
A humble alternative to technical interviews - realbarack
https://blog.zachwf.com/2019/02/a-humble-alternative-to-technical.html
======
ebiester
"It could also sew some bitterness within the engineering team: it might be
seen as unfair that some people can get hired through the nepotistic route,
while others have to do the tech loop."

More importantly, it will reinforce your organization's demographics. If your
trusted referrers are white and male, their networks will be overwhelmingly
white and male and it's just putting up another block toward those not already
in the system. If that happens in one company, it's likely not a big deal. If
it happens systemically, you'll see a bigger problem.

(People build networks in college, with people of the same demographics ->
people use those networks to get people in with a lower bar of entry while
those without the benefit of the network will face a barrier that the people
that were hired might not have been able to clear.)

The problem is that we don't have a better solution to the technical
interview.

~~~
thanatropism
You're fetishizing "demographics".

It's unfortunately that people don't get their fair chance period. That at
times this is evidenced by things that are more visible (black versus white,
female versus male) rather than more invisible (extroverted rather than
introverted, smiling versus shifty-doesn't-look-you-in-the-eyes) is both
unfortunate (there should be no racism!) but also symptomatic of which things
we care about and which things we don't.

People discriminated for reasons we don't care about (introverted, can't make
eye contact) are at the bottom of the pyramid then. We've decided they don't
have "demographics" and don't matter.

~~~
CydeWeys
Of key importance here is that race, gender, etc. are federally protected
classes, while introversion is not. Thus, businesses have way more incentives
to curtail discrimination against the former than the latter.

~~~
andrewflnr
I know you probably didn't mean to imply otherwise, but it's worth saying out
loud: that it's not illegal to discriminate against people with poor social
skills does not at all make it ok. The context was ethics, not law, as I read
it.

~~~
CydeWeys
Software development is a team activity, thus social skills are important. I
don't know if companies are "discriminating" in this area so much as they are
simply trying to find people with the right skills for the job.

~~~
belorn
There is several contradicting data points for what is an optimal hiring
strategy for a company. We have the old strategy of making members of a team
feel like then are kin, a.k.a band of brothers. The military use/used this a
lot and the underlying biological theory is that people will sacrifice self-
interest for individuals which is perceived as kin, or as the quote goes a
person will sacrifice themselves for either two siblings or eight cousins.

The opposite strategy is diversity with the ability for better adaptation. A
team with multiple perspectives is said to better anticipate the need of a
diverse customer base.

A third strategy is to look at specific risk. If for example theft by
employees are a high risk issue then rejecting applicants with correlating
traits with high risk for theft would be beneficial, which would be low social
economic status, but those correlate to race and ethnic class.

If we look at the issue from the perspective of what benefit a company the
most we end up in many cases with massive discrimination. Thus for social
reasons we address the issue as an ethical question.

------
Pokepokalypse
I tend to look at a candidate's work history.

If they've worked at least 10 years, as a coder - it's VERY unlikely that
they're a complete liar. Especially if you can call former co-workers, or look
at code samples they have online on a personal github, or look at their post
history on stackoverflow, or things like that.

Even a technical description of prior projects - is a really good indicator of
whether they're competent.

Puzzle solving - on the other hand, bears little resemblance to actual job
requirements in the real world. It's honestly a dumb way to vet candidates.
Would I like to see if a candidate, out of a pack of 5 or so potentially equal
candidates, has a better approach to creative problem solving? You bet. But
I'm more interested in their inter-personal skills, communication skills, and
their instincts towards the ethical challenges we face as engineers. (like:
when things go south - and blame starts flying). Who do I want on my team?
That's the most important question.

~~~
WilliamEdward
"Puzzle solving" is a nice way to dumb down the importance of good software
engineering vs good coding skills. This is especially important at the big 4
or 5. They don't really, truly care what languages you know or what stack you
know. They will give you the environment to use whatever you want.

What they need is someone who is good at solving problems, which ties into
your comment about dealing with bad situations. This is something startups
eventually adopt once they mature past needing a web developer to just throw
together a website for them, and on to someone who is more flexible and loyal.

So please don't reduce the importance of good engineering down to "puzzles".
They are a good indicator of someone who has all those qualities you describe.

And i wouldn't limit anyone to the big 5. If you believe Google's interview is
pure memorisation and no problem solving, don't interview with them. My point
is a good interview knows the importance of problem solving, whether solved
correctly or not, is about how you solve the problem, and so they design their
interviews thusly. That's my point which is contrary to the common sentiment
here that "puzzle" interviews are a waste of time..

This is especially true when really wealthy companies will teach you the
technologies you need to learn. You simply can't teach a good problem solving
skillset, though.

~~~
learc83
Good engineering is important. But solving a problem on a whiteboard isn't
"good engineering". The ability to solve whiteboard puzzles in a time boxed
adversarial setting, is nothing at all like solving large complex engineering
problems through "good engineering" practices.

I know plenty of capital E Engineers. None of them have whiteboard interviews.
They are expected to solve problems, but none of them are expected to draw
schematics for a bridge while someone watches over their shoulders.

No other non-performance based industry has this kind of weird hazing ritual.
Whiteboard interviews are nothing more than the current fad--they definitely
aren't necessary requirements to hire "good engineers".

~~~
WilliamEdward
Do you think the school system also isn't a good way to vet people, then?
Since exams are basically just "whiteboard interviews".

~~~
learc83
1\. Unless you are in a performing arts program, exams aren't really anything
like whiteboard interviews. They are much more limited in scope. You generally
have more time. There's no one watching your every step. You don't have to
talk while solving a problem. They tend to be written by people with at least
some formal training in pedagogy. They don't tend to be written and
administered by 24 year olds who are trying to prove how smart they are. Your
job while in school is to study for exams, so you tend to have more time to do
so.

2\. This part is more important. School is about a lot more than exams.
Projects were usually about 50% of the grade in CS classes.

If you made it through 4 years of the CS program I went through, you know how
to program, or you paid someone to go for you for all 4 years.

So yeah I'd take a B average from my school as proof that you know how to
program.

But I wouldn't make it a requirement.

------
vgoh1
I grew up poor, and out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total
of zero engineers. I would still be unemployed to this day if this type of
hiring were the norm (although it is not entirely uncommon). I can also say,
that the engineers that we have had come through our organization based on
referrals have not been the best quality. They tend to be engineers that are
generally likeable, but not very good. Referrals are probably the way with the
least friction to hire someone, so any time the way with the least friction is
not being used as much, you have to wonder why.

~~~
chrisseaton
> out of (mechanical) engineering college new a grand total of zero engineers

How did you manage to do an engineering degree and not get to know any other
engineers?

~~~
justinpombrio
I made friends in college by sharing a dorm and by hanging out on campus.
Later I made friends through friends, but those were the essential starting
points.

If you're poor, there's a good chance you're not staying in the (often very
expensive) dorms, and that you don't have much time to hang out on campus
because you have a job. I can imagine this kind of thing making it much harder
to make friends.

~~~
sethammons
Bingo. I made exactly zero connections while at university. Why? I had a kid
young. We both worked to make things float. I did not go to school events,
study groups, etc. Once, to finish a group project, we went to a kid's room in
a dorm. Literally the only time I was ever in a dorm. My very limited social
time was spent with existing friends.

------
dahart
I don’t even _want_ the ability to refer someone into my company. That’s very
risky and puts pressure on me to be right, when I might be wrong. I have
referred friends who’ve been rejected, and I’m glad because that’s better than
hiring my friend and having them not fit in. Then it’s _my_ fault.

I’ve interviewed and referred many people and made a lot of hiring decisions,
I would rather have everyone agree, I don’t think the ability for a single
person to refer someone past the interview process is a good idea at all.

None of the risks listed even compare to the risk of hiring someone who isn’t
actually very good or doesn’t get along with the team.... and despite thorough
interviews that still happens all the time. If the candidate is worth
referring, then the interviews will not likely be a problem. Things do go
wrong occasionally, but not very often.

Edit: I also meant to add that I think referrals are already weighed very
heavily in interviews in my experience. Sometimes even too much. Interviews
are already easier for candidates when someone who’s respected makes the
referral, so to some degree the proposal here already reflects reality.

~~~
hinkley
I don’t refer friends, I refer former coworkers that I would like to work with
again.

Problem is I don’t have the same diversity in my referral pool as I’d like to
see at work. Last couple of places have been pretty homogenous and I’m less
keen on referring people I last worked with ten years ago.

~~~
dahart
Of course. My coworkers are also my friends. By “friend” I mean people I know
that I’ve worked with before and that I like and would vouch for because
they’re good, as opposed to people I’ve worked with that I don’t like, or
social acquaintances.

I’m with you on diversity too, these days I prefer interviewing people I don’t
know and people with very different backgrounds than mine.

------
subjoriented
I use interviews to evaluate a whole lot more than just hire/no-hire.

I'm looking to understand what role someone is going to play in the
organization, and to help understand which team a person we're likely going to
hire will be a best match for.

We organize our interview loops around this, and a critical part of the
conversation in the debrief is role and team matching - not just a hire/no-
hire decision. Plus, we use this time to provide feedback to whoever the
hiring manager is about the candidate and potential future team member, which
streamlines more than just headcount.

Finally, the interview loop is an opportunity to manage cronyism. While we've
got a lot of people I trust to refer exclusively strong candidates, I don't
trust a single one to make fiat decisions. There's a human element to giving
someone that level of decision making authority, and without sharing gory
details - I've benefitted from having committee decisions in this situation.

Managing the feelings of referrer's getting their candidates rejected in a
hard problem. I've dealt with that in the past a number of ways but don't have
a working theory, other than "it's a job, people make mistakes, and hiring is
fit and timing as much as it is about technical prowess".

------
woolvalley
This is a no go in large companies, because the large company wants to avoid
'cliques of incompetence' and personal fiefdoms developing, not to mention all
of the other problems people have mentioned.

In large organizations, there are too many people for execs to know everyone,
so a standardized but rigorous process is better from their perspective.

I say tech's process is better than many other industries processes, which is
outsourcing evaluation based on credential prestige.

~~~
Apocryphon
Do it in the same way that ancient empires from the Romans to the Mongols did
it- break preexisting relationships with distance. Referrals are posted to
"frontier" teams separated sufficiently far away from referrers. Scatter them
across the org.

~~~
woolvalley
Then they have lunch together and talk about work? They would have to work in
unrelated things, which is hard to do when everyone is the same kind of
profession.

~~~
Apocryphon
Hard for them to become someone's fiefdom when they're all on separate teams.
We're talking about FAANG-sized companies here.

------
triplee
This is a bad idea and the person proposing it should feel bad. \-- Every
underrepresented group in tech ever, as well as introverts and junior folks or
those switching from other specialities

(Seriously, I get that we have problems with pipelines and tech. interviews
can be pretty terrible, but this is worse. Respected people are already in a
pretty set demographic that's harder to break into, and anyone they've worked
with is going to be similar. )

~~~
cortesoft
I totally agree with you, except the part where the person proposing it should
feel bad.

Many people don't realize the unfair advantages their demographic gets, and
shaming them for not seeing it is not a good way to get them to see the flaw
in their world view. Let's educate instead of shame.

~~~
triplee
Yeah, I wouldn't hold to that feeling bad part. It's a Futurama meme that gets
lost in the context of no GIFs. I forget that HN is like the internet of my
youth. :)

I 100% agree with the idea of using privilege to promote the unprivileged and
educate those in our own demographics.

------
pm90
> The risk that they will be humiliated at some point during the interviews.

As a candidate, this has happened far more often than I care to admit. I don't
take it personally: having worked at many corporations, I know that its
usually not any kind of personal animosity or judgement, its just work
politics. But the fact remains that it does happen.

~~~
bertil
It happens to me very often but I blame it on circumstances. I typically
interview at companies that have started a data science team with one guy
fresh out of a Master’s or a PhD, who think that his dissertation topic if the
end-all of data science, so they will quiz you insistently on scaling issues
of a rare alternative to random forest. “I’m sure that with 20 minutes look at
the literature, I could answer your question.” doesn’t cut it. Neither does
“I’m happy to talk about the implementation details of my PhD on clustering
large scale social graph rapidly.” or “I’m interviewing for a leadership
position; I’d love to talk to you about my managerial habits.” It tends to
feel like a relief.

~~~
scarejunba
How do you feel about questions about principles? They may look like “Are you
familiar with regularization in machine learning and why it’s used?”

~~~
bertil
Oh, by far that’s the more reasonable interview.

That’s actually how I test an audience when I speak in public (I might be a
bit more specific, like “should you regularise your data before a PCA?”): I
ask the question, those who have an opinion, I brand them as “in the know” and
I introduce a gesture towards them; and the others, I say that my talk isn’t
technical, but I re-use both gestures when making that distinction again.

A friend of mine had a brilliant equivalent when talking about data
engineering, saying “And we never had any problem after that.”
[https://youtu.be/ZaAbOKNWGA8?t=210](https://youtu.be/ZaAbOKNWGA8?t=210) A
group at the back burst out laughing and you can see him re-use them later.

------
nkingsy
Not a great way to increase diversity, and totally incompatible with referral
bonuses.

A hidden cost here would also be exposing perceived statuses (eg an engineer
who isn't as well respected would have their recommendations denied).

~~~
daenz
>totally incompatible with referral bonuses.

I think it's fair to waive referral bonuses if someone is referred through the
"trusted referral" process. If someone is dying for a bonus, they can still
steer the candidate towards the company and let them go through the technical
loop normally.

------
wenc
Trusted referrals have always been a valid approach to getting candidates _in
the pipeline_ , as long as it doesn't privilege those candidates over others
who came in through other channels.

However, I don't agree with waiving the technical interview.

Sometimes referrers, though well-meaning, have either an outdated or
incomplete idea of the candidate. Assessing a candidate's quality is quite a
complicated thing, and not everyone does it well though everyone thinks they
do. I say this because I've made erroneous referrals myself.

It's a bias-variance tradeoff. If you trust 1-2 key people, and if they are
right about a person, good, but if they are wrong they can be very wrong.
Whereas if you collect more data points from independent sources, you mitigate
the probability of huge errors in hiring, which can be expensive to fix.

Of course there are exceptions. In a world where if Larry Page wanted to bring
Jeff Dean on-board a fledgling Google because he's seen his work elsewhere and
decides to waive the technical interview, then it's a different story. But I'm
not sure if these exceptions abound...

------
johnrob
I suspect this might work better than expected. The fear is that employees
will exercise some form of nepotism that would “lower the bar”. That might not
happen in practice though. Would love to see an experiment.

~~~
stcredzero
Aren't there groups who have exercised some form of nepotism to "raise the
bar?" Haven't some early stage startups been able to do this?

------
quickthrower2
So in summary: If your company has a seemingly broken hiring process that
weeds out good people, bypass that process for people your people judge as
good, and keep it for everyone else.

I suggest that it is better to fix the hiring process in the firsr place and
just run everyone through it.

------
sytelus
One big issue in hiring is that _error exponentially multiply_ as organization
grows. One bad hire would hire two more bad hires and so on. Many would say
this is the single most important reason why great companies starts to falter
as they grow old - the ratio is no longer the same.

So in this proposed "solution", a misplaced trust will soon cause chain
reaction. Many companies place such trust in hiring manager giving them veto
power to go ahead even if all interviewers were in disagreement. I have rarely
seen this work out well. All good hiring process have checks and balances -
implicit infinite trust is never good idea in any system design.

~~~
magnetic
I didn't see any rule that said that anyone the "trusted circle recommends"
ends up being in such trust circle, so I don't see how they could be in a
position to exponentially multiply.

~~~
sytelus
It doesn't matter. You are putting someone in trusted circle using some
heuristics. Most trust relationships eventually forms delegation chain (A
trusts B, B trusts C, ...). All such chain degrades exponentially by some
factor, however small it may be. This is why organizations with deep
management hierarchies are so dysfunctional and inefficient.

------
alkonaut
A technical interview done well is a good thing. You get to ask the candidate
questions and they get to ask you questions. As the candidate, the technical
interview is where I can really size up the company. How are coding standards
decided? How does the development process work?

This is all interesting stuff to talk about for a candidate.

The closest thing to whiteboard coding I can think of as useful to the
employer is data structure and algorithm knowledge at a toolbox level. What
data structure would you use to implement a spell checker? A search for
restaurants within X km?

------
llamataboot
Technical interviews are awful. They are grueling and they are prone to major
false signals in both directions. However, I'm not sure this is the way to go
either.

Personally, I'd love for a "common form" application where you could do a
timed take home coding exercise, in absence of that, why not just talk through
code with an interviewee. You don't need to watch them code, if you are a good
judge of technical skill, you should be able to tell just by the way that a
candidate talks you through tradeoffs, refactorings, etc whether than can code
or not in a way that nothing else shows.

So you really need someone to write tests for their moon rover they just made
you to see that they can actually write unit specs, or would you rather talk
through testing tradeoffs, when they use mocks or not, what issues they've
encountered with long running test suites or flickering tests, how they test
the frontend, what their thoughts are on strict versus loose TDD, etc.

Get your candidate excited and let them ramble and you'll learn far more than
any contrived coding exercise, even if it isn't a whiteboard interview.

------
twic
I wouldn't want to be hired by a company that did this. I want to work with
good people. A rigorous hiring process, uniformly applied, will tend to select
good people, so it's an attractive feature of a company for me.

Although i have been lucky enough to work with some good people so far, i
wouldn't trust any of them to fill a company with equally good people merely
by recommendation.

------
cdoxsey
I worked with an intern for 6 months. He was great. Did everything I asked of
him and has code still running in production.

He went back to school and then applied for a full time position, so I
referred him with a glowing recommendation.

He was rejected because he was quiet and not a good cultural fit.

And that's why I avoid giving recommendations for friends. It's not worth the
risk of rejection.

------
wan23
Rather than doing this on the individual company level, which leads to all
kinds of problems that many other comments here have noted, it would make
sense to do this on an industry-wide level. We should have something like a
"Master Engineer" credential that should require another master to vouch for
you and some rigorous testing. If implemented correctly then it would become
obvious that asking FizzBuzz type questions to master engineers is a waste of
everyone's time. If we want to be treated like professionals, we should have
professional standards. After all, when doctors go for job interviews nobody
asks "what is a cell?"or to diagram the Krebs cycle on a whiteboard.

------
drugme
Of course it's kind of hideous but it's basically what ends up happening a lot
of the time, anyway.

~~~
deedubaya
Most of the time, it isn't what you know, but who you know. It's unfortunate.

~~~
stcredzero
Almost none if the time, it's who you know who also has a special insight into
what really makes for a good colleague in a really difficult endeavor in an
area people haven't tread before.

------
blaze33
My preferred interviews were those with programming tests to do at home with
some days before the deadline, allowed me to work like a remote dev would. On-
site interviews then included a code review of the test. No white board
coding, no timed programming exercise without internet, no asking things as if
I could memorize all the docs of all the tools I work with.

I also liked well designed tests because the more I feel actual work skills
are checked, the more confident I am that I would have well qualified
colleagues to work with and learn from.

With your scenario, I fear in most places it would end up like "we hire all
our friends, it's fun". Not even sure it would be legal to discriminate about
people you just don't know, however qualified they may be...

------
robalfonso
This seems like a situation where they came up with the wrong solution to the
problem.

The great engineering leader refers people who don't make it through the
technical interview. So the supposition is that "The company is missing out on
great developers due to filtering in the technical interview, lets get rid of
it"

When it should be "Fix the process so it doesn't filter out people while still
testing for technical competence"

We just don't do whiteboards, we usually do a take home assignment/test where
the candidate can make use of the tooling/environment in which they are
comfortable. We feel this is also most similar to how they are going to work
any ways so it is a true test of their work output.

------
scarejunba
This already happens in SF. If you think a CEO or CTO of a startup is letting
some technical interview failure stop him from hiring people he already knows
work well, you’re off your rocker.

I know one of my best bosses and mentors was hired off a terrible interview
and a strong referral. Well, that’s what I expect to happen.

------
speedplane
The problem with this approach is that it requires every employee to be
referred in. Unfortunately, most people don't know that many people who are
looking for jobs, especially people significantly older or younger than them
or from different regions.

------
ummonk
Such referrals are extremely useful datapoints to refine your technical
interview and reduce the false negative rate of the interview process. If your
interview process is rejecting a lot of quality people, that should be a sign
you need to reform it.

------
mynameishere
Yeah, absolutely not. If anything, the opposite would be better: No referrals,
no friends and family, no cliques.

------
forrestthewoods
So the solution is... nepotism?

(Not technically neptosim. But close enough).

~~~
RandallBrown
The difference is that if you're a trusted referrer and you start referring
people who suck, you could easily lose that status.

~~~
stcredzero
I think it would be a better idea if such employees were "probationary" and if
the referrer would be penalized for making mistakes.

------
hashkb
This is basically already the case. If you aren't experiencing it, you're a
Ringo. Edit: or you work with a ton of Ringos.

------
chrshawkes
This idea already happens in the industry every day. The last two corporate
gigs I received didn't require a technical interview at all and I absolutely
refuse to apply to any company that makes me white board or submit anything
coding related before they are paying me. I don't mind answering their
questions though.

As one of the previous commenters stated already, there is already plenty of
evidence as to whether or not somebody can code. If John Skeet applies to my
company, I'm an idiot if I ask him any programming questions.

If there isn't sufficient evidence online to showcase their skills, than make
them do the stupid coding examples.

In my case, I won't ever work for any company with whiteboard coding
exercises. It's the first thing I ask the recruiter and than I politely
decline the offer to interview and tell them exactly why. If more people do
this, it will catch on.

