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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

550 pointsby maddynatorover 3 years ago

57 comments

swmanover 3 years ago
I wish I could a 2-3 hour interview where I (or the candidate) showcase one of my projects and explain the architectural details and decisions in addition to showing any cool&#x2F;hairy&#x2F;insane code that got the job done. We can discuss those things and see how to improve them, or laugh at the crazy solutions.<p>Honestly how many times do I need to rehearse these dumbass algos (blah blah blah, so I&#x27;ll optimize for space with blah blah blah) okay already. I would much rather show you real world code that I&#x27;ve built, or passion projects I spend my free time on. I want to bring me to your company&#x2F;projects, so get to know what I&#x27;m about holistically as an engineer. I think you can best understand that by looking at actual work done and judging whether or not the person is capable of contributing to your needs.<p>Whenever we face challenges, we learn from them. At scale, we learn everyday. So just hire people who are passionate about facing challenges and learning from them. Not someone who can spend 8 hours a day like a college student playing leet code instead of building something useful. It really isn&#x27;t that hard to memorize a dozen essential data structures and algorithms. But then what? So cringe.
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iamsbover 3 years ago
Having unscripted conversations is one of the best way to be swayed by unconscious bias in interviews.<p>Even though this advice sounds awesome, I will be cautious of putting it into practice without thinking through the bias problem.<p>I do remember reading multiple research papers on this, but unable to find them at the moment. From anecdote - In the last company I worked in London, only one team (DevOps) did not follow scripted interviews. It was the least diverse team, not just in terms of representation, but in terms of diversity of thought. Most of it was comprised of &quot;tech-bros&quot;.<p>Scripted interviews do not mean you ask through a basket of questions. It just means that you stay within the guardrails of a set of topics and you go through <i>all</i> the topics. With in a topic, you have fair amount of flexibility. For example if you are hiring for a mid level Java programmer your topics may include - Java 8, Testing pyramid, Functional programming, type safety, developer safety(CI&#x2F;CD&#x2F;Rollbacks&#x2F;Code reviews&#x2F;Pair programming etc), some domain specific knowledge and so on.
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somberiover 3 years ago
Been on the hiring side for more than a decade. In addition to other advice in this thread, I would like to add -<p>I treat the interview as my chance to help the candidate pass the interview. This bent of thought may seem subtle, but makes all the difference in meeting the candidate in their terrain, and seeing the world from their point of view. Consequently, the case studies given explicitly state that if the candidate finds something else that intrigues them, I am happy to take that as a case study instead - gives them something to flaunt and for me to learn about.<p>Some candidates are shy to open up, or just not comfortable conversing with strangers, or misread the power asymmetry in the interview and get anxious - I spend a fair bit of time just conversing human to human.<p>For the really uncommunicative candidates, I make a slight of what they built (fake slight) and this gets the conversation going like a star. The good candidates exhibit a great amount of &quot;Builder&#x27;s Pride&quot; and defend what they built. They really good ones admit to the possibility that there were other better ways to have built, or explain to me the constraints under which they made the choices they did.
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charles_fover 3 years ago
Every few weeks someone comes back with the one true way of interviewing, or the X things wrong with how interviews are led. I have conducted a few hundred of these by now, and the most I know about it is that there&#x27;s no good way, because you try to figure someone out in just a few hours based on stuff <i>they</i> tell you. The format that seems to work the least worse for me is when you get them to tell you about actual stuff from their experience, which tends to prevent getting completely pointless people. I have been forced to do coding exercises for a while but I replaced by a general discussion on some tech they have been using recently, just to get a feeling of whether they understand what they&#x27;re doing.<p>Recently I have been looking for another team internally to my company. An interesting fit is that I went through 3 interviews. I&#x27;m an engineering manager. Two interviews were focused on system design, one was coding. The only non coding question I received was around how I coach people. The three persons who interviewed me I asked: &quot;what does the team need to do better&quot;, and they all answered a variation of &quot;it takes a while to get stuff to prod once it&#x27;s built. We need someone who can help get better at that&quot;. Yet not a single question for that. I guess the lesson learnt is that if you are looking for a particular skilk, maybe focus on that as well.
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CalRobertover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don&#x27;t give a shit what interviewers think.<p>Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with.<p>If nothing else, it&#x27;s _amazing_ for negotiating. &quot;honestly I&#x27;m really happy where I am, but every man has his price, what can you offer?&quot; does wonders.
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danielvaughnover 3 years ago
I tried the discussion approach instinctively in most of the interviews I performed. I tried to look at it as if both the interviewee and I are evaluating each other to see if we&#x27;re a match. Kept the conversation light hearted and mostly focused on general technology trends relevant to the job. Same as if you were at a meetup or something and had just met someone new.<p>The only difference is that I would drill into specifics in certain areas, but keeping it conversation-style so that it doesn&#x27;t feel like a pointed question. Usually I found it to be pretty easy to see a persons level of knowledge because they tend to hit a certain depth where they aren&#x27;t able to keep the conversation flowing, so you have to pull back up into their more familiar territory.<p>The only drawback with this approach is that I have to be really mindful about potentially being biased. Pointed questions aren&#x27;t as much fun but they&#x27;re easier to approach from an objective viewpoint.
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mark-rover 3 years ago
I recently had the best interview experience of my life from an interviewer who had this philosophy. He&#x27;s a professional interviewer who&#x27;s done thousands of interviews over the past few years. He feels that the best way to gauge a candidate is not by their knowledge of minutia, but by whether you can trust the things they claim about themselves.<p>He&#x27;s so passionate about the subject that he created a Youtube channel. It&#x27;s aimed at both interviewers who want to do a better job and interviewees who want to influence their chances of success. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLhCnsRMXhadbiHsTcxMCgeYxFRAfk1_C7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLhCnsRMXhadbiHsTcxMCg...</a>
arketypover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve been involved in interviews for new hires a couple of years now. I&#x27;m pretty sure I could have the interviewee talk about cucumbers for 10 minutes and I could determine if its a good hire or not. It&#x27;s all about getting insight about how the person thinks.
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01100011over 3 years ago
Depends on the role and the candidate. If I&#x27;m hiring for a lower skill position and the candidate has a strong resume I just might want to verify the resume and confirm they have a basic grasp of the relevant skills.<p>If I&#x27;m hiring for a high-output FANG job, you bet your ass we&#x27;re going to the whiteboard. Sure, I hate it too(on either side of the table), but it&#x27;s not too much to ask to prove that you can think on your feet and solve hard problems if that&#x27;s what the job is.<p>I generally tend to have discussions because I&#x27;m not very confrontational and also because I hate the modern coding interview. After moving to a FANG though, I now understand why the process is so hard. I also get that a lot of folks are frustrated because they&#x27;ve been told their whole career that they&#x27;re smart, and they probably are, but for some roles the bar is just set higher. My 30 year old self, who thought he was hot shit because of all the praise I got for doing basic work(shake and bake linux embedded work, deep dive bugfixing, mostly writing glue code), was in no way qualified to exist in the world I (barely manage to) work in now.
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Jugurthaover 3 years ago
There usually is not a table between us. I sometimes sit on a couch, or we both go to the balcony and talk facing the sea (balcony view:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jugurthahadjar&#x2F;status&#x2F;1451368193889538055?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jugurthahadjar&#x2F;status&#x2F;145136819388953805...</a>). If they smoke they&#x27;ll have a cigarette there. We sometimes hack on a project together right there.<p>I use the term conversation or dialogue often to do away from discussion&#x27;s root of &#x27;breaking&#x27; or &#x27;stomping&#x27;. I offer to make them coffee. We talk about pretty much everything. I ask questions. They ask questions.<p>We try to quickly get rid of the interview vibe by making them feel comfortable. We&#x27;ve refined this over the years.
jstx1over 3 years ago
&quot;Discussion interviews&quot; can suck because they&#x27;re a lie. You&#x27;re still being examined, and now you have to pretend that you aren&#x27;t being examined in addition to performing well.<p>Some of my best interviewing experiences have been when as part of the interview I ended up having a discussion about something. But the interview didn&#x27;t explicitly start with that format in mind.<p>Some of the worst interviewing interviewing experiences that I&#x27;ve had is when they say that it will be a discussion, and it is, up to the point when they spring an algorithm question out of the blue... it feels so scummy and fake. Ask me about the algorithm if you want, but mixing your question into 40 minutes of discussing other things and pretending that you aren&#x27;t examining me is a farce.<p>The intention seems to be to make the experience more authentic and it often ends up having the exact opposite effect.<p>If your criteria for hiring boil down to &quot;did I like talking to this person&quot;, you&#x27;re probably not hiring well and you&#x27;re allowing all kinds of biases to influence your decision. If your criteria are specific but you&#x27;re hiding them behind the pretense of &quot;discussion&quot;, you&#x27;re doing everyone involved a disservice.
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synergy20over 3 years ago
Good idea on paper, not practical in real. FAANG etc are whiteboard&#x2F;leetcode-ing everyone, I believe it&#x27;s one way to filter out the seniors. Be senior&#x27;s definition it means people don&#x27;t spend a few months on algorithms to pass interviews because they had no need to use them in the past 20+ years of their career. It&#x27;s intentional, talking about &#x27;dont do interviews, do discussions&#x27; is missing the point.<p>By the way, I do think whiteboard&#x2F;leetcode is important, just not that important.
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ab_testingover 3 years ago
I think the author has not really interviewed in the past couple of months &#x2F; years. Now-a-days I see interviewers skipping the pleasantries and straight jumping on to LC style questions. In fact, in a lot of companies, the first couple of rounds are online assessments where you try to pound on LC mediums or hards without even talking to anybody else
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mettersover 3 years ago
Not the main topic of the article, but in my opinion an interview&#x2F;discussion also is supposed to answer another (third) question: Does the company fulfill the expectations of the potential employee? Not only the candidate has to sell their own service&#x2F;skill during the interview&#x2F;discussion, the company is being evaluated, too.
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123pie123over 3 years ago
Depending on the interview I always try to make it light hearted and a discussion<p>One of the best times this happened is when I was being interviewed by the future manager and he said after 5 minutes you clearly know more than me and we started talking about the best places to go for a drink in the area.<p>I got the job and he was a fantastic manager and good friend
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bigmattystylesover 3 years ago
I do the discussion approach, but my goal is to make sure I &#x27;give candidates enough rope to hang themselves&#x27;. I also make extremely clear that it&#x27;s ok to tell me that they don&#x27;t know or aren&#x27;t sure. A lot of times, I never ask the question that makes someone look bad, I just let them talk. No interview system is good, but after cycling through many interview styles, this is the one I have found to be the least bad. On a side note, I also can&#x27;t believe tools like hackerrank report if a candidate has alt-tabbed out of the browser. I&#x27;m nearly 20 years in and I still have to look up basic syntax.
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pezzanaover 3 years ago
&gt; Here are some tips for converting interview into the discussion as an interviewer ...<p>Two ideas follow. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ll work very well.<p>Here&#x27;s the #1 thing you can do as a candidate to turn the interview into a discussion: Come prepared with some interrogative-led questions. These usually begin with the words &quot;who&quot;; &quot;where&quot;; &quot;what&quot;; &quot;when&quot;; and &quot;why&quot;. Then ask your questions at appropriate times. A good time might be, for example, right after you answer a question on a topic related to the question you&#x27;re about to ask. Another good time might be when the interviewer asks &quot;Do you have any questions for me?&quot; Having been on the other side of the interviewing table a lot, it&#x27;s quite surprising how few candidates have anything to ask about one of the biggest decisions they&#x27;ll ever make.<p>The quality of your questions will determine what you get out of the interview. To prepare good question, you&#x27;ll need to understand the following at more than just surface level:<p>- the position<p>- the company&#x2F;group&#x2F;pod<p>- the interviewer<p>Research these three things before the interview. The questions you bring to the interview should be designed to gather relevant and missing information on these points.<p>What&#x27;s &quot;relevant information&quot;? You&#x27;ll need some goals to figure that out. Don&#x27;t set foot in the interview until you have some goals that make sense for you.<p>Reversing the above into a process for preparing for an interview:<p>1. figure out why you&#x27;re interviewing at all, and interviewing at that company in particular<p>2. research the position, the company&#x2F;group&#x2F;pod, and your interviewers<p>3. draft questions you&#x27;ll ask during the interview<p>4. ask your questions at appropriate times during the interview
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spicyramenover 3 years ago
In my experience I have seen some candidates that work very hard and mainly do boiler plate code in their projects, they struggle in the Algos&#x2F;data structures but at the end of the day they get the job done. Others perform very good in Algos&#x2F;data structures but produce very little at work, and also people that do good and perform above expectations. Is hard for me to actually filter good candidates, and at the end of the day, I value output and some quality.
Daishimanover 3 years ago
To me it comes down to the following: you&#x27;re not going to advance your career at a place you don&#x27;t do your best in, and the best way to find out is to see how well you do with future _peers_. Treating your interview as talking with your peers frames your thinking in a much more productive manner.<p>Life&#x27;s too short to be stuck with mediocre employers.
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mikesabbaghover 3 years ago
Best interview questions are open ended general questions. What is your opinion on software security? How would you improve your efficiency?<p>This usually is a great discussion where everyone feels good at the end, but tell a lot about the sophistication of the person being interviewed.<p>After this, pass a small test to make sure the person can do some real work.
dtomsover 3 years ago
Don&#x27;t do interviews, do take home tests. Do what&#x27;s representative of the work you will be doing. I highly doubt even at google that it&#x27;s a life or death situation that you correctly code an obscure algorithm in 30 minutes. Folks think you &quot;cheat&quot; on take home, but all they are doing is selecting for folks who &quot;cheat&quot; by being able to memorize massive amount of leetcode questions, its still a poor signal. 6-8 400-500K interviewees, likely costs more than 2 folks reviewing a take home for 2 hours.
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jschrfover 3 years ago
I love this thread and the comments in it.<p>I just had a useless interview with a company that pops up here from time to time. The only thing I liked about the experience was that the itinerary at least tried to make it clear what the key values seemed to be: listening to customers, outcomes, evolving vision. I tried to &quot;map&quot; my experience with their potential customers and how they could think about the &quot;box&quot; and listen and solve.<p>There&#x27;s a 10 billion dollar problem in this particular industry and if you take the time to understand customers, it&#x27;s pretty obvious. I watched first-hand the biggest competitor of this org pivot for this after being around for decades.<p>The &quot;discussions&quot; I had were not discussions at all. They all seemed rushed. There was no &quot;deep dive&quot; into tech at all.<p>Next time I interview, I&#x27;m going to try a radically different approach: I am going to undershare rather than overshare.<p>As an interviewer, I&#x27;m going to start asking people about cucumbers rather than speak about particular tech or follow some form-based process.
akudhaover 3 years ago
Interviews can be made much more useful and pleasant simply by making a subtle change - instead of finding out&#x2F;exposing what the interviewee <i>does not</i> know, find out what they <i>do know</i>.
greenailover 3 years ago
I&#x27;m not sure why but it seems that most of my &quot;interviews&quot; end up with me asking lots of tough questions along with the reasoning behind my questions. I end up leading the discussion. I don&#x27;t have numbers but it seems I get offers when I take the lead and ask tough questions about the business, what challenges exist, and how the interviewer deals with them. Anecdotally when I&#x27;ve been passive in the past I&#x27;ve not moved forward in the process.<p>On the flip side, when doing the interview and when I&#x27;m answering&#x2F;explaining something to a candidate, I&#x27;m not really able to think ahead to the next tougher question in a chain of questions. I wonder how that impacts my assessments. I used to do 3-5 interviews per week, it is a shame I didn&#x27;t take notice of this and compare to the group&#x27;s consensus and outcome.
turbinerneiterover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve lately been trying to get people to teach me something as an interview.<p>Interviewed a guy with a PhD in organic electronics and asked him how to make an organic transistor at home. It was a great conversation, not sure yet if it was a great interview.
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asdfman123over 3 years ago
I think this is pretty much the opposite of what the evidence suggests: that unstructured interviews are pretty much worthless.<p>Conversations gives both parties more fuzzy feelings, but are they actually better or just easier and less awkward?
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chiefalchemistover 3 years ago
&gt; This makes me (and I guess most of us) nervous.<p>It doesn&#x27;t me nervous. It makes me wonder if they know what year it is. :)<p>Ultimately, it&#x27;s a relationship. Yes, it has to work for them. But it has to work for me as well. Fit matters.<p>If they&#x27;re doing all the asking and I&#x27;m doing all the answering that&#x27;s a red flag. If we get to the end and they say &quot;We have a couple minutes left...do you have any questions?&quot; That&#x27;s another red flag.<p>Put another way, as I&#x27;ve said before:<p>How you hire is who you hire.<p>So if you&#x27;re hiring ppl that can&#x27;t see your red flags...well...um...that&#x27;s a red flag ;)
kerngover 3 years ago
A friend once told me that he is interviewing Google.<p>I found that mindset very powerful.<p>And the best part, he got an offer but didnt accept it.
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madmax108over 3 years ago
Some of these are great tips and I agree wholeheartedly.<p>However, in personal experience, I&#x27;ve found that this works much better with more experienced developers rather than with junior engineers. Why? Because for some reason, a lot of junior engineers have been pavlov-ed into thinking every interview is for something at Google&#x2F;Facebook scale (no matter where they are interviewing) and they start describing extremely convoluted designs using tech that they are also not completely familiar with just because they want to come across as knowledgeable.<p>Something that I struggle with in these cases is reining in the dev back to the &quot;what&quot; rather than the &quot;how&quot;, because I&#x27;ve seen even good engineers go into this &quot;let&#x27;s add a system-bus for everything&quot; way of thinking. Constraining problems explicitly tends to devolve into the &quot;Interviewer-Interviewee information asymmetry&quot; which is the same with most DSA problems (At least with DSA, most constraints are known by both parties).<p>On the other hand, almost every time I&#x27;ve picked an actual problem we have with a system, be it a bug or a new product or something else, as an interview question with an experienced interviewee, I feel like I&#x27;ve come out understanding the problem space AND solution space better just through the process of discussion and in multiple cases, actually ended up using a lot of ideas from these discussions, so interviewing feels much more &quot;natural&quot; and a &quot;dominant strategy&quot; in game theoretic sense.
tchallaover 3 years ago
In the attempt of bias removal, interviewers now want to ask the same question to everyone and leave the effort to the interviewer. Take for example, the standard behavioural question which is expected to answer in a STAR format [0]. The question will go as &quot;Tell me about a time you did .... &quot;. Now, it all sounds fine and dandy but you are basically offloading everything to the poor interviewee. You want them to (1) think of an instance in their past and (2) think of a good, relevant instance in their career and (3) follow a format for your convenience. I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s a lot of pressure. Even if you want to stick to the STAR format - you can still be consistent and ask the same question with a twist.<p>&quot;Did you have any conflict at work? Tell me about such situations&quot;<p>&quot;What was the impact of the conflict?&quot;<p>&quot;What steps did you take to resolve it?&quot;<p>&quot;What changed after you took those steps?&quot;<p>Well, it&#x27;s the same line of questioning and addresses all needs of the interviewer. Yet, most of them wouldn&#x27;t do that. It&#x27;s still a discussion format and win-win.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careercenter.lehigh.edu&#x2F;node&#x2F;145" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careercenter.lehigh.edu&#x2F;node&#x2F;145</a>
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lwouisover 3 years ago
I read a lot of anti-diplomas ideology, especially from US culture. Over the years I&#x27;ve realized that the multi-years selection people go through in academia is a decent and most importantly long process to select people.<p>A lot of the conversation is on interviews these days, on the idea that anyone can be a genius programmer after a bootcamp. While I don&#x27;t deny it&#x27;s possible, I think traditional selection based on the school people went to, and building a relationship between companies and school is a good thing.<p>Trying to holistically evaluate a worker in a few hours is not nice. It&#x27;s very intense for candidates to have such opportunities to unlock in such a short time. People prepare for interviews intensely, and can live rejections as a deep traumas as a result. Having this process happen over years in academia seems healthier, and more accurate.<p>Companies would benefit from having their HR spend time studying curriculums of some schools, and build relationships. That guarantees a steady flow of qualified workers.<p>I see this where I live here in Japan, and I&#x27;m quite found of the work culture &#x2F; society it produces.
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airpointover 3 years ago
&gt; Use &quot;We&quot; instead of &quot;you&quot; because it feels more inclusive and it is. For example, ask a question as &quot;Suppose we have this problem to solve. How would we go about doing that?&quot;<p>Oh god how much I hate this! It’s misused by (some) managers so much these days, it’s infuriating. For me it has the very opposite effect than the intended inclusivity.
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robertwt7over 3 years ago
I love it, love the way principal engineers in google said that. I know how nervous some candidates are, also how nervous I am when I want to change jobs to big tech companies and being interviewed like that (man live coding sucks).<p>Wished more companies are implementing this way of interviews
thadkover 3 years ago
Some of these comments, like attending to relative position in space, remind me of Phil Agre&#x27;s fantastic &quot;How to Help Someone Use a Computer&quot; (1996) – <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.gseis.ucla.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;agre&#x2F;how-to-help.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.gseis.ucla.edu&#x2F;faculty&#x2F;agre&#x2F;how-to-help.html</a><p>Phil&#x27;s instructions mix some good influences and can be used when working with people in other mediated spot environments like interviews&#x2F;discussions too.
soheilover 3 years ago
&gt; Do they ask clarifying questions when they don&#x27;t feel judged<p>Sure, you can tell yourself fairytale stories, but you and the other person both know there will be generated a number right after the call ends that can only range from 1 to 4 and you will be assigned it.<p>Also if you treat this as a discussion you may come off as arrogant. After all everyone else is showing nervousness so the interviewer probably thinks &quot;what&#x27;s with this person who acts like they&#x27;re already on my team?&quot;
indymikeover 3 years ago
I&#x27;m not even sure what an interview that is not a discussion would look like and even less sure it would provide value, especially when it comes to technical talent. There&#x27;s far too much time spent on validating &quot;can this person do X that they claim they do.&quot; That can be easily tested or validated with reference checks. What is hard is knowing if an interviewee knows when to do X, when to do Y, and can they coordinate with teams A and B to get it done.
nemo44xover 3 years ago
It matters where you are in your career in terms of the power dynamic of interviews. Early on while unproven your answers matter and how you answer matters while having good questions is super important.<p>As you establish yourself the power dynamic changes considerably as companies are really trying to convince you to come over. At this point it really should be a conversation to understand if you’re a fit and it’s worth your time. Do the people you’re speaking with impress you?
anotheraccount9over 3 years ago
Discussion will only be possible&#x2F;advantageous if the interviewer decides to engage in a less strict and structured approach. I&#x27;ve had interviewers sticking to very specific questions and wanting very specific answers (not necessary what they needed to know me, but what they wanted to complete a form).<p>A discussion means an organic, constructive exchange. If anyone is too stuck-up, it way not work well.<p>Obviously getting to know the candidate through discussion is best.
posharmaover 3 years ago
Sorry. Countless articles have been written about how interviews should be conducted. But nothing changes. There are thousands of engineers vying for FAANG&#x2F;MAMAA and they’ll do backflips to get a job there; leetcode is nothing for them. Some do it to get better salaries as your compensation drops after the 4 yr cliff, some for prestige. So unless you can influence these companies to change nothing will change.
DeathArrowover 3 years ago
Any interview should be simple. You just have to not be a jerk:<p>-threat the guy as a human being, showing respect and kindness<p>-try to understand his mental processes<p>-try to asses his knowledge level by meaningful discussions, no &quot;tricky questions&quot; or &quot;leetcode&quot;<p>-ask to explain what he work on, what decisions he took and why<p>-explain some of your actual work issues and ask how he would address them<p>-do not try to make yourself look smart while trying to make your interlocutor look stupid
UncleOxidantover 3 years ago
I just got a development job where there was no whiteboarding, no linked list implementing, no balancing a red-black tree, etc. They just asked me to talk about some of my previous projects that interested them. Maybe things are changing. Or maybe it&#x27;s as the CTO said to me &quot;it&#x27;s hard to hire people right now&quot;. At any rate, I was pretty happy with this kind of interview.
christkvover 3 years ago
I usually would do three things. One show me or tell me about some code you are proud off, some code you are not proud off and what your learned from it and finally teach me something interesting that can be code or something else.<p>I’m looking for confidence, ability to accept making mistakes and improving and finally the ability to convey information in a teachable fashion.
fleroviumover 3 years ago
The problem with this piece is that it spends more time discussing a word change that how to make interviews more like actual discussions.<p>The word &quot;boss&quot; was original chosen because it avoided implications of a power dynamic between the boss and the worker. Centuries later, it has re-acquired the same connotation.
sushsjsuauahabover 3 years ago
I prefer a &quot;real&quot; interview. A discussion is nice, but is not as focused as a &quot;normal&quot; interview. I would like to be able to guess roughly how well I have done based on the answers I have given.<p>Lastly, I don&#x27;t want to have to guess what we should talk about so that you can feel you know I can do the job.
vbgover 3 years ago
I can interview any developer and by asking the right questions prove they are an incompetent fraud.<p>It’s a simple matter of asking the right questions.<p>Who’s wrong and who’s right?<p>The interviewer is always right.<p>If you don’t know what I think you should know then you’re incompetent.
austincheneyover 3 years ago
The biggest challenge with software interviews is that you don’t know when to lie. The process is maximally biased and so you have maximum incentive to lie. The only reason to not lie is reputation damage in the highly unlikely case you are caught. In the end you are either hired for more money or you are just wasting your time as a candidate.<p>Most of us really want to be as honest as possible, not just because we are good people, but because went want to ensure maximum compatibility. This is incredibly deceptive in itself because employer compatibility doesn’t really matter. As an employee you do things the company way or you don’t work there.<p>So, just lie. I really hate that, but there is no reason not to and every reason to do so. It’s just the nature of conforming to system of inherent implicit bias.
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wayanonover 3 years ago
Interviews have the benefit of appearing equal at least - everyone is asked exactly the same questions. Discussions might run the risk of appearing to give some people an easier ride than others.
totorovirusover 3 years ago
It is really hard to filter those &quot;discussers&quot; in this way. They often know tons of possibilities and not the practical solution or skills to carry out their proposed solution
xwdvover 3 years ago
Imagine a hellish interview process where multiple candidates are brought in for a “discussion” at the same time and based on the impression they give one could get the job.
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callamdelaneyover 3 years ago
I interviewed a guy who had this approach. He seemed to think it was a great way to avoid answering actual questions, needless to say it wasn&#x27;t a positive result.
margofxover 3 years ago
This is a way to go for me. It would be great to brainstorm and discuss things relevant to the industry or in the real world.
inertiaticover 3 years ago
As a person who used to take interviews, I thought discussions were the best way to figure out if someone is competent. I mean, when I ended up in a discussion with someone, I felt like I did great. I had a good time and it frequently led to an offer.<p>As someone who&#x27;s now interviewing a person or more every week (during a hiring surge), I still don&#x27;t know of a better way to interview someone, but I&#x27;m not convinced this is great. A lot of people, who are unquestionably smart, coming into the interview after long careers in big companies, have a lot of trouble expressing themselves (especially if it&#x27;s not in their native language), let alone selling themselves. They come in trying to find the correct answer for each question, even if it&#x27;s open ended questions to trigger discussion. And when asked for a concrete answer to something, they will instead fumble around, only touch upon the answer, and talk about something that distracted them.<p>We still frequently hire people who interview like that, but it takes a lot of thinking and extrapolating.<p>I&#x27;m still not sure what to do.
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0xbadcafebeeover 3 years ago
Slightly OT - on hiring, not interviewing - I recently realized what could improve hiring, and it&#x27;s simultaneously a great and terrible idea.<p>How does hiring work today? First, the employer sets out a &quot;careers&quot; page (which varies quite a bit, even within the same company, even for the same job title!) which includes the following banal information: A job title, part-time&#x2F;full-time&#x2F;remote&#x2F;location-based, a company values blurb, a paragraph about the general responsibilities of anyone with this job title, a tech stack, a list of prerequisites that nobody will ever meet &quot;or relevant experience&quot;, and maybe the benefits and perks.<p>Nowhere does it describe the actual project they&#x27;re working on, their timelines, what kind of situation you&#x27;re walking into, what the specific team&#x27;s culture is like, whether there&#x27;s a strong team lead or everyone is just a genius, if they&#x27;re culturally diverse, what their daily workflow is, whether their OKRs have sustainability or social responsibility goals, or feedback from team members. Is the project they&#x27;re working on greenfield or brownfield? What&#x27;s the architecture? Will you be on-call? Will you be supporting customers or working in a silo? What is the reporting structure like? Career advancement &#x2F; lateral movement? Training? Do they go to happy hour on Fridays? Is there an LGBTQ ERG?<p>And from the other side, the company knows next to nothing about who&#x27;s applying. After all the candidates have played tech buzzword bingo in their resumes, the company (or worse, recruiter) pulls out a divining rod and tries to pick up the one or two candidates who they <i>imagine</i> are a match culturally, technically, and professionally. If you don&#x27;t know somebody inside the company, or a recruiter doesn&#x27;t push you as one of the two candidates they&#x27;ve found locally, you might as well be a translucent blob of Arial 12-point font.<p>How can we connect employees and employers in a meaningful way that isn&#x27;t an arbitrary screening process? Well it seems to me that somebody has already come up with an answer: dating sites.<p>Please, stop throwing things at me and hear me out! What are jobs? Relationships between an employee and an employer. Well, dating sites are masters at finding the intersections where people match, in order to find good relationship matches. You can create a curated list of multiple-choice weighted questions, and ask the other person to fill them out, with a small text blurb to elaborate on your answer. The most common&#x2F;popular ones automatically bubble up for everybody as default questions.<p>This combination of quantitative and qualitative matching would allow people to quickly see which employees&#x2F;employers are the best match. We may still need a way to ascertain technical skill or professional experience, but at least the people who come in the door would appear to be the closest matches to what we want. Will there be some catfishing? Sure, but there already is with today&#x27;s hiring mess! Can somebody please make the OkCupid of hiring? I&#x27;m waiting to open my account.
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FPGAhackerover 3 years ago
A discussion is fine, but I’m too easily fooled by people.
coyguiover 3 years ago
This works for me.
dborehamover 3 years ago
This is the way.
EGregover 3 years ago
I do that on my own show, when I interview Noam Chomsky, former regulators etc. I don’t like to fawn over them and ask the same questions as everyone. I try to bridge what they talk about and modern technology, and see if we can have a meaningful DISCUSSION about freedom of speech or sociopolitics or economics or regulations. Here are some episodes:<p>Economics: Thomas Greco, community currency economist <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.intercoin.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;interview-with-thomas-h-greco-community-currency-economist&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.intercoin.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;interview-with-thomas-h-gr...</a><p>Regulations: Sara Hanks, former SEC regulator and author of Regulation S <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.intercoin.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;interview-with-sara-hanks-ceo-and-co-founder-of-crowdcheck&#x2F;1529" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.intercoin.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;interview-with-sara-hanks-...</a><p>Freedom of Speech: Noam Chomsky, sociopolitical commentator and linguist <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.qbix.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;freedom-of-speech-and-capitalism-in-2021-interview-with-noam-chomsky-community-economist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.qbix.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis...</a><p>I don’t hold back, in the Noam Chomsky discussion I accuse him for example of having a lot of social capital (followers and influence is a form of capital that is convertible to other forms) and he brushes it off. Overall the discussions tend to focus 99% on substance, and deal with the Web, Social Platforms, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, how they can change the world and the issues surrounding them.<p>PS: I know that for now no one has heard of Intercoin or Qbix or my interviews and I am OK with that. Eventually it will be discovered once our products are more mainstream. I am looking forward to interviewing Edward Snowden and a few other people next.