When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by verelo on Sunday January 20, 2019 @08:53PM (#18956958)

I kind of agree and kind of dont. I have a super simple inital question I always ask in interviews: Write me a function, in any language, that takes an array (or list) of integers and returns the sum. 90% of people that can do that are decent, and sadly i'd have to say i'm shocked by how many people struggle with this question, or the follow up of "ok interesting implementation, now what can go wrong at runtime?"

It's a great 15 minute question that I find often correlates highly with the people that get offers.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by unclebucknasty on Sunday January 20, 2019 @11:18PM (#18957595)

>90% of people that can do that are decent

I can't imagine this being an effective qualifier for any but the most junior of devs.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by bertil on Monday January 21, 2019 @06:43AM (#18959664)

Honestly, just try it. Have a significant preface about how it’s simple by design, and you are not trying to trick them, if you are hiring, say, a VP or a CTO; call it a warm-up if you want. But absolutely try.

I’ve had a majority of candidates with five-year experience as a data scientist not be able to load a csv file using np.read_csv() The problem wasn’t that it didn’t work (the csv intentionally had a minor quirk that demanded that one uses a non-default option) but the reaction to it not working, or, in a majority of cases, the inability to search (on Google) for “what function allow me to import a csv file into a table” was incredibly telling. From there, you can have a conversation about what they did and it often leads to a more honest portrait of their previous functions. Sometimes, that led to offering them a more suitable position.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by unclebucknasty on Monday January 21, 2019 @10:41AM (#18961043)

>if you are hiring, say, a VP or a CTO

If I were hiring a VP of engineering or CTO, my only goal in administering such a basic test would be to see whether they are offended and prepare to politely leave the interview. Not kidding here.

Sure, CTO duties can run a broad spectrum, depending on company size, etc. It could essentially mean "dev lead with a small team", all the way up to public company CTO with a good command of financials, managing budgets, large multi-level teams, etc. But, at either end and anywhere along that continuum, I would want to skip to probing higher-order thinking around architecture, strategy, people-management, etc.

So, if I've brought in people who I believe are adept at skills like these, I'd expect them to be confused and perhaps even insulted when I pull out a fizzbuzy integer summation problem.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by droithomme on Monday January 21, 2019 @01:15AM (#18958062)

It's a highly effective and quick disqualifier.

100% of those that couldn't do it are not qualified candidates.

Some of those that could do it are good candidates.

When you bring in someone that has a nice looking CV and experience and recommendations and you ask them a very basic question and they can't respond at all, it is a safe disqualifier. It also doesn't take six hours.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by unclebucknasty on Monday January 21, 2019 @10:33AM (#18960985)

>Some of those that could do it are good candidates.

Looks like you edited your comment. In any case, that's a non-statement, as some is quite different from nearly all (i.e. 90%).

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by unclebucknasty on Monday January 21, 2019 @01:34AM (#18958154)

>100% of those that couldn't do it are not qualified candidates.

OP stated nearly the inverse: that 90% of those who can do it are qualified candidates.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by dkersten on Monday January 21, 2019 @07:05AM (#18959786)

So you discard 100% of those who can’t do it, knowing that 90% of the rest are qualified.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by unclebucknasty on Monday January 21, 2019 @10:24AM (#18960938)

That's a different argument that gets us back to the original premise I disputed, so you're now just begging the question with numbers.

That is, your numbers are only valid if I accept the premise that I'm rejecting. I don't believe that 90% of people who can answer such a basic question are qualified.

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