Also, this argument is some grade school smarty pants "I'm too smart to show my work" bullshit:

> And because the interviewer can’t distinguish “skipped steps due to incompetence” from “skipped steps due to operating at a higher cognitive level,” they default to the interpretation that protects their ego.

I thought the days of hiring toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars was over?

Why is it that everyone says that soft skills can be more important than hard skills, that engineers talk to people they don’t sit in rooms turning requirements into code, but then, it seems like one of the criticisms about the interview process is “well, engineers can come up with good solutions when alone in a room”

That’s not the job. Articulating technical details when in conversation with your colleagues is.

How well someone can solve a whiteboard challenge or brainteaser is irrelevant unless you are hiring someone to solve 10min whiteboard challenges.

Of course the difficulty is how do you assess what the candidate has honestly achieved in prior jobs - what was there personal contribution, and do they seem to have approached things in a way that suggests transferable/general skills that can be applied to the position you are hiring for.

The graphic at the beginning of the article is certainly one problem - the interviewer needs to themselves have the experience to assess the candidate. There is no point having someone with 5 years of experience interview someone with 20 years, assuming you are hiring them for that level of experience.

I think the best interviewing technique is just to go over the candidates experience, from most recent to as far back as you think is relevant, and get them to talk about each project. What was their role, what were their contributions, why did they make the decisions they did, what might they have done differently, etc. etc. Ask them to summarize and deep dive into the architecture, draw it on a whiteboard perhaps.

On my current team, I care a lot about the ability to write fast code. The most important part of my process is a take-home designed to take 2 hours where the main goal is to solve a relatively easy problem as performantly as possible. Answers have varied from 0.2ms – 50ms.

Take-homes have some obvious disadvantages, but overall I find they're better at finding the people we're looking for than just about every other method. But I'm at a small company, hiring for a fairly specialized team. If the situation was different (e.g. I needed to hire 50 people/year) I'd use a much more standard process.

Giving candidates feedback is good, but it has nothing to do with the likelihood or cost of a bad hire. Making timely decisions is good ceteris paribus, but it's of secondary importance compared to selecting the right candidate. Same with "effort".

We’ve also been increasingly finding very few candidates know how to solve a complex question these days without LLM support lol. How are other folks changing their loops these days?

Why is that so groundbraking? wouldn't that immediately tell you a lot about the applicant, regardless of the final implementation being a 10 or not?

They sent me a summary document before the meeting, but I couldn't see the code until the interview. I felt like I identified the issue and where to make changes rather quickly, like 10 minutes of looking around and talking through how all the components and APIs fit together.

Then the interviewer asked me to implement a datetime solution, which in this time-boxed window my mind raced around to multiple solutions that I talked through out loud: I could write it myself which would definitely take some time for me to remember all of the syntax involved and reason through the problem, I could download an existing library which would also take some time to read documentation, I could google around for existing solutions in somewhere like Stack Overflow which is pretty hit and miss, or I could prompt an AI agent to write a solution for me. I talked through all of these, they wanted to know how I'd do it by hand at first, which I talked through for a bit but admitted I wasn't sure if it was a good way to go about it. Then I said given the time constraints the AI prompt route would probably make the most sense. By the time we arrived at that and tried it for a bit our time was basically up. And I got the impression suggesting AI to help code didn't impress the interviewer at all.

If others are able to stand out in this scenario then I guess I'll just admit I'm not the top candidate. My brain just doesn't work that quickly. I like to spend time gathering context and tinkering before really getting into the solution, and that probably doesn't come across well in these situations.

I've also seen quieter people who were average in interviews become excellent builders once they had a real problem to solve.

Interviews are useful, but the ability to ship, maintain and improve real projects should probably carry more weight.

They are testing for diligence just like exams in Confucian based systems.

if you can scope out your problem to a simplified version & have a pen & paper / whiteboard discussion with a candidate. the candidate starts from a blank slate. they create their own constraints, validate their own assumptions etc. if they can't design something that works - u can prove this since you already have a working product in production. that way interview takes place in less than 1:30hr. saving time for u & candidate.

you cover: communication, critical thinking, technical chops. 3 birds with one stone.

but unfortunately most people don't want to do that - because 1. their products r fugazi (fueled by vc money), they're on ego trips (we gonna scale) & lastly want to make interviewing a hazing|humiliation ritual.

Soon they'll add phrenology assessments and will call it science

This is very true and one of the easiest ways to find that out is to put people into a pressure situation and see how they respond.

And of course, you need to find out if someone has a famous clue of how to go about solving problems.

How do you assess developers when AI makes it possible to create software without even knowing the language?

Y'all, it's not that difficult. You can just pretend we're like everyone else because gasp our profession simply isn't that special like we all think it is for some stupid reason.

don't you realize it's exactly like

"attractive women reject the wrong suitors"

???