Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Interviews don't demonstrate ability or aptitude so much as they demonstrate ability to keep a cool head under incredible pressure. It doesn't matter how soft you make the whiteboard question: you are getting lower quality signal in an in-person office interview than you will in any other venue. Interviews are incredibly hostile experiences and nothing you can do, including comfy chairs, bright, cheerful surroundings, or free drinks will change that.

We need to engage with the fact that these interview processes are just stupid. We know a number of better ways to extract signal from candidates, but we keep interviewing face-to-face for technical ability because that's how it's always been done.

A number of companies are trying to embrace work-sample challenges to boost signal from candidates. But I don't think they get it. They assign take-home work before or after an interview, and still make decisions on candidates based on an "interview loop". If you have an interview loop composed solely of people, I don't believe in your process. We had a sort of interview loop at Matasano, but the open secret was it largely didn't matter, because if your (numeric) scores on our work sample tests were solid, the burden of proof was on the interviewers to override the work sample tests.

We worked with a number of different hiring groups at Starfighter last year, some of them quite smart, and at none of them did I see a process that deliberately and meaningfully insulated itself from "I'm having a bad day and haven't eaten lunch yet and now I have to interview someone" bias, or from "I'm putting you, the candidate, in the most uncomfortable imaginable professional circumstances and expecting not only perfect recall of the intricate details of your craft but also that you recite those details in a way that demonstrates confidence and ability to get things done".

All the hiring I see is still done by by subjective X-factors; worse, each interviewer in a "loop" has a different X-factor. Where's the table-flip emoji when I need it?

I'm 100% behind heavily weighting work sample tests. However, your system seems to minimize the value of non-coding skills. If the interview loop doesn't really matter, how do you answer questions like:

- Can this person communicate a technical concept to another engineer?

- Can this person communicate a technical concept to a non-engineer?

- Can they explain how the code they wrote works?

- How do they respond to technical feedback?

I'd argue that a good half of what makes up a good senior engineer is their non-technical skills. I won't claim that onsite "interview loops" do an amazing job of evaluating this, but it doesn't seem like work sample tests evaluate it at all. If your onsite loop doesn't really matter, how do you test for this?

Chatting about the output of a work sample test is a lot less pressure than a traditional interview; so it can add more signal. It's still probably more pressure than a regular work environment.

To me white boarding is no different from public speaking. Each person's skill is at a different point in the spectrum. It has nothing to do with the skills involved for software development itself.

A huge chunk of this stress is most people simply don't code on whiteboards most of the time. It's a skill which you can pick up fairly quickly which destroys the validity of this kind of hazing.

That's not the source of the stress of coding on a whiteboard. The source of the stress is you have to guess what the interviewer wants or you don't get to pay your bills next month.

Few people are in the situation of a single interview or they don't get to pay their bills next month. That's one kind of stress, but far from the norm.

Having conducted many interviews; there are plenty of people that lock up, but relax when you let them use a laptop even if you stay in the room.

> Few people are in the situation of a single interview or they don't get to pay their bills next month.

If this is true of the people around you, then you know folks who are very, very lucky in their life and work.

I assume we are limiting things to just software developers which tend to make above average salary's in most areas.

Anyway, some combination of cash on hand, liquid assets, credit, or just friends and family should be able to cover next months rent or something is very wrong with your finances. If you just mean need income at some point then sure most people are in that place, but any specific interview should not be all that important long term.

Further, for the vast majority of people retirement is based on personal savings. If you don't have several months savings by 30 that's a really bad sign that something is very wrong.

I say again: if all of that is true of the people you know, even in software, even making above-average salary for your area, you're very lucky.

Also, and I say this as someone currently going through the process: given the way hiring for senior to C-level roles goes in 2017, do not expect "several months" of savings alone will be enough to cover you. Most of the large companies you might like to work for (Google, Microsoft) have hiring processes which can't move much faster than six weeks, and they can stretch out to six months or more.

Most Americans don't have several months of savings regardless of age. I agree that it's a bad sign, but it has a lot more to do with the current economic climate than individual behavior.

For people who earn between $80-$100,000 a year the median 401k account at retirement is ~$255,000 http://www.financialsamurai.com/median401k-retirement-balanc...

(Note median is lower than average but means 50% of people have more) So, having a few months savings is common close to retirement age for people who make above average wages. Scale that back to mid 30's and a few months savings is still common.

A 401k is not a savings account. It's a retirement account. You're not supposed to pull from it between jobs, and there are serious financial penalties for withdrawing before you're past retirement age.

A 401k is also supposed to be able to provide you with an income resembling your at-retirement income for at least 10 years, which is obviously impossible if you only have 2.5x your at-retirement salary in it.

It's a source of stress for me. That, and someone staring at me intently without communicating to me why I need to design Tic Tac Toe or Uber.

Maybe I was lucky, but interviews were far from the most stressful or uncomfortable thing I encountered on the job. They haven't asked me about intricate details either (except one that gave me standard test with questions ranging from difficult to easy, but it still did not felt that horrible).

So, to hit it from the other side: maybe none of that matters.

For an industry practice that everbody is saying is so badly broken, people sure seem to be making it work--or sidestepping the braindamage.

For CTFs like Starfighter, or for any take-home work product exam that is objective ("Pass the tests, meet the performance requirements, etc."), the emphasis is placed on the deliverable and not on the candidate, right?

Which in turn suggests a question--is this perhaps a signal that we don't need to be hiring employees at all if we can just spec out the work correctly and the associated acceptance criteria?

> is this perhaps a signal that we don't need to be hiring employees at all if we can just spec out the work correctly and the associated acceptance criteria?

Try to get any work completed by "spec[ing it] out" on Amazon Mechanical Turk and you'll quickly find the value of employees (or at least, of using "hiring"-like processes to build a pool of known-good contractors and using them for all your work.)

> For CTFs like Starfighter

CTF?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag

Just to be clear: the Starfighter CTFs are not work-sample tests.

Yeah, I don't think it's possible to make interviews comfortable. They are assessments whose results have a direct impact on your livelihood. Even if the interview were "put your name in this hat; if we pick you, you get the job," we would have posts on Medium about the mathematics of optimizing your chances in the hat draw just to calm people down.

How do you feel about interviews for roles where it's required to keep a cool head under incredible pressure?

(This is a serious question. It describes a lot of the security incident response work I've hired for.)

If you think about professions with legitimate 'keep a cool head under incredible pressure' needs, none of them handle this with uncomfortable interviews.

Can you say more about how they do handle it? I've very little visibility into other professions' hiring practices.

(My housemate who's a middle school history teacher and I were mutually horrified last night at our respective interview experiences. He was hired to teach eighth grade after a single 45 minute Skype interview. I had just had a half-hour phone screen followed a week later by a two hour in-person interview, and I considered that quite short by my standards. I thought his process was ridiculously short; he thought mine was absurdly long.)

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