[BeetleB]

Instead of coding interviews, I suggest asking behavioral questions. Why? Because you can easily ask them when they say "Do you have any questions for us?" No one will think it out of place.

The reason I ask them? To expose the fact that behavioral questions are being gamed by candidates. Not once has an interviewer given me a good response. If they expect candidates to have good responses, they'll get a lot of candidates who memorized scenarios that may never have occurred - and they cannot distinguish between the sincere and those gaming it.

To give you an idea: A former Amazon employee was coaching me for their behavioral interview. For those unfamiliar: You look up Amazon's 14 leadership principles, take each clause in their descriptions, and come up with scenarios demonstrating each clause. His advice on how to prepare for it? If nothing obvious in your work history demonstrates the behavior, make something impressive up and memorize it.

Of course, Amazon's behavioral interview is probably the easiest to game, as you essentially know most of the questions in advance. Probably over half of the ones I was asked were straight from their descriptions (e.g. "Give me an example of a time you disconfirmed a hypothesis.")

[WalterBright]

> Give me an example of a time you disconfirmed a hypothesis.

So far, all of my hypotheses have been confirmed.

[kelseyfrog]

If this is genuine, it's a good indicator that more information can be obtained by making more risky hypotheses. If a joke then woosh on me. :)

[mandeepj]

> Of course, Amazon's behavioral interview is probably the easiest to game, as you essentially know most of the questions in advance

The devil is in the details. Once they will start probing, the candidates who had made up stories would start floundering.

[BeetleB]

Easy to handle this:

1. Pick an example from work where a coworker exhibited the behavior and you're intimately aware of the details

2. Pick an example from work that didn't go the way Amazon would have wanted it, but fantasize about how it could have. I think those who've worked long enough have plenty of tales to tell that didn't quite happen that way in reality, but make for a better narrative. Just adopt one of those. Do you think most of the comments people post on HN with experiences from their workplace are 100% accurate? Do you think they needed to spend a lot of time crafting that narrative? No.[1]

Both of these don't even require much prep.

[1] Edit: Heh - see sibling comment - written while I was writing mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983353

[sp527]

There's a magical escape hatch for this known as "I can't quite recall". The truth is most interviewers don't know how to properly evaluate the authenticity of a story and won't accord it much weight relative to the coding challenges anyway. You'll probably get through if you can pass the Leetcode portion and just bullshit well enough on the behavioral.

[cyanydeez]

All the police procedural propaganda makes people over estimate how well they'd discern fact from fiction.

[BeetleB]

> There's a magical escape hatch for this known as "I can't quite recall".

Indeed. I don't know how Amazon would evaluate that, but one probably should be wary if the candidate knew much of the details.

Except they shouldn't, because Amazon forces you to come prepared with these stories, and penalize you if you don't come prepared with these stories.

[cyanydeez]

You know you're in a hacker forum, where people "make up" solutions to imaginary scenarios all the time.

[angarg12]

Yes, behavioral questions aren't perfect, but I do believe they still serve a purpose. Sure, candidates will embellish and make up stories. Still you are able to weed out candidates who are an obvious bad match, or identify potential gaps that might need to be addressed after a hire.

[BeetleB]

My point isn't that behavior isn't an important factor - I think it's more important in predicting success than technical skills. The problem is this:

How many of your existing employees don't have these behavioral deficiencies that you're trying to root out? If you suddenly gave existing employees a behavioral interview, how will they fare?

[AtlasBarfed]

Amazon's hiring practices are the biggest tell of a sociopathic organization that you should only work for if you have to.

If you are good enough to "raise the bar" at Amazon, then you should be good enough to get a better job somewhere else.

What Amazon hires for is insecure people desperate for the Amazon stamp of approval and willing to be exploited for insane work hours and discarded before their compensation vests. That's what their hiring process selects for, not actual talent.

Then the abuse REALLY starts when you get there.

[jjtheblunt]

> What Amazon hires for is insecure people desperate...

They prey on that subset, but they hire for disposable warm bodies in general.

I worked for them for not quite a year, and quit, because it was so absurd how incompetent the many layers of management above were, who took home massive pay for emailing and deriding talented engineers they knew little about.

Disclaimer : I'd already saved more than enough to retire young, so didn't need to work there, just thought it interesting, am pretty sure was assigned to backfill a hire-to-fire departed warm body, and was quickly keenly aware of the scam almost ponzi scheme they run, having spent several years at Apple which was run excellently (where I was).

[AtlasBarfed]

Did you do their hiring gauntlet just for practice?

[jjtheblunt]

no, trusted the jobs to which i could be assigned would be interesting development, but was wrong