
The two questions I ask every interviewer - deafcalculus
http://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/two-interview-questions
======
nmalaguti
Each time I read a post like this I say to myself “they’re not wrong, but
something is also missing.”

If there was a way to evaluate a candidate based on how well they would do at
their actual job, in an hour or less, that couldn’t be games or cheated, we’d
all be using it.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t work on improving the hiring process, but how
much time, both from the perspective of the candidate and the company, is too
much time to invest in a potential hire?

Would we get better signal if you came to work for us for a week and paired
with everyone on the team? Sure! But how many candidates can take a week off
from their current job? The author talked to 11 companies. Could they invest
11+ weeks in their job search full time in order to find their next role? What
about the loss in productivity? Can you have more than one candidate in the
office in a given week? What if your ramp up time for full time employees is
actually longer than a week? Are you biasing for people who ramp up fast
instead of people who will be ultimately more productive and impactful?

I often feel that engineers write these posts because they know that they
themselves are good at their job, but feel it is silly to have to develop an
alternative set of skills in order to signal that they are a good hire. Or
they get rejected and blame the process or those alternative skills. I’ve felt
the same way and wanted the system to be better tailored for my skill set, but
balanced against the time investment for some alternatives, I see why we have
the process we do.

~~~
grue2
I use a work sample (short paid contract), but it's not perfect and boy is it
labor intensive.

As a hirer, you really can't win. There's not one hiring process nor guiding
principle that doesn't seem to bring out the pitchforks of those who were
frustrated, disrespected, or rejected by said process:

\- Show us your open source work. (You're excluding all but a lucky few who
have the privilege of writing open source code!)

\- Okay then, show us a personal project or some work you've done in your free
time. (What, so I'm expected to live eat and breathe code 24/7 to get hired?!)

\- Well, how about a short contract/work sample? (How am I supposed to find
the time to do that? I have a day job and a life!)

\- Shall we try whiteboarding/coding tests then? (This is so insulting!
Solving CS puzzles isn't what the job is about!)

One cannot, sadly, rely on the résumé. I have interviewed multiple self-deemed
"experts" in such-and-such language, only to find that they could not even
write a basic for-loop on the whiteboard.

~~~
jordanpg
I've learned that a decent proxy for this mythical silver bullet of hiring is
basic questions about tooling and networking.

Gauging someone's vast, claimed experience in some language or technology can
be tricky, but if they can't explain what a rebase is, or how maven dependency
management works, or how SSL works in general terms, it tells me a lot about
what kind of technologist they are.

~~~
jbattle
An alternate way to do this (which avoids false negatives cause they don't
know the same trivia as you) is to ask them to tell you about a tool/library
they are excited about. Or ask them to explain some part of their last project
in detail. And then keep asking probing questions to see how deep they can go.
You get the same sense of "how deeply does this person actually understand the
tools they use" but you dramatically reduce the risk of hitting one of their
(rare?) blank spots.

Side benefit #1 is you get a sense of what they think is important

Side benefit #2 is you find out if they can accurately gauge how well they
know what they think they know

Side-benefit #3 is you might learn something new!

~~~
jpindar
This is the kind of thing people in electrical engineering do.

------
dorfsmay
The "good fit" sent shivers through my spine!

I'm a bit of an odd ball in terms of background, and in my early 20's I
interviewed for really interesting jobs at really interesting companies
(Intel, oracle, Digital, and some more). Every single time the tech staff I
would have worked with finished the interviews by saying "You just need one
last interview with HR, it will be nothing, looking forward to work with
you!".

And every single time the answer from HR was that " I would not fit in".

After 4 or 5 companies turning me down I thought fuck this, I don't want to
fit in, I want to produce good quality work and make customers happy, and
started to look exclusively for contracts. Thirty years later, I'm still
contracting, every single of my customers has been very happy with my work.

Funnily enough, nobody tried to hire me as an employee in those 30 years! And
they were right, I'd probably wouldn't fit in. I don't accept status quo, I
don't buy in cargo cult, I'm not interested in coming in to wait for the hours
to go by.

Remember, "fitting in" is not necessarily a good thing. People hire me because
I don't.

~~~
vita17
The purpose of HR departments is to avoid liabilities. The purpose of
rejecting “bad fit” candidates is to avoid losing their job if someone who
looks or acts odd ends up being a liability. “You should have know he’d burn
the building down. He was weird. He had a nose piercing!” So they avoid hiring
anybody with a characteristic that could be seen as a red flag in retrospect.

It’s a product of the corporate mentality.

~~~
dorfsmay
Makes for very blend boring companies. Probably also explains some part of the
"lack of diversity": This person is so different than anybody else we've ever
hired, let's just say "They won't fit in". This is an easy loop to get stuck
in, and can really hurt people from minorities or with different background.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Unfortunately, the word “diversity” isn’t usually used in that context in the
corp world. Disruption is only something to talk about, they don’t want to
actually do our, nor hire anyone disruptive to the current culture.

------
chrisbennet
_" In 1985, Freada Klein (then head of organizational development for Lotus)
did an experiment... With Kapor’s permission, Klein pulled together the
résumés of the first forty Lotus employees... Klein explained that most of
these early employees had skills the growing company needed, but many had done
“risky and wacko things” such as being community organizers, being clinical
psychologists, living at an ashram, or like Kapor, teaching transcendental
meditation.

Then Klein did something sneaky. She submitted all forty resumes to the Lotus
human resources department.

Not one of the forty applicants, including Kapor, was invited for a job
interview. The founders had built a world that rejected people like them."_

[http://vault.theleadershiphub.com/blogs/if-you-werent-
boss-w...](http://vault.theleadershiphub.com/blogs/if-you-werent-boss-would-
your-company-hire-you)

~~~
jakobegger
Why should a company hire people that are similar to the founders?

At an early stage, companies need very different people than later on. At
first, they need generalists; once you reach a certain size, you need
specialists.

The founders should be self-driven, they should have a vision, they should
know about all parts of the business. Later employees should be excellent in
their speciality, should have execution skills, should be able to follow
someone else's vision.

~~~
xigency
And down the road they need zero generalists? I think the important takeaway
is that they were 100% rejected. Maybe they need fewer people who are framers
or founders as time goes on, but to have none sounds risky.

As you said the founders need vision. If those visionaries are filtered out in
hiring, eventually the company will die (on the inside).

------
mlashcorp
I always interview for "culture fit". In my experience, that's almost always
the bottleneck, and the technical part is rarely a problem. Learning a new
skill is not an earth-shattering problem if you have a good attitude towards
work, and good interpersonal skills are a must in teams

~~~
tehwalrus
Isn't culture fit just another word for "people like me"? There have been
numerous articles reporting the huge damage this sort of optimisation does.

Did you mean "inter-personal skills"? The rest of your answer seems to suggest
so. This is _not_ the same as culture fit.

~~~
ebiester
I've been looking for another word for "someone who is interested in the same
software engineering and organization practices as the rest of the team"
without using culture fit.

I don't care what TV shows they're watching or the color of their skin, but I
do care that they don't grate against testing a peer's ticket instead of
thinking it's below them. I care that they are helpful as a human quality. I
care that they are interested on working on a team that's highly
collaborative.

There are places where I'm not a great cultural fit. If the team's culture is
to take a problem, go off for months, and solve it, it's probably not for me,
but I know people who would be overjoyed in that case. I know people who'd
like nothing more to get a spec and deliver rather than gathering and
implementing requirements based on conversations within the organization.

In some sense, that's people like me, but I was in turn hired because I fit
those criteria. People who fit those criteria seem to be happy with the
engineering portion of the job, and people who don't fit that criteria tend to
be frustrated.

I use the word "cultural fit" but I'm not sure if there's a better term.

~~~
notacoward
Maybe "methodology fit" or "workstyle fit"?

~~~
stuntkite
Neither of those are even close to better. Basically the same but with more
letters and muddy the waters.

The only way to improve the concept, IMO, is to find the definition of the
real thing you are looking for. I think the goal is exponential outcome?
That's what business owners are looking for with any hire. Fit is silly, it
all seems like a puzzle, but it's an ecology. You want a catalyst that
challenges and unifies or someone that strengthens the existing base.

EDIT: Clarity

~~~
notacoward
> Neither of those are even close to better.

You just failed the "being civil" part of the interview. I think I'll let the
GP judge whether those are better. At least I'm trying to _help_ instead of
just slinging stones at others' attempts.

> Exponential outcome maybe?

Seriously? You complain about "more letters" and muddying the waters then you
vomit up _that_ monstrosity?

~~~
stuntkite
I am really sorry you read that that way. I was not saying your contribution
wasn't useful to the dialog. I was just saying that I think the category of
"fit" doesn't need a different term at the front but more a rethink. I was not
saying "Exponential Outcome" was a better set of words, but just my first
blush at what I think the desired thing in a hire is that could be used to
define new terms. I've changed my post to reflect that.

Again, sorry for making you feel like I was shitting on your contribution.

~~~
notacoward
> I think the category of "fit" doesn't need a different term at the front but
> more a rethink.

That didn't seem to be what $ancestor was asking for. It sounded like s/he was
wishing for a slightly different phrase for a slightly different concept, vs.
what "culture fit" usually means. Your "rethink" was not that. It was a
complete shift from strategy to outcome. Is that help, or appropriation? Not
for me to decide, but perhaps something to think about. It's a mistake we
engineers often make, and I'm hardly innocent myself.

~~~
stuntkite
I literally have no idea what you are talking about.

------
_chris_
_> If you want to make a change to your interview process, give it to some of
your current employees first. If anyone fails it, ask yourself if that person
should be fired. The answer is probably no._

That's a fascinating idea that's never crossed my mind. E.g., how many current
employees can pass whiteboard coding exams?

~~~
FeatureRush
Apparently there are already companies that take it a step further. They test
sample of their employees with some fancy IQ test that measures them across
several dimensions. From those results profile of desirable new hire is build
and all candidates get measured by the same test.

On reddit in threads about interviews I've already seen couple people
discussing those strange tests where in many questions there are no obvious
correct/wrong answers, like for example all presented shapes can in their own
way fit in presented pattern.

~~~
eklavya
If there is no obvious right/wrong answer, I wonder if they are limiting their
pool taking people who all think alike (kinda like in-breeding) or are they
using it diversify the ideas and knowledge etc. (like diversifying gene pool).

~~~
FeatureRush
Different answers probably give points to different traits the test measures,
the ambiguity is just irritating for test takers coming from more classical
tests where you know (or at least suspect) what is expected from you.

This whole test setup is not cheap so one can at least hope they considered
the issue of diversity? The other thing is did they actually tested which
teams perform better in specific problem domain that interests them?

------
lucideer
> _less than 10% of the companies that I 've interviewed with have said that
> their interview process was designed to evaluate how effectively someone
> could do the job that they're being hired for._

I don't think an interview process can do this tbh.

A good interview process can evaluate _if_ they can do the job that they're
being hired for, in most cases, but I would say only an actual
trial/probationary period can evaluate _how effectively_ they can do it. And
even then, how effective they are may be environmental - completely external
to their own internal competence.

After concluding that a candidate _can_ do the job, the secondary purpose of
the interview process is filtering for people that will positively affect the
work environment of their colleagues (and/or filter out those who may
negatively affect others). As an interviewer, I would make some effort not to
lean too heavily on my own biases and try and also consider how they'd get on
with my colleagues that I know well, but there is unfortunately always going
to be some implicit bias here.

------
arkadiytehgraet
As an interviewee, one of the questions (that I shamelessly stole from
somewhere on HN) I like to ask recruiters is this: "Do you like working here?"
The answers and the way the answers are given usually tell you quite a lot
about the company and the specific place you are going to work.

~~~
comstock
It’s a fair question, but if you asked me that in front of my boss or
coworkers I would likely immediately take a disliking to you because you put
me in an awkward situation where there are few easy ways to answer honestly.

~~~
arkadiytehgraet
This is why this question is so good: you either like working there, and then
you have no problem answering this question honestly (and without any
awkwardness), or you don't like, then surely you have to come up with some
elaborate yet unclear answer to this question, which is quite clear at that
point, and then I do not really care whether you take a disliking to me or
not, since it does not really matter any more.

~~~
comstock
Maybe in general that’s true. In my case even if I feel it’s a nice place to
work, I wouldn’t like being on of the spot in front of my boss/coworkers. In a
one-to-one interview it would be fine. Which was perhaps more the context of
your comment.

~~~
burger_moon
Not being able to speak freely in front of your peers would be a hard pass
from me. I'm not going to work somewhere I can't feel comfortable speaking
honestly.

~~~
olalonde
Let me guess, you wouldn't work somewhere you are unhappy to work at too?

------
dandare
His point, that hiring process is not a scientific process, is probably
correct. But the same is true about performance review process (in my
opinion). At best, the performance review is unscientific and biased, at worst
it is a popularity contest, while usually, it is a formality.

> I've never had an interview that tried to evaluate my ability to work in a
> team or prioritize tasks - both of which are probably more important to
> doing well in a software engineering job than being able to find anagrams in
> O(n) time.

And I have never seen a test that could reliably evaluate your "ability to
work in a team or prioritize tasks".

The hiring process is usually unscientific because making it reliably
scientific is very expensive.

~~~
rafiki6
Yes, but what about the commonly trotted out line of "hiring mistakes are
expensive so we'd prefer to not hire than make a mistake". Perfect example of
having cake and eating it...You have to eat the cost somewhere. Either it's in
the hiring process, the firing of a bad employee, or spinning your wheels
waiting for the right candidate.

------
conductr
I think this is a bit of a slippery slope. In that, if most employers really
evaluated what skills they needed over cultural fit and their desire for _The
Best_ then, I postulate many of these companies would also realize they have
absolutely no reason to be paying super high US/EU salaries, especially the
salaries for tech talent in the tech hubs.

They would realize that they probably just need a kick ass project management
framework and access to a pool of low paid but capable programmers (eg. a
remote team in India/China/etc). Most startup tech isn't solving any huge tech
problems, it's just building to spec/vision and iterating based on feedback
and maybe if you're lucky you get to do this under load/at scale.) I know
things have been outsourced with countless examples of bad results but I think
it's really just a project management problem - not a skills gap (again for
most startup tech we see today, but probably a significant portion of
enterprise jobs too).

I have more of a bootstrap mindset for most things. So I almost never
understand the $1M seed funded startups that get an office and hire a few
programmers in SV and instantly only have 6 months of runway just to build a
Tinder clone or something with little tech complexity. In my mind, they could
easily outsource development and spend 90% of their money on sales.

Edit: I say "outsource" a lot above, I actually mean remote teammates that you
manage

------
notacoward
He _almost_ gets it right. Hiring for some abstract "best" isn't so great.
Hiring for "culture fit" is practically an invitation to discriminate. OTOH,
people rarely do only one thing at a company, so it's important to remember
that you're hiring for a _job_ rather than a specific task. You need to
evaluate fundamental skills, including collaboration or leadership skills (and
styles), not just knowledge of specific subject matter.

~~~
throw999888away
I have mixed feelings on culture fit becoming a bad word.

I don't disagree with your point but I think there is a danger with ignoring
its value.

For example --leaving aside your views on SV startup sweatshops-- if you're in
a start up, you will at some point work late hours and you will at some point
go through stressful times. Sometimes the things that get you through those
times is that feeling of camaraderie and actually getting on with your
colleagues.

Screening on culture-fit is a good way to guard for that, and at least for me
it is unwise to not associate value with that.

Now, it could be that your culture is inclusivity. But then isn't hiring for
people who fit that mould still hiring for culture fit? Isn't that still
creating a monoculture? Isn't discriminating against a bigot brogrammer (who
may well be great at coding) still discrimination?

~~~
notacoward
The problem is that "culture fit" is too broad and too vague. Often it
includes things that are completely unrelated to job performance. If you want
to make sure people are able/willing to work long hours, ask about that (and
be aware that you're probably discriminating to some degree against people
with families or health issues). If you want to know how someone will handle
stress, ask about that. Not only will you be measuring actual job-related
skills or qualities, but you'll also be telling the candidate something they
should know about the work environment. On the other hand, hobbies and musical
tastes and political views should not be part of a hiring process, and that's
the kind of thing "culture fit" often seems to include.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> If you want to make sure people are able/willing to work long hours, ask
> about that (and be aware that you're probably discriminating to some degree
> against people with families or health issues).

Incidentally, discriminating on the basis of familial status or disability is
illegal in various jurisdictions.

~~~
notacoward
> Incidentally, discriminating on the basis of familial status or disability
> is illegal in various jurisdictions.

Indeed it is, and it should be, but many companies successfully use proxies to
get around that. It's a lot harder to win a suit because a company demanded
long hours than because they explicitly refused to hire people with families
or above a certain age. I didn't mean to encourage such chicanery, which is
why I already had the parenthetical comment about discrimination. My point was
that if there are expectations or behaviors like this, then they should be
addressed specifically instead of under a "culture fit" umbrella. Often that
will make their il/legitimacy clearer, and help to _prevent_ discrimination.

------
listentojohan
One of the good interview experiences I had, included going through a project
I had previously done, framing the problem, how I'd have worked through it
(with class/function level whiteboarding), and what could be improved. It was
a project from a previous job, but too high level to be replicated. But could
see how going through work from a previous job could be problematic (no code
was shown).

------
pjc50
Note that if your company is small, it can be very hard to do any kind of
meaningful statistical process control on hiring.

The "track careers of people you rejected" idea is an interesting one, but
depends very much on how public people make their careers. I suppose you can
rely on LinkedIn for 90% of people.

(What is HN's opinion of the Stack Overflow Developer Story?)

~~~
richmarr
We run an early stage applicant tracking system and see ourselves broadly as a
rejection engine. Something like 95% of the activity on our system relates to
candidates who end up being rejected.

Since our assessment data is structured our current iteration of the product
uses that to create value for rejected candidates, informing them where they
were strong or weak in comparison to the rest of the group, and showing them
some aggregate scoring.

It goes down very well with hiring managers, who typically don't have the time
to respond in detail or at all to rejected candidates, and (for the most part)
goes down very well with candidates.

------
cubano
There are so many cognitive biases in play when it comes to hiring its
basically a total crapshoot no matter what processes and shit is in place.

People hire people they like, period.

~~~
rafiki6
Disagree, we can basically eliminate the personal part of it. Blind
interviewing. I don't need to know name/gender/school etc. Technical skills
test as a filter given to current employees to track if it actually tests for
necessary skills. Second part of interviewing can be assessed by people who
don't see the candidate and we can obscure their voices.

~~~
mratzloff
The cognitive biases aren't just around appearance or voice...

~~~
rafiki6
Not sure what else there can be if you create a normalized test that has been
designed to predict success by being applied to your current employee
population. Take away personal interviewing and voila. I can't judge this
person on my inherent bias towards a race, gender, etc. if I can't see them or
determine where they are from. The test should be the only bar required to
grant a person an opportunity, nothing else. No need for resumes.
[https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-
intervie...](https://hbr.org/2016/04/how-to-take-the-bias-out-of-interviews)

------
comstock
> If you want to make a change to your interview process, give it to some of
> your current employees

I don’t think I would respond well to this as an employee.

~~~
dx034
Why not? I think it's a valid test for a company. If the majority of your
employees wouldn't pass the hiring test, why use it for new employees (unless
you're looking for someone more senior)? Employees can probably best give
feedback on how to adapt it so that it mirrors the actual work.

~~~
comstock
Many people seem comfortable allowing their companies to treat them as low
value commodities and will do anything asked of them.

In general I don’t exactly think like this. I do the work within the scope of
what I’ve been hired to do. I’m lucky, at least right now, that I have this
choice because my skills are somewhat rare. Want work outside the scope of
what I’ve been hired to do? Pay for it, or find someone else.

I don’t want to be asked to interview again, it’s not a pleasant experience
for me, and critically it’s being presented as “something you have to do”. If
you want to do this, offer additional compensation for doing something outside
of the scope of my work.

~~~
BeetleB
>Many people seem comfortable allowing their companies to treat them as low
value commodities and will do anything asked of them.

If that's how you feel about it, would you not agree that asking such
questions in an interview is treating the candidate as "low value"?

~~~
comstock
Personally I think interviewees should be financially compensated for
interviews. The typical view is that they’re being compensated with a “chance
for a job”.

------
ksk
These posts always read to me as being a bit presumptuous. The fact that
you're looking for a job at that particular company means they're doing
_something_ right, with regards to hiring, or shipping quality products, or
having a good work culture, etc, etc. If I was the interviewer, I would never
hire a person with this sort of "know it all" attitude. If you think you can
be a better interviewer, then you have to show you are, rather than coming up
with a logical argument of "doing it this way makes sense". Basically, unless
you yourself are in that position, or have intimate knowledge of it, you don't
know why someone made those decisions.

------
unoti
In the original article the author said:

> I've never had an interview that tried to evaluate my ability to work in a
> team or prioritize tasks...

I found this interesting, because there are some good ways to look for this
that I always ask when interviewing. I wonder if the author had been checked
on these things and just didn’t notice.

One thing I always do in interviews is after I see the approach the candidate
is taking, show them another approach and see if they can understand it and
run with it. Many candidates struggle with wrapping their brain around any
other approach than their own. This is about collaboration and teamwork.

It’s also very common to have behavioral questions that talk through what some
challenges were and how you solved them, and to ask probing questions about
how the candidate dealt with differing opinions in the best way to proceed.
This also is looking at teamwork skills.

Regarding prioritizing tasks, it’s routine for me to ask a candidate to break
a problem down into components. Then evaluate which are the most difficult,
and which they’d tackle first and why. I’m looking to see if they try to
reduce risks early in their process. This is something more senior people do
better.

I wonder if the author has indeed been interviewed about teamwork skills and
just didn’t realize it.

------
j_s
I would like to see YC take over the initial chunk of the hiring process for
their companies, and publically document the heck out of how to do it best.

Posts like this one demonstrate that free access to the front page of HN for
job listings isn't enough:

Don't work for CrateJoy |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486301)

------
kreetx
A side note, but the latter two answers (2. being a good fit and 3. doing a
good job) sound very much the same to me.

~~~
0xffff2
I think "fit" is referring to ability to get along with the rest of the team,
regardless of ability to do the job. They aren't quite opposites, but they are
mostly unrelated.

~~~
kreetx
It can mean that too, yes, but if the recruiter word-by-word says 2. then it
could also mean 3. But then the rest the rest of the argument quite some
weight since 3. is not rare anymore, as it's included in 2., too.

------
dvt
> I've heard "Hmm, I don't actually know what it is that we're looking for"
> from a few recruiters

Why do you even care _what_ recruiters say? They're there to make as many
hires as possible and get their commission. Don't get me wrong, this is
actually a decent question, but you might as well ask a car salesman what he
likes doing in his free time. It _doesn 't matter_ \-- he's trying to sell you
a car.

> How do you evaluate how well you're meeting your goal? -- The majority of
> the companies that I ask this to essentially answer "we don't" to this
> question.

I'm going to go ahead and call BS on this one. Literally every company
(outside of early-stage startups) has some kind of performance review. Most of
these are completely artificial and completely suck, but they're definitely
_there_.

~~~
tehwalrus
Performance reviews and their flaws are discussed in detail later in the
article. In particular, they detect false positives but not false negatives.

------
derekmhewitt
Just as a spitball idea...

What about a structured "cohort" hiring process where you give potential
employees short term (literally one or two days, where you have a group
exercise like a "hackathon" where you make a sample product for demo, then
moving up to one or two week rounds) contracts that allow you to evaluate and
accept (pass on to future rounds) or reject a large candidate pool and thereby
filter your potential future employees. Given the current costs of recruiters,
HR personnel, interviews and headhunters this might actually end up being
cheaper than current "traditional" hiring methods and could generate some very
effective development teams.

~~~
scrumper
That means you can only hire people who don't currently have a job.

------
austincheney
My goals as an interviewer:

1\. Do you have a solid understanding of the foundations for your
skill/discipline?

2\. If you were given $100,000 VC capital and told to build a revolutionary
new thing how would you build it?

If a candidate cannot adequately address the first objective then I will find
another candidate who can. This is pure and simple elimination with simple
non-biased questions on things the candidate should know to do their job
without abstractions, tooling, and other trendy bullshit.

The second objective is where I can evaluate my bias against the candidate's,
but only after the candidate has passed the technical evaluation in a non-
biased manner.

~~~
qaq
No offense but if candidate has a credible answer to "2\. If you were given
$100,000 VC capital and told to build a revolutionary new thing how would you
build it?" wtf would she/he work for you :)?

~~~
Can_Not
It's because he wants to focus on building the thing, not focus on acquiring
VC funding.

~~~
marcosdumay
You are really asking to be bullshited (even if people had a good answer, they
won't have an elevator pitch to tell you in an interview). Unless you are
looking for people that can make an argument, you are selecting for the wrong
trait.

~~~
austincheney
> You are really asking to be bullshited

The question is rhetorical, so what does this matter? It is part of a job
interview. It is not a VC pitch. If this confuses a candidate and they answer
a question not asked I would not hire them. Interpreting and following
instructions are important skills.

~~~
marcosdumay
> so what does this matter?

You are select for the "can bullshit people on short notice" ability. It is
very likely not correlated with other abilities required for the job, thus, if
it is not required, you will very likely fail the stronger candidates because
of that.

~~~
austincheney
Creativity is directly correlated with problem solving.

~~~
marcosdumay
And dishonesty correlates with what?

~~~
austincheney
What dishonesty? The entire thing is a rhetorical exercise on the fly.

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eagsalazar2
No interviewing system is perfect or even good. Having said that interviewing,
in my experience, isn't actually the biggest problem companies have with
hiring. The biggest failures are when you have that realization that someone
isn't working out where most companies don't have the stomach to deal with the
problem decisively through candid feedback/conversation or possibly letting
that person go. This natural shyness around confrontation hurts everyone
involved including both the employee in question and all their team members.

------
kevinmobrien
Interviewing is subjective. It’s about sitting down in a specific context and
extrapolating, based on incomplete information, about a future set of
conditions that will likely change when time catches up to them.

If we can start with the idea that interviews are a very blunt instrument, the
process becomes at least somewhat compressible: it selects for people who
recognize the parameters and perform well within that context. At best, that
pattern-matches to success. At worst, it filters out talented folks who don’t
interview well, but could code well.

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jasonmaydie
"Best people" and "good fit" means they are looking for someone with both
technical and soft skills. They don't want a skilled worker who is difficult
to manage or communicate with, and they don't want a nice guy who is not
skilled. It makes sense to me.

------
marcoperaza
I disagree with the reasoning here. Just because the interviewer says 1 or 2,
doesn't mean that they're not actually or also looking for 3. We humans tend
to be imprecise in understanding and stating our own motivations.

------
scraft
The best interview I had (for a lead games programmer position) was a written
test, I can't remember the exact details but perhaps 24 pages and 45 minutes
to complete it. Before starting I flicked through the entire test to get a
feel for what was being asked of me, and then for a little while debated just
getting up and leaving the room. It felt a bit crazy, a test on all sorts of
disciplines of games programming that I wasn't an expert in, and I didn't
intend to become an expert in (and the job I was applying for didn't require
me to be an expert in). But I calmed down, tackled the test in the best way I
could, answered the questions in an order where my most confident answers (and
quick to complete) answers were done first, then moving onto ones I had a
pretty good idea of, then ones I knew less well, etc.

40 minutes in, the CEO of the company came in, it is a ~300 man company, so it
was interested in itself that he came in. Anyway, he wanted to go through the
test, I said I hadn't finished yet, and had made a note of the start time, and
still had 5 minutes remaining. He said it doesn't matter, lets have a look.
And he flicked through the test and didn't look at my answers and instead
found a section of the test which I had completely ignored (it was to do with
AI and path finding, both topics I have done almost nothing on during my
entire education and career). Of course, this was the question he wanted me to
answer, I explained the reasons I hadn't answered it, and said if they wanted
me to do things like this it really wouldn't be a suitable job for me. But he
persisted, stop worrying about all of these things, just answer the question
now. Again I had that slight feeling of wanting to just leave, but again I
overcame in.

I started talking him through the things I did know about the question,
pointing out areas which could cause problems, then started listing what I
could do to limit the question to avoid some of these issues (it had a picture
of a top down level, the question was inside a box, I said lets initially
forget about the box for example). Then I started just talking about an
initial algorithm which could route AI around the level - I said it would
obviously be really bad (basically AI just walking into things, then working
out where to go next, and then a bit later saying oh I could keep track of
where I have been in case I end up at the same point, etc.) we talked more
about it, he asked some questions, and bit by bit I came up with a solution.

He said that's interesting, because during this process you have described
parts of various algorithms which someone who has studied AI would know about,
but you are going from a brute force perspective, not having any way points in
the level, no extra level knowledge. I said I didn't realize I was allowed to
do that, if I could do that, I could potentially come up with some nodes in
the level, and rather than bumping into objects, go between nodes, work out
the distance between nodes, build up a graph so you know the best way to get
between points. Again he was happy, I was describing, or partially describing
an actual solution. His next question was but how would I work out where to
put the way point nodes, and again I just starting looking at the image,
thinking about good positions for the way points, looking at the normals from
each wall face, and started to see that putting way points as far away as
possible from all normals had some advantages, and bit by bit came up with
some sort of solution about how to do this.

By the end of it, there was a solution which involved preprocessing the level
data offline, when the game runs using this data to move around the level,
being able to handle paths becoming blocked (or new paths being opened),
strategies for running this on a separate thread or CPU, asynchronous to the
main game. It was demonstrating knowledge of the full pipeline for making a
game from artist making levels to game running at 60Hz on a PC/console, and
also taking into account human resource, i.e. we could do things this way,
which would give us a slight edge, but it would make the designers life a lot
harder, so I'd probably not do that, take the performance hit, which is small
and can probably be won back by the level designerse having extra time to
optimize anyway.

I was offered the job, ultimately I had a better offer elsewhere so I didn't
take it, but for me the test made a lot of sense. My day to day job (Tech
Director of a 12 man games development studio) is constantly having to solve
problems which initially do not appear to have an answer. The ability to break
down an issue, not panic, look from various different perspectives, build up a
solution, have a good feeling for what parts of the solution are weak and need
further research etc. to me makes a huge difference between an 'ok'
programmer/developer and an exceptional one. I haven't used the same test
approach, but have certainly learned a lot from it when hiring people, never
trying to trick interviewees, quite the opposite, trying to give them as many
options as possible, and just urging them show me how they would be able to
deal with day to day issues and come out on top. I certainly worry that whilst
I got through, some people really would have just walked out, and in some
cases you could argue those people wouldn't work well when faced with tough
problems and lots of pressure, but on the other hand, but outside of the
testing environment they'd be fine. Anyway, I personally wouldn't want to
create quite as much stress/pressure if I were to use these technique in
future.

------
mrlyc
When interviewing potential employers, I ask them

1\. Do you conduct regular peer reviews of your documentation and code?

2\. Do you have a bug tracking system?

------
mratzloff
I've accumulated so much material about interviewing I've thought about
writing a book. No one would read it, of course, because everyone thinks
they're an expert at it already.

In my experience, 9 out of 10 interviewers are terrible. They come up with
assumptions before talking to a candidate, then come up with even more
assumptions during the interview. These assumptions are almost always
unchecked, meaning that they never ask a single question to verify their
guesswork.

Perhaps the most critical failure, which this article touches on, is that
people can't adequately describe why their hiring successes were successes and
why their hiring failures were failures. If they did, they'd understand just
how many of their interview process (such as it is) is a crapshoot. They have
no conscious understanding of what it takes to be successful at their company,
because they've never thought about it in any serious way.

They ask for code samples, but never look at them. What's really important is
that you know all of their current technologies and use them in exactly the
way that they do currently. So to determine that they sometimes give out
poorly-conceived coding assignments that are either testing something
completely irrelevant or are so large in scope that you are basically
rebuilding half their product.

They ghost candidates, even candidates that have gone through multiple rounds
of interviews, forgetting that people who interact with their company go out
into the world and form opinions and things to say about them. This is
especially true of candidates who are really engaged with your company's
mission. (Besides, it's just rude.)

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, except when being
interviewed, where anything you accomplished at a previous company is viewed
with the detached impatience of someone eager for you to stop talking so long
so they can get to their questions. Listening to what people _actually_ say,
instead of just your impression of what they say, means listening to the
motives, emotions, and body language surrounding what they're saying and
asking questions that get at the heart of _those_. It's the single most
effective interviewing method, but almost no one does it.

Because I hire others, when I am being interviewed, a popular question is "How
do I hire?" Everyone is looking for a solution with the appearance of a
rigorous methodology. If I wrote that book, I'd have to sell a snake oil
solution that guarantees great hires, because no one wants to hear the
reality: that it requires experience, empathy, and active listening, and
there's no one-size-fits-all solution for each person. People don't like
nuance; they want a simple, step-by-step guide, not some amorphous process
that might take a lot of self-work.

------
dilemma
Using proxies for competence is a slippery slope towards misdirection and
irrelevance - and as a result, incorrect hiring decisions.

In another thread today, someone mentioned they reject every CV that has two
typos or more. It's a proxy, and it is irrelevant for the job.

Once you start going down the path of proxies, you add more and more far
removed ones. To keep hiring performance high, resist adding the first proxy.
Actually ask questions relevant to past work experience that maps to the
actual job. Maybe do work samples.

To circle back to the two questions in the blog post, no interviewer can
answer them because they use proxies too far removed.

~~~
logfromblammo
Think of the resume as a deliverable. This potential employee sent out the
deliverable without reviewing it for spelling and grammatical correctness.
They almost certainly did not ask someone else to proofread it and suggest
corrections.

Would you want to put this person in a position where they may have to deliver
binaries, code, or other documents to a customer? Would they ignore or skip
steps in your delivery process, too?

------
johnpython
If there is a gross lack of diversity within your company and you routinely
use "culture fit" as an excuse to turn down PoC candidates, what conclusion
can be drawn about your organization?

