My Worst Phone Screen

For the record I just want to point out that this post is yet-another trojan horse style advert for Hirelite.<p>They seem to be publishing a load of these: a few linkbaity lines of otherwise meaningless anecdote, followed by a pitch about their business.<p>Did no one notice that the post isn't attributed to anyone - that makes the <i>my</i> part of "my worst phone screen" kind of bunk. They also carefully link terms like "rock star" to other similarly linkbaity posts which makes me conclude it's all just carefully crafted BS content.<p>Hirelite are not doing anything wrong as they are free to do what they like on their blog. But I'm surprised that the HN community is adding and voting on these with less discern than I would have otherwise expected.<p>Edit: turns out HN community isn't adding these, just voting on them, see child comment below...

I literally thought this was going to be a post about phone screen quality or a comparison of smartphone screens.

It's not just clueless recruiters who ask these kinds of questions. I've had technical folks (including YC founders when I've interviewed at their companies!) ask me if I'm a rockstar developer, to rate my skills from 1-10, etc.<p>Other horrible interview questions:<p>1. Describe your strengths/weaknesses/creativity. (Dunning-Kruger pops up again. The first time this happened to me, every time I was about to mention something I was probably good at, I kept on remembering someone else who was way better, so I ended up saying "umm..." for about a whole minute. It's emphatically <i>not</i> false modesty, it's just that for many things, there aren't objective ways for me to know if I'm good at it. Also, if I knew what my weaknesses were, I'd try to improve them so they're no longer weaknesses! All these questions do is evaluate your ability to bullshit.)<p>2. Name as many data structures as you can. You have 1 minute. (This happened to me at Palantir.)<p>3. What does X.Y.Z. (some acronym) stand for? (Without asking me anything else about X.Y.Z.) Interviewer then proceeds to ask me 5-10 more acronyms.<p>4. Do you prefer working in teams, or do you prefer working by yourself? (Sounds like a false dichotomy and a stupid generalization. Sometimes, the person asking won't accept my answer when I say there are aspects of both I like.)<p>5. Questions where the interviewer has no idea what they're talking about. For example, when I interviewed at Google, I got asked to describe how the normal distribution converges and how I would use this to build a text classifier. (The Googler who asked me this admitted he didn't even know what a normal distribution was, the question was just something he heard somewhere, when I said I didn't understand the question.)<p>6. Asking me if I use Python, and when I say no, asking me to estimate the runtime of a Python program to calculate the first billion numbers in the Fibonacci sequence anyways. (Also at Google, by a different person.)

Even thought the phone screen was amusing, I couldn't help but think to myself: Did it really happened? And... when?<p>While reading it, I felt like it was a cute/short marketing story. So, I wasn't surprised at all to read the last paragraph (Working for hirelite, a better interview process blahblah)

<i>Recruiter: Do you have J2SE?</i><p>Seriously at this point, just walk away. Nothing good can come after a question like this.<p>(Not because of the technology, solely the wording of the question)

Short interesting post that brings up a good lesson, not for job seekers, but for recruiters. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for those unaware of it, states (paraphrased) that the more competent you are, the less confident you are in your competency. Inversely, the less competent you are, the more confident you become in your ignorance.<p>Recruiters almost always want to hear someone tell them "I'm the best of the best" in an interview, but generally the only people who think that are middle of the road at best. Recruiters should know this sort of thing and look for the guys that say 6-7 instead of the guy claiming to be the Michael Jordan of computer programming.

The point of dunning-kruger effect is not that there's no correlation- it's just not linear. Studies show there is a tier of most competent people who tend to rate themselves lower than the secondmost tier of competence, who rate themselves higher due to a combination of signaling effects and dunning-kruger ("too dumb to know how dumb you are," or more accurately, "not quite smart enough to know that there is a lot you don't know").

I am reminded about an incident that occurred during my time in college. A teacher had "determined" that a lot of the class was cheating(1) and decided to grade based on program performance. This led to a lot of sizing up of our fellow students. One worried my friend John and me greatly as he talked and acted as if he were God's gift to programming and was practically giddy with excitement at the prospect of kicking his fellow student's butts.<p>I am sure he would have said "10" to this recruiter without a second thought.<p>He handed in his assignment at the same time John and I did. He could not help but tell us about his algorithm to do the graphics faster than anybody else. His explanation led us to believe (and be proven right later) that he had a poor understanding of performance and believe that shorter line count always had better performance(2).<p>(1) the people he thought were cheating, weren't (2) yes, load time was important, but it wouldn't tip the scale - plus writing to the same byte of memory multiple times doesn't beat an array lookup and one write

A conversation with a recruiter isn't an "interview".

If you know in advance that's the game you're playing...<p><i>Do you have J2SE?</i><p>Yes. J2SE, J3SE, whatever it takes.<p><i>How good are you at programming on a scale from 1 to 10?</i><p>11.<p><i>You're hired!</i>

That's what a Monty Python sketch of a phone screen would be like.

I haven't interviewed for a LONG time, and I'm not sure what recruiting is because I'm quite disconnected with big business practices, but I do believe Interviewing is just Selling yourself), so on a completely arbitrary and imaginary scale, why wouldn't he just say "I'm a 10"? (I know the developer was thinking of a particular scale - but was the interviewer?)

A dozen years ago a few of us interviewed this guy, thought he was a good fit. When we went to check in with our boss to see if we could hire him, she turned him down. Why? "He seemed kind of geeky."

Oh, <i>that</i> kind of phone screen. For a moment there I thought we might have some interesting discussion about Gorilla Glass.

If this is the way most recruiters work (by just following buzzwords), why do companies have recruiters? Just curious.

That programmer level matrix linked in the article is even dumber than the interview

The sad thing is that the team of developers at the company may have been the most brilliant people you've never worked with. At my last company, we had a very difficult time getting even vaguely qualified people in (I'm no elitist, we're talking folks who literally could not code a for loop). When I looked into the methods used by our internal recruiter to advertise jobs, I was appalled. I can't even imagine how awful his phone screens were.