Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews?

Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I performed under pressure.

Having been on both sides of the hiring table now many times, there is only one approach that makes sense to me:

1. Speak to them over the phone to make sure they are decent human being, verify again in person.

2. Be upfront with general compensation ability and expectations so that neither of you waste the others time.

3. Do a pair-programming exercise where they build a small piece of software that mirrors something that would be working on as a day-to-day there. Make it clear that finishing is not important, you just want to see their thought process and how they communicate. Ask them to refactor parts of it at some point to see how coach-able they are and how they respond to criticism.

This strategy has worked exceedingly well for me, and when I was on the other end of the hiring table the companies whose process generally looked like this were great places to work with good people.

Algorithm questions are a hazing ritual, and so many junior devs get sucked into wasting hundreds of hours practicing them when they could be building real-world skills. This practice has got to stop, IMO.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

> Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews?

In my experience, the gap between the HN comments section and the real world is massive when it comes to hiring practices.

In the world of HN comments, most people tend to identify with the candidate rather the interviewers. The interview candidate is the hero, the underdog, and the person we're supposed to root for. The interviewers are bumbling fools, drunk on power and dead set on abusing their power to find flimsy excuses to reject candidates.

In the real world, most of the senior engineers I know have spent considerable time on both sides of the interviewing table. At different points in their career, they've been the ones asking questions as well as the ones being interviewed. This leads to a lot of cross-pollination of interview techniques as well as different perspectives on what works vs. what doesn't.

We can all agree that interviewing and hiring practices aren't perfect, but it's much harder to suggest better alternatives. At one point, I tried directly asking candidates how they'd prefer to be interviewed in a way that best highlighted their talents. A surprising number of people defaulted back to standard interview practices, but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers.

These online discussions inevitably skew one way, because no one wants to be the bad guy defending the current imperfect status quo. Even the author of this article artfully dodges any request to suggest alternatives, instead falling back on the safe and secure "we have a lot of work to do" response.

> At one point, I tried directly asking candidates how they'd prefer to be interviewed in a way that best highlighted their talents.

This is really cool to hear from someone else. I've done a similar thing, asking "What do you think you could do during a technical interview to best showcase your skills?"

I too got a surprising number of terrible/generic answers, though it very likely could have been nerves in the moment.

> most of the senior engineers I know have spent considerable time on both sides of the interviewing table. At different points in their career, they've been the ones asking questions as well as the ones being interviewed. This leads to a lot of cross-pollination of interview techniques as well as different perspectives on what works vs. what doesn't.

I'm one of those engineers. The company I currently work at has no problem finding and hiring competent engineers. I also have no problem suggesting something better than what most companies do. And yet, whenever I interview at other companies[0], the most common interview experience I still have are the horrible ones described time and time again here.

The sort of "cross-pollination" you refer to is not widespread.

[0]: A few times a year, just to keep my feet wet.

>but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers.

Is that really so far out? In many lines of work, you're expected to be trained into the position. My experience in software is that each company thinks they want someone who already knows X, Y, and Z, and can hit the ground running with no training.

But in reality, the hire will likely spend more time maintaining P & Q, and working on S, and will need quite a bit of domain knowledge as well as knowledge of the company's custom code and practices and internal organization before they're fully ramped up. And by the time they'd even get to work on X, Y, and Z, the company has likely moved on to A, B, and C, which almost everyone there is just learning.

It's a job that requires constant learning, and you're going to need to train your new hires whether you like it or not.

That's why when I'm called on to be the one asking questions, I mostly look for whether they enjoy learning and experimenting, whether they can have fun with old stuff and convey the differences between that and the new stuff (and why they're different), and whether they're open-minded or stubbornly convinced that they know the one true way.

That's the sort of thing you need when your old system has a decade+ of custom code and the dust hasn't even settled on the new system enough for the pros to know the right ways to do things with it yet. What you really need is someone with basic skills that's also open to being trained and learning new things.

Once my Mgr needed to reject a dev who had said something that did not vibe well with another manager, engaged the candidate in another round of tech interview with a L1 candidate who was working as a dev in the same team. (L1 is supposed to be a Mgr but worked as dev to sideline the immigration process). The candidate was asked offbeat Mockito unit test questions with the intention of rejecting. Speak of Hazing, some interviews are setup to reject candidates for the sake of rejecting.

Without necessarily accepting the premise of "legitimate and realistic", yes, in some markets it's very rare. I've personally never had an interview without a whiteboard problem.

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