[rmATinnovafy]

I'd like to see software engineers who are part of the hiring process in their company apply for their own position anonymously. Go through the whole enchilada: the phone interview, the code tests, the puzzles, the questions regarding optimization and performance, etc. Let's see if they can pass all the hurdles.

I have $100 here that says most won't (if any).

* If we can't hire people due to a broken system, how do we expect to succeed?

[crusso]

I've been on the hiring manager's side and the employee's side, more the former than the latter.

I don't get your beef.

The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software.

Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique.

The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together.

Do you want to send me your $100 via Paypal?

[rmATinnovafy]

I don't have a beef with it. I also think that of you apply to the jobs posted on HN, you will get my point.

Sadly, I don't use Paypal. You can make a donation to your local hackerspace with the $100 that you will soon lose.

Good luck.

PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?

[mgkimsal]

"Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?", especially, perhaps, the people you didn't hire?

Almost without exception, people who don't get hired never hear back from a company as to why. Yes, I know all about "everyone's afraid to get sued for saying something wrong". So... develop a neutral feedback form to candidates as to why they were passed over, skills the interviewer(s) thought were lacking, etc. This will mean that people can get better, perhaps get another job (yes, maybe at a competitor, but also maybe somewhere else entirely), and continue to earn income, pay taxes, and contribute to society in a productive way. Some people can contribute without a job, sure, but right now most people need jobs.

Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level. We wish you the best of luck in your job search". This would be courteous, professional and helpful all at the same time. Between my own experience and that of several colleagues, fewer than 5% of employers ever provide something even remotely useful in terms of feedback.

How do we expect the job seeking population to get better without providing feedback mechanisms for them to learn from?

[yummyfajitas]

Telling someone "we're sorry - we had 8 candidates apply for this position, and we ended up taking on someone with more experience in X, Y and Z compared to your experience level.

And what about the cases where your reasons are not "more experience in X, Y, Z"? Cultural fit is a biggie - one might turn down a candidate who is more qualified because his banking attitudes would go over badly at a startup, for example.

[mgkimsal]

That's true, and in those cases, a more generic "we had other qualified candidates" letter/email would be fine. but all too often corporate america just ignores people altogether - won't return emails/phone calls, and basically leaves the person out to dry. Working via a recruiter, you at least have a person at the agency who might be sympathetic.

Companies don't seem to realize that treating applicants bad is just as detrimental in many cases as poor customer service. I've had bad experiences with job application processes, and I've told many people chapter and verse about the companies involved. If they can't even treat people well who want to work there, how will they treat customers after the money is received?

[yummyfajitas]

That's true, and in those cases, a more generic "we had other qualified candidates" letter/email would be fine.

If unskilled candidate X gets "other candidates had more specific skillz" while uncultured candidate Y gets "sorry, you suck for unspecified reasons", it sounds like a lawsuit risk.

[bobb3456]

Telling the candidate anything specifically negative invites argument and misinterpretation. In practice, the better companies always use the "other qualified candidates" letter. The worse ones tell you nothing.

[crusso]

> PS. Have you ever asked the people you have interviewed what they think about the process?

Specifically asked? I've received lots of feedback from people who made it through the process. They've added to my bag of interview techniques here and there. In general, they appreciated a hiring manager who spent a lot of time and effort fielding good people. Those kinds of comments tend to be a bit self-selecting, though.

I've had a couple of candidates who didn't make it get frustrated with the process. One in particular lost his cool just trying to pseudocode a routine to determine prime factors of the input or something like that. If you lose your composure doing something like that, I don't want you in the trenches with me late at night when we have a demo to show to customers the next day and something isn't working.

When people have asked me for feedback on why they weren't made an offer, I've always tried to be as candid as possible; especially when it seemed that they were sincerely trying to improve. Screw HR and their obsessive need to CYA.

[theoj]

>> The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet

Genuinely curious: why do you consider spontaneity an essential trait in a programmer?

[bobb3456]

I agree with everything you've said except for the bit about puzzles -- I've never found any correlation between the results from burn-the-ropes/odd-shaped manhole cover-type questions and strong programming skills. I've had at least one candidate who did superbly on the puzzlers (had clearly not seen them before)- best performance we'd seen-and could not program his way out of a wet paper bag. We stopped the puzzlers shortly thereafter. Brain teasers are a waste of time.

[chubbard]

Yea I have to agree with other posters. This is easy money for most software engineers because they have exactly the skills that will be posted on the ads, criteria that are checked, etc. I think even your challenge misses the point of the article which is when we post wanted ads we put down such specific skill sets that if we rigidly stick those skill sets, just like our software does, we'll miss the people that can grow into those roles.

The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person.

If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners.

I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.

[EliRivers]

That makes no sense to me. I know exactly what skills my company needs (or rather, what the hiring people look for on the CV). I know exactly what the interview is looking for. I know exactly what programming language to brush up on, and I know the complete set of coding problems set in the interview.

I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person.

What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.

[why-el]

I think you are missing the point. The challenge is to design a set of hurdles that are equivalent to those faced by potential hires, not the exact ones. Of course you ought to know what your company asks for. Furthermore, I don't think its all about the questions. Part of the challenge is to design the exact same circumstances, i.e. puzzles, phone interviews, travelling, amount of time to review what the company requires, length of interviews, and so on.

[codexon]

breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions

I probably botched an interview where they expected me to come up with an RB tree fast enough (it was a company that has posted on HN).

Tipping people off to questions is cheating the test, so you have some people trying to temporarily bulk memorize algorithms that they'll forget in another month before an interview. Does anyone else not find this stupid?

[rhizome]

Did you ask them when the last time was that they had to use an RB tree in their software?

[codexon]

No and I doubt they would have hired me because I asked a snarky question.

[antidoh]

> What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for?

The kind of people who want to "see how you think."

[btian]

I'll add another $100. I think the fundamental problem is that employers are unwilling to take on someone unless they are absolutely certain that the candidate is the right person because firing is extremely difficult and complicated (with potential for law suits) if the new hire does not prove to be a good fit.

[xsmasher]

It's not just lawsuits. Getting a new hire equipped and up to speed takes resources, and drains productivity away from existing employees.

Also, once you've done a little training the sunk costs fallacy can kick in, even if you wouldn't hire them in hindsight.

[misnome]

I thought this was what probationary periods were for; evaluating a new employee with the opportunity to not continue their employment at the end of it.

[mjwalshe]

What in America the land of "at will" employment I find that very hard to believe.

[noonespecial]

You might find out something frightening. Getting the job mostly just came down to luck.

[entangld]

People in the real world realize that outside factors have a lot to do with hiring.

But when these conversations turn into arguments it all comes down to some applicants being more "qualified."

There are lots of reasons people get hired to do jobs they've never done before and lot of those reasons are subjective.

[rmATinnovafy]

Exactly.

Maybe the CEO got a not so gentle nudge from the investors to hurry up and hire somebody and you were the one they were interviewing next. Stuff like that happens a lot. The process is more about outside factors than the actual interviewing process itself.

[anonymoushn]

I've never received an offer to work as a software engineer other than by going through the whole interview process. My impression was that the vast majority of other people who became software engineers at the companies I applied to had done the same.

I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.

[philwelch]

In most cases that's how the engineers got hired on in the first place, so I don't understand your beef. Plus, what you really want is to hire people better than the ones you already have.

[gcheong]

Well if I am working at a place that would tend to imply I did get through all that. Why would my chances be less a second time around? That said, I do agree that the hiring process is rather broken, just not sure that this would be a good test to show that.

[mahyarm]

Most of them had to go through the same thing to be hired.