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I'm not convinced that any particular interviewing method produces better results than a dice roll over my hundreds of interviews I've conducted. Interviewers tend to prefer certain formats or methods and justify them post hoc as more efficacious but it's all some mix of vibes, cargo culting and rng. I feel best about striking out candidates over basic interviewing red flags, but there's not some strong indicator beyond candidates not disqualifying themselves due to saying slurs or bashing their former coworkers or whatever e: assuming their resume and background are true and match what the role needs biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 01:23
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biceps crimes posted:I'm not convinced that any particular interviewing method produces better results than a dice roll over my hundreds of interviews I've conducted. Interviewers tend to prefer certain formats or methods and justify them post hoc as more efficacious but it's all some mix of vibes, cargo culting and rng. I feel best about striking out candidates over basic interviewing red flags, but there's not some strong indicator beyond candidates not disqualifying themselves due to saying slurs or bashing their former coworkers or whatever I've always skewed heavily towards vibes. It's caused conflicts with other interviewers who say things like "no this junior dev shouldn't be allowed to use the internet during their interview. They should have the python standard library memorized because they might also just copy/paste from stack overflow." I can't say my method is better, but I like to think I can usually tell when someone is bullshitting because they usually flail if you start interrogating something they say beyond the surface.
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Aug 4, 2023 01:41
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it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. interviews need to have clear success criteria that can be met or failed. make a rubric, y'all. it doesn't have to be algo lottery. but it has to be quantifiable. algo lottery and trivia are absolutely the worst way to implement a rubric-able interview, and that's _still_ better than vibes / "we just have a conversation" / etc because at least there are success criteria (lame though they may be)
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Aug 4, 2023 01:49
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Achmed Jones posted:it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. interviews need to have clear success criteria that can be met or failed.
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Aug 4, 2023 01:57
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I'm not really certain that hiring based on hackerrank is much better. I would LOVE to see an objective rubric because that would make things a lot easier on me the next time I'm in a position to hire. Most of the rubrics I've seen just boil down to "did they score x on the automated coding test", and "rank them 1-5 on these 10 categories of vibes". Assigning a number to subjective qualities doesn't make them quantifiable.
ZShakespeare fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 01:59
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Konar posted:That's the least worst you've encountered? That is an absolute nightmare of all the poo poo that makes this field loving garbage. And you call it humane lol Writing code, kubectling around a cluster, and whiteboarding with a member of the team are a nightmare? Idk that's pretty much the job, and I don't mind it too much. All we're doing is making the interviews as close to a pairing session as an interview can be and then seeing what it's like to work with the candidate. I thought the nightmare stuff was teams that make candidates jump through weird hoops and do feats of algorithmic strength like a hazing ritual. Of course the power imbalance of an individual interviewing with a company and the resulting stress and nerves can't be eliminated. Best we can do is be aware of it, be friendly, and try to make the mood relaxed and casual. 10 minutes of mutual introductions and chat usually calms the nerves. biceps crimes posted:I'm not convinced that any particular interviewing method produces better results than a dice roll over my hundreds of interviews I've conducted. Interviewers tend to prefer certain formats or methods and justify them post hoc as more efficacious but it's all some mix of vibes, cargo culting and rng. I feel best about striking out candidates over basic interviewing red flags, but there's not some strong indicator beyond candidates not disqualifying themselves due to saying slurs or bashing their former coworkers or whatever IMO the best you can do is get the interviews close to what the job actually demands and then give candidates space to make you happy to work with them. And that's all very contingent and subjective. The only thing I'm comfortable laying down as a rule is that the interviewing team should talk a lot before and after interviewing: what they want to cover, what they're expecting from the candidate, and afterward what they saw and how they felt. When the entire team is on the same page, I've seen that tends to go more smoothly. You can flush out the weird stickler on the team who would've gone too hard on some inconsequential piece of knowledge. My worst interviewing experiences were when I felt like I was getting whipped around by each interview in terms of style and difficulty, like there was no coordination. And on the other side, being part of the huddle afterward can be chaotic. Achmed Jones posted:it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. interviews need to have clear success criteria that can be met or failed. My only reluctance about framing it this way is that there's a pressure to create a general rubric that applies to multiple teams, or the same team at different times when they have different needs. I'd say create that rubric and don't be shy about changing it with each role you hire for. Definitely go in knowing what you're looking for though. Also my current manager has a habit of explicitly going through different kinds of biases and how they might present, just as an awareness checklist thing, and that's been surprisingly helpful. If anything it helps to reinforce that we shouldn't take our first impressions too seriously. acksplode fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 02:01
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i get the theoretical reason behind doing a full panel half day interview but having done it once it sucks so much rear end you're probably taking a whole day off to do it and you've got jack to show for it if you don't make it through or get a poo poo offer e: i think it's probably one of the best formats for giving both parties a picture of what they're in for, but it's such a huge commitment Erg fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Aug 4, 2023 |
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Aug 4, 2023 02:05
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I think the best technical interview I went through was one where I hauled my computer into the office (they had computers available if I didn't have my own) and I pair programmed a pretty simple text parser game. Once I had completed the task my partner asked me to add something that I thought would be cool to it so I added some command line argument parsing using I library I heard about the other day that I thought was interesting to make it "unixy". It was only one and a half hours of the 4 hour panel, but it sticks out as a good experience.
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Aug 4, 2023 02:10
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Erg posted:i get the theoretical reason behind doing a full panel half day interview but having done it once it sucks so much rear end Absolutely true, it sucks, and I don't know what to do about it. Candidates should straight up get paid for their time, though that doesn't help with having to get time off their current job, and might violate their employment contract. Best answer I've come up with is to just acknowledge it and communicate respect. I end every interview I give regardless of how it goes with a sincere "you're donating your time, your time is valuable, thank you." Take-home usually comes up as the answer to this problem but that can favor people with lots of free time, i.e. the young and childless.
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Aug 4, 2023 02:17
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Pre-pandemic we'd fly candidates out to whatever office they'd be interviewing at and paid for their hotel, which IMO is a pretty strong way to communicate "yes we understand that showing up to this interview panel is a big time commitment from you, so we're also making a similarly large investment in it". Nowadays it's all remote interviews, which on the one hand is a smaller time commitment from candidates (what with not needing to travel for it), but also loses something in the process. Take-home's suck even more in that regard because they demand the candidate spend way more time than the company spends on it, instead of the company paying someone to spend 1:1 time with the candidate in an interview (plus presumably some time spent reviewing that interview afterwards).
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Aug 4, 2023 03:26
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Achmed Jones posted:it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. interviews need to have clear success criteria that can be met or failed.  We're trying to give people the option of "take home, or personal work" just to see that you can actually make things. That way you don't have to spend any time provided you've done anything on your public GitHub. The really interesting stuff, like if people react to stress/mistakes in a healthy way, is incredibly hard to suss out or objectively measure. You can try, but it does feel like rolling the dice sometimes.
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Aug 4, 2023 04:17
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luchadornado posted:We're trying to give people the option of "take home, or personal work" just to see that you can actually make things. That way you don't have to spend any time provided you've done anything on your public GitHub. this owns, having to do a takehome when people could just look at my github was always so frustrating! nice!
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Aug 4, 2023 05:10
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I had been cornered in hiring based only on behavioral interview questions and no coding and the it has been a majority failure. More of them have turned out bad and outright terminated than I ever saw anywhere else. I just kind of realized in the conversation how terrible it had turned out. The idea was that our kind of work is so peculiar that they'd have to be trained in it. Maybe it's true, but they could at least write a for-loop in advance of that. acksplode posted:So far it's been a pretty good balance of being humane, sniffing out frauds, and giving everyone a fair chance to shine. I get to be That Guy by pointing out you can't track the ultimate outcomes of the people you rejected so there is still uncertainty for how well you are actually doing. I will still concede that must be at least okay if you haven't had any flops.
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Aug 4, 2023 05:20
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I somehow remember that in Catch-22 they're in the 256th Airborne, tagline "two to the fighting eighth power!" This concludes the most practical mnemonic for small powers of two.
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Aug 4, 2023 05:40
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Achmed Jones posted:it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. they could do worse
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Aug 4, 2023 08:21
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Steve French posted:Personally I think it is a good rule of thumb, and if it takes a while for someone to be able to make their first PR after starting it's certainly an org smell. However, in practice, I think it's a somewhat insignificant hill not worth dying on because the leverage is so limited: you're just improving the productivity of new hires in the first couple of days. If I were going to spend time on some developer productivity work and I had a choice between something that reduces time to first PR for new hires vs something that generally speeds up development for everyone once they're onboarded, I'm gonna be pretty heavily biased towards the latter unless it's clear there are bigger wins on the onboarding side. If your org cannot get new hire accesses with multiple weeks/months of notice, they are likely also bad at giving accesses to current hires when needed. If you cannot get from 0 to passing tests in a day, chances are your build is a mess and you cannot include new tools in your process. ... It's not about improving productivity of new hires, it is about keeping your processes unfucked, and new hires are the best test subjects because they have not yet internalized your org's bullshit.
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Aug 4, 2023 08:57
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As a candidate I interview based on vibes almost exclusively. There's a bunch of orgs where the hiring manager or skip level just feels like a jackass, and I in no way want to have to deal with that.
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Aug 4, 2023 12:30
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e: nevermind
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Aug 4, 2023 13:18
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Achmed Jones posted:it is not appropriate to interview people based on vibes. you certainly have the best intentions, but that's how people end up hiring folks just like themselves. interviews need to have clear success criteria that can be met or failed. I'd love to see how orgs do a rubric for non-technical skills. Those are the places I always worry about and beyond having a script of questions with expected answers and having multiple rounds where interviewers use the same question bank I can't think of a good way to evaluate a candidate that's not somewhat based on vibes.
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Aug 4, 2023 13:42
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A big one I use is essentially to look at the signal/noise ratio of the answers people give. I had a PM candidate who gave a 5 minute answer when he could have used one word. Hard pass there. Presenting a scenario and seeing what potential issues or considerations folks come up with can be good, but I hate the idea of docking points because someone didn't say "loading" within 45 seconds.
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Aug 4, 2023 14:44
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StumblyWumbly posted:A big one I use is essentially to look at the signal/noise ratio of the answers people give. I had a PM candidate who gave a 5 minute answer when he could have used one word. Hard pass there. This is largely what I mean when I say "vibes".
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Aug 4, 2023 15:26
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you can do pretty reasonable rubrics on the "tell me about a time when..." questions. like, you decide what interpersonal skill you're wanting to evaluate, and then you ask the candidate to describe a time when they displayed that skill, ask some probing questions to figure out "what did you the candidate actually do" and "what was the final outcome", and then you can objectively look at that to see whether the candidate's actions displayed the skill in question and whether they did so in a way that effectively produced a positive result. it can be kinda tough to interview juniors with zero industry experience that way though. also seriously disadvantages people who don't prep for those questions by going over their work history and cherry-picking the best examples to answer with.
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Aug 4, 2023 15:43
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Blinkz0rz posted:I'd love to see how orgs do a rubric for non-technical skills. Those are the places I always worry about and beyond having a script of questions with expected answers and having multiple rounds where interviewers use the same question bank I can't think of a good way to evaluate a candidate that's not somewhat based on vibes. i've talked about it in here before (might be able to check my previous posts if you can bear them), but for this it's mostly about defining what the levels are. so for "can accept critical feedback" maybe you have boxes for "accepts feedback easily," "accepts feedback with visible annoyance," "argues with interviewer," "calls interviewer a rude name." for rubrics and all, it's less about eliminating every trace of subjectivity and more about doing the best you can to have success criteria. grading essays is also subjective, but rubrics help it to be a repeatable and fair (or more fair) process. like, you can rubric out what it means for somebody to be a jerk, what it means to be collaborative, etc. those will of course be somewhat vibe-ish, but consider how much better it is to have a piece of paper that says "accepted feedback easily on x, folded like a wet piece of paper on y, became agitated when tests failed during z, absolutely refused to badmouth former coworkers even though i got the sense they deserved it" than a sentence that just said "seemed nice, maybe a lil high strung".
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Aug 4, 2023 15:43
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yeah what jabor said
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Aug 4, 2023 15:45
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Jabor posted:you can do pretty reasonable rubrics on the "tell me about a time when..." questions. like, you decide what interpersonal skill you're wanting to evaluate, and then you ask the candidate to describe a time when they displayed that skill, ask some probing questions to figure out "what did you the candidate actually do" and "what was the final outcome", and then you can objectively look at that to see whether the candidate's actions displayed the skill in question and whether they did so in a way that effectively produced a positive result. These blow up when the question you ask doesn't involve the thing you're trying to evaluate. Which sounds obvious, but I've seen it happen a lot.
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Aug 4, 2023 15:47
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I think what I'm learning here is that I'd really like to find my way into more orgs with a mature processes around hiring so maybe I could get some different experience.
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Aug 4, 2023 15:55
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ZShakespeare posted:I think what I'm learning here is that I'd really like to find my way into more orgs with a mature processes around hiring so maybe I could get some different experience. Most mature orgs aren't going to have uniform process
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Aug 4, 2023 16:00
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Not only can the process be different, people will value things differently and ask different questions. So interviewing for the same position on the same team can be quite different depending who is in the interview. Standardizing helps, but doesn't remove the human element. I've interviewed so many people... Every method feels like a failure in its own way. I'm convinced the best method is whichever one I like the most and gets me the job. 😑
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Aug 4, 2023 16:11
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I had been cornered in hiring based only on behavioral interview questions and no coding and the it has been a majority failure. More of them have turned out bad and outright terminated than I ever saw anywhere else. I just kind of realized in the conversation how terrible it had turned out. How did that hiring theory even start? Like I haven’t done a lot of hiring, but even I’ve come across nice people who look good on paper who literally can’t code.
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Aug 4, 2023 16:18
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lifg posted:How did that hiring theory even start? Other end of the spectrum from "please invert this binary tree in o(n) time" questions that people hate, would be my guess.
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Aug 4, 2023 16:30
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Anyone have any good resources on how to manage upwards as a tech lead? I've got a mediocre, and rather non-present, direct manager. My team is re-building and not only needs more managing (ugh, I never thought I'd say that) but we also need to remove someone from the team that is actively a detriment to technical progress. The easy answer is  , but I've put considerable time and effort into this team/project already and don't want to start over. I love the company I'm at, the projects I get, and almost all of the people I work with - so it would be hard to let that go.I've had some skip-level conversations, and they acknowledge that my direct manager's presence is spread thin. I'm not sure how to push harder on my manager, and/or push harder on their manager.
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Aug 4, 2023 17:07
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Interviewing someone today (vibes only), reviewing the resume now Ugh do I have to??
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Aug 4, 2023 17:14
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Konar posted:Interviewing someone today (vibes only), reviewing the resume now  holy poo poo. I sometimes can't help myself when I see "master/expert in X" on a resume - I have to poke that bear 
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Aug 4, 2023 17:17
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welcome aboard Mr FullStack Builder! well, FullStack Builder, we just say FullStackBuilder
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Aug 4, 2023 17:22
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Please, Mr FullStack Builder is my father!
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Aug 4, 2023 17:24
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Konar posted:Please, Mr FullStack Builder is my father! Call me "Adjusts Padding on the Fart Button"!
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Aug 4, 2023 17:40
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You must evaluate him per the rubric, hope you remembered to include a provision for "insane cringe".
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Aug 4, 2023 17:40
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luchadornado posted:Anyone have any good resources on how to manage upwards as a tech lead? This varies based on the personalities involved, but in general it's better to raise the issue and let them indicate whether they want to solve it or have you come up with a solution. Be prepared for both of those conversations.
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Aug 4, 2023 17:43
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Please Mr Fullstack Builder is my father. You can call me Dunning.
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Aug 4, 2023 17:49
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luchadornado posted:Anyone have any good resources on how to manage upwards as a tech lead? Regarding the problem team mate, talk to your manager, present facts (eg they worked on X and screwed it up) and separately present feelings (eg I leave every conversation tired and depressed). "Fire them" is very rude to say, but "I don't want them on my projects" is definitely appropriate. In general, why is your manager having trouble? Is your team particularly large, or do they have something personal going on? Or are they just having trouble with a normal workload?
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Aug 4, 2023 19:26
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