

Ask HN: How to conduct interviews to identify hackers? - evolution

HN,<p>I'm walking to interview people for internship from renowned technical institute here in India. What are the approaches I should take in interviewing to identify their hacker quotient?<p>To clarify, the internship will be into technical -- identification and implementation of user behavior analysis, statistics and pattern algorithms.
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viraptor
I noticed that a simple, open ended task with a lot of time to solve it gives
you a nice idea. I'm not sure what kind of task would be applicable for you,
but I do a simple database manipulation in python. Some people will just do
the minimum that works (or sometimes doesn't), but some will send the whole
git repository, show that they did tdd, generate documentation, handle
logging/reporting, etc. It becomes obvious quickly who do you talk to.

These are done at home before the interview - I don't think we need to worry
about anyone getting outside help to get a perfect answer. With the amount of
bad/mediocre answers the onesI'm looking for tend to really stand out. And
issues can be verified at the interview.

The trick is to invite people to go as far as _they_ want instead of giving
strict boundaries. And lots of time. If it should take an hour to complete,
give out a couple of days before the interview anyway. If the answer is really
good, the interviewed person will be able to talk for hours about the details.

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lsiebert
A few suggestions.

I'd avoid a maximal test as a basis for your decision. It's fine to test to
make sure a potential intern has the technical knowledge to succeed, but
studies have shown that given a familiarity with the subject, real world
ability is largely not correlated with being able to do really well on a test
of how fast/smart they are on a test. What seems to be a good predictor is
something called grit... Basically how well a person deals with setbacks,
keeps moving, perseveres etc. You should ask about setbacks and challenges
they have faced and how they dealt with them.

I recall that there are grit assessment tools like questionnaires; I know West
Point recently began to use one for it's cadet applicants. There may be one
available online.

Remember that good hackers may be introverted, shy, or lack social skills.
People have inherent biases against such people, tending to think of them as
less intelligent and capable. Also remember that people have a bias and will
rate more attractive people as smarter, more competent etc. Try to be aware of
these inherent biases. so you pick the best candidate on their ability and
merits.

Hope that is helpful.

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leeny
Ask them some basic coding exercises. Mind you, I don't mean testing them on
specific knowledge of a language (e.g. "does java always pass by reference?")
but rather testing how they solve a specific problem. Iconic, overused example
of this is reversing a linked list, though by now I feel like everyone has
memorized how to do it because it's such a common interview question.

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lis
For starters you could check if they have a github account. This might not be
the best indicator, but it could give you a hint.

You could explicitly ask for open source projects they have contributed too
(or that they are following).

~~~
evolution
yes, thank you for the idea. Although I'm not quite sure undergraduate
students here contribute much to the open source projects.

