Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It's skills that a 4-year college student learns at approximately 19 and then promptly does not use for their next 50 years of actually building things.

It leaves out looking at the engineering skills it takes to put something past the finish line on budget.

It's at best, an adjacent sideshow and at worse a proxy for ageism to preference people closer to 19 and less capable at getting quality software out the door.

And maybe that's why the industry has such a damn hard time getting quality software out the door.

Maybe.

Here's a far better idea. Give them a broken build or crashed code or some other failure and ask them to fix it. If they can navigate around a system, diagnose a defect, find the cause, offer a patch, and match the coding/commenting style etc, that's an actual player you need, not someone who can still solve an algo question from their CS101B midterm exam at 37.

This version can go deep as well. You can have separate branches and an issue tracker, maybe with the conversation of the bug already going. Maybe the comments have a patchfile that needs to be manually applied. Maybe the patch has a new bug in it ... Perhaps it's a red herring and addressing a similar but unrelated issue. Maybe it's a closed bug and a regression and nobody wrote a unit test for it. Maybe the unit test is there and it's up to the candidate to discover it or the unit test is out of date, buggy and useless.

This is the real stuff.

Get them to communicate after. Saying something like "the unit tests were broken" versus "I was unable to understand how to get them to work right so I moved on" ... That's a huge difference in attitude - only one of them is a team player.



also if you're going to "timebox" be very very generous. If you think it takes 30 minutes, give them 5 hours and say you're being generous.

I've known people who program things like jet engines and stuff that goes into space. They know their stuff, are super methodical and take their damn time to do it well.

Quality programming is a rarely practiced time consuming art and you'd be lucky if you have 10% of your workforce doing it. Heck, you'd be lucky if you have 1%. Those people save the ship.

I'm not one of them. When you meet them, they're like a different kind of human.

If you timebox them to 30 minutes, the people who write mission-critical quality code will fail to get it in on time and be filtered out.

These are the people who write those 10,000 word articles that appear on HN with carefully constructed schematics, equations, and code that you struggle to understand and bookmark to study later.

On the other hand, if you give people 5 hours, I assure you, the morons will still obviously be morons and you give the "True" Engineers who take their craft dead seriously a chance to shine.


Have you given interviews like this?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: