

My Worst Phone Screen - nathanh
http://blog.hirelite.com/my-worst-interview

======
dotBen
For the record I just want to point out that this post is yet-another trojan
horse style advert for Hirelite.

They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise
meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.

Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the
_my_ part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link
terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me
conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.

Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on
their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on
these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.

Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see
child comment below...

~~~
nathanh
I try to make sure Posterous attributes them to me (see the end of this post
for an example).

If people don't find them interesting, I can stop posting them. I had been
under the impression that self-posts were fine. Most of the time, we're trying
to be an advocate for job seekers (currently just developers) in a market that
is very company friendly.

~~~
dotBen
Nathan, you're clearly very clever at intentionally writing copy that will
pique the interest of hacker news crowd, which presumably is your target
audience.

I think where you fall down is that submitting all the articles yourself. It
removes a lot of the authenticity from the notion that someone independent to
your company thought your post had merit to be on HN. That is also why usually
it's frowned upon to submit your own blog posts to HN.

Also the anecdote to pitch ratio of your phone screen post makes it feel to me
that the only reason you crafted the content was to be able to make the pitch
in the first place.

It all feels like this the discovery of your service is being being done by
force not osmosis.

~~~
nathanh
Thanks for the feedback Ben. I post the articles on HN when I publish them.
Maybe next time, I won't publish them to HN and see if the readers do it on
their own.

I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found
some of the best content here to be self-posts.

~~~
dotBen
_I was under the impression that self-posts were not frowned upon. I've found
some of the best content here to be self-posts._

There's nothing wrong with the odd self-post, especially if it is a Show
HN/Tell HN or whatever. But almost all of your recent activity of your account
is promoting either your company, your event at SxSW or your personal blog.

How many self-promoting posts do you need to make before it becomes reasonable
to ask whether you are fairly contributing to the HN community? Perhaps you
could use your ability to identify successful content to curate and promote
the work of others too by submitting more content created by others?

------
radicaldreamer
I literally thought this was going to be a post about phone screen quality or
a comparison of smartphone screens.

~~~
dpcan
Ha! Me too, in fact I've clicked it 3 different times today because each time
I wondered why I haven't read about different phone screens yet - then slap my
forehead. Apparently I really want to know about the quality of various phone
screens.

~~~
josegonzalez
Odd, my browser makes links I've clicked a different color (gray versus
black). Are you using lynx, or just a combination of different browsers?

~~~
Macha
Home-Mobile-Work I guess? That would explain seeing the link unclicked three
times.

------
moldyapple
It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had
technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their
companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10,
etc.

Other horrible interview questions:

1\. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up
again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention
something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was
way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's
emphatically _not_ false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't
objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my
weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All
these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)

2\. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened
to me at Palantir.)

3\. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything
else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.

4\. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself?
(Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the
person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I
like.)

5\. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about.
For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the
normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text
classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a
normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere,
when I said I didn't understand the question.)

6\. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the
runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the
Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)

------
d0m
Even thought the phone screen was amusing, I couldn't help but think to
myself: Did it really happened? And... when?

While reading it, I felt like it was a cute/short marketing story. So, I
wasn't surprised at all to read the last paragraph (Working for hirelite, a
better interview process blahblah)

~~~
yummyfajitas
I can believe it. Recruiters are clueless. One of my favorite recruiter
conversations (note: recruiter was British):

R: I noticed you are located in Jersey City, but this job is in New York. If
you get this job, how long would it take you to relocate?

Me: I'm confused.

R: My client wants people onsite. No remote workers.

Me: I live 15-25 minutes away from lower Manhattan [where the client is
located]. I take the PATH train there every day.

R: I see, but my client wants people located in NY. They are quite clear on
this. You aren't even in the same state.

Me (having no intention of moving): I'll need to give my landlord 30 days
notice.

Just humor recruiters. It's not their fault they have no clue. If they ask you
to rate yourself on a scale of 9-10, say "11". If they have no idea of
American geography, tell them you will relocate.

~~~
brown9-2
If the recruiter has no clue of geography, or heck is in a completely
different country - what are the chances the position they are recruiting for
is any good?

------
brown9-2
_Recruiter: Do you have J2SE?_

Seriously at this point, just walk away. Nothing good can come after a
question like this.

(Not because of the technology, solely the wording of the question)

~~~
csel
Anytime a recruiter mentions the word 'Rock Star', 'Ninja' etc.

Run or hang up.

------
bherms
Short interesting post that brings up a good lesson, not for job seekers, but
for recruiters. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for those unaware of it, states
(paraphrased) that the more competent you are, the less confident you are in
your competency. Inversely, the less competent you are, the more confident you
become in your ignorance.

Recruiters almost always want to hear someone tell them "I'm the best of the
best" in an interview, but generally the only people who think that are middle
of the road at best. Recruiters should know this sort of thing and look for
the guys that say 6-7 instead of the guy claiming to be the Michael Jordan of
computer programming.

~~~
arghnoname
This is true relative to their own ability. A highly competent person may
consider themselves to be more skilled relative to average than an incompetent
does, but the highly competent person will most likely still be under-
estimating his ability and the incompetent over-estimating their ability.

This is critical, because it means thinking you suck doesn't imply that really
you are good. A 95% percentile person might think they are in the 60th
percentile, and so might a 5% person. Both have the same opinion of
themselves.

Another critical point is Dunning-Kruger hypothesized that for highly skilled
individuals this effect was due to their lack of awareness about how
relatively unskilled others were. When they were given a chance to look at
other work they were able to more accurately assess their knowledge.

One possible control is instead of asking individuals how good they are would
be to show individuals existing code and ask them how good _it_ is. Dunning-
Kruger would suggest that incompetent people would be too ignorant to
accurately assess it, and most likely over-estimate its skill, whereas skilled
people _are_ able to accurately assess fault in others' work.

------
hammock
The point of dunning-kruger effect is not that there's no correlation- it's
just not linear. Studies show there is a tier of most competent people who
tend to rate themselves lower than the secondmost tier of competence, who rate
themselves higher due to a combination of signaling effects and dunning-kruger
("too dumb to know how dumb you are," or more accurately, "not quite smart
enough to know that there is a lot you don't know").

------
protomyth
I am reminded about an incident that occurred during my time in college. A
teacher had "determined" that a lot of the class was cheating(1) and decided
to grade based on program performance. This led to a lot of sizing up of our
fellow students. One worried my friend John and me greatly as he talked and
acted as if he were God's gift to programming and was practically giddy with
excitement at the prospect of kicking his fellow student's butts.

I am sure he would have said "10" to this recruiter without a second thought.

He handed in his assignment at the same time John and I did. He could not help
but tell us about his algorithm to do the graphics faster than anybody else.
His explanation led us to believe (and be proven right later) that he had a
poor understanding of performance and believe that shorter line count always
had better performance(2).

(1) the people he thought were cheating, weren't (2) yes, load time was
important, but it wouldn't tip the scale - plus writing to the same byte of
memory multiple times doesn't beat an array lookup and one write

------
tptacek
A conversation with a recruiter isn't an "interview".

~~~
nathanh
I just updated the title from "My Worst Interview" to "My Worst Phone Screen"
to be more clear.

~~~
jrockway
Not really a phone screen, either. The phone screen happens after the
recruiter gives your information to someone you'll actually be working with.

~~~
gcheong
If there are answers to questions that result in your information not being
passed on to someone who you'll actually be working with then it's a phone
screen.

~~~
tptacek
If after the transaction you could still go directly to the company and
interview with them, it's not a phone screen.

~~~
gcheong
Well first he said HR, then he said recruiter so I assumed a recruiter working
in the HR department directly for that company not as a 3rd party which could
be bypassed after the fact without an inside contact.

~~~
tptacek
If you say "recruiter" to me, I think "huckster third-party middleman trying
to insert themselves between HR and candidates". My definition is, I think,
pretty close to the prevailing one.

~~~
wooster
At the last BigCo I worked at, we would call our HR reps who did phone screens
recruiters. We had no outside recruiters.

Otherwise, this "someone is wrong on the Internet" stuff that just takes up
space on comment threads on HN has gotten way out of hand.

~~~
tptacek
I reread the article. You're probably right (he talks about getting "called
back for an in-person interview).

I swear to god I'm not commenting out of someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet-ism.
There are developers out there that really believe that what recruiters think
about them matters, and recruiters really do prey on that.

As an employer, I also have an irrational distaste for recruiters. They are
the worst cold-call inside salespeople ever; it is _impossible_ to get them
off the phone.

------
gojomo
If you know in advance that's the game you're playing...

 _Do you have J2SE?_

Yes. J2SE, J3SE, whatever it takes.

 _How good are you at programming on a scale from 1 to 10?_

11.

 _You're hired!_

------
wesleyd
That's what a Monty Python sketch of a phone screen would be like.

------
dpcan
I haven't interviewed for a LONG time, and I'm not sure what recruiting is
because I'm quite disconnected with big business practices, but I do believe
Interviewing is just Selling yourself), so on a completely arbitrary and
imaginary scale, why wouldn't he just say "I'm a 10"? (I know the developer
was thinking of a particular scale - but was the interviewer?)

~~~
bartonfink
You don't do that because you aren't sure what scale the asker has in mind
when they ask you to rate yourself on a 1-10 scale. If Paul Graham asks me
that ?, his view of a 10 is going to be significantly different from some
recruiter whose last job was managing a Dairy Queen.

I've handled this by giving my own rating as well as who I think a 10 would
be. For instance, I'd say that I'm a 5 but my 10 is someone like Bill Joy or
Linus Torvalds - truly world class developers.

~~~
yanowitz
Agreed - answer by first calibrating the scale. Or run screaming, if you can
afford to blow off the interview.

------
ja27
A dozen years ago a few of us interviewed this guy, thought he was a good fit.
When we went to check in with our boss to see if we could hire him, she turned
him down. Why? "He seemed kind of geeky."

------
mhw
Oh, _that_ kind of phone screen. For a moment there I thought we might have
some interesting discussion about Gorilla Glass.

------
siddhant
If this is the way most recruiters work (by just following buzzwords), why do
companies have recruiters? Just curious.

------
Hominem
That programmer level matrix linked in the article is even dumber than the
interview

------
georgieporgie
The sad thing is that the team of developers at the company may have been the
most brilliant people you've never worked with. At my last company, we had a
very difficult time getting even vaguely qualified people in (I'm no elitist,
we're talking folks who literally could not code a for loop). When I looked
into the methods used by our internal recruiter to advertise jobs, I was
appalled. I can't even imagine how awful his phone screens were.

