Ask HN: Advice on Designing an Interview?

[wlpu]

I recently started at a company x months ago. A colleague and I, both agree t0hat the interview process is not one we would willingly tackle again. I raised this with my manager and they have delegated complete responsibility to myself, which I am pleased about, however I don't have a huge amount of experience as an interviewer, although I have done government training to be an interviewer (anti-bais, score cards). The type of role is a Data Engineer favouring the profile of a Software Engineers in the data space. What advice can you offer? If you have interviewed for a similar role what good/bad experiences have you had?

[rzz3]

If you’re going to give a code challenge, make it simple, representative of a real-world problem, and allow them to use resources like stack overflow/blogs/manuals/GitHub issues. Code challenges where you implement an algorithm from memory select only one type of candidate: people who study for interviews.

[muzani]

It's pretty simple - find people who are smart and get things done.

Do test their technical ability, the ability to actually do the job. Fizzbuzz filters a remarkable number of people, so you don't actually have to make it too tough. One of my favourite tests is seeing if someone can reverse a linked list, or do stuff like a FIFO queue with a filter.

You often want to filter overly clever people. So you might play with time. Give them too much time to do a simple implementation, but too little to do a full one.

And then you want to filter for people who just dumbly copy paste answers. This is most fun as a conversation around certain topics. It doesn't have to be a technical challenge. I've had a lot of fun just discussing architecture and tech stacks with applicants. How would you solve this problem? What stack? What's the drawbacks?

[VirusNewbie]

I think easy level coding challenges are a good filter, but not a good way to assess technical skill.

At my previous bigco, I did a collaborative linkedlist problems to understand if they could handle null checks, recursion, checking bounds, etc.

Some people clearly had been practicing LL coding stuff so they flew through it in ten minutes, so I'd just change it a little to make sure they understood what they were doing.

Other folks were deathly nervous and would bumble through it but they'd eventually pass, but they got the same 'score' as the people who did it in five minutes.

Some people couldn't pass it no matter how many hints I gave them, they didn't even really understand loops/recursion. So the filter worked there, and that was the point.

It's other rounds that you can assess the depth of their knowledge moreso than coding challenges.

[avl999]

Whatever you do, do not give a "take home assignment"... one of the worst trends in the industry.

[wara23arish]

Isnt the time you need to dedicate to get good at Leetcode way more than just completing a take home assignment?

[avl999]

LeetCode is transferable skill, any time you spend practising those types of problems will scale to all interviews for all companies you are going to be doing in that interview batch (and perhaps even years into the future). It also serves as a good review of CS fundamentals which you may have forgotten since college or never learned in the first place.

Nothing like that can be said about a take home-assignment asking you to implement boring app with a backend, frontend and a suite of tests over the course of a day to an entire weekend.

Leetcode is like O(1) time work (admittedly with a large constant) that doesn't generate additional work for every company you are applying to. Take home assignments are O(n) time work where you have a bunch of crap to do for every company.

[wara23arish]

I see your point. I concede that grinding leetcode scales better to diff companies you’re applying to.

I’ve never had to do a take home thats that extensive. I agree that’s overkill. The one I’ve done recently was to just use an api they had, make a few wrapper endpoints. Probably took a total of 4 hours from start to submitting. I felt that wasn’t too bad for me personally.

[VirusNewbie]

The difference between LC style interviews and take home style is that you don't know how many candidates they spammed with the take home test. You might be competing against 10 or 100 other candidates. Maybe they don't even get to yours before they pick someone to hire.

At least with the LC style phone screens you have another engineer burning an hour so you can be confident they're at least a little serious about your potential as a candidate.