[pavlov]

> If I were hiring for a basketball team, and had to choose between two candidates neither of whom had experience playing basketball and were alike in all ways except that one was an avid soccer player and one was equally fervent about pottery, I would choose the soccer player.

That’s not at all what happens in programming interviews that use algorithmic puzzles.

You have candidates who already have a professional track record in basketball, and instead of focusing on that profile and whether it’s a good fit for your team, you give them a timed soccer workout because it’s somehow a more objective measure of athletic ability.

Any basketball team that hires like that wouldn’t survive for long. The quiz interview format in the tech industry is a form of “anti-Moneyball”. It works for the SV giants because they have an enormous supply of candidates and they need generic competence that can be shuffled around. Smaller companies would do much better to hire for the actual role, not for “Cracking the code interview” memorization performance.

[jaredklewis]

The basketball was just a metaphor to explain relative similarity. Obviously hiring for an actual basketball team is a very different set of challenges as they literally have hundreds of hours of video taped performance history to evaluate before the candidate even walks in the door, and at lower levels, asking candidates to spend several days “trying out” is not considered onerous. But I would still argue that performance on programming puzzles much more closely correlates to programming job performance than knowledge of Chinese poetry.

As for hiring people based on their experience profile, it’s great of course in the case of candidates with lots of open source contributions and such, but this has the issue of ignoring the majority of candidates which don’t contribute to open source. Should being an os contributor be a hard requirement?

But if you are suggesting that a resume with the words “5 years experience web development at company x” means anything, I’m a little incredulous. I worked with people that claimed to have far more experience than that and struggled horribly with even the most basic tasks.

Finally, a little tangential, but memorization gets a lot of flack for being a “stupid” skill. My experience is that it is nearly impossible for adults to memorize something like Chinese by poetry “by rote.” Indeed if you try memorizing some poetry I think you’ll find that it really is a very fulfilling and creative process.