[fredley]

...If "Tells me when I'm doing something in a way that could potentially be improved, in a polite, validated way" falls under your definition of "Difficult to work with", then perhaps he wouldn't want to work with you anyway.

However if you want to hire people to just complete tickets as fast as possible, maybe that's a valid reason to reject the candidate.

[nilkn]

"Difficult to work with" is perhaps too harsh a statement. But the candidate is asking for a completely custom treatment at the earliest possible stage of the interview process. The candidate is also assuming that the interviewers aren't aware of the caveats mentioned about standard coding screens/HackerRank exercises. The candidate's proposal also doesn't mirror real-world conditions, because I doubt the job consists of adding features to their own codebases. The candidate also doesn't seem to acknowledge that this is not the entire interview but rather just a low-investment screen to decide whether to perform the full interview in the first place. The candidate also glosses over the value of the standard screen, which is that it's uniform across all candidates.

To be clear, I wouldn't rule out someone for this, but I can sympathize with where I believe the above poster is coming from.

[spyspy]

I have a lot of problems with this paragraph, the same problems I see again and again on both sides of interviews.

> "Difficult to work with" is perhaps too harsh a statement

That's exactly what the OP meant to say, and verbatim what they would have said in an interview debrief. The interviewee wanted some amount of compromise, and all of a sudden they're "difficult to work with". Now everyone else in the room is framing this potential hire as an asshole. There's no coming back from that. I've seen this happen many times. One term of phrase like that and instantly a qualified candidate is out because someone latched onto a single fault and made wild extrapolations about it.

> just a low-investment screen

You have no idea how much of an investment it is. I've had hacker rank problems that I was expected to spend 3 hours on. That's a pretty big investment just to get my foot in the door. Sometimes (read: often) the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. The employer wants me to give it my best when they're not even willing to come up with their own questions.

> uniform across all candidates

I see this a lot as the panacea of interviewing. Sounds good to have everyone on a level playing field. But if you start out with a crappy process, applying it to everyone equally isn't going to get you good talent. As an interviewee, I'll still be bitter about the bullshit you put me through, even if everyone else had to do it.

[StavrosK]

> just a low-investment screen

Low-investment on the part of the employer. They still expect me to spend 90 minutes on proving I have seen a REPL before, which is time I, frankly, don't have. I'm happy to answer/talk about things that relate to my job, but working on puzzles that just happen to be solved more easily by programming has exactly nothing to do with it.

> the candidate is asking for a completely custom treatment

What's next? Having to actually look at someone's CV? That's insanity.

[mox1]

Why are you looking for jobs if you are too busy to spend 90 minutes of effort on applying for that job?

Maybe the whole point of the test is not how well you do, but how you react to being asked to do something you feel is beneath you...

[StavrosK]

> Why are you looking for jobs if you are too busy to spend 90 minutes of effort on applying for that job?

I didn't say I'm too busy to apply, I said I'm too busy to spend 90 minutes on useless tests.

> but how you react to being asked to do something you feel is beneath you...

You know what a great test for that would be? Ask the applicant to wash your car.

[dfabulich]

> useless tests

These tests aren't useless. Tons of candidates have never seen a REPL before and are totally unable to solve even a trivial coding assignment.

I suppose your company is too clever to waste their time on such useless tests? Who at your firm wastes hours interviewing candidates who have no ability to code?

[StavrosK]

If someone has never seen a REPL before, it'll take us less than 90 minutes to figure it out, so we don't tend to waste applicants' time with those.

Going through someone's Github (or any other project they feel is worthy of sharing) and asking them questions about why they made the decisions they made has been orders of magnitude more illuminating than asking them to come up with an algorithm for solving the subset sum problem without Googling.

[brooklyn_ashey]

Well, washing cars turned out to be the point for The Karate Kid... and humility before technique. I agree that few employers will be like Mr.Miyagi though ;

[StavrosK]

Ah, but Daniel was training, not interviewing :P

[nilkn]

I can only speak for where I currently work. Our phone screens take 45 minutes on average rather than 90. If you don't have 45 minutes for a coding phone screen, then you also don't have 45 minutes for anything else you just mentioned, so I actually find your response fairly disingenuous. In fact, you don't have time to interview with any company in any capacity at all.

We actually take great care in examining resumes and CVs before proceeding with a coding screen. We've had plenty of senior developers fail the most basic questions (think FizzBuzz), which is why we conduct these screens.

[StavrosK]

> Our phone screens take 45 minutes on average rather than 90

Even phone screens are better than "Here's a HackerRank link because I don't want to spend time talking to you, enjoy the next hour-and-a-half solving riddles".

[nilkn]

I don't think I fully appreciated that HackerRank does not involve the direct participation from anyone at the hiring company. I wouldn't be on board with that, and that certainly makes more more sympathetic to the OP.

[StavrosK]

Yeah, that's what galls me about it. They even give you (the proverbial you) tests so you literally have to spend zero effort, yet you tell the interviewee to spend 90 minutes on it because it costs you nothing. If you want me to spend time on your process, at least spend that time with me. I want to learn about you as much as you want to learn about me, but you don't see me sending you a Google form with 300 questions about your company to fill out.

[tty7]

Yup, this is basically what I meant - but much better articulated. Something I need to get better at

10/10 !

[Sir_Cmpwn]

You're asking the same of the candidate, though. You want them to write a unique solution to your silly puzzle tailored to your company. It's a two-way street.

[Joe-Z]

Going on and on about issues you already brought up in the past, while they may be sensible, but for which you don't have the time or resources to fix just yet doesn't do any good either. So a constant complainer would be someone difficult to work with.

In the same spirit you could definitely see it as unreasonable for a candidate to suggest you adapt your screening process because they know better (even if it's said in a polite, validated way).

[tty7]

To your first point, yes exactly. The interview is as much mine as it is the candidates.

Not necessarily hiring to complete tickets as fast as possible, but some who can take a task and complete with minimal issues. I don't want to be stuck in meetings or arguing in PRs etc.

[foo101]

Would you really want someone to take a task and complete with minimal issues if the task does not add value to the organization or is counterproductive?

I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues. Where I work, one is encouraged to argue about what is not right in the meetings and offer better solutions.

This candidate is doing exactly that: Argue why a certain hiring methodology is not effective and what a better alternative is. Considering that this candidate does not just follow orders but challenges the status quo and the fact that he has volunteering-based projects to show makes this author very likely a good fit for my organization.

[tty7]

Let me explain a little better, and again I am only basing this all off the small amount of data we have.

Let me give an example as I am not the best at articulating. hopefully this helps.

Lets say I hired this engineer as Senior or Team Lead. Now I want the base docker image we use for node bumped a major version. I checked the changelog for the nodes releases and knowing our codebase I think its safe.

I could ask a Junior dev to do it, but I knowing that they are lacking experience this may seem like a "big deal" when really its not.

What I want is the node version updated, validation unit tests pass, regressions tests are good. And it to be released. If there is a failure along the way, address it or sure lets chat about it.

But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him.

Sure there would be areas this person might excel at, but some days little tasks just need to get done to keep the ball moving.

[foo101]

> would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him

Looks like it is a difference in culture that I am used to and the one that you are used to.

At my workplace, it is perfectly acceptable for someone to suggest a complete change to our CI/CD process. In fact, we have changed our complete CI/CD process twice (SVN/build scripts -> Mercurial/Jenkins -> Git/Travis-CI) already with minimal loss in productivity because someone questioned the existing CI/CD process and suggested a well thought plan to switch to a new one.

But I get your point that sometimes it may not be feasible to carry our such a drastic change in process, infrastructure, etc. But suggesting such a change is going to be acceptable and we refusing to accept such a suggestion is also going to be perfectly acceptable and both this person and us working in harmony even after this disagreement is also going to be acceptable.

[crdoconnor]

>But this Email in response to hackerrank - would make me perceive this to be someone who would respond with a complete change to our CI/CD processes, to our infrastructure, maybe to even using Node - as this sort of task is beneath him.

This makes me think that you're a poor judge of character and of a slightly authoritarian mindset.

This email is one of many protesting an industry interview culture that prioritizes badly thought through exercises that bear little relationship to the job being interviewed for.

>What I want is the node version updated

And do you really think that seeing candidates reverse a binary tree without protest will tell you how well they can perform at this kind of role?

[epicide]

This is really taking it to an extreme. Just because you don't fight back against some entry test doesn't mean you won't fight the important things.

> I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues.

Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants. You can have them.

[foo101]

> This is really taking it to an extreme

No more extreme than suggesting that someone who raises thoughtful questions on a broken hiring process must certainly be a bad fit for an organization.

> Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants.

Now, this is taking it to an extreme!

[epicide]

If they are assuming they know more than everybody involved and making suggestions to a process they haven't even gone through 20% of, then yes, they are probably a bad fit.

It's extremely hypocritical to criticize someone for the very thing you are doing (assuming the other person doesn't know how to do their job). Couple this with the fact that they are not asking for any advice on their hiring process, it's a pretty rude thing to do.

A little bit of fluff added to the wording doesn't make it suddenly polite.

> I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues.

Someone who can't do straightforward tasks without having an issue is incompetent, pedantic, or both.

[foo101]

If your company wants people to just do straightforward tasks without raising pertinent questions, your company sounds like a bad fit for many good engineers I know. For example, I personally, would never work for a company like yours.

I am quite lucky to have worked in companies where the peers and management encourage debates and arguments and do not take it as a sign of incompetence.

I had no idea there were companies that would take perfectly reasonable questions on a broken process as a sign of incompetence. Thank you for enlightening me. I now know to be careful enough to avoid such organizations in future.

[epicide]

Replying to myself as I can't nest further.

I never said raising issues is bad. Where I work, we highly encourage people to bring up issues as they see them.

However, when you bring something up as an issue, it usually helps to suggest a solution (which this original GitHub post fails to do) and we don't generally try to take unsolicited advice from people who aren't even part of the company yet.

[busterarm]

I'm always struck by how many people in this field I encounter who think it's not collaborative work and that it's "OK" to work at a desk with headphones on all day.

Maybe at a consultancy and only if you're far downstream of dealing with clients.

That's not normal, nor should it be.