[enraged_camel]

I used to share your opinions, until I sat at the other end of the table and interviewed candidates. The problem is that people lie constantly about their credentials, experience and knowledge. They lie on their resumes, they make up fake references (sometimes going so far as to pay their friends to lie for them), they might even have someone create fake portfolio websites for them and showcase those as their own. There will never be a way to detect such deception without asking candidates basic questions as a way to at least "smoke test".

[wombatpm]

A resume is not just a piece of paper. It’s a piece of paper with lies on it. And it can be the difference between not getting a job and not even coming close.

-Dave Barry

[scarface_74]

I’ve been interviewing people as either just another person in the loop or the person who could give the thumbs up about whether I wanted someone on my team and the manager just rubber stamped it for over 20 years - no coding just conversations.

I’ve never regretted a single person I hired and they have always been able to do the simple CRUD work that most of the 2.7 million developers are doing.

And before the gate keeping starts. I’ve been through the “Making Great Hiring Decisions” training and have conducted behavioral and system design interviews at AWS.

[lmm]

> I’ve been interviewing people as either just another person in the loop or the person who could give the thumbs up about whether I wanted someone on my team and the manager just rubber stamped it for over 20 years - no coding just conversations.

Sounds like a good way to filter for the right class background. (Which, given how well that's correlated with intelligence, is probably as good a hiring method as any)

[scarface_74]

What do you mean by the right class background? If you think I’m a white guy who graduated from a prestigious school, I can guarantee you that’s a far from accurate assumption.

Let’s just say when I walk through my neighborhood I’ve read comments about me in my own NextDoor group about someone “suspicious” and realized they were talking about me or my son…

[lmm]

> What do you mean by the right class background? If you think I’m a white guy

This is why I find it so frustrating to talk to Americans.

> Let’s just say when I walk through my neighborhood I’ve read comments about me in my own NextDoor group about someone “suspicious” and realized they were talking about me or my son…

So you're a member of the class that lives in "good" neighbourhoods where it's suspicious for certain types of people to be? I think you've proved my point.

[scarface_74]

I think you’re more showing your own biases. I never said that the neighborhood was “good”. I just said that there aren’t that many people with my skin color…

But back on topic. I base my interviews on behavioral traits that for framing, can be sussed out by asking “tell me about a time when” type questions.

You did see the part about I’ve gone through the interview training by the second largest employer in the US didn’t you?

It doesn’t matter if you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard if I’m looking for someone who “takes ownership”, “digs deep”, and has shown the ability to deal at the level of “scope” that I’m looking for an knows how to “deal with ambiguity”

[lmm]

> But back on topic. I base my interviews on behavioral traits that for framing, can be sussed out by asking “tell me about a time when” type questions.

> It doesn’t matter if you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard if I’m looking for someone who “takes ownership”, “digs deep”, and has shown the ability to deal at the level of “scope” that I’m looking for an knows how to “deal with ambiguity”

That definitely sounds like something that would filter more for "went to the right schools" (or, more generically, "mingled with the right people", but schools are the easy way). I could certainly believe it's as effective as "reverse a binary tree", but I very much doubt it's fairer.

[blincoln]

I like your "tell me about a time when" approach,[1] and I've used it successfully in the past, but I've never seen a good way to formalize it. Have you ever been able to delegate that responsibility to a team of other people and get results more or less consistent with what would have happened if you'd conducted all of the interviews?

My current opinion is that while it's effective, it means there's a significant bottleneck (sometimes a single person) for the hiring pipeline. i.e. you still need at least one earlier tier of interview to winnow the candidates down to a volume that's manageable for the bottleneck, and the earlier tier needs to be something more standardized that can be delegated to a larger group of people. i.e. "can this person explain common technical details A, B, and C of work in this department well enough to demonstrate solid understanding?"

[1] I read years ago that border guards in some countries use a similar technique, because if someone is being deceptive, it's unlikely they can handle a random walk to an arbitrary depth of detail.

[aleph_minus_one]

I ask myself whether this problem is also part of the US mentality: in Germany, one would rather be tempted to treat even white lies as fraud, and thus compare (culturally, though not legally) such liars with criminals.

On the other hand, in my experience such fraudsters are in most cases easy to detect: just ask them some hard questions (where the candidate will either know the answer or not, thus rhetorics or charisma won't help) about the topics that the candidate claims to have expertise in (choose the question in a way that even very capable candidates will only be able to answer a fraction of them - this is fine and intended).

Typically, after 30-45 minutes you are either sure that the candidate tells the truth about his capabilities or is a liar (hardly ever anything inbetween happens).