This is really why I use the 'easy' type questions (some variation of fizbuzz or something simple). A senior guy will crank it out in 5-10 mins. I then ask a question or two on how to improve it and a mini walk through of what they did and why. I also make it clear I sometimes get people who just can not do it but have the resume chops for it. I then usually spend the rest of the time digging on previous techs they have used, problems solved, etc.

The annoying ones are dudes who want you to somehow do a big O proof of some NP complete problem, with tests, proper code, and in front of 3 people in 45 mins (with 5 left for you to ask any questions). For something you may have not touched in 20+ years. I do not want a guy who can create the proof. I want a guy who can explain it in plain English to the 3 other guys in the group and maybe take a few days to get it right and make the code easy enough to understand so when we have to change it in 8 months they can pick it back up.

This is true. I interviewed someone for a senior eng role the other day and when asked a couple basic CS questions that were not simply trivia, the candidate fell apart totally. Like asking basic DB questions to a DBA candidate, or asking basic web/css/html questions to a frontend developer. They immediately went to the back of the line.

Please share the questions. I always find it amusing that tech types seem to believe their idea of “basic X knowledge” translates across the board. I think it’s this attitude of “oh you don’t know what I think you should know” that proliferates the industry that is a major part of the problem. How do you handle folks that don’t have even the most basic form of formal “CS knowledge” but can still ship product? Do you just dismiss them completely over being able to have a water cooler talk about O(...) and some algorithm someone would never have to implement in that specific context? Seems like a premature optimization to me.

+1 Very well said. I've actually experience this first hand while interviewing for one of the FAANGs. I have a background with embedded software engineering, working with C/C++, and working with low level I/O and bare-metal + using RTOS, and also Unix/Linux, and the position I was being interviewed for was for an "Embedded Developer." The job description described the role working on their RTOS. During the phone interview, the interviewer asked a question that (later I found out) can only be solved optimally using splay trees or red-black trees.

I have worked in the embedded industry for 6 years, and have worked on a wide variety of projects (from WiFi to drones/airplanes to medical devices), and have never needed to use this, yet the interviewer expected me to know this.

Anecdotally speaking, when recruiters throw this kind of curve balls, it's because they already have someone in mind for that position and are interviewing candidates just to fill paperwork.

Yes, please share the questions.

+1 for fizzbuzz. It still amazes me how this simple little test can often weed out a largish portion of candidates early on.

I do not use fizzbuzz but variations that are simple like it. I do not like fizzbuzz for 2 reasons. It relies on a math trick. Modulus math is something everyone can grasp but it is not something everyone knows about. Plus it is easily looked up and gamed. I try to pick something that has a few if conditions and a loop, which is what most people do. Bonus if it can be a 'refactor' style problem for the small walkthrough afterwards. But it is not necessary for that. If I were to make one up right now I would say something like 'given a string reverse the first half and move the second half to the front of the string and return the result'. There are enough little gotchas there to see if they have a feel for what can go wrong and loops and ifs. It also has an advantage that it is not easily looked up on the internet and pre-studied as fizzbuzz has been codegolfed on some discussions. The downside is it would probably burn a lot of time. So you need to budget your time with them accordingly. If I can talk someone into it I try the test out on them beforehand to see how long it would take. I want it to be quick. I just want someone who is competent and can explain what they did and has some relatable experience and can explain what they did there.

One of my goto fizzbuzz-like variations is windowed mean - how would you implement a class with a method accepting and returning a number, such that the number returned is the mean of the last 100 numbers the method was called with.

Some people ask more clarifying questions than others, but in any case a few minutes gets spent on this, we have a laugh and move on with our lives.

Of the failing candidates, around one in three or so spend nearly the entire interview on this or fail to answer entirely because they can't get the maths right.

Is that a "math trick"? It doesn't feel too different to fizzbuzz. It's not complex. It relies on high school maths, and except for very junior positions, for a job where you are expected to solve much more complex problems every day without handholding, even if you can't remember how averages work so I have to hand you the math, not being able to reason through the problem from first principles seems like a pretty big red flag for your problem solving skills to me.

What do people think?

That kind of math is fine. The mod operator is not one that everyone uses but add/sub/mul/div is something most people use all the time. It is why I avoid mod in that situation.

Once I show someone the 'mod' trick they instantly get it (if they have any sort of math background) but I want to avoid as much as possible anything tricky in a interview. I want them relaxed and not tense. As that is a different kind of test. Throwing in a trivia trick can hurt the interview. I have run across many programmers that are decent at it and have never used it.

Also for your problem it would depend on the level you are interviewing for and how much time you want to allocate for it. As it is also a balance of filter and getting to know them which is mostly time management on your part. Remember you probably are going to be working with them. So a bit of chit chat goes a long way too. You can also use 'fizzbuzz' as a question 'do you know the trick of fizzbuzz'. If I show them the mod trick and they get it right away they show aptitude to learn. If they already know it then see if they can explain it. etc etc... Get them to talk. Also talk back to them like a peer as they very well could be! They should be interviewing you too.

I just try to avoid tricky bits in interviews and expecting tricky results from them. It would be like asking the to write a swap two values function and expecting the triple xor solution. Tricky is for something you have been working on for 3 weeks and need a better solution, plus two spike stories. It is not for interviews. :) Just ask yourself would you be massively annoyed if someone asked you this in an interview with no context as to why and expected a particular answer. If the answer is you would be annoyed then do not do it. If you feel it is OK and you would expect it then go for it. Just remember your time management.

I mean, "is x divisible by y?" is only one aspect of fizzbuzz, and something that can be solved in many ways - you don't have to use the mod trick. You could write a function that uses a loop and subtraction to do that bit, if it comes down to it. If I just want to see you can code I'll take it and move on, and if I'm at a point in the interview where I am looking for something else then that's a conversation starter.

But if you are applying for a programming position and claim a decade of programming experience - and literally can't come up with any path towards a solution - I smell a rat.

thats fair

Here's the funny thing. I've worked with recruiters where the candidates they supplied needed the tech screen upfront and recruiters where the sell call upfront was useful.

Honestly, the latter guys are absolutely fire to work with. I think recruiting is like security engineering: 90% of the guys doing it are total rubbish so you just assume that's what it's like. But that last 10% are super good, and the top 1% are really freaking good.

I remember when I first encountered a recruiting pipeline put together by a guy who was good at it. Literally every person I spoke to was a good engineer. We did tech-screen them, but only after the initial call where we talked to them about their interests and our company objectives.

Literally every one of these engineers knew:

* What sorts of problems they wanted to work on

* What stage of company they wanted to work at (seed, series-A, ..., big established company)

* What risk they were willing to take

* What sort of team they wanted to work on

This may not be scalable at Google/FB where you're hiring commodity L3-L5s a lot.

Anyway, I was very impressed. Also, the fact that almost every one of them didn't bat an eye at the tech screen. You read some of the comments on HN/Reddit and you see that these guys are a cut above the standard dudes.

Like, just the social nous. Way off the charts. On HN, people talk about an interviewer mis-sizing the problem: "Haha, so I told him I'd do it on a single SGI UV 300 with 3 TB of RAM. The interviewer got stuck. I got him.". These guys are like way better. If you mis-size, they'll just be like "Ah, okay, so you can get this done on a single machine these days, they have a lot of RAM, but that's trivial. AWS has the u24s for 24 TB or something. So let's say the problem is even bigger or that we want the other advantages of clusters" and they'll take it away. No chip on the shoulder. No insecurity. If some constraint doesn't make sense, they'll say "Okay, if we were doing this in prod, I'd push back on that, but let's say it's the case" and just go on.

We didn't convert everyone - not everyone wants to work in our domain or wants to deal with the quirks of our team or whatever, but that's life. It was way more enjoyable as an interviewer.

> This may not be scalable at Google/FB where you're hiring commodity L3-L5s a lot.

I think that's probably more the rub than anything. I never had a happier time being an interviewer than my time at hypergrowth startups. The sheer caliber of both candidates AND resource allotment towards landing them was far higher than what I was able to see in the BigCo environment. It made things a lot more pleasant.

>On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team, I will interview at the very least 50 candidates.

I'll give you a pro-tip: Candidate Interview Packs. Cook up some Google Slides with the main info about the position, the company, the team, what you expect from the person, what you are looking for, the interview process, etc; beyond the dry JD that HR shares. Give it the personality of your (Engineering) team and generate a PDF that you can share with the 50+ candidates.

It has worked for me in the past.

I think a big problem is companies and in house recruiters who reach out to experienced/settled engineers and first thing they want is send you through some hr / tech quiz pipeline. No. I need to hear what this is about and if it's something I'll bother jumping through hoops for. Your recruiter's quick calls are not cutting it and that is not the same as "applying".

Honestly, I question most interviewers ability to evaluate someone as low or high skill. I honestly don't think the testing works most of the time.

If you really believe so, then I think you are failing to grasp how low "low skill" truly happens to be.

Nope, I think lots of people perform 'low skill' in a whiteboard scenario that are not. And the arrogance of their interviewers gets them on HN making very bold claims about other people's skill levels without consideration for the scenarios involved.

Don't get me wrong-- I've worked with very incompetent people. Many of them would have passed a coding interview though.

My whiteboard coding interviews now mostly consist of asking someone to write a for loop with one state variable. That's my bar for low skill. If you can't write 6 lines of code in 45 minutes with one loop and one variable, then you and I are going to have problems working on logic problems on a whiteboard on the actual job.

I've interviewed enough people who don't even know the syntax of a for loop for the language that they chose to use.

As a general matter for how the industry as a whole interviews, I agree though; I am no longer a fan of tricky algorithmic or esoteric data structure questions in whiteboard interviews. The problem I find with other people's interviewing questions is that most people are still asking things that are way too difficult, and they don't end up judging anything other than "Did this person just cram hundreds of hours of algorithms questions?" or "Did this person get lucky and happen to know this type of problem ahead of time?".

For better or for worse, my company schedules me for like >90% system design questions now, which I prefer anyways. Start with a very simple problem and system, and then just throw wrenches.

I'm only 90% sure I know the syntax of a for loop in my chosen language, C#. The reason for the missing 10% is that I never write this syntax.

Most loops are covered by a foreach or by LINQ (think: map and reduce, buy nicer).

The few times I actually need a for loop I type: "for" <press enter> <type the limit for i> <press enter> and then I focus on the loop body. If my needs are more complicated, I _modify_ the for loop my IDE gives me.

Yea I meant a for-each loop.

I'm not sure the last time I wrote a for loop that wasn't for-each.

I felt this way too until I was made to start giving interviews. However low a bar you're imagining, I assure you I've seen "strong on paper" candidates who failed to meet a lower one. I don't know if people are lying, or people cheated through school, or talked other people into doing their work at the jobs they claim to have had, but it's really astonishing how unable to write code they can be.

However, the particularly insidious candidates are the ones who have developed a skill for talking about software/programming but can't actually write code no matter how much help or prodding they are given. As soon as you accidentally hire one of those, the case for technical interviews becomes a lot stronger.

I was going to write a similar comment when I saw yours. We've recently hired someone who was great on paper, was adept at talking about software/programming and was able to present some code he allegedly wrote and explain it. He seemed like a great fit based on the discussions but we hadn't actually given him a whiteboard interview.

Once he joined the company he proceeded to actually be completely unable to write a single working piece of code. Everything he wrote needed to be reviewed and had major glaring issues. When confronted about it, he would say that he couldn't figure it out so decided to just commit his unfinished code.

That guy was senior, had worked for 20 years and is really good at talking but when it comes to actually developing software, he is completely utterly incompetent.

I am constantly surprised at how many Brillant Paula Bean [1] developers are out there successfully interviewing, getting hired and BS-ing their way through jobs. I've always wondered if this is as prevalent in other industries outside of software.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

I don't know how many people saying otherwise would constitute sufficient evidence in your mind, but add me to the list of people that disagree with this sentiment. I've had candidates who couldn't code a loop. Not "did something suboptimal", I mean literally couldn't write a single line of code.

I've had candidates who seemed incredibly accomplished when talking them, who showed amazing looking demos and could talk at length about them. But when given a task to do on the computer, given 2 hours alone to sit and code, couldn't do even the first part of the exercise - despite it being something you could literally copy and paste from the documentation that we gave them a link to!

I've frozen in interviews and been unable to think on simple problems just due to anxiety (which I've never experienced at work; if I can't think, I just say, "let me think about it" and I get back to the person in a bit). Other interviews I've completely demolished - solving problems that were supposed to take 30 minutes in 2 minutes, for example.

I think the type of problem and structure we use for interviews is bad. Let the candidate code alone without you watching. Give them internet access. Come back in an hour or two, or let them do it remotely or as a take home. This is more like our real jobs; and gets rid of cutesy "do you know this algorithm?" questions, which many whiteboarding problems are. Instead of going for pure data structure / dp / search / sort algorithms, have them implement things like business rules.

I'm 100% sure I've come off in a couple interviews like one of those "phew we dodged a bullet there, guy can't code at all" stories. Meanwhile actually I can and many employers have been very happy with my ability to do so, and I've had a long and reasonably successful career.

The problem's not even that I'm bad under pressure, and in fact I've repeatedly been told the exact opposite by people who've worked with me. The problem is specifically about doing a programming performance in front of an audience, in an interview rather than co-worker context. I'm god-awful at that unless I'm heavily prepped for exactly what's going on. No tools? I'll forget basic syntax, yes even in "a language I chose". Let me use tools? I'll forget how to use them, or get self-conscious and avoid things I'm not entirely sure will work, overriding my own muscle memory. It's a very specific problem but I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely can do the job just fine, but is also entirely capable of coming off like a complete "faker" in an interview.

[EDIT] to make matters worse I can talk about programming just fine in that setting, which probably adds to the "he's some kind of social engineering genius who learned to sound exactly like a competent programmer while somehow also not learning a single thing about programming" impression. It's not usually an issue, but I'm quite sure I've reinforced some interviewers' notion that it's a good thing they do whiteboard screening because they're overwhelmed with lying applicants, and that I was one of them.

Exactly. Yet if you listen to HN you get the impression 80% of the industry can't even do their job. Yet, if that were the case how the hell are they hiding that from their current employer??????

I've met one developer who couldn't do their job, and he moved into a pre-sales role shortly thereafter.

Everyone else was fine and did a good job but send them unprepared to a random interview on any given day of the week and I'm sure it'd be another one of those "well we dodged a bullet there".

The signal to noise ratio is Garbage.

> The problem's not even that I'm bad under pressure, and in fact I've repeatedly been told the exact opposite by people who've worked with me. The problem is specifically about doing a programming performance in front of an audience

Sure a "whiteboard interview" basically optimizes for people who can actually pass whiteboard interviews rather than people who can do the job.

But to claim that there is a NON-NEGLIGIBLE number of people who basically become 100% ignorant when under the stress of a whiteboard interview BUT are excellent employees in any other stressful situation is, to say it in nice words, [requires citation].

And if one really has this apparent rather unique type of handicap, then better mention on CV to try to get some empathy from the hirer, or just _train_ to avoid it. Yes, most people do _train_ for the express purpose of passing interviews.

I suspect some significant percentage of applicants may not have a disability, exactly, or always totally flub an interview in this way, but may do so often enough that it looks like the level of competence in the industry is much lower than it actually is, if one is taking one's personal experience with interviewees as an accurate measure of that. Add to this that assuredly some of the people confidently complaining about how 90% of their applicants can't write a for loop overlap with the ones generating complaints from applicants that some interviewers are themselves incompetent and asking broken questions (I guarantee you the people doing this think they're great interviewers and getting nothing but signal from their process, and they're probably also likely to exaggerate stories when relating them), then factor in a real tendency to take a 90% OK-to-good signal in interviews and practically forget it happened, taking the 10% bad as more accurate, and I think it's highly plausible the state of things isn't nearly as bad as some believe it is.

Tech interviews are remarkably scattershot in the form they take (outside well-known big companies), and are unusually anxiety-generating, even in the notoriously anxiety-filled field of interviews. Describe what one might (emphasis on might, part of the problem is that it's so often a surprise) expect in a tech interview process to some people outside the industry, and gauge their reactions. I definitely think it's likely they have even worse signal-to-noise ratio than is commonly thought.

[EDIT] Certainly I find it far less plausible that there's an absolute army of people out there, dwarfing the count of actually capable programmers, who are brilliant con-persons but too dumb to figure out that that skill itself is more valuable than programming, outside the top couple percent of programming jobs by comp, and apply it more directly to business roles that actively want it.

I don't think it's 90%. I'm saying there is a very, very low bar, but I would say it's hit by 20%-30% of candidates that reached me, not that many. Obviously this depends on much you offer, whether HR prefilters, and the like. But this is not 90% of candidates, I think.

And I'm quite confident it's not the interviewer. Usually the panel is quite anonymous when it comes to calling a "bullshit" candidate. We ask panel persons individually to avoid the "no one wants to contradict someone calling X bullshit'" effect.

I don't think tech interviews are _any_ worse than the ones outside. If anything, we have less standardization than other industries. I work for a engineering company first (software second) and the engineer interviews are basically _manufactured by HR_ (not engineers).

I wholeheartedly agree. Note that my second example was exactly that type of interview - we leave the candidate to code alone, technically sometimes in the same room as us but sometimes in a separate room, but either way with only a few "check ins" every 15-45 minutes depending on how things go. They have internet access, a base file and console session open that can run the file, and an editor already set up (not necessarily their editor of choice, though we've had people install an editor at the start of this process).

In this scenario, having someone literally be unable, in 2 hours, to replicate the first example code of some library, when they have access to almost identical code in the docs, is a pretty good filter.

Everyone experiences stress on an interview, and thus may not be able to solve "do you know it" problems that he would have been perfectly solved after a better night's sleep. That is not the problem (we call them "happy idea" problems around here). I really dislike being asked this type of problems and I also dislike asking them for these reasons. Despite the fact the positions I've interviewed for you end implementing "pure data structures" much more than you end up implementing business rules (we build software for engineering: simulation, optimization, etc.). So imagine how low I set the bar between my colleagues.

The problem is when you apparently _forget_ the syntax for a function declaration in a programming language you claim N years of experience in your CURRENT position. This is just absurd. Our you suddenly get completely stuck with counting odd numbers on a sequence or the like. And this happens surprisingly frequently. I just cannot believe you can have this type of anxiety (I am extremely shy myself) outside your first or maybe second interview.

I think my daily driver language (Ruby) has become so ingrained in my mind that it's written out of muscle memory in Vim, and translating that direct connection from thought to Vim into a whiteboard might actually be challenging. You almost never write for loops in idiomatic Ruby anyway, you use an iterator chain.

Languages like C that have a single official for loop syntax are a bit easier to remember, in part because it's a syntax I have previously used on a whiteboard rather than exclusively in actual code.

So if a candidate can't write a loop on a whiteboard, maybe let them try in a non-IDE text editor, or have them glance at a formal grammar for the language as a refresher that won't give away the game to someone who can't actually code.

Even if your IDE would type your entire programs for you, you would still know the syntax of the language just because I am 100% sure you have actually read more code than you ever wrote. And do note that even in C there is not a single official loop syntax -- a while (get_next())-like thing is a perfectly valid loop in C. All of them valid answers -- I used the word "sequence" and not "C array" for a reason.

And if I start showing them an EBNF grammar for the language, now that's TWO languages that you will show you don't remember rather than one. I find this even more absurd; you don't remember anything of the syntax of the language you used at work for years, but you think you can rediscover it from the FORMAL language specification in a whiteboard?

> Nope, I think lots of people perform 'low skill' in a whiteboard scenario that are not. And the arrogance of their interviewers gets them on HN making very bold claims about other people's skill levels without consideration for the scenarios involved.

This is it, in a nutshell.

In all my years of interviewing candidates, I've never run into the mythical experienced developer who doesn't know anything about programming. Yet according to HN lore, there are hordes of them out there.

My theory is that the only thing there are indeed hordes of, is experienced developers who can be made to look dumb by subjecting them to whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivia and other such questions which are completely unrelated to the job performance.

There is a reason that "FizzBuzz" is a meme! I love the expression, "Job candidates who can't seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag."

It's too true. A quick search found the source article that I read years ago here[0]. :)

0: http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

> http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

From that page:

> We can't understand why so many people "fail" the Fizz-Buzz test unless we understand why it is "hard" (for them).

But the article doesn't even talk about the environment, which is what it's all about.

It's hard "for them" because they're being asked to write the code on a whiteboard, with a job/income on the line, with stress and anxiety dialed up to 11, with someone breathing down their neck watching, while expected to simultaneously provide cheerful ongoing commentary to "show how they think".

Under those conditions, I totally believe close to 100% perfectly competent developers will fail at it. But of course it has nothing to do with the programming part.

Most of us have heard of FizzBuzz while chillin at home reading articles and immediately thought "that can't be hard" and tried it and indeed it is laughably easy. So we can't understand how "they" could fail at it because we didn't experience it under interview hazing conditions.

So the "them" is actually all of us.

To me that is the key takeaway of FizzBuzz.

In my case I failed at fizzbuzz because I was interviewing after spending a full day merging 2 versions of dbdumps into one, while getting rid of duplicate entries/foreign keys, etc. I could still do a pseudo code version of it, but I couldn't remember modulo function. At all.

Sometimes it's easy. We had a candidate who looked good on paper and sounded good in person. When it was time to start the screening test he asked to go to the bathroom. And never came back. We took that as a red flag.

You're right to question it, but this is also why testing is so prevalent apart from the deluge of unqualified/barely qualified applicants. It's possible for a single person to spend an hour (perhaps over lunch) with prospective candidates and better evaluate them, with a corresponding better evaluation of the company by the candidate, without needing to do the multi-stage multi-test multi-people rigamarole big companies are addicted to. Similarly such people can usually detect resume BS better and whittle a list of 50 down to a shortlist of a few to spend that hour on each and come away with more than one good fit. But the skills needed to do that aren't widespread or taught or in many cases even acknowledged as existing. Hence tests, where when followed as a script can be given and scored by even the most disinterested programmer who'd rather be programming instead of doing their manager's job. Now you don't even need someone ok at resume BS detection to narrow the list, you can parallelize that 50 hours.

Of course the tests are proxies and often aren't even scored objectively. And most tests aren't very good at proxying anything general (hence companies' tendencies to have several). There's a lot of problems that remain, our industry doesn't take hiring seriously. But testing and trying to test as early as possible have come to dominate for not totally unreasonable reasons, and persist at the large companies despite the well-known negative trade-offs. It's a startup's/small company's advantage to not copy bigco's interview processes.

> I will interview at the very least 50 candidates.

Why? IMO this is about an order of magnitude too many. I typically interview about 3-4 people, on rare occasions a few more. I've been interviewing candidates for about 25 years now.

If your recruiter is sending you 50+ mismatched resumes for a role, get a better recruiter. But even in that case, you should notice and weed these out while reviewing the resumes yourself, before getting to the interview stage.

I literally cannot imagine any scenario where I'd interview over 50 people for a role. Or even ten people.

A few startups ago we had to grow the team from 20 people to ~120 in a year. Your approach would result in interviewing well over 5000 people in a year. That would be over 20 people a day, every single day, zero work getting done meanwhile! I suggest a re-think of your hiring strategy.

> being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical interview

Which one is more likely:

1. Senior people who have built many successful products don't actually know how to do what they've done.

or

2. Interview techniques that focus on skills unrelated to the job (e.g. whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivial pursuit) have an inordinately high false negative rate.

If you're interviewing 50 candidates, your process is horrifically broken. As soon as you find an acceptable candidate, hire them. They don't have to be perfect; no hire will be, no matter how much time you spend. You're wasting company time and money.

In case you're interested, there's a bit of mathematics related to this. It's called "The secretary problem" [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Thanks! I've seen this before but forgot what it was called.

I am reading this correctly a short list of 50 for a single role?

It’s completely insane if they’re interviewing 50 people per role. The filtering process is entirely broken if they’re doing that many. The most people I’ve ever interviewed for a job is 7.

Do you have some context around that number? E.g. are you in a large company that pre-filters the pool for you?

I ask because 50 is not completely unreasonable. I've had positions where we've had to interview dozens of candidates, in our small company. In larger companies, often someone else does some initial interviews though and that filters out candidates who e.g. can't code at all (sometimes - not always!).

7 was at a large enterprise software company. I don’t remember exactly how many phone screenings they did, but it was less than 20. I still thought it was too many.

Like I said, I think if you have to interview that many, your filtering process is really broken further up the pipeline. You don’t know what you want, what the job really is, the or application process isn’t properly structured.

Interviewing large numbers of people is also a huge liability unless you’re extremely consistent and well-documented in your hiring process (something which I’ve found to rarely be the case).

> You don’t know what you want, what the job really is, the or application process isn’t properly structured.

I interviewed at Google. The position description versus what I was interviewed on were two worlds apart. Like the position mentioned front end CSS and HTML. I was grilled on SQL in two of the 4 interviews. This wasn't a SWE position, it was more of a client support role, but I was given a coding test. I did poorly on the test, but I still consider it difficult for a role that was not a SWE.

It didn't even seem like Google knew what role they were hiring for they just wanted "someone technical" to do something. I left this process feeling pretty confused and turned-off at their hiring process and questioning if I really wanted to work at a place like that.

It's possible they're including phone screens/interviews there, not 50 total on-site interviews.

If it was 50 phone screenings, that’s still way too many for a single role. Everywhere I’ve worked, it’s been narrowed down to maybe 10 calls and 3-5 candidates. I can’t imagine who has the time to waste on 50 calls to candidates.

Yeh going through 50 cv's to get a long list is fair enough but actually phone screening 50

I see a lot of comments asking for clarifications on the numbers, the process, and what is being tested during the interview.

Let me clarify first that 50 interviews include phone screening, where we don't do specific technical questions but rather just poke around what the candidate is looking for and whether they seem able to explain what they have been doing without drowning.

As for the process we use, we are a hedge fund of 30 people, we have no HR, so I directly deal with head hunters. That means the numbers I gave are "raw".

I see a lot of comments arguing whether it's even possible to assess technical skills during an interview, and overall spitting on whiteboard brain teasers.

For the former, really, you need to be in the front row of hiring to understand it. I'm not talking about filtering candidates that can answer library specific trivia or solve red black tree removal on a white board here. I'm talking about senior Python developers that cannot remember the syntax of a for loop, data science specialists that cannot ELI5 the intuition of a linear regression. That's the degree of "low skill level" I'm talking about. I think a lot of people here are biased toward thinking the average programmer on the market should be the same skill level of their average colleague.

This is Wrong.

You are reading hacker news, you are very likely to be passioned and dedicated about what you are doing, you are most likely working in an above average company, surrounded with above average colleagues. Your perception of the average programmer is biased toward your own surroundings.

Now I see that the whiteboard interview seems to be really dreaded. And man, do I feel you. I also used to hate them as an interviewee. But that does not mean they are all the same.

When I do a whiteboard interview, I am perfectly aware that the candidate is obviously stressed, uncomfortable, and not at 100% of his potential. That's why the questions I ask are typically not too intellectually challenging. Some variations of the fizzbuzz mainly, along with a small exercice on recursivity in case the fizzbuzz is too easy.

"Whiteboard interview" should not become a strawman for "24yo fresh grad throws B-tree inversion at you to feel superior". Really, the only thing that should be tested in these interviews is your programmer muscle memory. And from my experience, it does work.

> That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interviewee to go straight to the point, and thus perform a technical check early in the process.

I would think that any "straight to the point" hiring process would be "straight to the point" because it avoided the technical interview process:

A) there's not much you can do to entirely avoid problems with work performance and B) technical knowledge can only be sussed out so far in an interview, period, before actual work performance in the context you're hiring the person for can be evaluated.

I've been a software engineer for over 6 years and I still have to do 20+ interviews.