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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what useful signals are supposed to come out of an interview. If referrals and recruiters aren't an option I'd probably try to skip the interview altogether and go with a long probation period (3-6 months). Or possibly have a short 20 minute free-form interview talking about their last day job and expectations of the new one with a very short list of major red flags ("doesn't want the job", "unable to form sentences") then block candidates who raise them.

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- How do they take a business problem and model it into code - How do they debug their own code - Is their code easy to read - Do they name their variables/fields/methods/classes in easy to understand and consistent ways or are the names confusing or inaccurate - How do they take constructive criticism - How collaborative are they - Do they think about the problem first or do they just start hacking away - When asked to add a feature to existing code, do they start hacking or do they write out a test describing the new functionality first - When confronted with vague requirements, how well do they ask questions to get the information they need - How much experience do they have with algorithms, database design, systems design, building things so they scale well

If it were possible to work all that out in the interview then there wouldn't be any bad hires.

As a wishlist I like it, I just don't see how you're going to assess all that in an interview. You'll notice that the technique of the day ("teach me something") doesn't address any of the dot points and that holds for ... pretty much any technique. Interviews are a weak process for assessing anything.

The long probation approach completely ignores the very real costs of onboarding someone new.

It takes time, money and people to bring someone in, and hiring is actually quite a risk for many companies (unless they're huge and/or in a hiring frenzy).

If a candidate doesn't work out, that's a lot of time and money down the drain, and potentially lost work, and disruption to teams and timelines, etc..

Most people don't get this part, and I think that's why they don't understand why interview processes are structured the way they are.

You really want to do the best possible evaluation, on all fronts, at the start. The longer a bad candidate stays in your pipeline or company, the more expensive and disruptive it gets.

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