It should be easy for smart people to talk to other smart people.

October 20, 2020 8:53 PM

I’ve been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here’s why… and what it should be like instead. "Or, another way to put it … if I’m a good engineer, it should be easy for me to talk to a hiring manager at a company I might be interested in, at a time of my choosing. But that’s simply not possible today. Despite the refrain that we’re in a candidate’s market and that there’s a shortage of good candidates, which should mean that candidates should have the power to call the shots, today’s hiring process couldn’t be further removed from this ideal. And it’s not just broken for a specific type of candidate. It’s broken for everyone."
posted by geoff. (48 comments total)

Or, another way to put it … if I’m a good engineer, it should be easy for me to talk to a hiring manager at a company I might be interested in, at a time of my choosing. But that’s simply not possible today.

Big shoutout to all the engineers who treated that polisci elective like a bird course, your patron saint has clicked post.
posted by mhoye at 9:07 PM on October 20, 2020 [31 favorites]

The end of the article is sort of a plug for interviewing.io, which give me incredible performance anxiety. If only because I'm old and haven't dealt with problems like this, well ever. Likewise, I do not talk like "return a list of all of its boundary nodes in counterclockwise order." I don't know how often that comes up.

This why I left Google summarizes work of a software engineer more accurately. You have a failing project done by an offshore team, it might've come in with the perception that everything is fine because an offshore team hid it, so you have a ton of technical debt you can't quantify and any honest assessment will make it worse. Figuring out how to solve this, how to make your superiors look good and yourself in the process is a much more important problem. Also I'm guessing outside of maybe a few very, very technical jobs, do you ever get "graph node reversal" as a problem.
posted by geoff. at 9:16 PM on October 20, 2020 [18 favorites]

This is one of the most Engineer Mentality articles I've ever read. 'Engineer Mentality' I've come to believe, is always looking at machines, systems, cultures, as problems that are amenable to solutions (if we just applied thinking and process), rather than those things as the actual outcomes of social-cultural-political forces. Why can't we just do better technology, and make everyone have a better time at work?' 'Why does hiring people have to be really shitty for everyone?' are the kind of questions you ask if you breeze past all the known features of labour/education markets in every different style of economic system. Looking at the problem of unemployment and hiring inefficiency in skilled labour markets, and not realising that it's one of the central questions of political economy, going right back to Adam Smith and Ricardo.

in the midst of a talent shortage, companies ignore the candidates who apply to them and pay recruiters without domain expertise to chase the same ten engineers with the same credentials. This is a textbook example of an inefficient market.

Bzzzzzt. It's the textbook case of an informal cartel.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:24 PM on October 20, 2020 [86 favorites]

my last round of interviewing, I got asked all about tdd, unit test, technical debt management, devops, agile...

my first week on the job: we don't do agile, tdd, or devops. too time consuming. did you pr yet?

ugh.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:29 PM on October 20, 2020 [20 favorites]

Yea, there's definitely a challenge in work sample testing -- you have to carefully titrate how much domain expertise you require for programming challenges, because if you are open to the possibility of hiring new grads, then asking candidates to pretty print an org chart from data stored in LDAP is counterproductive.

Worse, it's a huge challenge for third party recruiters trying to credential you: the domain expertise they do inject is only useful in a fraction of employers. So they end up casting the widest nets and use the most abstract problem descriptions feasible, and you as a candidate have no idea how this may or may not apply on the job (hint: often the employer doesn't either).

That said, at least in SRE, log parsing / regex is basically half the coding screens. And companies do a good job of matching challenges to positions. As a candidate I frankly enjoyed the harder ones; Mozilla threw a cutely framed clique analysis problem at candidates. Which, like the Google SRE book, is probably half marketing material.
posted by pwnguin at 9:46 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is there a cure for Engineer's Disease, other than applying a large rock to the affected area?

Hiring sucks because like everything in business, it is optimized for specific metrics and not outcomes. Bring in the people, interview them, do they meet vaguely-defined requirements that may or may not have anything to do with the actual work? How should the hiring person know? They are an expert in the hiring system, not what the job entails.

This would be a farce, except that for most Americans it's what determines the level of health care they receive.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:46 PM on October 20, 2020 [22 favorites]

Is there a cure for Engineer's Disease, other than applying a large rock to the affected area?

Well, we can take a page from social psychology and review one of the most widely cited papers in industrial psych. A meta analysis of techniques, they find the 3 most valid selection methods are:

1. Work sample tests
2. Structured interviews
3. IQ tests

Well, IQ test are out, so we're left with structured interviews and work sample tests. Work sample tests abound in pretty much every hiring scenario I've been party to. But for reasons I choose to attribute to ignorance and stupidity -- but could easily be something more malign -- structured interviews have not caught on, and there are zero companies in the HN portfolio to address that.
posted by pwnguin at 10:01 PM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

It’s been a long time since I’ve known an engineer personally or done anything connected to engineering, so pardon my ignorance - is “eng manager” really a phrase people use? It appears a lot in this article, to the point of distraction.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:11 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

> is “eng manager” really a phrase people use?

Yep. Wouldn't want to confuse 'em with the Product Managers, or the Project Managers, or the Program Managers.
posted by aneel at 10:16 PM on October 20, 2020 [13 favorites]

Ah yes, the dreaded “PM” : the ever ambiguous two-letter acronym thrown around as loosely as own-back-pats at a Product Launch party.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 10:21 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

> is “eng manager” really a phrase people use?

Yep. Wouldn't want to confuse 'em with the Product Managers, or the Project Managers, or the Program Managers.


Of course there are different categories of manager; my question was specifically about the use of “eng” rather than the full word.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:24 PM on October 20, 2020

I just went through this meat-grinder and used all of the services that the author recommends. None of them are great. Even the 'solution' service here is super bad, the style of interview that they use is effectively HackerRank-via-screenshare. Not great.
posted by thebigdeadwaltz at 10:29 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I’m an eng manager. We mostly say “EM” to save time while hopping from video call to video call all day. Worse, we abbreviate software engineer and then pronounce it “swee”, as in “are we getting any more SWE headcount for H1?”

😔
posted by migurski at 10:45 PM on October 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

Coming from the S part of STEM, I thought this was about a different kind of engineering. I'm in bioprocess engineering, overlaps a lot with chem engineering, and if a candidate is missing a skill or if a job contains work you wouldn't be able to handle, this will usually be apparent from the job description or candidate resume alone, if not then 1 minute into the phone screen.
posted by picklenickle at 10:46 PM on October 20, 2020 [4 favorites]

That ex-Google engineer's blog is very interesting, geoff.:

No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote.

Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.

You apply for promotion by assembling a “promo packet”: a collection of written recommendations from your teammates, design documents you’ve created, and mini-essays you write to explain why your work merits a promotion.

A promotion committee then reviews your packet with a handful of others, and they spend the day deciding who gets promoted and who doesn’t.

During my two-year honeymoon phase, this system sounded great to me. Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions.

In its decidedly more finite than I ever would have guessed wisdom, Google has modeled its promotions procedures on the college admissions process, only instead of forcing the people they choose along with those they reject to abandon almost an entire year of learning the things that would have allowed them to do well at their institution in favor of constructing paper maché caricatures of themselves puffed up to the size of parade floats in hopes of impressing the committee the way colleges do, Google actually pays people to neglect their own jobs as they undercut the work of their colleagues, and practice weaving a net of plausible lies that will allow them to land positions of responsibility where their malicious incompetence can do some real damage.

No wonder every Google product I use and rely on seems to be slowly – but lately more rapidly – turning to shit right before my eyes.
posted by jamjam at 11:04 PM on October 20, 2020 [38 favorites]

Worse, we abbreviate software engineer and then pronounce it “swee”

Tell me you're Singaporean.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:20 PM on October 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me

This is all intensely late-Soviet, both the system itself and the earnest faith in it the writer describes holding
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:26 PM on October 20, 2020 [13 favorites]

The entire article is really just one great long advertisement for the author's company.

The Google article deserves a post of its own. Ironic how Google has 'evolved' from brave new world-changing startup into nothing more than just another large, faceless corporation, but worse.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:29 PM on October 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

Ha! This might be a Rorschach test. Yes there's certainly an Ivy League admission thing going on but I got a completely different view of things. I hated the committee at first and then realized that it actually created a better developer:

- He assumed the high profile projects needed his help to get out the door. This might be true but by not helping them out and not being a team player he's really forcing the program to get out the door with the resources given. Having an objective committee review him removes his boss who probably was also judged on the success of the higher profile project. We don't know if really the cost of bringing something like Google Wave to market was way higher than estimated and internally calculated for because it cost other projects.

- He added metrics to what he was doing. He thought it was fluff and make a good point that some of it was theater but how else was he supposed to expect to be judged? He was doing a good job and that was proven by creation of metrics to show he was. By focusing his priorities on things he couldn't quantify like improving developers to things that could be quantified he may very well have been helping the company. Sometimes it actually is better not to improve a ten year old Perl file but simply slap on another feature until it fails catastrophically.

- Referring to the "sister-team" India is generous and feels like an internal to Google phrase. In all my experience there's an enormous pressure to push development to low-cost offshore as quickly as possible. I don't think the lower cost of offshoring is quite appreciated enough. We're talking $5-15/hr versus $200/hr. Without getting into ethics technical debt gets cheaper when the labor to alleviate the technical debt gets cheaper. Technical debt is 40 hours to rectify for a STEM top school graduate? Looks a lot cheaper at 1/5th the price.

Not to be a contrarian but it seems like he was looking to expect that Google hired him like he was a doctor coming from a top program. People give other professions a lot of deserved respect and believe them when they manage their time. For a lot of easons the corporate world isn't like this and Google taught him how to play the corporate game.

Cynically, what he did and what Google does isn't what a family run company with longevity in mind would do but very much what a company that is beholden to the stock market does.
posted by geoff. at 11:30 PM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

Cynically, what he did and what Google does isn't what a family run company with longevity in mind would do but very much what a company that is beholden to the stock market does.

Berp, that got all mashed up. Anyway google is run like a giant sanctioned pump-and-dump stock.
posted by geoff. at 11:41 PM on October 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Definitely relevant to my work life, though a bit bitter sweet as I found out today as part of the process of my current company being acquired by a FAANG company the recruiting team won't be invited to be a part of that transition. Fun dealing with this anxiety of losing my job on top of the pandemic! So I might be a bit punchy given the slow burn distress I'm currently feeling so I hope I'm not too harsh. I’ve also used all the products that she’s mentioned, though not her companies tool, interviewing.io, but Hired, Triplebyte, AngelList, LinkedIn Recruiter, That said this line (amongst many others) stood out to me:

It should be easy for smart people to talk to other smart people.

Or, another way to put it … if I’m a good engineer, it should be easy for me to talk to a hiring manager at a company I might be interested in, at a time of my choosing.

I've no idea where that comes from, why should you by dint of being an engineer get to take up someone elses time on your whim, divorced from any other considerations? One there’s a lot of emphasis she’s putting on smart here. One thing you hear a lot is ‘we only want to hire the best people’, best being undefined and just assumed to be the same thing as the next startup down the street also wants.

And to some degree that’s true, there’s a stereotypical silicon valley startup engineer profile for a reason, but it’s also a large part of the reason there’s a lot of representation issues in SV. The best fit is someone who can do the job them team is working on well, ‘smarts’ aside. Often it’s someone who’s done some percentage of the work before but there’s enough new challenges they can grow and apply what they already know to solve something new.

How does this get assessed then? If you’re a good engineer how does the company know? This credentially problem has then moved out to schools, prior companies, and to some degree github and the open-source community. There are a number of solutions, some of which she talks about later to circumvent the schools/jobs filter, but I can speak from personal experience it can be very hard to convince someone in power to sidestep that when they themselves came through the same wringer on top. A continued version of the tale-as-old-as-time hazing justification.

If I’m actually good at my job, why can’t I just set up some conversations with companies I think are cool and see if it’s a fit? Why do I have to subject myself and others to an endless parade of vapid conversations and the inevitable busywork that precedes them?

Recruiters are a forward facing product of a lot of competing systems of both politics, power, and company process. It's really easy to slam them as she does, but it's missing the forest for the trees. For one, a lot of hiring managers I know are adding in hiring on top of all their other duties. This isn’t something where they get to swap out 5 hours a week from their 40 hour work schedule, but rather it often gets added on top of a packed schedule. Is this a good idea? It’s not! There’s a lot of problems with extractive capitalism, even for those who many perceive as winners. But given that’s often the situation, just setting up a conversation requires a lot of time from people who are already time-strapped.

As to why submit yourself to busy work? In some regards a light level of busy work often works as a screener for interest. There might be some value in separating those who wouldn’t be interested in accepting an offer from those who would. Is it the best system? Not always, but it’s not the only system with slight upfront costs to serve as a tourist filter.

Talking to people can suck, but it’s amazing how speaking to people who are involved in a job search seems to some as a huge mountain to be overcome. There are certainly people for whom it’s not easy, or truly a hurdle too big to overcome, so I’m not trying to downplay that here. There is also a group that views anything other than engineers as lesser beings and not worth even condescending to. Perhaps everyone in the second group is secretly in the first and using it as a coping mechanism, but until I get more evidence there having a non-engineer in the process can be very useful in helping figure out how a future employee might relate to the broader organization.

In any event, on interviewing.io, once you’ve built up your reputation by doing mock interviews (persistent, meaningful credentialing)

Lastly, as this comment in long enough, I’m not sure how much this will help in the long term. As mentioned I’ve worked with Triplebyte before and there was a problem there of disconnect between in what Triplebyte was measuring. What they thought was important vs. what the hiring manager thought was important came up multiple times, the candidate might have scored highly on a data modeling segment, but wouldn’t do very well on the onsite. It wasn’t because they were bad or that Triplebyte was wrong, but their focus on the same issue was different than what the hiring manager needed. Maybe they’ve solved for this and are really able to align with each company they’re working with, but it can be a real issue and not one that’s easily solvable.
posted by Carillon at 11:49 PM on October 20, 2020 [7 favorites]

There's an old reddit comment about this stuff that's worth a read. It's long, but one paragraph has always stayed with me (emphasis mine):

Because of the difficulty of finding a working environment that's empowering and supports rather than sabotages productivity, few good programmers will leave a workable gig. They tend to stay put. Rather than accepting applications, you have to hunt them out, and then make a sale. There was a company that matched up productive open source programmers (measured in terms of github contributions) with local opportunities, but guess what, that's not how companies wanted to hire. Perhaps it's ego, but they wanted brilliant applicants to notice the opening on their web site and then call a phone number. If I were hiring, I'd be on github committers like ugly on an ape.

I notice this a lot during the initial contact phase of recruiting; companies want you to treat them like they're Facebook or Google when the reality is they're just another gray-faced corporation.
posted by um at 12:31 AM on October 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

companies want you to treat them like they're Facebook or Google when the reality is they're just another gray-faced corporation.

But Facebook and Google are just another gray-faced corporation.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:57 AM on October 21, 2020 [12 favorites]

As to why submit yourself to busy work? In some regards a light level of busy work often works as a screener for interest.

Unfortunately it also often works as a screener for how much of their own time someone is going to be prepared to give to the company free of charge.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:04 AM on October 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

No for sure, I'm definitely not talking about say, building and maintaining an open-source project entirely on your free time. More like creating a basic resume or having a 15 minute phone call.
posted by Carillon at 1:18 AM on October 21, 2020

No for sure, I'm definitely not talking about say, building and maintaining an open-source project entirely on your free time. More like creating a basic resume or having a 15 minute phone call.

The reality may be more like this.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 4:36 AM on October 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah, hiring in tech is broken at every level, and most of it is because we tech people are notoriously bad at dealing with wetware issues, and would rather design clever software with URLs ending in ".io" to try to go around the problem rather than deal with the messy reality of people.

That said, can we all agree that external tech recruiters are the literal worst, and should be shunned from polite society? A few former coworkers and I still maintain a Wall of Shame for the worst cold-emails we've gotten. Easily at the top of that list is the dude who decided to bring his PUA skills to his job, and sent out an email blast trying to neg candidates. Like, he tried to subtly throw shade on their former employers and imply that his company was way cooler to work at, or something. It must've been some sort of mail merge that pulled from candidates' LinkedIn or something, but it didn't have any guardrails and it wasn't very smart about how it used that data. The email I saw contained the sentence "I see you've worked at Google and Facebook--what do they do?"
posted by Mayor West at 5:52 AM on October 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

I had a phone screen a few years ago for a job that was doing the exact same thing that I'd done on a previous job on a very similar product. First they asked me to code a fibonacci sequence in python and then they asked me how many gas stations there were in Pennsylvania. I should have just hung up the call at that point; anyone still doing those sad old Google puzzle questions during a tech interview isn't really a company that I'd want to work for.
posted by octothorpe at 5:57 AM on October 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

I am not an engineer, but based on my personal experiences I can only conclude that there are many, many people in all walks of life whose main skill in life is putting forth the false impression that they are competent, pleasant individuals in job interviews.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:28 AM on October 21, 2020 [17 favorites]

> Of course there are different categories of manager; my question was specifically about the use of “eng” rather than the full word.

Yes, the literal term "Eng Manager" is used at my current company, often (but not exclusively) in contexts where you talk about both the "Eng Managers" and "Product Managers" at the same time. The long form "Engineering Manager" is much rarer. The short form "EM" does come up. I just looked in Workday, and in the official org chart these folks are labeled as "Engineering Leader", but nobody calls them that that I've heard.

"This meeting is for the Eng Managers and the Product Managers to give status reports".
"Rajini is the Eng Manager on that project."

The Engineering department is often referred to aloud as "Eng" and in writing as either "Eng" or "Engg".

"We need to get input from Eng"
posted by aneel at 6:50 AM on October 21, 2020

Yes, this is a prime example of the Engineering Mentality but at least it's trying.

It should be noted that hiring is broken for hiring managers as well as candidates. In my last job I wanted to hire some engineers which meant I needed to interact with the third-party hiring system. Their web-based system would not let me enter all the information required so I could not directly publish. The recruiter had to go in and fill out the information I couldn't access. The list of candidates I received was total crap and I ended up hiring people that others had recommended but only, of course, after they endured dealing with the third-party hiring system. It was as if it was all designed to discourage you at every step.
posted by tommasz at 7:18 AM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I am not in software, but the job search and hiring processes I have been involved with have all been pretty terrible in ways that echo some of what the article talks about. For both good and bad reasons, things are set up to prevent open and honest direct communication, and SO MUCH of your time as an applicant gets sucked into things like retyping everything from your resume into the company's candidate portal because they use that kind of speed bump as a first-level screening device.

The article seems to be pushing for additional third-party credentialing as a big part of their solution. I can't speak to software, but it is hard to see that working well in most fields (where there are usually already multiple credential systems anyway).
posted by Dip Flash at 7:46 AM on October 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Particularly given the factor of companies doing COVID-related layoffs this year, the “candidates who apply to us are probably bad, we should chase existing FAANG employees even harder” philosophy seems even more broken. /facepalm
posted by FallibleHuman at 8:39 AM on October 21, 2020

I can't speak to software, but it is hard to see that working well in most fields (where there are usually already multiple credential systems anyway).

I can speak to software (to some extent), and it fills a need because there isn't a lot of formal academic credentialing. Which can be pleasant or frustrating, depending on what side you're on—it's still possible to be a self-taught coder and find a company willing to overlook the lack of a degree (or in one case that I'm aware of, lack of a highschool diploma!), in a way that many other fields simply won't consider doing. On the other hand, it means having a fairly rigorous interview process to determine if someone is worth hiring, in the absence of just leaning on academia to provide an imprimatur.

Vendor certifications were sort of the 1990s solution to this: vendors or de facto standards bodies created certifications and cert tests, generally with very few prerequisites, so you can acquire a credential to add to your resume.

interviewing.io seems to want to add another path, where you do mock interviews to build up experience points or something; I don't really see the benefit to either party, really. If some younger or otherwise un-credentialed person was asking me for advice on getting into the field, I'd probably tell them their time would be better spent creating a GitHub account and using it to document their progress while taking some Udemy courses.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:13 AM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Companies want to pay "top"dollar for plug and play employees. Where do they think these trained and credentialed employees are coming from? The best experienced employees are ones trained internally, but our economy has decided to do more with less.
posted by rebent at 9:24 AM on October 21, 2020 [7 favorites]

or one, a lot of hiring managers I know are adding in hiring on top of all their other duties. This isn’t something where they get to swap out 5 hours a week from their 40 hour work schedule, but rather it often gets added on top of a packed schedule. Is this a good idea? It’s not! There’s a lot of problems with extractive capitalism, even for those who many perceive as winners. But given that’s often the situation, just setting up a conversation requires a lot of time from people who are already time-strapped.

If you are an Engineering Manager, hiring is one of your main duties. Over the course of every year, you should plan on spending 5 hours a week thinking about topics like:

1. Justifying head count / chasing open reqs from higher ups
2. Improving your interviewing process
3. Sourcing candidates
4. Networking within the industry to build a bench of people you want to reach out
5. Retaining your existing employees (level promotions, 1:1s, compensation decisions, team cohesion)

If that doesn't sound like something you want to spend time on in perpetuity, I recommend avoiding the Engineering Manager promotion.
posted by pwnguin at 9:33 AM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’ve often wondered how long before the rest of us start needing/using agents like Hollywood has for our careers. As the hiring process gets more complicated and takes more time, requires more (maybe too much) self promotion, when does it make sense to have someone that just does that for you, but paid by you and working for your interests? Idk like the time for this has come. Perhaps long overdue.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 9:38 AM on October 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

As a personal rule, I do not speak to engineering recruiters for any reason whatsoever.
posted by Arctic Circle at 10:21 AM on October 21, 2020

As a personal rule, I do not speak to engineering recruiters for any reason whatsoever.

I spoke to one once because I was thinking of putting a band together and I'd heard he was a really good harmonica player.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 11:00 AM on October 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

my last round of interviewing, I got asked all about tdd, unit test, technical debt management, devops, agile...

my first week on the job: we don't do agile, tdd, or devops. too time consuming. did you pr yet?

I'm glad I just saw this. Couple years back I made an attempt, hoping to score better salary, to get a different position. One employer who still has not rejected me outright, wanted, essentially, a 3-week trial period, with no guarantee that the pay would be better (in fact, I did the math, all these places we're on par with my current employer when accounting for benefits). I passed on that as I didn't want to further ruin my relationship with my current employer, given the stakes and potential rewards.

The other employer rejected me after a couple attempts at a TDD project. What's amusing about the prevalence of asking about TDD during interviews (between this and other companies), is that I've also been going to (not during the pandemic) these Python Data Science talks on a monthly basis or so. The January 2020 one was on testing data science code, and the speaker was like, essentially, "what do you know about testing?" to which one of the more seasoned members of the audience answered roughly "I haven't heard about TDD until just recently," which told me a great deal - TDD is a great technique, but evidently it's a parlor trick in the hiring process of a company you may be interested in. This could be extended to web frameworks and whatnot.

So I've been building a portfolio for a while now, and committed it to my personal page a couple years ago amidst the 2018/19 government shutdown (in fact I need to update it for the past couple years of stuff), and that's me upping the ante. A lot of us have no time for parlor tricks, the world certainly doesn't either. We got work to do from climate to economy.

Anywho, this is just another chronicle.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:57 PM on October 21, 2020

There is a reason why my LinkedIn profile says--I'm paraphrasing here--"If you want to interview me, I'll talk through a project I've worked on; I do not do whiteboard coding or take-home projects, because I am not a performing seal".
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:39 PM on October 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

Well that's unfortunate, because all the jobs doing whatever you wish are already taken -- by children. We are all seals performing for employers, or even for the self-employed, customers. By all means, loop your project work into the behavioral 'tell me a about a time when' interview section, but don't think I can infer anything meaningful about technical knowledge or skills from a chat about previous projects. There are hundreds of thousands of reasons to lie to me about how well your project went and how involved you even were in it, and I have no way of measuring how transferable any expertise acquired will be.
posted by pwnguin at 8:13 PM on October 21, 2020

I've been a hiring manager for software developers for around 20 years now and 'tell me about a time when' works pretty well if used appropriately. Whiteboarding is a horrible way to interview. Rote CS algorithms are a horrible way to interview and take-homes are... I don't like them? I wouldn't do them, so I wouldn't expect someone else to do them. Software developer interviews have fallen into a rut based on the FAANG interviewing process - although MS probably started some of it if we want to add a letter. Credentials are worthless, depending on what you're looking for. Some of the worst *developers* I've worked with have masters and phds in compsci. They couldn't pass basic code reviews.

One of the best hires I made was a person who did a career shift later in life and was a clear problem solver from the first interview.

Look at passion and ability with a baseline of knowledge. For software dev it's all about being willing to dig into the problem and figure it out. And then innovate.
posted by ryoshu at 9:30 PM on October 21, 2020 [9 favorites]

There are hundreds of thousands of reasons to lie to me about how well your project went and how involved you even were in it, and I have no way of measuring how transferable any expertise acquired will be.

That's weird, I usually don't have much to talk about the projects that went well. Even if I was the lead on the team and was completely in charge. They were my favorite projects but there's no usual good story to tell in an interview. We followed solid project management practices, we developed code according to best practices, the team was enthusiastic about the project and put crunch time in at the beginning to get the unknowns out of the way early on. We were aggressive in meetings in expressing concerns. We even delivered early, the team took generous days off due to the one or two weeks of working to 7PM each day. Project won awards but 5+ years on it was still a fun project I did I remember fondly. I learned shit from it though, I already knew these things would make a good project.

If I'm interviewing I ask for failures. I've learned way more from my failures. For some reason a lot of startups or at least places I've interviewed don't ask this and don't really like hearing about failures. I think if you fail hard it isn't that you didn't put in the hours, or didn't account for an edge case, or didn't have performance issues. There's giant organizational change, some that you could have controlled and some you couldn't. Figuring out what those are and how to address them is much more valuable to me in a developer or really anyone on an engineering team and I'd rather people make those mistakes before they come to me.

Maybe there's a culture of interviews in a lot of tech companies where they want people that got lucky and kept getting a natural 21?
posted by geoff. at 12:11 AM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

If only because I'm old and haven't dealt with problems like this, well ever. Likewise, I do not talk like "return a list of all of its boundary nodes in counterclockwise order." I don't know how often that comes up.

Yeah, if I ran into a question like that the first question that would come to mind is “have you or anyone you’ve worked with ever had to do anything remotely like that as a part of your job?” I’ve very rarely done deep algorithm work in 25 years of doing this stuff, and when it happens it never proceeds along the lines of “I pulled a ticket to sit alone in a vacuum and design an optimal algorithm for X this week.” What happens is the smartest people on the team get together and clonk their heads together like coconuts for a long time until they really understand the problem and eventually a solution falls out. Then it gets written and packaged up with an interface so that nobody else has to touch it again pretty much ever. And even that’s only assuming there isn’t a pre-packaged open source solution that already addresses your exact problem, which, increasingly, there is.

I will say, the “max product” question, though, was a tough problem for an interview, but tractable enough so long as you don’t necessarily demand the candidate use terminology right out of their CS201 textbook (that expectation is a subtle part of the industry’s ageism). I do tend to strongly suspect companies that ask things like this are more interested in a sort of corporate egotism than they are in hiring. It’s kind of an open secret by now that Google’s interview process has become so labyrinthine that most of the people already there couldn’t get re-hired. I’ve been off them since they pulled the billboard recruiting stunt early on and were reportedly trying to hire people with advanced degrees for grunt work.

That said, it was kind of painful to read that first session though, because, to be frank, I wouldn’t have hired the guy either. He seemed bizarrely unaware of the concept of a stream, needed to be walked into the idea that inserting something into a sorted list is fast (even if he couldn’t come up with “O(log n)” on the spot), and most teeth-grindingly of all, never asked if the numbers in the stream could be negative (which complicates the problem enough I’d be secretly hoping for a “no” but for this problem it’s super important to know).
posted by gelfin at 9:39 AM on October 22, 2020

Credentials are worthless, depending on what you're looking for. Some of the worst *developers* I've worked with have masters and phds in compsci. They couldn't pass basic code reviews.

This is really what I expect coding screen questions to detect, and why whiteboarding tasks continue to be done despite their many flaws. Fizz Buzz is famously used as a screening question to detect exactly that scenario (but it may have become too popular to continue in that role?)

I’ve been off them since they pulled the billboard recruiting stunt early on and were reportedly trying to hire people with advanced degrees for grunt work.

That was a long time ago and yet, Google reports they hired exactly zero people from that campaign. But I guess you can get into the headspace of a lot of programmers with a couple of billboards on 101.
posted by pwnguin at 10:39 AM on October 22, 2020

Metafilter: the smartest people on the team get together and clonk their heads together like coconuts
posted by hearthpig at 5:37 PM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

my elder brother who has worked a series of full-time jobs for his entire adult life was made redundant and forced to become a dirty freelancer like me and had no idea where to start so I said 'ok get on linkedin and go from there'. So my bro has always been a bit of an overachiever and once he started swimming in the same garbage slurry of bullshit the rest of us have to struggle with he had no problem finding a fetid piece of debris to cling to (i.e. he got a contract yay). But then he starts criticizing my linkedin page and cv and giving me tips on how to improve it so I look like a better job candidate and I'm like no you don't get it the objective with linkedin is to filter the bullshit job offers and that means staying above the hustle and resisting the urge to keep tweaking and updating. Like I'm already on a first-name basis with anyone in my city who might need my skills if I started fucking with my linkedin profile I'll just wind up on the radar of recruiters in virginia and dubai and I can't be bothered with that crap. If I feel like fucking off and working in Edinburgh or Wellington I'll just work the FOAF-chain until I strike gold or get sick of searching
posted by um at 8:25 PM on October 22, 2020