
Startup Interviewing is Fucked - wheresvic1
https://zachholman.com/posts/startup-interviewing-is-fucked/
======
lacker
Would you rather work with this person:

 _Interviewer: Okay now what if you couldn’t use the standard library? Imagine
it’s a 200GB file and you have to do it all in memory in Ruby.

Me: Why the fuck would I do that?_

Or with this person:

 _Interviewer: Okay now what if you couldn’t use the standard library? Imagine
it’s a 200GB file and you have to do it all in memory in Ruby.

Me: Ah what an unusual situation, to be using Ruby without the standard
library. Well, I would do it like this: <writes 20 lines of code, there's a
bug, they fix it themselves without prompting>_

While interviewing you might think a question is silly. But perhaps the
interviewer has asked this question to 100 people and found it to lead to
intelligent discussions that reveal a lot about job candidates. Don't assume
that a process is a bad process just because it rejected you.

In particular, this sort of assumption seems designed to test your
understanding of the linear stream processing type of programming. You
probably wrote something that operated on an entire array, and the interviewer
was curious to see if you were flexible enough to change that into an
iterative algorithm. Perhaps you used a sort when you could have been slightly
more efficient and used a single linear pass. A good programmer will be able
to handle this, even if the specifics like "200GB file processed using Ruby
with no standard library" are silly.

~~~
pjm331
i'd much rather work with the first person

~~~
ng12
I don't believe that. What's going to be their response when you ask them to
do something on the job that they don't want to do?

~~~
mmt
> that they don't want to do

This seems like a strawman.

If your point is that the author presented an interview vignette where the
"Me", interviewee, character reacted to an unpleasant situation with less
grace and courtesy than ideal, I doubt anyone would disagree. It was likely
also just for emphasis and not to be taken literally, as it wasn't core to the
point of the article.

It's not that the interviewee merely didn't _want_ to perform the exercise.
It's that he questioned (or rejected) the premise of needing to do it that
way. In the context of the interview, what would it show?

There are plenty of people who very much want to work with someone who will
question and even push back on "going off the reservation" (as a comment up-
thread put it).

~~~
ng12
It shows a willful stubbornness that is incredibly difficult to work with.
Obviously I'm not asking you the question because I'm a masochist -- I'm
asking it because I'm trying to glean something about your abilities. The fact
that the author would rather flaunt their ego as a "real developer" than
suspend disbelief for a few minutes marks them as unnecessarily argumentative
in my mind.

~~~
mmt
So what you're saying is that you _don 't believe_ the GP because you come to
a particular conclusion as to the signal that such a reaction in the interview
sends about the character of the candidate?

Are you asserting it's impossible (for reasonable person) to come to any
different conclusion as to the signal that it sends?

As compared with the author's suggested alternative, do you feel that asking
such a question is a better way of determining both this signal _and_ the
something about the candidate's abilities you were hoping to discover?

~~~
ng12
I'm not asserting anything. I'm asking the above poster to think about what
kind of person responds in the first manner.

------
bsaul
i used to recruit people without having them pass coding intervuew. Never
again. It depends on the job of course, but for anything that involved writing
lines of code, it's not even an option.

The main problem being that a bad developer can cripple your codebase for a
long time before you actually realize it. And some people are good at
pretending to know what they're doing.

i guess it's more of a matter on how your coding interview are conducted. I
usually try to have the person design and code some features of a program
solving a real life problem. And then we talk about it. This also let me see
if the person is a good fit and is able to work in a team.

~~~
ansible
Yes.

We do some coding problems in our interviews, but it isn't puzzle-oriented or
even requiring much knowledge of a standard library.

We're looking for basic stuff, like looking for a pattern in a list of items.
Things were there will be multiple correct ways to implement it, and can
choose an implementation language.

One candidate we had... oh boy. The guy could talk. Excellent, excellent
verbal communication skills. He really sounded like he knew what he was
talking about. But completely balked when it came to putting bits in a file.
Just wouldn't / couldn't, even when I tried to talk him through the process.

My recommendation after the interview was a hard 'no', that we should under no
circumstances hire this person. Management, apparently dazzled by the
aforementioned communication skills, wanted to give this guy another
interview, over my strong objections.

The second interviewer came to the exact same conclusion. Maybe they'll listen
to me next time.

------
pavel_lishin
I'm curious about this embedded tweet:

> _I 've been twitter following the careers of people we interviewed but
> passed on at my last gig._

> _Turns out we were almost always wrong._

I wonder how they established that they were wrong. How do you evaluate
someone's performance at their next employer from their tweets alone?

~~~
amdelamar
I was thinking about that too. Maybe because that candidate moved on to
another company doing XYZ, and they tweeted about it or already made an impact
somewhere else.

EDIT: But really, I think its subjective or FOMO thinking on their part.

------
ng12
I try not to judge. If it's a company worth working for their contrived
question usually has a point to it.

A good example: a few years ago I was given a take-home assignment for a
language I had zero familiarity with it. I asked the recruiter about it,
assuming it was a mistake, and she assured me it was intentional. Turns out
the team had decided to optimize for people who can dive into complicated,
unfamiliar domains and figure out a reasonably clean solution. In particular,
this language had a feature explicitly for making problems of this sort easier
and they were selecting for engineers who would be able figure that out.

That's not to say every company does it well -- I'm sure there are many cargo-
cult interviewers out there -- but I certainly wouldn't say it's "fucked".

------
lolsal
I am guilty of doing interviews with silly questions (200gb file, in memory).
I usually start off the test with something like "This is a silly contrived
question, mainly we just want to see how you think. Talk about what tradeoffs
you're making and why." It tends to work well - the candidate tends to not be
so defensive or anxious and will relax a bit to walk through the problem.

------
bgrainger
Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10992640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10992640)

