates, free advice, paid services, friends and colleagues existed well before GPT.

The hard part of a resume is having the experiences to talk about. Either you've got it, or you lie, that hasn't changed.

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them.

I disagree. The experience in resume is basically a name-dropping, it doesn't tell you much about how much they know / what are their abilities.

As an interviewer, what interests me is whether they have non-surface knowledge about something. I'm looking for a T-shape - getting a broad, but surface level knowledge is not that difficult (often just reading some tutorial suffices), but not everybody can get deep into the topic. So a major part of the interview for me is going through their resume and probing whether this is their deep topic and how deep can they go.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

Totally agree. One of the best discriminator questions I've found is to have a candidate talk about a technology they've used in the past, and then talk about the pros and cons of that tech, and also to compare that tech with a competing tech they're familiar with.

Poor candidates say something like "it's all great!" or "it's all awful", which is almost never true. They're unable to go beyond a very surface level "I called this library and it worked" kind of analysis. Good candidates are able to compare and contrast the pros and cons of lots of underlying details.

sfblah• 2 years ago

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

busterarm13• 2 years ago

It's weirder than that. For Meta's interview, how well you do on preparing specifically for their interview and trying to max out the specific metrics that they're judging you on isn't just tied to whether you get an offer or not but where in the scale they pay you.

They care a lot less about what you've done and where you are in your career, mainly because most of the what and how of the job is fairly unique to Meta.

They want good Meta employees and people who thrive specifically in their culture and not necessarily people with a career trajectory and goals beyond the company.

Turns out that there's a lot of over-achieving types out there whose sole desire in life is to be Good Germans. You will know immediately if this is or isn't you.

geetee• 2 years ago

Is it overachieving or seeing a shortcut to retirement?

dumbo-octopus3• 2 years ago

You misunderstood. They (Google too) are precisely interested in selecting for folks who love drilling on mundane tasks so much that they’ll willingly devote hours upon hours to doing that very grinding you might detest. Because that’s approximately what the next N years of their life will look like…

LVB2• 2 years ago

I recently bailed on their process. My reward for passing the leetcode gantlet would be a 50% chance that the offer would require uprooting my family and moving across the country. Ok, we’re done.

busterarm13• 2 years ago

They really need to get their shit together. Even for a few years after the Instagram acquisition and having an established office in NY, they tended to be pretty wishy-washy even with new hires on whether they could work from NY or would be forced to relocate to the west coast and it would take going through their full orientation in CA before you found out.

Now that they have a big office in Moynihan and SWE teams that do operations work they're a little more consistent about being able to work out of the location that you expect, but they still can't seem to always figure this out for sure _before_ you accept their offer.

nickcox• 2 years ago

Why didn't they tell you this at the start?

corimaith3• 2 years ago

IMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process.

I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rather than filtering things in. Try to make the general candidate more like you in the first place.

hn_throwaway_995• 2 years ago

Your solution is "change society" because you think that's easier than fixing your hiring process???

passion__desire• 2 years ago

In order to make an apple pie, first invent the universe.

tylerchilds2• 2 years ago

That's roughly how Apple became Apple. Computers as a lifestyle.

Google could have made the world googley, but they kept the googley to themselves.

corimaith3• 2 years ago

I agree it's hard, but it is A solution rather than no solution. I just don't think you can "fix" the process with a purely isolationist approach. You either change the world or the world changes you.

busterarm13• 2 years ago

Given how the culture of every company I've ever worked for was a stinking, nasty, high-school environment and how the companies' values did nothing but encourage ineptitude and mediocrity, I'm glad that companies absolutely suck at exporting their culture as much as they suck at building it. Your suggestion will give me nightmares for weeks.

corimaith3• 2 years ago

I'd agree that whether a specific culture is worth preserving or not is another question. Change by itself is not necessarily good or bad.

But my point of how internal culture gradually changes is in effect an exportation from another culture to this one. If the toxic practices you are describing were to begin to become relentlessly exported to the environment around you, remaining defensive dosen't work long term. You'd need to push back.

raincole• 2 years ago

Isn't Google the exact example of "exporting your culture outwards"...?

It popularized algorithmatic puzzles via Google Code Jam way before LeetCode was a thing. I might be completely mistaken, but Google seems to be the one company that popularized free food among SV companies.

And they have a slogan that became a meme, while not necessarily in a positive way.

AIorNot• 2 years ago

that doesn't sound so spicy at the moment

- I'm a 20+ year tech veteran with an award winning engineering background and a solid 20 year career in major (albeit Non-FAANGM companies) and I recently went through 5 interviews only to be told the remaining 3 interviews and 1 final onsite (which I need to fly in for) will be postponed to next month..

In the past 9 months that I've been looking full time roles, its been a series, 3-4 rounds of initial interviews, take home projects, etc so far to no avail...

Each time I'm afraid that some sharp 25-35 year old will get the job..

It really sucks that longevity, skill, wisdom and experience is valued so little by tech culture..

tomalaci• 2 years ago

I usually just do a small pair programming session for a simple problem that can be expanded with various tweaks (even fizzbuzz can work for it, I usually have some business problem related components).

During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes).

Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).

kgeist• 2 years ago

That's how we do it:

- 30 minutes of basic theoretical questions: SOLID, design patterns, DDD, clean architecture etc. just to get an overview of what they know and what their experience is, and if we'll have to assign them some courses later

- 30 minutes of a practical task: they're given a very bad piece of code (1 screen), and their task is to review it. Things like: SQL injection, lack of transactions (data consistency), lack of locks, bad variable names, bad program structure etc. The review is interactive where the interviewer can give tips. Usually it gives a pretty accurate picture of their actual experience/skills, and weeds out 99% unfit candidates.

If all is well, there's then 1 hour interview with CTO to check the soft skills: motivation, corporate culture fit, they also negotiate the salary (based on the previous interview)

We don't do leetcode and don't ask to write a test project.

Observations:

- many candidates who are good at theoretical questions completely fail the code review: i.e. they simply memorized it without deep understanding

- there are candidates who are not good at theory but pretty good at spotting most problems during the code review. For us, it's usually OK. It's often good self-taught engineers.

anon22981• 2 years ago

I’d love to see an example on the bad code and also the ”correct” notes. I have a couple years of experience and it’d be nice to see what I can spot.

Anyone know a good resource for something like this?

jaymzcampbell• 2 years ago

I've found the Code Review Stack Exchange to be pretty good for this sort of upskilling: https://codereview.stackexchange.com/?tab=month

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

That's about right. I'm OK with 3 rounds (plus a short phone screen as the 0th round) but anything more than that would bore me.

BerislavLopac• 2 years ago

The key insight on hiring technical people that I have gained over the 30 years of my career is something that seems very logical and natural, but seems to be forgotten too often: you cannot have more junior people evaluation more senior ones.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization?

OP has never worked in a corporate environment

kreetx• 2 years ago

Yeah, in a way this "spicy" take is somewhat idealist (naive?). Bigger companies, even the ones that are not all that bad, can have quite a lot of process due to the fact that there are non-technical people involved, often in controlling positions for the hiring process. Although I can't say I enjoy it, I actually don't mind it that much either.

sandywaffles• 2 years ago

I've generally enjoyed the teams that I've worked on where the hiring process was more extensive. And those places where the hiring was less extensive I've not been happy. It only takes one or two duds to make it through in order to ruin a team.

I'd rather work on a team that did their best to make sure there were no duds even at the expense of missing a genius, so long as everyone that did make it was on right side of the bell curve.

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My spiciest take on tech hiring

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