Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything. Hiring is no different. Why do so many of us that say “of course you shouldn’t reimplement timsort, stand on the shoulder of giants” either make up an interview process based on gut feeling or cargo cult one based on what we heard google does?
So no matter if you've read the literature and implemented a process, there is something wrong with it.
That's why there threads persist. Every process has something wrong with it depending on who you are. Funnily enough everyone eventually manages to sort themselves into the right category.
The system isn't broken any more than armed conflict is broken as a way of settling disputes. It's works, it's just a little terrifying and awful.
Personally, I'd rather not work somewhere that hired based on drilling fringe information - what will the job be like? Maybe I'll feel differently in 10 or 20 years
I would hope so, because I do all those things and, after over a decade writing software, find the ability to solve puzzles almost completely useless for most coding I've ever done. But reality doesn't need to make sense. So, if you want to work for Google or Facebook, learn puzzles anyway :)
That may not be necessarily a bad thing, depending on the position of course. But projects are not the be all end all, at least not in my company, and where I interviewed.
1. The first interview must not be a technical assessment — identify shared interests, look for collaboration opportunities. You need to understand if the person in front of you will be someone you would work with for the next 10 years, their current technical skills have little to do with this.
2. At the end of the first interview, right before the logistic questions, assess how they position in the junior-senior axis — either with direct questions or by pushing them to the topic. Once you‘ve done that ask an evil surgically difficult question — the correctness of the answer is not what you‘re looking for: pay attention to how they present their (eventual) missing knowledge, or how the address the answer by giving context. A senior developer doesn’t know everything, but must know enough to manage gaps in their knowledge.
3. Search for young and talented people — search for the fire in their eyes. You want someone which, eventually, will reach goals by their own.
That said, I do like the interviewing approach we're replying to, other than that "y" word... :-)
Did you know that it is perfectly legal to discriminate against young people?
Yeah sucks to be them, I guess. Apparently nobody cares about discrimination against those people.
Old people are among the richest people in the world. But I guess when things are made fair, and neither young or old people are discriminated against, that appears like "discrimination" against those who are now being treated fairly.
> was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both.
Neither, I think. The Algorithm interviews are bad for 90% of the positions out there, and experience matters much more than trivia, so you were right then.
And today, everyone is trying to hire "senior" (and above), so there's no concept of "will learn, lacks experience" - and the algorthm questions do badly at identify THAT, so you're right today too.
It turns out that interviewing is hard, and we don't know what works well. Most of us think "we" are the ones that can obviously see what's wrong and everyone else is interviewing poorly. Most of us are wrong.
But even besides that, we need to focus more on getting newer coders that DON'T have experience. We'll spend years looking for people that have experience...longer than it would take to grow that experience. We want seniors because we want people that will grow without being mentored, because we have far more work than people...but we skip one of the ways to reduce that workload.
I'd much rather have an interview that was teaching something new, and see how the person processed it. That's not a good interview either, but at least it is trying accomplish the correct goal.
And when we do interview for senior and above, experience will count a lot more than building a frickin' linked list.