I've been in this game for a while now and the breakdown is pretty simple. If you are an employer, I implore you to trust me on these two simple points:<p>1. Finding decent people that are both technically competent and a good culture fit is bloody tough and can take a lot longer than you'd ever expect.<p>2. Interviewing/screening these people is simple. Don't make it more difficult than it needs to be.<p>You've done the hard part and you're confident the person/people you've found are worth at least a couple of hours of your time for an interview so why waste that time by applying a boilerplate interview process that every other company uses?<p>Give the candidate a realistic technical challenge to complete in a realistic timeframe, in an environment that will be indicative of the environment they would expect to work in should they succeed in getting the job.<p>If you're happy with the technical results, spend at least an hour with them having an actual conversation. Don't sit there throwing stock interview questions at them, don't try and nitpick on their CV. Just talk to them. Get a feel for their personality, the things that motivate them, the things that annoy them, the things that inspire them, etc.
Peroni writes in his top-level comment, "Give the candidate a realistic technical challenge to complete in a realistic timeframe, in an environment that will be indicative of the environment they would expect to work in should they succeed in getting the job." And of course that is saying "Give the candidate a work-sample test." That's a very well validated hiring procedure,[1] one that every company ought to use for essentially every job. In most parts of the world, you can add incremental validity to the hiring process by also testing the job candidate's general cognitive ability (a.k.a. IQ). In the United States, you have to take careful legal steps to be able to add a general cognitive ability test to your hiring process, but you would have to take the SAME legal steps to make a diploma or degree a requirement for hiring (a little known fact about the key Supreme Court case on the issue). Anything else you do in hiring has less impact on gaining successful workers than work-sample tests and general cognitive ability tests.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923</a> (this earlier Hacker News comment gives full references for the statements in this comment)
Yes. I have a new rule with recruiters. If you are trying to recruit me, make me an offer. Otherwise, go away. You called me, not the other way around. I'm not going to jump through a bunch of your hoops to prove to you for free that I can do what you already know that I can do just by looking at my resume, looking at some of my public projects, and asking me questions in an informal, short interview. And I'm certainly not going to do that knowing that, even after the end of an extremely long and taxing process, you can <i>still</i> refuse to offer me a job.<p>What I've done should be proof enough. I don't want to jump through a bunch of arbitrary hoops so that I can get an incrementally higher paying job (maybe) and devote my life to working on someone else's vision. Gee, can I?<p>I already have a job, and it might be different if I didn't. But maybe not.
I think there's a lot of general recognition that the interview process is suboptimal, but it'll probably be slow to change at larger companies mostly out of inertia. Part of the problem is that developers tend to do most of the interviewing/phone-screening, and a lot of us don't like it and/or aren't very good at it. Thus, it's unlikely that we'll be willing to put much thought into improving the process (note, I have <i>never</i> had a performance goal related to interviewing). Usually, we just go with what we know, which is the standard white-boarding style interview.<p>That, and I wonder if there's a certain fraternity-like hazing element. One of our HR people recently brought up the possibility of removing one of our hiring steps (a take home programming assignment), and I found myself irrationally against the idea. I even joked that I wanted new candidates to suffer just like I did. On reflection, that might not have been a joke... Not particularly proud of it, but part of me resists changing the process because <i>I</i> did really well at it.
This person sounds completely insufferable. He basically is declaring himself too good for interviews (except for C-level execs, whom he apparently tolerates). Heaven forbid you don't just assume Ernie Miller is god's gift to your job position, because he is Ernie Miller and he is a special unique snowflake who is not to be insulted with petty questions pertaining to his ability to do the job.<p>Anyway, good luck with that.
It's interesting to note how many people that actually work at a place had to jump through all of the pre job offer hoops. I think you'll usually find a lot of people who were able to avoid much of that stuff because:<p>1) they were hired before the company started doing it<p>2) they new someone going in so they got hired without as much rigmarole.<p>3) they started as a contractor/freelancer and were converted to employee without interviewing<p>4) they came to the company through an acquisition<p>It seems like if you're not good at these annoying pre-offer activities that you're better off taking one of the above routes into a new job rather than trying to play these games.<p>[edit formatting]
I think that we can simply say "no one has been fired for traditional interview". Yes, it is broken, ineffective, interviewees mostly hate it, some egos get hurt while solving fizzbuzz on the whiteboard, etc. But for an interviewer, it's a safe choice. It's something he has done hundreds of times, something the interviewee expects. He might miss some really good potential employees but at the end of the day, everyone will be ok. Trying something totally new requires some courage and stepping out of comfort zone, probably a lot, and that explains it.<p>And if we are talking about major corps, it would require lots of investment in terms of internal training, would take a while, in other words - it's expensive. And they still get a lot of top quality candidates, so why bother?
"If a company isn't making efforts to recognize you as an individual during the interview process, an accepted offer letter isn't going to promote you to personhood."<p>This is a great point. I've noticed that culture tends to be pervasive. The good experiences I've had with companies started from first contact. So have the bad experiences.
I'd say asking a candidate to implement levenshtein distance in an interview (probably not the best question to ask I'd say) is more about creating a level playing field for candidates who might not have "attended and spoken at relevant conferences" or have "a bunch of apps doing mission-critical work in production", but might be thoroughly productive and successful at XCorp nonetheless.<p>In fact, a candidate might have experience in something completely different but maybe just as impressive - publishing a paper on an optimization for an algorithm, creating a programming language, submitting Linux kernel patches, etc. How would one differentiate a candidate like that with someone with "a list of public repositories on GitHub as long as your arm"?
I have a simple rule of thumb when interviewing other people... I don't care so much what you know how to do, as much as I care how you handle what you <i>don't</i> know how to do. Technical skill can be discovered quickly enough in the interview process. Ways of thinking, that takes work.<p>As for the original article... if a company puts you through a long interview process, you should take advantage of it to learn about them as well, and see if it's where you want to work. Don't just be a replaceable part.
My personal opinion. If you are hiring for a fulltime role where you hope to have that person on the team for a long time , then it is a heck of a lot more than just technical ability that matters. I learned this from an ex-boss who taught me the value of skills that matter in the long run. Hint: technical skill is just one aspect and not enough. It matters what the attitude is, what encourages/discourages them etc. Why do these matter ? Because we are humans and we use our experiences/emotions/values in practice a lot more than just technical skills.<p>The game changes however if you need an expert consultant/contractor/freelancer who can solve a <i>very specific</i> problem with a <i>very short</i> period of time. For those, go hard on the <i>specific</i> tech. questions.
You know, there's a lot of these interview articles. Where whiteboarding doesn't work. Or whiteboarding works but filters out a vast majority of applicants. Give homework problems instead. No, applicants can easily cheat or resort to copy pasting code when given time away from the interviewer. The future is GitHub repos to see candidates' prior work. No, open-source code is not verifiable and easily falsifiable.
What about determining if an applicant has solid fundamentals, not overthinking it, and having him or her learn on the job? Whatever happened to providing training? Is there really no room for apprentices or novices in modern tech companies?
I've done very few interviews (on either side of the table) but I wish I would come across one that had two main questions in the technical interview:<p>1. Write some piece of code that you think is cool. It doesn't have to originally be yours, and if it would take too long to recreate exactly, write it out in pseudo code and explain how it works and why you chose it.<p>2. (Slightly more common, and I've asked this before) We are having Problem A, and it would be within the scope of your responsibilities. How would you approach it?<p>the interviewer asks follow up questions to both and hopefully learns something in the process.
I am attending interviews these days and can echo a lot of what I read. Sometimes the interviewers just keep forcing you to the answers they have or they ask the same question to everyone - it's new to the first one but anyone coming in later already has the perfect answer. Your past doesn't matter - only the 30 min demo of you will sell. Only if in real world products got sold by their demo and not final functionality.
I never got to interview for a startup. Is it common to have a 1:n interview? At every single big company I've interviewed with, interviews were always 1:1.<p>He threw out 1:n interviews being bad as if it were the norm.<p>I also have no idea what he meant by this:<p>"All of this for a position that will involve working remotely (you are working remotely, aren't you?)."<p>Stopped reading after that because it didn't sound like he and I were in the same industry at all.
I recently failed a tech interview. I was asked to pair program on a calculator.<p>Something so simple became more difficult under the pressure of someone watching you the entire time.<p>It's also nothing I've ever even thought of building nor something I would ever be asked to build in a real work environment.<p>I have stellar reviews from my former employers. I know I don't suck, but hell if that didn't shake me to the core.<p>Maybe I'm just venting.
> Once I started to apply this simple filter to the incoming opportunities, things got much easier<p>What filter? I didn't see him mention the filter he's using. Maybe he means he rejects a company unless it has an adaptive interview. But, how can you do that unless you take the interview?
Ive been doing interviews for a few months now, and I try to make it as casual as possible. Why? Because I don't want to ask the candidate about who they think they are, I want to know who they <i>actually</i> are.