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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well at all the places that didn’t hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.

I know, because I’ve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.

In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and you’ll get lucky somewhere. It won’t make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.

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>you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason

My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.

And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.

Yup! To be honest, it should be obvious via someone’s resume and references whether they’ll be capable of adapting to the job without making them jump through random hoops. People treat hiring devs like they’re hiring a contractor to paint their bathroom, instead of hiring them like white collar professionals who will grow with a position.

Arrrgh I remember an interview where I got this lucky... and I ended up failing it miserably. It was a python-heavy position, and I had been watching some Peter Norvig videos in the weeks beforehand to prepare. They asked me to implement some basic functionality of a poker game, which was EXACTLY what one of the videos was about. I was trying so hard not to copy his approach, and my own 'natural' approach would have been fairly similar (but not nearly as elegant), so by trying to avoid both of those approaches I made a complete mess, haha

And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:

* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).

* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview

* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it

* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck

This is not “fair”, but it’s a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and don’t take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.

They just have a pool that’s filled with bad candidates. They want to disable luck for them.

Ironically, they turn on luck even more.

Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.

I think it's trickier to gauge in knowledge work because there's a ramp-up period, even for top performers. Just understanding the institutional context that led to the current ecosystem - essentially understanding every Chesterton's Fence you encounter - takes a substantial amount of time.

They don’t have the money to hire lawyers to pursue discrimination suits, and the potential SME employers frequently don’t have the balance sheet to be collectible.

It’s a different ballgame when you can gamble $20k to make $1M.

Typically there's a lot of onboarding, and even a good candidate might not get a lot done in the first month or three... By the time you realize the new hire isn't a good fit, you've spent a ton of time on training.

Otoh, if you hire me to frame a house, it'll be objectively clear you need to get rid of me in the first hour, if not the first ten minutes. I don't know how I'd get past a screening for that either, but still.

No it isn't, their strategy is great at increasing the rate at which they select those deadly "bad hires". There's just an insane amount of risk in doing these sorts of tech interview things; code up a quick monte carlo simulation to convince yourself if you like. It's just that the risk doesn't fall on the improperly aligned humans conducting the interview, it's offloaded onto the company.

Exactly, you could just as easily hire a bad candidate because they got lucky, and this happens all the time.

I mean, they could just as easily hire a bad candidate that happened to cram that specific interview knowledge the day before but is otherwise a bad developer.

Personally I don’t agree with the crazy tech interviews at all, no other job on the planet does it like this, even high skill jobs like doctors or professors. They hire based on your experience, your references, and a good chat to make sure you’d be a culture fit. If there’s a serious problem with a doctor once they start the job, they’d be let go, but they’re professionals so this isn’t a super common occurrence.

The exact same process could be taken with developers IMO. If I have a seasoned career, you should hire me based on that, not because I jumped through hoops you set up.

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