My previous satire (of another satire) received a lot of attention.
Here is the original post: https://medium.com/@NTDF9/if-companies-interviewed-tech-recruiters-the-way-they-interview-programmers-f18e1a980cdd
Here’s the hacker news discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14584868
Following that post, I received a lot of messages asking me what really should one use for hiring? Some asked the question with genuine intention of trying to understand what’s wrong. Others asked the same with anger, opposition or outright spite.
Turns out, questioning the incumbent process doesn’t appeal to the vast majority of engineers and leaders in hiring. Here’s Gayle Laakman McDowell defending the process on hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411703
To Gayle’s credit, she does seem to want to understand why so many people oppose the coding interview as it stands. She seems to believe that the coding interview really is picking smart people, despite all its flaws.
Not singling out Gayle, there are many engineers in Silicon Valley who themselves memorized the crap out of coding questions for 6 months, got a job at a big company and now subject others to through the same hazing ritual.
A college intern recently told me, (paraphrased) “All my roommate does in college is memorize coding stuff cuz that’s what gives a job. He doesn’t care about courses or the knowledge on his plate. He doesn’t want to learn how to think out of the box. This interview process is crap. I have to waste so much of my life memorizing this at the expense of really researching my area of interest.”
I understood exactly what he meant.
For a long time, my go-to response to supporters of whiteboard speed coding interviews has been, “Sure, ask coding, but why do you need to time it? Why do you need to hire a candidate who solves 2 whiteboard problems in 45 mins? Why do you require candidates to spit out the most optimal answer? Doesn’t that simply optimize for candidates who have memorized solutions? Aren’t you hiring a regurgitator at the expense of someone who can figure unknown shit out? Why do you focus so much on corner cases? Because most candidates who haven’t seen the problem before aren’t going to run through every edge case in 5 mins. Sure they might catch a few but they might not have enough time to fix it in that duration. Is this not obvious?”
Nope. Nobody seems to get it. Especially not the incumbents who memorized themselves to get a job.
Finally, I found a video that explains what I’m trying to say. The interesting bit starts at time 3:36.
Thanks Neil deGrasse Tyson! Next time someone why I oppose coding interviews the way they stand, I’ll just share this video.
