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Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

Neither choice is valid. Software development interviewing is broken. We are starting to finally collect data to prove this. https://blog.interviewing.io/technical-interview-performance...

Humans are bad at evaluating candidates and generally we do a bad job of creating criteria to assess people because what we are doing is attempting to assess risk and humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk. Here is one example of how poorly investors assess risk because of our inherent biases and bad information http://www.nber.org/papers/w22143. The same concept applies in interviewing. With all due respect, the software community has no established criteria for what makes a good software developer or engineer bases on hard evidence. It's all anecdotal and every hiring manager leans on their own flawed biases based on their experiences.

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> Software development interviewing is broken

Do you know what interviewing in non-tech fields is like? Complete bullshit. It's more about making your resume sound impressive and being buddy-buddy with the interviewer. At least we have meritocratic ideals, even if some companies implement them poorly.

Is there really value in raising up an ideal that doesn't hold in practice in any way shape or form? It seems as if our interviewing methodologies are designed simply to have a guise of meritocracy whereas in other fields that guise is dropped entirely and we see what really exists for what it is (mostly bullshit).

I think it's more of a cargo cult type thing, where a lot of companies saw Google's hiring process and tried to copy it without having a deep understanding of how it works. There's no reason for coding interviews to be bullshit. I only give one interview question: fetch some data from an endpoint, manipulate it and display it. It's simple and the best proxy for what day-to-day work is like that can be completed in an hour.

If that is the only kind of problem your company works on then it is a great question to ask just that problem. I like to ask a wide variety of questions to make sure I don't just target someones strengths or weaknesses.

The sad part is it's still really just a FizzBuzz. I get resumes from lots of people with really great backgrounds who just can't write simple code. I'd love to ask more interesting, varied questions but three out of four candidates don't have the tools to solve those.

I understand that there is variance in interviews. However, I don't understand how interviewing.io is fixing it? Or are you just collecting data to prove it?

I don't run interviewing.io, so in all honesty I have no idea what they are doing to fix it. But hopefully they do fix it.

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