Two hilarious observations about stereotypical business programming culture:
Before hiring, tech fit decisions are made by elaborate pretend tests and painfully detailed technical discussion upon people who supposedly needed to gain years of experience in a specific field. After hiring, tech fit decisions are made by a PHB glancing at the cover of PC magazine and saying "make it so, number one" and the existing staff starts googling furiously and supplies something workable in a week or two even if they never heard of the technology the day before.
At 2pm "Work at home, are you crazy? Without my direct supervision hovering over your shoulder I'd appear unnecessary and you can't be trusted to accomplish anything at home and nothing can ever be accomplished individually, things can only be done by a team where a sociopath will take all credit for the teams effort" or, uh, usually a little more carefully phrased but this is what they actually mean. But at 2am the tone changes "well of course you can work at home at 2am to fix any emergency all by yourself in a completely undocumented system you've never heard of before and we trust you'll always be available 24x365 and never out of town or drunk"
I am not agreeing on this.
Unless you are hiring an expert, most of developers out there earning their lives by coding can not write a simple bubble sort when you give them a console.
Not because they don't have the capacity, They will either not remember the algorithm at the moment or haven't had a such situation requires similar approach at their previous work.
If you really want to know if he/she knows stuff, ask him a task/question/bug and let him explain how he would solve it. if he is good, he will start telling the approach in different aspects, he would even start writing you a pseudo code to solve it.
The approach taken in the article is not explaining how to HIRE programmers.
To be fair, eliminating a fair portion of candidates (assuming the test does a good job of identifying the ones you wouldn't hire) isn't a bad thing. Time is a valuable resource.
I always find it funny that half the people/companies advocating these approaches can't even keep a simple WordPress blog up when faced with a bit of traffic.
You spend day and night on building a product, you make sure everything works right and its scaled for traffic. Once you have a beta product ready, you decide to blog about it, you meticulously work on generating some good content, fire up a large instance on AWS, set up a wordpress blog, and the blog is live. Now you decide to post about it on HN, fortunately some people like what you have written, you start getting traffic.
And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.
Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.
I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.
I hosted my WP blog for free on OpenShift and (with free Cloudflare) it was able to handle Reddit/HN traffic spikes without a problem. Not sure why everyone doesn't do something similar.
It's not a candidate's problem that they can't code? I think the candidate has a level of responsibility here. Really they shouldn't be applying for a development position if they can't code.
Excellent. I love when things like this get more visibility. Now, let me go make notes on my book of all the red flags of why I should stop talking to a company.
As a candidate, I understand the system is incredibly broken. Maybe one way out is to have recruiters who have a technical background. I have seen that happen with exactly one company where the lead recruiter had a BS from MIT. She was awesome and a genuine pleasure to talk to. Also, she had enough of a understanding of the company stack that the interview acted like a semi-filter.
I don't use standard tests when hiring (read: to weed out candidates)
I'm in the process of hiring again as the team is growing and this has struck a chord with me.
I tend to see a resume, if it looks at all decent I will do a interview. Some would say do a call or give them a test to weed out etc. I've done enough interviewing to know that
1) people almost always are different than what their resume portrays for better or worse.
2) body language is 90% of our communication so why waste time on the phone.
3) If its so important to get someone I deem as a good fit I want to meet them.
4) I "waste" a lot of time interviewing, but I get better at it each time and I've found people who would otherwise never have gotten into see me that were spectacular hires. Also I have lots of friends who hire and sometimes someone is great but not for me, the favor has paid off when its returned.
The bottom line is people are unique in many ways. Why try to push them into a standard mold or discard them if they don't fit.
P.S
With regard to testing I usually tailor a test of 5-6 questions AFTER the interview so I can evaluate anything I am not sure of after speaking to the potential hire. I also let them do it at home with their tools. I don't care to see if someone can work with me hovering over them, because I have not intention of doing so on a day-to-day basis.
This looks interesting, though I don't agree with the "most candidates cannot write code to simple algorithm" thesis.
I interview A LOT. Almost 100% of the candidates I receive cover the basic programming abilities.
The real problem is that they don't know how to THINK.
I talk with them 20 min on the phone when they have to present a problem they had and how they solved it. Then I try to find out what they find interesting.
Giving a mini project is a good idea, but it does not scale well, and still requires a lot of resources top candidates will just not be willing to invest.
There's a fence here - a bimodality if you will. I've been on both sides of it.
I used to do a large amount of phone screening for Amazon, probably over a hundred in all by the time I got sick of being a professional interviewer. I experienced much of what the author did: the bulk of the candidates had zero algorithms or data structures knowledge and could not program. Not "can't program well" or "can't program at a professional level", we're talking "I don't trust you with a simple shell script".
Now I work for a rather more obscure startup - we're relatively well known in the tech scene around here, but we're by a very long shot not a mainstream household name. The caliber of people that come through the door now is vastly different. I've interviewed some duds here, but have never interviewed someone in this position that just outright couldn't code.
The question I have for the author is who he hires for, and how much they pay. The low end of the software industry is plagued with people who have no business calling themselves programmers. It's really a vicious cycle - there's a large segment of our industry where the typical skill level is disastrously low, which causes ever more bureaucratic and ever more absurd filtering mechanisms to be invented, which further alienates programmers who have any real choice in employers.
Nowadays I'd be mildly insulted if given a FizzBuzz during an interview - but I used to do the same out of necessity, because 25% of my candidates couldn't pass it.
A simple programming task adds 20 minutes to the burden of the interviewee, costs you next to nothing and weeds out the folk who don't actually know how to program. If someone fails to print prime numbers below 100 in 20 minutes, there is something wrong with his skills.
I understand the frustration of sifting through hundreds of "fake" resumes where candidates can't code a fiz-buzz, but from the other end it is a total waste of my time spending 20 minutes of my time solving these coding challenges every time I want to know more about a prospective position.
If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understand if a candiadate is or not up to par for the job from a quick email or phone call.
The site has been crushed under the HN traffic (and wherever else this link is propagating today.) So I can only state my opinion on the title which is; this is a terrible basis on which to decide who to hire.
I would never hire anyone without having an actual conversation with them. Whether I can get along with the person, if they will be a good fit for our team is the most important criteria.
Test taking is not an important skill for any job I'd be hiring for.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
Before hiring, tech fit decisions are made by elaborate pretend tests and painfully detailed technical discussion upon people who supposedly needed to gain years of experience in a specific field. After hiring, tech fit decisions are made by a PHB glancing at the cover of PC magazine and saying "make it so, number one" and the existing staff starts googling furiously and supplies something workable in a week or two even if they never heard of the technology the day before.
At 2pm "Work at home, are you crazy? Without my direct supervision hovering over your shoulder I'd appear unnecessary and you can't be trusted to accomplish anything at home and nothing can ever be accomplished individually, things can only be done by a team where a sociopath will take all credit for the teams effort" or, uh, usually a little more carefully phrased but this is what they actually mean. But at 2am the tone changes "well of course you can work at home at 2am to fix any emergency all by yourself in a completely undocumented system you've never heard of before and we trust you'll always be available 24x365 and never out of town or drunk"
[+] [-] whizzkid|12 years ago|reply
The approach taken in the article is not explaining how to HIRE programmers.
It is about how to ELEMINATE them.
[+] [-] RHSeeger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|12 years ago|reply
Surely there must be an algorithm for that?
[+] [-] saching90|12 years ago|reply
And BOOM, suddenly you find out that the large instance on AWS, cannot handle the traffic, you are befuddled its not like the server is getting million hits/sec. You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog, and you realize that's not the case.
Now you go back and start fixing your self hosted wordpress blog, you feel sad that you missed out on audience because the server crashed, your work gets derailed because now you also have to maintain the blog server.
I agreed I too would have been irritated to see the link not working, but its not that you switch to an x-large instance each time you post a link on HN. Sometimes you just want somethings to work. But alas that's not the case.
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arikrak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetimmes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
As a candidate, I understand the system is incredibly broken. Maybe one way out is to have recruiters who have a technical background. I have seen that happen with exactly one company where the lead recruiter had a BS from MIT. She was awesome and a genuine pleasure to talk to. Also, she had enough of a understanding of the company stack that the interview acted like a semi-filter.
[+] [-] robalfonso|12 years ago|reply
I'm in the process of hiring again as the team is growing and this has struck a chord with me.
I tend to see a resume, if it looks at all decent I will do a interview. Some would say do a call or give them a test to weed out etc. I've done enough interviewing to know that
1) people almost always are different than what their resume portrays for better or worse. 2) body language is 90% of our communication so why waste time on the phone. 3) If its so important to get someone I deem as a good fit I want to meet them. 4) I "waste" a lot of time interviewing, but I get better at it each time and I've found people who would otherwise never have gotten into see me that were spectacular hires. Also I have lots of friends who hire and sometimes someone is great but not for me, the favor has paid off when its returned.
The bottom line is people are unique in many ways. Why try to push them into a standard mold or discard them if they don't fit.
P.S
With regard to testing I usually tailor a test of 5-6 questions AFTER the interview so I can evaluate anything I am not sure of after speaking to the potential hire. I also let them do it at home with their tools. I don't care to see if someone can work with me hovering over them, because I have not intention of doing so on a day-to-day basis.
[+] [-] dblumenfeld|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pramodliv1|12 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liranz|12 years ago|reply
I interview A LOT. Almost 100% of the candidates I receive cover the basic programming abilities. The real problem is that they don't know how to THINK.
I talk with them 20 min on the phone when they have to present a problem they had and how they solved it. Then I try to find out what they find interesting.
Giving a mini project is a good idea, but it does not scale well, and still requires a lot of resources top candidates will just not be willing to invest.
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
I used to do a large amount of phone screening for Amazon, probably over a hundred in all by the time I got sick of being a professional interviewer. I experienced much of what the author did: the bulk of the candidates had zero algorithms or data structures knowledge and could not program. Not "can't program well" or "can't program at a professional level", we're talking "I don't trust you with a simple shell script".
Now I work for a rather more obscure startup - we're relatively well known in the tech scene around here, but we're by a very long shot not a mainstream household name. The caliber of people that come through the door now is vastly different. I've interviewed some duds here, but have never interviewed someone in this position that just outright couldn't code.
The question I have for the author is who he hires for, and how much they pay. The low end of the software industry is plagued with people who have no business calling themselves programmers. It's really a vicious cycle - there's a large segment of our industry where the typical skill level is disastrously low, which causes ever more bureaucratic and ever more absurd filtering mechanisms to be invented, which further alienates programmers who have any real choice in employers.
Nowadays I'd be mildly insulted if given a FizzBuzz during an interview - but I used to do the same out of necessity, because 25% of my candidates couldn't pass it.
[+] [-] lrem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clueless123|12 years ago|reply
If would be nice if the recruiter agencies (who are actually getting paid to do a job), would hire people qualified to understand if a candiadate is or not up to par for the job from a quick email or phone call.
[+] [-] saching90|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|12 years ago|reply
I would never hire anyone without having an actual conversation with them. Whether I can get along with the person, if they will be a good fit for our team is the most important criteria.
Test taking is not an important skill for any job I'd be hiring for.
[+] [-] nandemo|12 years ago|reply
Case in point, the article does not recommend hiring without talking to the candidate.
[+] [-] zby|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 013|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gregors|12 years ago|reply