Hacker News Reader

Comment by DesiLurker | Hacker News Reader

protip from someone in the trenches: until you have given the problem to many people in interviews and evaluated their responses to calibrate your judgement, problems like these serve only one purpose in an interview that is satisfying interviewers ego about how smart he is.

View on HN

I've proposed (and been rejected) where I work that we have both high and underperformers go through mock interviews for their roles, to see if our interview questions could distinguish who was who.

I understand that this is going to be awkward, especially for the low performers, but at the moment I don't think our interview practices are based on anything. We ask questions and then later have a conversation about how and whether or not our questions revealed the presence of the attributes we were supposed to be assessing for and it feels very made up and make believe. Plus, people could be given incentives for going through the process and bonuses for passing the mock interviews to encourage them to try

If we could get people where we already knew how good or bad they were to rerun the interview process then we could start to figure out which questions and which evaluation methods were useful in separating good candidates from poor ones.

just make everyone in the company do it IMO, and let the managers distinguish who was an over/underperformer later on

Of course, you'll just find out that there's practically no correlation.. Some of the least useful teammates I ever had ended up at Google, and one of the best programmers I've ever met makes $10/hour at a fucking call center out in the middle of nowhere

It's not good enough to test only the people who have already passed a similar test. It's easy to get a nonsense negative correlation, like more experienced people performing worse in their job, because the people with less experience that nonetheless got hired must have had some other factor that made up for it. That can result in a negative correlation in the already-hired pool even if there's a positive correlation in the potential-hire pool.

This is the same problem you see with people claiming that GPA or GRE scores have no or negative correlation with academic success.

I've come up with a few interview questions, and reviewed a few more. In my experience there's a ~decent rule of thumb for gauging difficulty and time required to solve a given problem.

A person in your company, after having read the problem and glancing at the rough description figures out a clean solution in time X. That's without the interview stress, knowledge of the problem domain, with the pacing of the problem laid out in writing. A well-performing candidate coming in cold, stressed from the interview setup and under time pressure will take 3X time to solve it.

So if it takes much more than 10 minutes for someone at your company solve your proposed interview question reasonably well, it's almost certainly too difficult.

Completely agreed. Questions need to be calibrated. I start with a task that I can do in N minutes and give the candidate 3N minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com