Top voices on hiring: Thomas Ptacek, Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge, Gergely Orosz, NeetCode and 11 others.
Whiteboard algorithm questions became the standard filter; the dispute is over what they measure and what replaces them.
Our reading of what a group of claims have in common, one level above a korrent: a korrent is our reading of what somebody said, a view is our reading of what several korrents share. The claims are printed under it, so the sentence can be checked against them.
Nobody is filed under a view — claims are. A person is named here because a dated claim of theirs sits under it, and somebody whose claims sit under two views appears under both.
Gergely OroszNeetCodeDavid Heinemeier HanssonMax HowellJoel Spolsky
Gergely OroszAdam WardTom VerrilliNeetCodePavel DurovDavid Heinemeier HanssonThomas PtacekJeff Atwood
Danny MartinezCharity MajorsThomas PtacekSteve YeggeJoel Spolsky
A viewour reading
Their wordsGoogle will keep asking it in in-person settings / on sites for sure
Their wordsIf anything it adds mobility because every major startup + Big Tech does it do learn once and for all~10 years you benefitted
Their wordsIt was created because it’s easy to scale to thousands of relatively untrained interviewers with hundreds of questions where it doesn’t matter if some leak
Their words1) Study a data-structures and algorithms book. Why? Because it is the most likely to help you beef up on problem identification.
Their wordsHashtables: hashtables are arguably the single most important data structure known to mankind. You absolutely have to know how they work.
Their wordsApparently, FizzBuzz style screening is required to keep interviewers from wasting their time interviewing programmers who can’t program.
Their wordsSadly, despite the fact that I think that all good programmers should be able to handle recursion and pointers, and that this is an excellent way to tell if someone is a good programmer, the truth is that these days, programming languages have almost completely made that specific art unnecessary.
A viewour reading
Their wordsDSA was always meant to be a filter for a mix of college education + willingness to learn something pointless
Their wordsThe new generation will probably never know I am wondering when most places (not Google) will drop Leetcode
Their wordsAnd DSA interviews were never the best for that. Well, thinking, sure. But in terms of like does that skill translate to what you're doing on the job? It never really translated to that. It was more about evaluating like does somebody think?
Their wordsAnd the second reason that's stayed sticky is that companies just have no idea how to evaluate. Like And they probably never did.
Their wordsI would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles.
Their wordsGoogle: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
A viewour reading
Their wordsTrial periods could get longer as interview signal gets weaker for on-the-job performance
Their wordsresearch has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company. But yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one across the table assessments.
Mental modelSignalling
Their wordsfor a lot of companies, it's hard to think of a better way than you know, doing side-by-side real work to get those signals.
Their wordsthe number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
Their wordsI'm not going to spend four interviews going through and asking somebody data structures and algorithm stuff. I just have them do work that might be similar to something I'd give them on the job or even just have a conversation with them. See how they think. Like can they think through trade-offs? I don't even care about what answer they give me to a problem. I care about like what's like why did they say that?
Their wordsWell, it's in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress. If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?
Their wordsI think part of the secret there is that Elon actually knows things. And when you know things, you can evaluate the quality of work products. And when you can evaluate the quality of work products, you can very quickly tell who's full of shit and who will actually take you to Mars.
Their wordsthe main pivot point for getting hired was not your resume, was not the schooling you've had, it was not your grades, was not your pedigree, it was how well you did on two things. A, your cover letter. Because I can only work with people remotely if they're good writers.
Their wordsBut even the flimsiest work-sample outperforms interviews, so the effort pays dividends immediately.
Their wordsMaybe it’s foolish to begin interviewing a programmer without looking at their code first.
A viewour reading
Their wordsReference checks becoming baseline and good references needed
Their wordsAFAIK they regularly pass on ppl acing the interview but where references (ppl they worked with) are not a slam dunk convincing
Their wordsAnd it works: look at how well they are doing as a business!
Their wordsa) referrals became more important tho. Warm ones; “worked with this person and they’re gold” type of ones. It’s how eg AI labs hire a lot
Their wordsI assume same will happen now: to get into "hot" AI-native companies, you'll need to have had "battle scars" solving similar problems that they struggle with.
Their wordsIf we look at the long-term success rates, we have had more long-term employees from I've worked with this person for 2 years, we should hire them than we have from the open calls.
Their wordsI’ve said many times that if I had to choose between interviews or references, I would pick references every time.
A viewour reading
Their wordsThere is nothing valuable that you get from giving me 8 n 45 minute interviews with different people that are all asking me different variations of the same question.
Mental modelCircle of competence
Their wordsCan you be calibrated as an interviewer on every single opening, for every role? My God, no, not even close.
Mental modelLess, but better
Recalls holdingI used to cast a much wider net, like I felt like people ought to get to interview anyone who was being hired over them.
Their words nowI’ve come to realize that having too many veto points in the system is dangerous and doesn’t actually add more value.
Their wordsBecause here is the thing about interviews: they are incredibly hostile experiences for candidates.
Their wordsConfidence bias selects for candidates who are good at interviewing.
Their wordsthere may be no cohort of professionals less qualified to assess barely-tangible socio-psychological attributes like “passion” and “confidence” than the modern software nerd.
Filed here becauseWritten as a defence of the loop, not a complaint: the rejections are the price paid for fewer bad hires.
Their wordsThe thing is, Google has a well-known false negative rate, which means we sometimes turn away qualified people, because that's considered better than sometimes hiring unqualified people.
Their wordsAs far as anyone I know can tell, false negatives are completely random, and are unrelated to your skills or qualifications.
Filed here becauseA remedy for the bias, from someone who defends interviewing.
Their wordsSo: don’t listen to recruiters; don’t ask around about the person before you interview them; and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you’ve both made your decisions independently.
A viewour reading
Their wordsthat I think is the most valuable thing that you can do as a hiring manager is understand how someone thinks.
Their wordsone way you can kind of like get at somebody's taste is uh when you're interviewing them is just ask them about some of the things they built that they never shipped.
Their wordsit's really helpful to get people off script and see how they react and how they think on their feet. And that's going to give you a much more accurate idea of like what is it like to actually work with this person day-to-day.
Their wordsIf the project was a team project, look for signs that they took a leadership role.
A viewour reading
Their wordsThe last company to remove DSA interviews (aka Leetcode) is Google
Their wordsThe AI-style interview fwiw is good and increasingly necessary just not as easy to “scale it” like DSA.
Their wordsb) more startups filter for “AI positivity” as a whole
Their wordsRIP all-remote video interview hiring processes, hello onsite rounds
Their wordsIronic how it will now also be thanks to AI video being too high quality!
Their wordsAnd even for things like coding interviews, allowing candidates, of course, to use AI tools because that's going to be part of what the work requires now.
Their wordsI think we probably will see different interview formats introduced. I just think it is going to be a slower transition than most people think.
Their wordsI think Google has pretty much gone to on-sites at this point, back to the traditional whiteboard format. And they'll let you code on a laptop if you want to, as well, but it's going to be in person. Somebody's going to be watching you code, and you're probably not going to be able to cheat your way through that.
Their wordsNever say “Maybe, I can’t tell.” If you can’t tell, that means No Hire.
On our filingfrom The interview loop is noisy and biased, and rejects good people almost at random to What former colleagues say about a candidate outweighs how well they interview
Matched by wording, not yet read into a view. The archive grows on its own, so this is where new claims wait for somebody to read them.
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