Comment by tempsolution | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempsolution | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah this is the M.I.T. and Harvard "process". Hire success, instead of fostering success. Works well for small companies. If you need to hire 10.000 to 30.000 people a year, this approach is absolutely useless.

Also just because someone can't come up with the coolest solution for your project, doesn't mean they aren't good developers. This is even more biased than algorithmic interviews, because algorithmic interviews have structure. I actually CAN solve a puzzle in 20 mins. You definitely can not solve a project in 20 minutes or even an hour. It is impossible. And the best candidates will be those who sit back, analyze the problem for days or even weeks and come up with a good solution for your project. This approach is so infeasible for general interviewing that I don't even know where to begin. You are basically filtering out EVERYONE and take the one person who knew enough upfront to accidentially solve your problem best...

He said "impressive proposal", not "coolest solution".

To me, "impressive proposal" means "articulation of a workable plan", the components of which are relatively small, actionable, and take into accounts requirements, and that demonstrates a good understanding of risk. In fact I'd argue that the ability to do this kind of top-level break-down well is one of the best indicators of seniority. The downside is that to do it well requires knowledge of a very specific process, architecture, and technology stack. That is, if you're good at breaking down problems use stateful Erlang and OpenBSD running on bare-metal with web clients, you might have an issue breaking down using stateless C# on Azure with Android native clients. Some combinations are more compatible than others, of course, but any senior dev in one stack is going to have to recapitulate the learning curve of another stack before they can regain this superpower! (We may like to think that only architecture matters, but it is relatively rare that an architecture rendered in one stack is actually isomorphic to the same architecture rendered in another!)

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