Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

https://fagnerbrack.com/technical-interviews-reject-the-wrong-engineers-a8e78ca04b2e

by fagnerbrack • 2 months ago

57 109 2 months ago

The deeper issue is tacit knowledge. Most of what a skilled engineer knows is not something they can articulate on demand.

Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutions when alone in a room”

That’s not the job. Articulating technical details when in conversation with your colleagues is.

dijksterhuis• 2 months ago

eh, my take is that you’re kind of going off in a specific direction when reality is actually behind you little here.

i cannot explain why it’s not possible for us to fling the flange if i don’t understand how both the flange flanges and the fling flings.

being able to talk about it is a downstream effect of knowing about it.

BugsJustFindMe4• 2 months ago

Articulation is not the issue; the reasoning and consideration process is.

If you step back a bit from the words on that page and squint, what you might see is something like "Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious."

The discovery of the right path forward for the goals of the organization comes after that and takes time and planning.

jjav2• 2 months ago

"Most of what a skilled engineer does is recognize, sense problems, and feel things that may not be obvious."

This is a great way of putting it, love it.

At the end of the day, that's it. A lot of people are very good at executing the tasks, delivering what needs to be delivered.

But the special people are the ones who maintain a constant sense of awareness of what might be off and digging deep into it.

mixmastamyk• 2 months ago

One returns in a week with a fully articulated solution, not at point blank. Famously, Archimedes came up with his in the bathtub.

watwut• 2 months ago

It totally is the job. What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think?

First you think, then you think about how to say it, then you talk with others. Then you think again and maybe talk again.

But, it is not like we were designing everything in quick on the spot debates without research.

jjav2• 2 months ago

What kind of unreasonable process you have that people dont have time to think?

AI is making this much worse. Executives expect you to be managing a herd of AI agents working on a dozen things at once, 24/7.

Good luck trying to find time to think. This will backfire.

fagnerbrack• 2 months ago

Tacit knowledge is not soft skill, there's quite a comprehensive field of neuroscience research around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

a-dub• 2 months ago

here's an idea for an "experienced" technical interview structure. "we care about x, y and z. you have forty five minutes to convince us that you will meaningful help us achieve our goals. we then will take 30 minutes to push on technical details as we see fit. you will be judged based on technical content, choices, taste and your overall approach and strategy for moving us forward and convincing us that you're the right person to do it. good luck!"

paulluuk• 2 months ago

I wonder how many great engineers with stage fright you would lose this way, though.

BugsJustFindMe4• 2 months ago

we care about x, y and z. you have forty five minutes to convince us that you will meaningful help us achieve our goals. we then will take 30 minutes to push on technical details

This part is good.

as we see fit. you will be judged based on technical content, choices, taste and your overall approach and strategy for moving us forward and convincing us that you're the right person to do it. good luck!

This part is confrontational and will lead to worse outcomes. "As we see fit" signals capriciousness. "You will be judged" signals hostility. "you're the right person" engineers conflict; there is no "the right" person, only "a good" person. And telling someone "good luck!" in this context is like telling them to try not to die while standing on a narrow plank over a pit of sharp spikes. No matter how you think you mean it, it will come across as callous to many.

FireBeyond2• 2 months ago

I do agree with your assessment, on both parts, but I think it could survive with minor tweaking.

"We are going to push on the technical details, both those we agree with and disagree with. This is where the rubber meets the road. You've painted a picture, how does it stand up to scrutiny and challenge. In the end, while there may not be perfect alignment, we're looking to see how your ideas go through the process of validation and how we get there, communication, exploration, and collaboration-wise."

zipy1246• 2 months ago

The main problem is good engineers have no need to sit through your 12 step process. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).

dangus5• 2 months ago

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy.

At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview.

Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?

This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a good selection of quality talent available right now.

newtonianrules2• 2 months ago

I don’t want to put my future coworker through six rounds of interviews. If it takes more than three rounds + a phone screen to figure out if someone is a good fit then the process is broken.

ninininino• 2 months ago

an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?

Many many folks are the type that is willing to hard grind/suffer short-term to get through a hoop, but as soon as they are inside they turn that 'optimizer' mindset towards 'how can I do the minimum necessary to coast and collect my paycheck'.

And many many folks who are highly motivated to work hard every day at their job are not highly motivated to prepare for jumping through a hoop like a circus clown.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

If I think your interview process is onerous, I’ll ditch your company.

I’m not interested in companies arrogant enough to think people should want to work there so much that they will endure your hoop jumping.

zipy1246• 2 months ago

I am not talking about difficulty but length and bureaucracy.

angiolillo2• 2 months ago

Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.

To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.

To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.

To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.

There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.

mathisfun1232• 2 months ago

The main problem is good [doctors] have no need to sit through your 12 [years of school]. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).

do you agree with this?

zipy1246• 2 months ago

Except Doctors have to do that regardless. They can't choose a hospital that will hire them with 6 years of school instead of 12.

A good engineer is likely to find an equivalent job with a shorter or less bureaucratic interview process.

voakbasda• 2 months ago

Absolutely. Witnessed it directly in the form of med students paying other people to take their tests for them.

bradlys4• 2 months ago

Where are these jobs paying $500k/yr that I can skip these interviews? I haven’t seen them yet. I hear about jobs paying below $100k/yr that do this but that’s not getting us anywhere in SF.

zipy1246• 2 months ago

I mean we know the answer to this. As you go up the seniority ladder interviews become less and less onerous and at some tipping point are not required. Aqui-hires such as Alexandr Wang at Meta for example. Non aqui-hire we have for instance when Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. I somehow doubt they went through as many round as those below them.

Apart from that when lower down in seniority generally start-ups. There are many founders who get funding, know good people, and will hire them without many interviews. Having a good network is critical for exploiting all of these, as the interviewer has already effectively judged your skills over many years or decades.

IshKebab• 2 months ago

Of course. This isn't a secret. But nobody has come up with anything better. Doesn't seem like this guy is proposing anything either.

kadhirvelm2• 2 months ago

We’ve added collaboration and communication as big facets in our hiring loop rubrics, and reduced the complexity of our questions. We also tell candidates this ahead of time - been honestly working pretty well so far, it indexes more on those soft skills and gives us just enough insight into the hard skills to make a call.

We’ve also been increasingly finding very few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol. How are other folks changing their loops these days?

root-parent• 2 months ago

> few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol

Please tell me you are joking.

myself248• 2 months ago

If you're hiring from the town where Kool-Aid is headquartered, don't be surprised if most of the candidates drink a lot of it.

kadhirvelm2• 2 months ago

I wish, but maybe it’s more fair to say how people think has changed. It’s like for these complex questions, they can break the problem down quickly into smaller functions, but implementing the functions is slow? Sometimes a non-starter? Idk, it’s different. Our old ways of interviewing aren’t working the same

mathisfun1232• 2 months ago

don't you people get tired of reposting this take?

don't you realize it's exactly like

"attractive women reject the wrong suitors"

???

bryanrasmussen• 2 months ago

I think I find someone sexy and fun is obviously more a personal feeling on matters while I am looking for someone who will help me meet our goals for Q4 with a high degree of technical excellence seems something that should be measurable and not left up to a feeling at the moment.

So I guess I don't realize it's exactly like, I personally I feel it is significantly different.

dkarl• 2 months ago

This article repeats what we've long known about how technical interviews aren't great at evaluating technical skills and inadvertently filter for things that aren't important. But it doesn't offer a better way of evaluating technical skills. It talks about how to evaluate other things that do matter but aren't substitutes or proxies for technical skills.

Also, this argument is some grade school smarty pants "I'm too smart to show my work" bullshit:

And because the interviewer can’t distinguish “skipped steps due to incompetence” from “skipped steps due to operating at a higher cognitive level,” they default to the interpretation that protects their ego.

I thought the days of hiring toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars was over?

jghn5• 2 months ago

I know this is an outlier, unpopular opinion by my experience has been that the percentage of people who can really talk in depth through technical details but can't write decent code is quite small. But the percentage of people who can talk the talk but can't write code or solve puzzles on the spot in an interview environment is much higher.

Everyone has their one favorite anecdote about the one person who slipped through the cracks and singlehandedly brought their company to its knees. But I contend that people spend far more energy defending against this use case than the reality warrants.

seanmcdirmid• 2 months ago

There are many steps so you can’t show them all (each step has sub steps and so on). You prioritize steps, but when you are showing your work you focus on steps that are key for you and think would be key for your interviewer. It isn’t crazy that you would guess wrong about the latter given you don’t really know them.

A reasonable candidate can definitely make the mistake of not showing steps that they think aren’t important (and they can also go the other way and show way too many unimportant steps).

JohnMakin• 2 months ago

Someone like this may be skipping steps because to them the steps may be so obvious as to not need to be explained, and they are giving more benefit of the doubt to the interviewer than they should. your framing makes it seem like arrogance when in the vast majority of the time I’ve seen this, it’s the candidate making the assumption the person on the other side is their peer.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

I helped out with interview prep and coaching a while ago.

One of the unexpected hardest parts was getting people to open up to the idea that they needed to improve something about their communication in interviews. It's so easy to comfort yourself with fictions about the interviewer failing to recognize your qualifications due to their own ego or other explanations. There are a million blog posts, Tweets, Reddit posts, and angry internet comments that will validate these feelings. Getting rejected and then going to the internet to validate your feelings of being wronged is so much easier than trying to reflect on how you could have done better.

Doing mock interviews for people was exhausting due to the time commitment, but it's one way to try to get around the defensiveness that comes from being rejected for a real job. Even with that, some of the mock interview candidates would get angry with the feedback and try to argue with you. It's weird to see. Nobody likes feeling evaluated and judged, so imagining an explanation that shifts the problem to the other person protects their ego.

comfysocks• 2 months ago

An easy way out might be to just ask the candidate how they got from one step to another. That way you can differentiate between “toxic, so smart i can’t communicate” and “non-toxic, so smart that i honestly thought the step seemed trivial, but would be happy to explain if i was mistaken about that”.

Insimwytim• 2 months ago

toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars

This is your framing, which is openly hostile to people, that you chose as your enemies. And that framing itself is a great demonstration of toxicity.

The whole narrative is just an attack on engineers, who do the job, coming from the side of the so-called "communicators".

pelagicAustral2• 2 months ago

I don't understand why can't someone just come up with an interview where they propose an issue that is truly something that can be expected in the role, give the applicant a few hours to come up with an action plan and a solution architecture, put it down in writing, sketch some graphs, and then present it...

Why is that so groundbraking? wouldn't that immediately tell you a lot about the applicant, regardless of the final implementation being a 10 or not?

bradlys4• 2 months ago

That’s a system design interview. Those exist already and are about 45 minutes in length.

jghn5• 2 months ago

This style of panel is great.

The one thing interviewers need to stay aware of though is that they will have immense insight into the problem whereas the candidate likely has never thought through the problem space before. And this can lead to unfair judgements. I know I've fallen into this trap before, where I'd run the same session with so many candidates that I had a thorough big picture view of every possible approach. I'd see a candidate stumbling a bit and think, "Why can't they see the obvious answer in front of them?" when in fact I wouldn't have seen it on my first go either. I just had seen dozens of candidates go through the same exercise to the point where it seemed like old hat.

jjmarr• 2 months ago

These are called take-home interviews. They exist and applicants HATE THEM for being too long/"free work".

pelagicAustral2• 2 months ago

Well, yeah I know about take-homes, I mean 2 3 hours tops. In-office.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

In my experience most candidates actually love them. They prefer the lower pressure and better relevance to the job.

If you give candidates the choice between a short take home or a 1-hour on-site technical round, almost everyone picks the take home. We’ve tried it.

It’s only online that you get the rants about “free work”, but the people making those complaints usually hate on-site technical interviews equally.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 2 months ago

That's just assessing someone's ability to design a solution, while presumably what you are hiring for is the proven ability to deliver solutions, add value to the organization over time, etc.

Of course it would be a major red flag if someone couldn't come up with a good sounding solution to something they claimed to be capable of, but a having a plan is not enough. Ideas are really a dime a dozen, and the ability to deliver is the what you really need, which is why VC's tend to fund people, not ideas.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

Even harder with AI.

How do you assess developers when AI makes it possible to create software without even knowing the language?

robofanatic• 2 months ago

Give an abstract requirement and access to your AI tool. Ask the candidate to create a working solution and review the AI generated code. requirement analysis and code review are now the primary skills for developers.

andrewstuart4• 2 months ago

Interesting.

I don’t think code review of AI is important at all - specially given the developer might not even know the language, in which case it’s irrelevant.

I think ability to build checking, verification, linting, testing and cross LLM code review mechanisms is important, which ensure that fast changing or unpredictably changing ai code has consistent behavior and is security checked.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 2 months ago

The main goal of hiring someone should be to assess how well they can do the job you are hiring for, and for anyone with job experience (i.e. not fresh out of college) the best indicator of that is what have they previously achieved (especially in more recent years).

How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges.

Of course the difficulty is how do you assess what the candidate has honestly achieved in prior jobs - what was there personal contribution, and do they seem to have approached things in a way that suggests transferable/general skills that can be applied to the position you are hiring for.

The graphic at the beginning of the article is certainly one problem - the interviewer needs to themselves have the experience to assess the candidate. There is no point having someone with 5 years of experience interview someone with 20 years, assuming you are hiring them for that level of experience.

I think the best interviewing technique is just to go over the candidates experience, from most recent to as far back as you think is relevant, and get them to talk about each project. What was their role, what were their contributions, why did they make the decisions they did, what might they have done differently, etc. etc. Ask them to summarize and deep dive into the architecture, draw it on a whiteboard perhaps.

tptacek5• 2 months ago

Experience-based interviews are a fantastic way to select for candidates who have "failed up" through a long series of jobs. The underlying dynamic is that it usually takes more than a year to sever a technical employee; you can faceplant in a role and still wind up with a resume improvement.

skydhash• 2 months ago

Experience as in numbers of years or project participation is flawed. But experience as in contributions and knowledge of some specific domains is good IMO.

sanderjd10• 2 months ago

I hear this a lot, but man, I just really don't think so. First of all, 1-year stints come off very poorly in this kind of discussion. (I would say that a bias against people with a bunch of short stints would be a failure mode of "experience-based interviews" rather than the failure mode you're describing.) But also, I have had these discussions with (in my judgement) both "failed up" candidates and "tons of valuable experience" candidates, and I just don't have this experience that it's difficult to differentiate.

I'm fully aware that according to the internet, there is an epidemic of bullshit artists who can go deep on the architecture and tradeoffs and their contribution to the things they worked on, without having actually contributed to those things, but I dunno, the narrative just doesn't jibe with my anecdotal experience.

My only uncertainty here is that I do think I have been very fortunate in the people I have worked with in my career, so I might just be getting lucky. But I have truly never worked with someone who is hired largely on the basis of a strong resume, but genuinely can't grok fizzbuzz, or whatever the contemporary equivalent of that is.

I also recognize that you ran a real company doing real work on this, so I'm generally inclined to defer to your wisdom...

You can tell that I'm very torn on this, because the conventional wisdom is so strongly against my perspective on it, and I generally put a good deal of weight on conventional wisdom. But man, I dunno, it all really feels like an inertia thing that I increasingly question the original foundations of. Sometimes the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes on...

HarHarVeryFunny4• 2 months ago

Sure, that's a risk, but that's part of the purpose of an interview - both to discover what they claim to have done, and to assess how accurate that is. This is the purpose of asking about decision making processes, alternatives, architectural summaries and deep dives, etc - if they really did everything they claimed then all relevant details should come rapidly and fluently.

The problems with the alternative - interviewing based on problem solving and coding challenges are:

1) For the most part it doesn't work. Companies like Google, that have reflected on and assessed their own interviewing success, have come to the conclusion that there is little correlation between how well people interviewed in this style do on the interview vs how well they perform on the job. This is a pretty low bar to beat!

2) If you are interviewing for 10-20-30 year senior with a track record of success and adding value, how can you possibly hope to assess that via problem based challenges, especially if conducted by a less senior developer who doesn't themself have the skill set and track record you are hiring for? How do you know if the person just talks a good game and can throw around high level concepts, or can actually deliver?

I do think there is some value to problem solving as a small part of the interview process, but certainly not if this comes at the expense of ignoring the candidate's actual experience and accomplishments which is the best indication of what they are capable of.

sanderjd10• 2 months ago

Yeah this is my "natural" interviewing style. Like, I have a resume, I'm talking to a person, my natural curiosity about the person and their work leads me to exactly the kind of conversation you're describing. Then my hire / no-hire intuition is basically "am I impressed with them after that conversation?".

But then I've also read a huge amount about interviewing "correctly" over the years, probably starting with the fizzbuzz article, and eventually participating in "Big Tech" interview panel training, etc. And all of this directly contradicts this natural intuition that I have, and which your comment is espousing.

So I'm honestly left with pretty strong cognitive dissonance about it at this point. Are we wrong? Or is everyone else wrong? How can this consensus on the "right way" have become so ingrained for so long while being so wrong?

(I also haven't been involved in a lot of hiring or at a big tech company since 2022, so I also have no idea how things have evolved to adapt to the advent of AI tools. Surely nobody is doing the same kinds of whiteboard problems as they used to do! Right?!)

jghn5• 2 months ago

This is still my preferred method.

The one counterargument that I accept as valid is that this method struggles with equity and bias. It's impossible to have a conversational interview style and ensure everyone is getting equal treatment. And it's impossible to rule out subconscious biases as a factor while you're having that conversation. While giving people cookie cutter panels doesn't completely remove those issues, it helps a lot.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Hiring based on gut feeling about how impressive the candidate feels can be misleading when you only do a little hiring. It can work for small samples sizes if you have a strong front end filter or you are primarily getting candidates through trusted referrals.

Then one day you encounter a candidate who is great at impressing people. They leave you feeling excited with the possibility of working with them. You feel delighted after each encounter. Then you hire them and they’re not good. At all. They don’t know basic things that you assumed they would based on how they spoke in conversation. They used all the right words and maybe even recited the precisely correct things to say for a system design question about past work, but when they have to do the same work they’re lost.

It’s a weird feeling to discover your intuition about someone was completely wrong, because we all think we’re better than average at separating the wheat from the chaff. I think it happens to everyone who does hiring at scale.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

Of course the difficulty is how to you assess what the candidate has honestly achieved in prior jobs - what was there personal contribution,
What was their role, what were their contributions

I got a hard reality check on this when my company was getting close to hiring someone I worked with at a previous company. Their resume claimed a lot of achievements that other teams had handled. Their work was always a problem and had to be quarantined from production systems because they were very careless and would even submit broken code without testing it.

They would spend a lot of time in Slack discussing other team’s work so they got good at talking about it. I think they also used a trick where they claim to have competing offers from other companies and not a lot of time for interviews, pressuring the interviewers to do discussion and resume reviews instead of getting into technical questions.

This wasn’t the only time, just the first time. After that I started doing more checking for claims on resumes, including calling old friends who worked with a person. It’s crazy how often someone will claim some responsibility or experience on their resume assuming that nobody will ever check it.

sanderjd10• 2 months ago

I definitely think checking references should be more core to the process. I don't really understand why it isn't. Legal concerns? Or just because it takes a lot of time?

I would personally feel way better about interviewing for jobs if it was like peer reviews during a performance review cycle.

siliconc0w• 2 months ago

Just do one project. Ask them for an interesting or challenging problem they had, go over it at a high level from a business and technical perspective, and then dig in as deep as you can on specific parts. Ask about business impact, how was that measured, what were the tradeoffs, what made it especially difficult, what were the alternatives, what they'd do differently, etc. If they can go deeper than you can, then that is a good sign.

sanderjd10• 2 months ago

I was really hoping for a conclusion section with pragmatic suggestions for how to apply these insights to a real hiring process. I'm left thinking "ok this all makes sense, but what do I do with it?".

tptacek5• 2 months ago

This post is 2/3rds about accuracy problems with interviews (and, yes, I think the weight of the evidence is that interviews are effectively random functions), and then it culminates in a "FATE" metric that is mostly not about accuracy.

Giving candidates feedback is good, but it has nothing to do with the likelihood or cost of a bad hire. Making timely decisions is good ceteris paribus, but it's of secondary importance compared to selecting the right candidate. Same with "effort".

m_m_carvalho• 2 months ago

As a former IT instructor, I've seen students who performed brilliantly in exams and interviews but struggled when faced with real-world ambiguity.

I've also seen quieter people who were average in interviews become excellent builders once they had a real problem to solve.

Interviews are useful, but the ability to ship, maintain and improve real projects should probably carry more weight.

dust-jacket• 2 months ago

Interviews are useful, but the ability to ship, maintain and improve real projects should probably carry more weight.

But how do you assess this? Maybe we should get them to write a document that details what they've done, and then invite them to a conversation to discuss it.

Oh wait...

TheGRS2• 2 months ago

I'm thinking of a technical screen I did recently where I didn't move forward. The time to do the screen was 30 minutes, and it was where they had a full frontend/backend and I needed to navigate around to fix a pretty arbitrary issue. I'd say this is preferable to a leetcode problem for sure, but also, I do tend to take my time to understand the system a bit before committing to changes, I mean this is sight unseen. I'm wondering if this felt too slow to the interviewer.

They sent me a summary document before the meeting, but I couldn't see the code until the interview. I felt like I identified the issue and where to make changes rather quickly, like 10 minutes of looking around and talking through how all the components and APIs fit together.

Then the interviewer asked me to implement a datetime solution, which in this time-boxed window my mind raced around to multiple solutions that I talked through out loud: I could write it myself which would definitely take some time for me to remember all of the syntax involved and reason through the problem, I could download an existing library which would also take some time to read documentation, I could google around for existing solutions in somewhere like Stack Overflow which is pretty hit and miss, or I could prompt an AI agent to write a solution for me. I talked through all of these, they wanted to know how I'd do it by hand at first, which I talked through for a bit but admitted I wasn't sure if it was a good way to go about it. Then I said given the time constraints the AI prompt route would probably make the most sense. By the time we arrived at that and tried it for a bit our time was basically up. And I got the impression suggesting AI to help code didn't impress the interviewer at all.

If others are able to stand out in this scenario then I guess I'll just admit I'm not the top candidate. My brain just doesn't work that quickly. I like to spend time gathering context and tinkering before really getting into the solution, and that probably doesn't come across well in these situations.

glaslong• 2 months ago

It often selects for a confident first shot, which is why we see these orgs drift towards lots of engineers who can blast out code but cannot maintain or evolve any existing systems proficiently. On rare occasion that is even the hiring goal!

lubujackson• 2 months ago

This is the exact problem. Some people can flip between one shotting for interviews and going deep for real work, but they are extremely rare.

As a senior, I would much prefer a candidate who can discuss options more than write code - the writing itself is secondary, especially with AI. I want to see someone grapple with tradeoffs, clarify what they know and what breadcrumbs they want to follow before committing to a solution.

eudamoniac3• 2 months ago

So it took you 15-20 minutes in an interview just to decide on the method by which you will begin to implement "a datetime solution"?

TheGRS2• 2 months ago

I'm hand waving the exact times, it was probably talking through how to filter by datetime a specific way for maybe 5 minutes followed by some discussion around these other ways to go about finding a solution. It was filtering by date starting from the beginning of the week. I searched around for a little bit since I didn't really know how to do this off the top of my head. Found a function that did what I wanted, then ran into type issues, more flailing around trying to get this working. I'll fully admit I didn't ace this.

dzonga• 2 months ago

let's say you make a saas for automatic birdfeeders.

if you can scope out your problem to a simplified version & have a pen & paper / whiteboard discussion with a candidate. the candidate starts from a blank slate. they create their own constraints, validate their own assumptions etc. if they can't design something that works - u can prove this since you already have a working product in production. that way interview takes place in less than 1:30hr. saving time for u & candidate.

you cover: communication, critical thinking, technical chops. 3 birds with one stone.

but unfortunately most people don't want to do that - because 1. their products r fugazi (fueled by vc money), they're on ego trips (we gonna scale) & lastly want to make interviewing a hazing|humiliation ritual.

stormking• 2 months ago

Someone else here already pointed out the problem with that approach: After the second or third candidate, the interviewer is very familiar with the problem and may become unfairly judgemental with later candidates if they don't immediately see "the obvious". Which wasn't obvious at all to him as well, two weeks ago.

pcan77• 2 months ago

I love how people in this thread are ABSOLUTELY BAFFLED at "how do we do this a better way." How about the same way doctors, lawyers, and literally everyone else does it? Look at credentials, schooling, past experience, references and personality interviews rather than 99% leetcode? I have lawyer, doctor, etc friends (aka high up professionals who get paid what we do or more) and they think it's absolute insanity what SOFTWARE engineers have to do to get a freaking job. They think it's asinine, quite frankly and all go "well what did you even go to school for? Don't they know you worked at a Fortune 500 company for over a decade? Why are they having you do trick questions from CS101 courses?"

Y'all, it's not that difficult. You can just pretend we're like everyone else because gasp our profession simply isn't that special like we all think it is for some stupid reason.

eudamoniac3• 2 months ago

This doesn't work when there are terrible devs somehow stealing paychecks from big companies for years, not even mentioning interview fraud. I've interviewed credentialed people who can't write fizzbuzz. Until tenure and credentials indicate skill, they can't be used!

Some companies I think do indicate skill, like a L5 at Google can do fizzbuzz I'm sure, but somewhere like Cisco or random small startup might as well be nowhere. As for education, no CS program in the country is a guarantee.

jghn5• 2 months ago

This is such a tired canard. Do these people exist? Yes. Assuming you can hold an in depth, detailed technical conversation with them I'd contend the percentage of these people is astonishingly low. We spend way too much mental energy defending against them.

The real problem is not enough interviewers can discuss in depth technical bits themselves, and thus they can't get signal when talking to a candidate.

SatvikBeri• 2 months ago

Every interview method has some glaring flaws, and I find you mostly have a choice of which flaws you pick.

On my current team, I care a lot about the ability to write fast code. The most important part of my process is a take-home designed to take 2 hours where the main goal is to solve a relatively easy problem as performantly as possible. Answers have varied from 0.2ms – 50ms.

Take-homes have some obvious disadvantages, but overall I find they're better at finding the people we're looking for than just about every other method. But I'm at a small company, hiring for a fairly specialized team. If the situation was different (e.g. I needed to hire 50 people/year) I'd use a much more standard process.

JamesSwift• 2 months ago

Hmm thats a pretty interesting variant. I dont think it would apply directly to our team, but I like the potential playground it gives for both coming up with solutions as well as being a kickstarter for convos on alternatives.

mattgrice• 2 months ago

I think there is a misconception that FAANG type coding interviews are trying to find stars. They aren't, otherwise they would not cap the difficulty and have a bank of approved questions which can be crammed via leetcode.

They are testing for diligence just like exams in Confucian based systems.

type0• 2 months ago

Some companies try to add science to the process with personality assessments

Soon they'll add phrenology assessments and will call it science

readthenotes1• 2 months ago

"They found that avoiding a toxic worker generates roughly twice the return of hiring a star performer."

This is very true and one of the easiest ways to find that out is to put people into a pressure situation and see how they respond.

And of course, you need to find out if someone has a famous clue of how to go about solving problems.

Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

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