[HN Gopher] Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions
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Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions
Author : Ozzie_osman
Score : 97 points
Date : 2020-10-27 20:53 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (somehowmanage.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (somehowmanage.com)
| juskrey wrote:
| Hiring is not broken, it's just a two way filter, tried to be
| cheated both ways.
| [deleted]
| thatcat wrote:
| One side has a way bigger pump
| andrewprock wrote:
| One thing that most people, including the OP, don't seem to
| understand is that the heavy process and rigid structuring of the
| FAANG interviews is to transform the "Optimal Stopping Problem"
| (aka the "Secretary Problem") from one of of ordinal evaluation
| to one of cardinal evaluation.
|
| Extracting a cardinal evaluation goes a long way towards solving
| the "Optimal Stopping Problem" more tractable and efficient.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I see where the author is coming from, certainly. But, you have
| to realize, most hiring discussions on HN end up emphasizing the
| candidate's perspective. From my POV as an interviewee, I don't
| actually _care_ about any of these myths. What I _do_ care about
| is being tested fairly, using problems and scenarios that could
| come up in real work, not whether I can regurgitate some DP
| algorithm.
|
| IMO, this is what's lacking in most interview processes I have
| participated in, and most of these issues can be fixed by
| following a structured interview process. As a side benefit, you
| may end up with better candidates, as well. At the very least,
| you can actually _tell_ if the candidates you choose to hire are
| as good or better than other people who have gone through your
| interview process, and that 's worth something.
| seibelj wrote:
| > _Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We're getting
| better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases
| the same candidates and assesses them in the same way._
|
| I would pass this buck way, way earlier. Many diverse future
| candidates (non-white) are educated at awful public schools. When
| you begin your education at a miserable daycare-school then you
| are far less likely to make it all the way through the life-
| pipeline and get in front of a high tech recruiter. I have hired
| diverse candidates and they are great just like all candidates I
| hire. There simply aren't that many that apply, and the pool of
| diverse candidates is sucked up by way better-funded FAANGs and
| similar.
|
| I would argue we need to completely reinvent our primary
| education system from the ground up to offer more choice and make
| them way less depressing for lower-income students. You can't
| expect a tech recruiter to fix 2 decades of mistakes through
| their hiring system.
| monksy wrote:
| I'm convinced that the best way is to have a beer with someone
| and to get them to start ranting about the bugs they've had to
| catch and resolve. The more swearing about the technical stuff,
| the more confident I am about that they solved it. I'm more
| interested in hearing about the problem solving in the contexts
| that they've worked through, what they learned, and their
| experience over all. Experience is universal.
|
| Telling someone to get 3 values of a list that create the high
| product isn't going to solve your production issue on a
| saturday night.
| fastball wrote:
| Non-white is an interesting definition of diverse.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Explaining things as problems of lower-income students doesn't
| really work, and "solutions" built around this assumption will
| fail, because even if you consider higher-income subsets of the
| racial demographics, or otherwise control for parental income,
| you still get huge disparities in the numbers of high-
| performance students.
| dheera wrote:
| While that does explain part of the issue for racial
| discrimination, gender discrimination is much less well
| explained by gaps in public school systems.
|
| The medium- and higher-income districts are all still close to
| a 1:1 gender ratio but tech companies are really, really far
| from that.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| It doesn't have to start early in the pipeline.
| https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates
|
| It's only relatively recently that female graduates even
| reached parity with (and now outnumber) male graduates. It
| will take even longer for the male:female divide to be closed
| in STEM.
| Swizec wrote:
| I have some insight into this.
|
| My schooling was in eastern-ish europe growing up in a low
| middle class environment. My girlfriend grew up in SFBA and
| went to high school in Palo Alto.
|
| The difference in perspective is astounding. Even simple things
| like what you consider normal.
|
| Like, I grew up knowing that The Boss is someone you hate and
| despise who makes your life miserable. Becoming the boss is
| villified. Rich people are bad. Everyone is out to screw you.
| That includes rich people, poor people, the government, the
| police. Everyone. It's you against the world. The forgotten
| class everyone exploits and nobody helps. High taxes, no help.
|
| Oh and teachers are all dumb. Otherwise they wouldn't be
| teachers.
|
| By comparison the normal for my girlfriend is "You invent
| google street view or cofound the next ebay, obviously. That's
| just basics". At the least you do well in school, get great
| grades, and climb a corporate hiwrarchy to near top. That's the
| failure mode if nothing else works.
|
| Learning the US corporate/business culture has been imo my
| biggest challenge moving here.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| While attending a poor school and growing up in a poor
| environment gives you a completely different life perspective
| than growing up in a rich one, it's worth noting that this
| isn't what people mean when they talk about "diversity".
| TameAntelope wrote:
| It's what I mean. It's not only what I mean, but that
| diversity of viewpoint is incredibly valuable when trying
| to solve problems as a group.
| Swizec wrote:
| I know it isn't and that makes it even harder to talk
| about. Classism is understood and recognized in Europe and
| people are working on it. USA is still stuck pretending it
| doesn't exist.
|
| Similar to how 50 years ago it was pretendint sexism isn't
| a problem.
|
| Imo it's important to talk about all types of systemic
| issues, not just the popular ones. And to quote one of my
| well meaning friends: _"Oh pfft your issues don't count
| because you can pass (look white and male)"_
| saagarjha wrote:
| I grew up in the Bay Area and went to school in Cupertino;
| the number of people who are of the perspective you described
| your girlfriend having are in the minority even here. There
| are a handful of schools across Palo Alto and San Francisco
| that enable that kind of thing.
| bradlys wrote:
| Minority of the overall population in SV that went to
| schools here? Yeah, probably. Minority of the people who
| end up in tech in SV and grew up here? No. I've met too
| many people in SV that are in tech and who grew up here to
| come to that conclusion.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I am in tech, as you might guess ;) I know the type of
| people mentioned in the parent comment, they go to a
| handful of schools I could name specifically, and the
| reason they are that way is that they are either the
| children of multi-millionaires of billionaires, or are
| friends with someone who falls into that category, or at
| the very least go to the school and benefit from the
| parent donations and atmosphere. That isn't to say that
| there isn't a drive to do well at other schools in the
| valley, but it's nothing like "I'm going to start the
| next big thing", it's more like "I'll make good money at
| FAANG someday" for most people.
| Swizec wrote:
| For the record: My gf's parents went out of their way to
| ensure she went to that specific school. I'm told it
| pretty much broke them financially to have the correct
| zip code.
| est31 wrote:
| Indeed it's common for parents to go to great lengths to
| put their children into the right school. It's a bit sad
| that there are so high differences between quality of
| schooling in the US. Having the right/wrong friends can
| change entire lives, as can the teaching. That being
| said, telling kids they either start the next facebook or
| they are losers and have to take a loser FANG job is a
| bit bit overdone though... But I guess it all depends on
| perspective. If you are already in the upper class, you
| want your children to get upper class jobs and upper
| class success as well.
| azernik wrote:
| Generally there is a disproportionate dropoff among minority
| and female candidates at every stage of the career pipeline,
| not just in the pre-interview parts.
| Kalium wrote:
| There's a reflexive tendency for people to assume that a
| problem manifests at whatever point it is measured. It's an
| easy assumption to make.
|
| However, estimating malnutrition by measuring the heights of
| adults is not a great way to get a read on current food
| supplies.
| seibelj wrote:
| You make a fair point, but it is very hard to snap my fingers
| and make more competent programmers of all races that
| perfectly align with society's representation of them.
| User23 wrote:
| As far as I can tell White Americans are a super-minority in
| Silicon Valley hiring pipelines. Of the 100 or so interviews
| I've done in the past few years I'd say about 2% were White
| American, 5% were of East Asian origin, and the rest of South
| Asian origin. Fact is if Silicon Valley firms actually want to
| be diverse, that is to say accurately represent the
| demographics of the USA, they need to hire more White
| Americans, not fewer.
| dpeck wrote:
| 2%? There is no way unless you were specifically setup for
| that by advertising exceptionally low pay and willingness to
| sponsor visas, and even then that seems off by 10x or more
| from my experience.
| [deleted]
| saagarjha wrote:
| You're saying that you interviewed 100 people and 93 of them
| where South Asian? That seems insane unless you're actively
| hiring talent from India.
| User23 wrote:
| Yes, it's pretty obvious that management at this company
| and org is actively and preferentially hiring talent from
| India based on my lived experience. And note there wasn't a
| single Black or Hispanic American candidate in the pipeline
| that I got to screen. Not one.
| actuator wrote:
| Yeah, this doesn't seem believable at all. East and South
| Asians are definitely overrepresented (compared to US
| population) in tech but not by these numbers. Luckily some
| big companies do publish diversity reports which will
| easily give information about the actual stats.
|
| FB's diversity report. https://diversity.fb.com/read-
| report/ White Americans make up 37% in tech, 63% in
| leadership positions in Facebook.
|
| GitHub is 70% White and 15% Asian.
| https://github.com/about/diversity/report
|
| Apple is 50% White and 23% Asian.
| https://www.apple.com/diversity/
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've observed similar demographics in North Texas,
| consistently over a 20-year period.
| mcguire wrote:
| For meat processing plants?
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| (Author here)
|
| This is the "pipeline problem" debate. You're right, it does
| start much earlier than tech companies, but also, it's too easy
| for hiring managers at tech companies to just throw up their
| hands and say "we can't do much, it's just the pipeline that
| isn't giving us enough diversity." There is plenty of evidence
| that it's not just a pipeline problem.
|
| One of my co-authors wrote a really solid piece on this:
| https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/secti...
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Why is that "solid piece" acting like stereotype threat is an
| actual thing, and not the totally debunked replication study
| failing pseudoscience that it is?
| seibelj wrote:
| I agree with you that tech companies can do better and have
| done better. But this is like, they are doing 1.5x better. To
| do 10x better the educational system needs to be totally
| reworked.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| I think it's far more likely that there are numerous 1.5x
| improvements to be made along the entire funnel than that
| there exists a 10x solution at any one point. Making each
| person who 'owns' a piece of the process accountable for
| optimizing their portion is going to yield far better
| results than passing the buck.
| ozim wrote:
| I disagree with the article because author seems to miss the
| point of a lot of comments in here and is reaching simplistic
| conclusions.
|
| Lots of people don't nag about whiteboard interviews at FAANG, I
| think a lot of people who are commenting here don't even send
| their CV to any of those companies. People nag about other
| companies using whiteboard interviews as some kind of "silver
| bullet" of hiring. Most of the time I see negative comments about
| it, it is that some small startup which is trying to get people
| to work below market price is grilling people on interview like
| Facebook or Google. (as a side note there is whole list of bad
| stuff that medium/small companies do just because "goog/fb does
| that", but they should never do)
|
| Other negative that I see in discussions is, technical
| interviewers are assholes that want to show you how smart they
| are. Which FAANG interviewing style is helping to spread. Asking
| random algo question, that you know answer to and the person you
| are interviewing does not, makes it easy to feel superior.
|
| Being thoughtful about hiring... Yes if hiring manager has
| resources to do that then he might build amazing hiring engine.
| Again most of the companies have scarce resources, and
| entrepreneurs probably spend more time on sales than on hiring,
| because you should hire only if you really have to. Probably
| hiring is also not their core business.
| dia80 wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the authors book?
|
| https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about
| dadrian wrote:
| This is a really good overview, one of the better things I've
| read about hiring in a while. I led engineering hiring at a ~25
| person startup last year and I strongly agree with the authors
| description of the differences between FAANG hiring and smaller
| company hiring. The part about fit resonates with me as well---
| everyone we recruited and hired with specific ideas about how
| they'd mesh with the team outperformed the hires who were closer
| to just "filling seats".
| goi wrote:
| > Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We're getting
| better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases
| the same candidates and assesses them in the same way.
|
| What about neurodiversity and hiring neuroatypicals? "Culture
| fit" is often a euphemism for discrimination against them and
| others with poor social skills.
|
| Also, call me cynical, but I've come to view blogposts like this
| as little more than marketing for the author and whatever company
| they started/work for. They're always vague, self-congratulatory,
| studiously avoid saying anything genuinely controversial, and to
| the extent that they're critical, it's often just as a way of
| contrasting themselves with the competition.
| avip wrote:
| Cultural fit sucks, but working with developers who cannot
| communicate clearly and effectively also sucks. The "how to
| interview" discussion must always focus on what sucks less as
| the whole framework of thinking sucks here.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Why do we need diversity if it is more or less the same job?
| you need people who can do the job and it is likely they will
| have some common traits
| lliamander wrote:
| Everything I've seen suggests that neuroatypicals are over-
| represented in tech relative to the wider population. I'm not
| saying there isn't anything more to be done for them, but I
| expect they're still going to have a more welcoming environment
| in tech than just about anywhere else.
| goi wrote:
| The industry isn't nearly as accepting of them as it was ten
| or twenty years ago.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > find a friend who's spent time on hiring, and ask them for
| their favorite battle story.
|
| Anyone here have good hiring stories?
| Aeolun wrote:
| The biggest revelation of being on the hiring end is that we
| generally know whether we want to hire someone a second after
| the interview ends.
|
| The most interesting thing I've heard I guess has been the guy
| who replied 'Well, they're all idiots there' when asked why he
| wanted to move.
|
| Like someone else said, hiring is mostly just tiresome.
| jzwinck wrote:
| At a university recruiting event I asked one candidate if he
| was willing to move to NYC to work with us. Most people say
| yes, a few say no thanks and move on.
|
| This candidate said "Well my partner is considering a job in
| Texas."
|
| I asked candidate if he preferred Texas to NYC.
|
| "Not really, they have scorpions."
| mundo wrote:
| A former job of mine forced candidates to fill out a form for
| one of those abominable HR candidate tracking sites, maybe
| ICIMS, and I saw the following gem from one applicant:
|
| Q: "One of CompanyCo's core values is Openness. How have you
| demonstrated openness in your career?"
|
| A: "I am open about my contempt for bullshit questions like
| this one."
| munchbunny wrote:
| I don't have good stories (or rather, none that I would want to
| share), but I do have battle scars. Hiring is hard. It's really
| complex to get right, and I spent years tuning the process.
|
| Having done both, I'd much rather be on the hiring end than the
| candidate end. But as the hiring manager, I mostly just felt
| weariness at the process.
| nawitus wrote:
| >On the other hand, if you're a brilliant engineer who struggles
| with being told what to do or doing work that you can't
| immediately connect to something intrinsically motivating to you,
| that FAANG interview just did both you and the company a favor by
| weeding you out of the process.
|
| Or maybe the candidate is willing to do that type of work during
| work hours, but lacks the time and motivation to do it at home
| after work.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, all that said, it's been interesting that no one has wanted
| to work with me. Frankly, it was shocking, as I definitely have
| the skills, experience and "soft" skills, like Accountability and
| Responsibility, as well as years of experience at selling
| difficult projects to real hard-nosed, empirical managers.
|
| I also would have been quite willing to work for a fraction of
| what people that don't have my chops would want.
|
| The worst was working with recruiters. They are downright
| insulting. Quite jarring.
|
| Whiteboard/LeetCode tests are a flat-out insult to me. I won't do
| well at them, and I'm quite aware that people spend _huge_
| amounts of time, practicing for them, so I don 't have a chance.
|
| I do have a few hundred thousand lines of code, dozens of blog
| articles, dozens of repos, and a decade or more of checkin
| history. I've been told that I "faked" it, which would be
| hilarious, if it weren't so insulting.
|
| In the end, I just decided to stop looking for work, and I'm
| working in a small startup team, writing some fairly powerful
| software, for free; because I enjoy doing this stuff.
|
| It's pretty odd that the current scene is actively hostile
| towards folks like me. I feel that it's fairly self-destructive.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm a little confused by your post. Why do you think you've
| been singled out and nobody wants to work with you? Simply
| because you don't excel at whiteboard coding or leetcode
| questions?
|
| I'm honestly curious. I have never had to really do either of
| those things in order to get great jobs that pay quite well.
| Granted, I don't work for a FAANG, haven't even interviewed for
| one, but I don't feel any less successful even so.
|
| I'm tempted to think you come off as difficult to get along
| with, but this is entirely based on your writing style here and
| may be entirely unwarranted :). I've always found that being
| agreeable helps an awful lot.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| In the USA, do most companies whiteboard/LeetCode? In Canada,
| it seems that only a minority of (admittedly top) companies do.
| At least up here, not being able to do algos is a barrier to
| top tier employment, but certainly not employment in general.
| bosswipe wrote:
| I'm in somewhat the same circumstance. Have had a very
| successful 15 year career until this last iteration of job
| seeking. In all this time I never bothered learning the grab
| bag of tricks for mathematically optimizing recursive
| algorithms because it never came up in the many thousands of
| lines of codes I've written or code reviewed. I've learned many
| other hard problems and I can usually run circles around all
| the super smart new grads with their memorized algorithms, but
| it doesn't seem to matter now.
| dasm wrote:
| Why not try to get better at whiteboarding?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Not the OP, but I've reached a similar place to the OP (I've
| given up looking for paid software engineering work for now).
| Why not get better at whiteboarding? Because it's only useful
| for getting a job. It's not a useful skill in doing the job.
| People spend hundreds of hours practicing to answer
| whiteboard interview questions - more power to them if they
| actually need the gig really bad. I just don't want to play
| the game anymore. Fortunately, there are companies (usually
| small ones) that aren't obsessed with whiteboarding - my last
| few gigs have been at places like that. Usually the hiring
| folks are older (as am I) and they remember what hiring and
| interviewing were like 20+ years ago.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Because every second that I spend on small-batch academic
| exercises, is a second not spent working on ship code.
|
| Here's how I spent today:
|
| I woke up at 5AM, like I always do, and did my two-mile walk.
| During the walk, I sorted through today's job. I'm working on
| a social media app, and I'm setting up the baseline (admin)
| stuff. I needed to add the capability to convert "standard"
| users to "manager" users, and I'll also need to add UI in the
| app (native Swift iOS/iPadOS/Catalyst app) to manage
| permissions.
|
| I figured out how I would do it. It was a combination of work
| on the backend (I needed to add some functionality to the
| admin user layer), the SDK (I needed to add a couple of
| methods to funnel the UI requests to the REST API), and the
| app, itself (I needed to add a button to the user edit
| screen). The tricky part would be the backend work. I needed
| to do this in a manner that would not invite any security
| compromises, and would catch errors. I also wanted to
| leverage the current structure, as opposed to introducing new
| structure.
|
| I don't write stuff down, if I can help it. After my half-
| hour walk, I knew what I needed to do, and, by 7AM, I had the
| basic framework in place on the backend. I couldn't test it
| until I also had the work done on the SDK, so I started that
| (it wasn't much code).
|
| By 9AM, I had the whole stack in place, and there were a
| number of bugs. I like to test, so I was able to figure out
| where they happened. Most were in the backend, so I spent a
| lot of time with Charles Proxy, examining the exchange.
|
| By 5PM, I had it all working, but I need to make the app UI
| better. It needs a confirmation alert. Otherwise, it's pretty
| much done.
|
| Tomorrow, I'll add the confirmation, and do a lot more
| testing. This is fairly critical stuff. I can't afford any
| security lapses here, and I need to make the UX as smooth as
| possible. Because of the nature of the work, I need to figure
| out the best way to provide instantaneous user feedback,
| while waiting for the server to do its work. I'll hammer that
| out in tomorrow morning's walk.
|
| And I spent absolutely no time at all, practicing LeetCode.
| mantap wrote:
| I've also been accused of faking things that I definitely did
| do myself, sometimes I find myself unconsciously playing down
| accomplishments so as to not to be accused of fakery.
|
| What you can keep in mind is that there are very large amounts
| of money at stake for software engineering jobs. So it is
| magnet for every kind of faker you can imagine. So don't take
| it personally, just be thankful that you are qualified for a
| job that many people _wish_ they could do.
|
| And yes the whole thing is a game. The people who are good at
| the game are most likely to win. So just learn to be good at
| the game.
| comprev wrote:
| I hadn't thought of tech jobs being a target for fraud but it
| makes sense. Candidates will always test the market for how
| much they can inflate their experience.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > I'm working in a small startup team, writing some fairly
| powerful software, for free
|
| If you don't mind my brusqueness, how are you feeding yourself?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Savings (not like I have choice). I'm also looking to
| establish some cred that just can't be ignored. I'm fairly
| good at that kind of thing; it just takes time.
| dia80 wrote:
| Lots of criticism of various points in TFA here. I really need to
| make a senior hire. Where can I learn to do it right?
| cosmotic wrote:
| I'd give FAANG more credit if they had better track records of
| producing good products with good design and good engineering,
| but the track record is mostly a trail of failures in terms of
| bad design and bad engineering.
|
| Facebook has largely stagnated aside from acquisitions. Most of
| their scaling issues were resolved a decade ago. If you consider
| the repeated, practically universally hated redesigns, how is
| their hiring process working for them exactly?
|
| Amazon has numerous, obvious, long standing problems with their
| web store and cloud services. Maybe they are engineering toward
| higher profits instead of satisfied customers. Fire stick and
| amazon video UI is a trash fire. Regardless, I don't see any
| amazing engineering coming from amazon. Maybe its all in
| fulfillment? From what I can tell, Amazon just finds okay
| engineers that are willing to be exploited until they run away
| when they realize how awful it is to work there. When you
| consider the fulfillment employees things don't get rosier.
|
| Apple basically forces a curated design aesthetic down their
| users throats. Some like it, some hate it. I use a mac and
| android. As a user, iOS and macOS literally sicken me; I have to
| go into the accessibility and turn off all the animations and
| transparency. Apple's software has notoriously gone down hill for
| many years in terms of bugs and performance. I'm sure there's a
| lot of great engineering work that goes into a lot of what apple
| does, but it's almost all throw away. They focus on trendy
| features that no one wants. It sells a new year of iPhone
| upgrades, then it's abandoned because no one used those features.
| I still feel bad for all the companies that have been swindled
| into adding touchbar support and all the users that were swindled
| into paying $200 for the touchbar they won't use.
|
| Netflix hasn't changed in a decade. Maybe their backend systems
| have improved? I still regularly encounter buffering issues and
| the UI has been terrible since the first iteration. I still get
| DVDs in the mail and they visually downgraded the UI for that a
| few years ago but otherwise the feature set has never changed.
| The quality and selection of the petrol-disks transported using
| petrol is still superior to the largely-free-to-them transmission
| of the digital versions. I presume their hiring is largely
| focused on content creation at this point. Maybe their backend
| systems are more reliable now through engineering?
|
| Google is so infamous for product failures theres a metaphorical
| graveyard. How many times have they tried on the messaging front?
| I think we are at iteration 6? That's 5 failures in a row. The
| things they've succeeded at like search, mail, and maps were all
| done over a decade ago. Since then it's just been repeated
| downgrade after downgrade. Maybe all their engineering work is
| going into search rankings and anti-spam which are decent but not
| obviously better than its been in the past. Point of diminishing
| returns probably.
|
| I'm sure there are brilliant engineers working at all those
| companies, but it largely isn't demonstrated in overall output
| from the sector. Now considering the _quantity_ multiplied by the
| quality of engineers, it 's truly shocking I can't reliably send
| a text based message to an arbitrary person in the same city.
|
| All things considered, the efficacy of their hiring practices
| can't be too far ahead of the industry average so I don't think
| it's fair to hold them up on a pedestal and claim 'Regardless of
| how bad you think they are at hiring, FAANG's hiring practices
| are effective'.
| librish wrote:
| Another benefit of whiteboard interviews that I often see left
| out is how well they scale.
|
| You can train a lot of engineers in how to conduct these
| interviews fairly quickly and you tell them what information to
| focus on and how to document it. You can then pass this
| information to a hiring committee that has a _lot_ of experience
| in evaluating candidates. Having sat in on some hiring committee
| meetings I can see how little weight is given the algorithm _if_
| the candidate has a good reference or highly relevant experience.
|
| The issue with the interview alternatives that most people
| suggest is that they would require your most senior engineers to
| spend a really really large portion of their day on hiring which
| can burn people out quickly.
| dheera wrote:
| My main issue with whiteboard interviews is that they often ask
| you to code something that is completely unrelated to the job,
| and is not representative of your normal work efficiency at a
| task that is within your area of expertise.
|
| For example, I've had several machine learning engineer
| interviews in which I was asked to write some variation of NMS
| (non-max suppression) or gradient descent on the whiteboard.
| What machine learning engineer writes that kind of code
| anymore?
|
| I can write it, yes I can fumble (a lot) and figure out how to
| optimize it, but in reality these are the type of algorithms
| that you _almost always_ use some library that someone has
| already written for you for that kind of stuff. They spend the
| entire hour nitpicking at your implementation of NMS, base
| their entire impression of you on that implementation of NMS,
| and never in your entire interview ask you anything about, say,
| what the state-of-the-art object detectors are, what their
| breakthroughs are, how their networks are roughly structured,
| what you might think about doing to improve on them, what you
| could do if you only had limited annotation data, and other
| real machine learning questions.
| blamestross wrote:
| Actually evaluating your knowledge is hard. Picking something
| to be a rough litmus test and testing that, despite it not
| being directly related to the job seems reasonable.
|
| It has been 3 years since I interviewed somebody for a ML
| position. Mostly I focused on knowledge of model execution.
| Most ML libraries were horrible for use in production at the
| time and I was more worried that a candidate wouldn't be able
| to productionize a good model than I was worried they
| wouldn't be able to build that model.
| m0zg wrote:
| I don't see how it's a "myth" that "whiteboard interviews suck".
| You never write code on a whiteboard in the course of your day
| job. The obsession with whiteboard interviews is absolutely
| idiotic IMO, as is the obsession with asking deep algorithmic
| questions which the candidate will definitely not be able to
| answer convincingly if they didn't encounter them before.
|
| It's idiotic that someone has to prepare for a month to do a 5-7
| hour whiteboard interview loop that has no relation whatsoever to
| the job duties. You don't quiz a barbecue chef on Michelin star
| molecular cuisine, yet this is considered totally normal in our
| profession.
|
| At a minimum, ask questions that one could figure out without
| knowing the answer beforehand, and at a minimum let them use
| their text editor. Better yet, don't do this shit at all, and ask
| people to solve a _practical_ problem similar to ones they're
| likely to encounter if they take the job. It still provides a
| good filter, arguably better even.
|
| As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials,
| memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala,
| not practical technical skill per se.
| blamestross wrote:
| > As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials,
| memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala,
| not practical technical skill per se.
|
| Those sound like they might correlate well with the traits
| desired.
| bulatb wrote:
| The article explains in detail how a pressure difference can
| create a force, and how the process generates these differences
| and how the force is felt as suction, but still argues that the
| process doesn't suck.
|
| A process good at screening applicants should 1) identify the
| good ones and 2) identify the bad ones. The standard whiteboard
| interview makes no attempt at (1) and operates by throwing almost
| everyone in bucket (2) regardless of potential.
|
| This is plainly, in general, a process that sucks. It just
| happens that the way it sucks is not a problem if you're FAANG.
| sofal wrote:
| You're exactly correct, and the complete lack of attempt to do
| (1) means that if you're a perfectly qualified candidate, then
| getting an offer is very much a crapshoot. It's actually quite
| easy to get into _a_ FAANG company overall, it 's just
| difficult to get into a _single specific_ FAANG company on a
| single try. The interviewers are mostly not good at
| interviewing and they 'll just let you in as long as you can
| solve their little toy problems the way they would solve it.
| Sometimes it's easy enough, and other times your luck runs out.
| pm90 wrote:
| The fetishization of Google (specifically their interview
| process) has really hurt the industry and caused a lot of
| unnecessary stress for a lot of engineers.
| filereaper wrote:
| Agreed, lots of companies have Google style interviews when
| they are clearly _not_ Google.
|
| You better have quality work to do and equivalent perks as
| Google to put candidates through their style of interviews.
|
| Otherwise those companies are delusional and I have the
| world's smallest violin for their recruiting woes.
| soared wrote:
| #2 made me smile because Amazon is so blatantly against this.
| Amazon gives you their 12 principles and wants you to come up
| with 36 stories (3 per principle) about how you used these
| principle at work.
|
| My interviews were far and away the least thoughtful hiring
| experience I've ever had. It was clear each person was filling
| out a form while I was talking, and followed up with pre-written
| questions. There was nothing non-traditional, and the 6 hour loop
| definitely did not respect my time. ~50 hours of prep, 10 total
| hours of interviews ( 2 hours of screening, 6 hour loop, 2
| additional interviews for other roles).
|
| I had really great interactions... after the forms we're filled
| out. Interviews went well - I was put into the "recycle" status
| but never found a role there that really fit my experience.
|
| Nontechnical but still tech consulting, not aws.
| the_reformation wrote:
| As somebody who's somewhere between mediocre to good at
| whiteboard interviews (passed the loop at 1 FAANG, rejected by
| the rest), I think they're pretty solid. Most programming
| challenges, even at FAANG-scale, ultimately decompose into some
| family of classic interview problems (usually a graph or a hash
| table.) Everything else I do at work is implementation or stack
| specific. The average programmer will pick it up with enough
| exposure. But problem solving is somewhat binary (yes I realize
| thats an oxymoron) and not easily pick-up-able, at least on the
| time horizon a hiring manager wants to deal with.
|
| I realized this when I got a lot better at whiteboard interviews
| after a FAANG job for a couple years. A coding challenge that I
| took the full hour on and bombed out of college was now done in
| twenty. I just picked up the problem solving intuition by writing
| a ton of code.
| louthy wrote:
| How much code do you normally write on whiteboards in front of
| people? It is such an artificial and for some, confrontational,
| way of problem solving, that it just filters for people who can
| stand in-front of whiteboards. It's a discriminatory process
| that shows pretty much nothing about the individual's capacity
| to function as a software engineer in a team.
| ksk wrote:
| I disagree. It doesn't have to be confrontational if you
| don't want it to be. As a manager whose used it plenty in the
| past, I've found it to be an excellent tool to filter out
| people who were smooth talkers and seemed "clued in" but
| didn't have the technical chops to do anything. I didn't care
| at all about syntax, language of choice, or anything
| superficial like that. All I wanted to see was how they
| approached a problem, not that they simply memorized a piece
| of trivia. Also you can ask design or high level architecture
| questions during a whiteboard-interview too. I have found
| that simply trusting someone's word is not enough, you need
| to verify that they can actually back it up. In the end,
| resume, grades, side-projects, whiteboard code, style of
| problem solving, feedback from previous co-workers, etc, etc,
| are all signals that you have to absorb and make a decision.
| You can't just rely on one signal.
| blamestross wrote:
| I realized 4 years of teaching in grad-school precisely
| prepared me for whiteboard interviews. I literally spent 3
| days a week working out problems on whiteboards in front of
| bored/annoyed people.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Good practice, yes. However what if those bored/annoyed
| people decided you were a failure and couldn't feed your
| family if a single unseen problem is not done in 15
| minutes?
| mcguire wrote:
| Ultimately, I'm not sure what form of interview process
| would satisfy you.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's not a question of whether it provides a perfect signal.
| It's a question of how the signal it provides compares to
| alternatives. Say what you will about whiteboards, but every
| other interview structure has its own issues, including being
| artificial, particularly at scale.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If a doctor can be interviewed without being asked to
| operate on people, or an architect without being asked to
| build a home, can we not interview without asking someone
| to write code?
| scarmig wrote:
| Moving to a doctor-style credential model would probably
| make the interview process less intense. But it also adds
| years of additional education and certifications. And
| it's unclear whether it would cause a net reduction of
| stress and pointless studying: pre-med and medical
| students aren't known for their laid back progression to
| gainful employment. A lot of the people here would
| clearly be shocked to discover just how adversarial jobs
| outside of software engineering can be.
| mdifrgechd wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with doctors' career progression
| but as I understand they have a residency which is
| basically a super long training / interview. And I bet to
| become a surgeon at an elite institution you have spent a
| lot of time being watched doing your job.
|
| Also another good example is cooks, who get hired based
| on working a shift unpaid to see how they fit with the
| team.
|
| Asking for a hands on demo is pretty common.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Honestly I think this is a poor analogy. It's
| considerably easier to verify the work history of a
| surgeon or an architect. Their work is prominent and
| difficult to plagiarize.
|
| Trades might be more applicable, and in trades you
| likewise have certain kinds of certification or even a
| guild-like system to keep skills and performance visible
| and consistent. There's not really any equivalent in
| programming (though there is in IT more broadly). Even a
| university degree is not really any particular proof of
| an ability to code, a lot of programs can be taken
| without having to write much code solo.
|
| Programming is usually done collaboratively, either
| implicitly (through the use of base libraries) or
| explicitly (coworkers, group projects) and there are
| definitely people who freeride on those collaborations to
| a great extent.
| louthy wrote:
| Not every approach is bad. As an interviewer myself I find
| that just talking to the person as a human being and asking
| them about their current work, previous work, and interests
| tends to expose nearly everything I need to know. I
| initially just want to see if the person is likely to be a
| good fit for the company. This can be triggered by
| attitude, arrogance, etc.
|
| Engineering-wise I can focus on any one thing they bring up
| and ask them to explain in more depth, this then becomes a
| dialogue, which is vital I think, because they're
| interviewing me and my company as much as I am interviewing
| them. I intentionally don't try to catch them out, in fact
| the opposite, a candidate at ease is the one that opens up
| more and will give you more insight into who they are and
| what they are about than any whiteboard exercise.
|
| I'll then talk about the requirements for the role they're
| applying for and try to see if their knowledge covers what
| we need. Again, just a dialogue.
|
| If that first interview goes well, then I will ask for
| examples of code they have written, or set them a test to
| do in their own time if they have nothing of their own to
| show. Granted that takes some of their time, but it only
| happens if they're being seriously considered, and
| importantly (I think) allows them to use their own tools,
| in their own time, in their own way, this gives them a
| chance to shine.
|
| This might not work at FAANG scale, I dunno, I find the
| idea of working at any organisation like that a pretty
| miserable one. But talking to someone in a respectful way,
| rather than putting them in an uncomfortable situation that
| bears no resemblance to what their day-to-day would be,
| shouldn't be hard to scale.
|
| Although, I suspect much of these issues come about because
| of the inadequacies of the interviewers rather than the
| candidates, they're hiding behind tricks, gotchas, and
| memory tests, because possibly they don't have the range
| themselves to extract something meaningful from the
| candidate to rank them.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| This is almost exactly my approach. I've interviewed
| 100-200 engineers in my career and hired 10-15 of those.
| Not one of those hires was a failure and I didn't need to
| incorporate puzzles as part of the interview process. If
| you're an experienced engineer with a history of
| designing and delivering business solutions for multiple
| domains you should never need to ask trivial data
| structure and algorithms questions that can be easily
| looked up if they're ever needed.
| bradlys wrote:
| > I realized this when I got a lot better at whiteboard
| interviews after a FAANG job for a couple years. A coding
| challenge that I took the full hour on and bombed out of
| college was now done in twenty. I just picked up the problem
| solving intuition by writing a ton of code.
|
| Were you perchance interviewing others while at FAANG or doing
| anything related to interviewing (speaking with coworkers about
| it, etc.)? I've seen plenty of people come out of FAANG worse
| at interviewing than they went in.
|
| The problems I've heard most of my peers solve at FAANG are not
| really that relevant to interviewing. At least, none of them
| are like, "Yeah, man, totally kick ass at leetcode now that
| I've been at Facebook for a year!"
| dmurray wrote:
| One way to look at it is that your ability to contribute is one
| part familiarity with the stack, the problem domain, and the
| company's development process: one part "generic
| ability/competence".
|
| You're going to learn the first part on the job. It's rare -
| especially in Google's hiring - that you want to hire someone
| for their deep familiarity with the tech stack or problem
| domain. So you select for the second part.
|
| But your test for the second part still involves specialising
| in some process. Take home tests or pair programming exercises
| aren't "culture-blind" any more than whiteboard tests. So a
| large important part of the industry standardised on a
| "development process" of writing code on a whiteboard, a
| "business domain" of advanced-undergrad-level data structures,
| and a "tech stack" of "pick any language you want, or a
| reasonably rigorous pseudocode". If everyone learns that to the
| same degree, the remaining differences between the candidates
| are mostly in part 2.
|
| There are some downsides that get trotted out on HN every time:
| you may reject someone who's really good but didn't take the
| time to focus on undergrad data structures, you may reject
| someone who is particularly bad at whiteboard stuff (typically
| due to nerves), your process is easier to train for recent CS
| grads from good universities. But every system has downsides.
| This one is reasonable for Google and not-terrible for you, but
| you may be able to do much better by focusing on one of the
| sets of people Google's process underrates.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Most programming challenges, even at FAANG-scale, ultimately
| decompose into some family of classic interview problems
| (usually a graph or a hash table.)
|
| Most problems decompose into _using_ a graph or a hash table
| (or an array), not implementing one. And the hard bit is
| usually things like translating the business requirements,
| architecting code to keep it maintainable over time, and
| dealing with buggy / opaque 3rd party systems.
|
| Classic whiteboard interviews don't test these things at all.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Didn't find this one compelling. "Some truth to it..."! Please,
| it's an industry-wide disaster, aka billion-dollar mistake.
|
| Granted some of the test fashion is useful for computer
| scientists and the fraction implementing algorithms. But the
| other 80% are being selected for the wrong thing. These other
| folks that are curious could be trained on the job (the growth
| mindset) in a few weeks, if that were still a thing.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| The author contradicts himself in trying to argue that hiring
| isn't a crapshoot. On the one hand, he says the best hiring
| managers "didn't chase the same pool of candidates everyone else
| was chasing--instead, they found non-traditional ways to discover
| really talented and motivated people who weren't in the pool of
| usual suspects". But then in the _very next paragraph_ he cites
| Google, Facebook, Stripe, and Dropbox as examples. Huh?
|
| It's so misleading to cite BigCos as examples of excellent
| hiring, because the founders of the companies and the initial
| employees are never hired in the same way that their engineers
| are currently hired. They're usually just people who happened to
| know each other in a dorm. It's only after the company gets a
| bunch of funding that they need to fill seats with a bunch of
| warm bodies. But the success wasn't because of the assembly-line
| style hiring, it's the product idea and the personal qualities of
| the founders that drove the success of the company. Engineers
| throw themselves at those companies because of the compensation
| and prestige. It's not because they have a magical snowflake
| hiring process.
| jaredtn wrote:
| I think he's saying that Google at a certain point in time
| managed to hire the talented & motivated people. So it can be
| done, because these companies have done so successfully at
| points in their past.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > Google at a certain point in time managed to hire the
| talented & motivated people
|
| Google started with talented and motivated people.
|
| They also hired talented and motivated people, but that in
| itself is not proof of anything. Did they hire talented and
| motivated people _because_ of their hiring process, or for
| other reasons, such as that Google is a place where a lot of
| talented and motivated people really wanted to work?
|
| There are different spins you could put on the hiring
| process: (1) it's extremely difficult in order to pick out
| "the best" engineers or (2) it's extremely difficult in order
| to pick out the engineers will do anything to work there.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Did they hire talented and motivated people because of
| their hiring process, or for other reasons, such as that
| Google is a place where a lot of talented and motivated
| people really wanted to work?_ "
|
| I might be misremembering but I seem to recall that
| Google's hiring bar in the early '00s, before they grew
| into a behemoth, was even higher than it is now. If you
| weren't from an elite CS program with near perfect grades,
| they wouldn't even look at you.
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