An engineer's perspective on hiring

Oral exams, live coding exams, system architecture exams, take-home exams, behavioral examinations, code review exams, extended essay writing exams, case study exams, sample work trials.

You can't be a real professional if you have to take exams in every job change.

In serious professions, people take exams early in their careers for being certified. Sometimes they take additional exams to renew their certificates. And that's all.

They don't take exams from random people in random companies that know nothing about evaluating knowledge. They take official, standardized exams prepared by professional testers/educators.

Engineering jobs can't be standardized. Engineering and required skills and knowledge is too broad for that.

An interview is not an exam. It's a meeting. The interviewer asks questions to learn about the candidate. The interviewer may ask some questions to learn about the company and the position. That's all. That's the universal definition of a job interview. All the other things are additional tests and exams.

Do they need to do those exams for better selection? Probably not. Their "hiring process"es are not backed by any science. Then why are they doing that? They have to filter somehow. If there are 1 to 100s ratio of candidates for each position, they need to filter hard. Exams are the standard method for ranking and filtering.

But we are professional engineers, not students.

Failing a take-home is an entirely different thing. It's a huge loss in time and mental energy.

I've only done 3 of those in my career and only because the projects sounded interesting. 1 of those 3 resulted in a job offer which I can now confidently say in hindsight was the worst job in my career (...so far!).

I'm now leaning towards just filtering out companies that do take-homes because it signals to me that they don't care about their candidate's time and how a company treats its candidates is usually a good indicator of how they treat their employees.

Part of what lead to it I think is we hired largely straight out of college and doing a 9-hour interview with someone with little experience is a waste of time.

It worked great. In my five years there we only had a couple people not make it past the probationary period.

There's a trade-off: if a company spends more time / requires more effort on an interview process, they can get a better signal on the candidate's abilities, but then they'll lose out on candidates who are unwilling / unable to commit this time. This might just be a hard trade-off in recruiting.

Let’s face the reality that most developers will never be able to write original software and just put text to screen using a tool or framework. Don’t call these people engineers. These people are the assembly line of software. Measure them according to desired patterns. They are copy/paste but smarter than data entry and understand some of the restrictions in place. Expectations are low and compatibility and replacement are the key business values.

Next are the people who test software, the QA. We expect more from these people and then work them harder for less money at a lower level of reputation.

Next are the people who evaluate software. These people are closer to engineers. These people include accessibility, security, and performance experts. These people are more like a combination of QA and senior developers. Evaluate these people on these criteria: written essay, technical knowledge, force them to measure things in real time and see how they perform.

Next are the people who actually write software applications. Let’s call these people solution delivery. These people are similar to junior architects and actually build things. These people should be evaluated only on the basis of organizational capabilities above that of the engineers that measure things.

Finally are the software owners. These people resemble a combination of project management and junior architects. They must have the experience to know how to build original software, like the junior architects, but also a planning vision to push though demands from competing stakeholders. There is busy savvy to this comes from a solid engineering planning vision plus superior communication skills most lesser software people never honed. Think of these people as senior principals with real authority. Evaluate these people on their delivery experience, using numbers, and reputation.

If you get nervous, the main thing you can do is more interviews. My personal anxiety peaks right before the start time, luckily my bathroom is next door to my office! But after doing dozens of interviews I settle in once it gets rolling.

If you hate leetcode, well just get good at it. Yeah it is kinda dumb but it is straightforward to practice. And there is a lot more to a leetcode interview than knowing tricks - you need to communicate well.

Take homes? Yeah they are time consuming. If you really need a job do them, otherwise pass on the company!

Overall as a candidate you really need to try and go one level up on selling yourself - not just why you are a great candidate (which you are of course!), but why you would succeed at this role in particular.

Why would you do this given the expected average tenure is probably like 18 months to 2 years?

What has worked for me, honestly, is being directly involved with my hiring pipeline and having conversations.

It seems like common sense, but there's a lot of reasons not to do this and people will make good arguments to prevent it. "What about bias", "your time is more important" etc;

However, bias is an unfortunate consequence of selecting for value fit anyway and I can't think of a more important task than selecting the members that will be the future of the company.

I've had some positions that were open for a weekend where I got 400 applicants, and yes, it was daunting to go through and give each of them an honest shot, but you know: I had to do it. What's the alternative? I might miss a fantastic candidate because someone didn't understand what I actually need.

Evaluating programmers and "devops" people is just insanely hard, technologies are mostly fungible. If you can write one C-like language you can learn the others in about a month, but what can't be taught is what your values are, if you think in a systemic way, if you're easy to work with and respect others.

So, my solution is to have a conversation, challenge what they know, see how they react when challenged, see how they react when they reach the end of their knowledge and see what they're most proud of and if they get excited by it.

No gotchas, no esoteric internal handshake, just: are you defensive? Are you curious? Are you passionate? Can you communicate effectively and are you intelligent.

If you hit those, you can do anything.

"How do you even know who to interview?"

This is a hard question, for me there's not a lot of candidates that are physically located in my region, so those go through as long as they have something on the CV that looks relevant. For others it's a combination of: would it be easy for them to move, have they worked remote (and can do it in a region where I have a tax entity) and how strong of a fit to the role is the CV, lots of experience in games would be what I expect since I work in video games - but if you're going for a backend programming role then: what have you built and what do you list as your responsibility to achieve it?

With this mindset I managed to build a high performing, high trust team that executed very well on (literally) impossible demands. If the ownership of the company was better that team would have easily been world class.

We also exceeded dunbars second (clan) number with the size of the team, so it wasn't intrinsic to small teams (80+).

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this (flawed) argument, I’d be rich and would no longer have to sell ads on my Hacker News comments. I’m going to get hate for this unpopular opinion but here we go.

So often, “But Leetcode isn’t like REAL programming” is the siren song of the programmer who probably overestimates their coding skills and experience.

Yes, I hate to say it - live coding is actually one of the best signals you can get on a candidate’s seniority and ability to program a computer (and more importantly, their core computer science skills). A good interviewer is trained to know how to probe your CS knowledge during this, and will watch how you structure code, break down problems, debug, and think about testing. They will even ask you to make changes to see how coachable you are and what you might be like to work with. It’s not about inverting a binary tree while sharing your screen, it’s about showing me how you solve a problem, then translate what’s in your head to code.

Take home exercises provide little to no signal, and screen out people who have families (who wouldn’t bother with a 4 hour take home exercise after work). I don’t want to see how you Google, I want to see how you think.

These candidates always want some version of, “But trust me, bro! Hire me: I’m a senior engineer, I don’t remember how to Leetcode! I’m good, I promise!” But what they won’t admit to themselves is that a good senior engineer is able to do all the things a junior can do PLUS all the things a senior can do.

It’s not perfect, but I won’t hire anyone that can’t pass a live coding round.

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