Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkchu | Hacker News Reader

While I fully agree with the author that coding interview questions are not great, I think something important to keep in mind is that "fixing" programming interviews it is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

I think the best way to gauge a candidates programming ability is to work on a small project with them, similar to Automattic's approach [1]. Unfortunately, this method is extremely expensive, to both the candidate and the company.

Maybe company's are "lazy" for sticking with archaic methods that are not always fair to the candidate, but when the author claims that companies are simply "too lazy to figure out how to interview people effectively", I feel he is trivializing a very difficult problem to solve.

[1]: http://davemart.in/remote-hiring/

View on HN

> I think something important to keep in mind is that "fixing" programming interviews it is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.

Only because the formulation of the problem is wrong in a manner that precludes the solution; you can't fix the programming interview because an interview is not, no matter what you do to it, a good way to assess practical programming skill. It might be a useful way to assess other skills that are relevant to the work of someone being hired as for a job that involves programming, but not the programming part.

I think there's a business opportunity here. Imagine something like ETS's system for administering the GRE: Come into a location in your city at a particular date/time, sit down at a computer pre-loaded with various editors / IDEs for common languages, and run through an 4-hour coding exercise specified by the hiring organization, and, at the end, your code is provided to the hiring organization for examination. Internet access is freely permitted but it is fully logged and reviewable by the hiring organization. A proctor is present to keep an eye out for cheating and to resolve any technical difficulties. This reduces the pressure to something not much higher than working in a regular office.

Bear in mind that this is for the coding part, which people seem to have the most difficulty doing on a whiteboard under pressure. There would still need to be a conventional behavioral interview as well.

Somebody want to run the idea past YC? ;)

Sounds like what Triplebyte promises, but doesn't quite offer yet.

Triplebyte seems to angled toward doing pre-screening; the hiring organization still does a full interview loop afterward. What I proposed would be more along the line of handling the mechanics of administering a coding interview for a hiring organization while allowing their hiring manager & HR full control and also making the candidate as unstressed as reasonably possible.

Honestly this sounds terrible. I would never take a proctored test for an interview. Might as well just send the company a copy of your grades from some computer tech class in school, because that is basically what you're proposing.

I will happily spend a few hours preparing an open source project and presenting what I've created as part of a final interview.

Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test takers. A great team needs a mix of of skills- technical experts, business minded folks, and motivated leaders. I don't have the magic answer but I'm sure that proctored testing is the wrong answer.

> I would never take a proctored test for an interview. ... Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test takers.

A conventional interview is basically a set of tests already. A conventional whiteboard coding interview segment is a proctored test, with the interviewer serving double duty as the proctor.

This proposal aims to reduce the stress by having an impartial proctor instead of an interviewer looking over one's shoulder as you code.

Is it possible to lower the cost of failure? Quarantine new hires and let them go quickly if they don't work out. Have a bunch of "ready-made" tasks ready for them. For senior hires, talk for a bunch of hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com