HN Explorer

Ask HN: What do you expect from a meaningful technical interview?

1 points by pthreads ↗ HN
Recently there was a post regarding technical interviews (how performance is arbitrary) and it got a lot of responses from HN'ers. So I wanted to ask the community how would they design a great technical interview? Disclosure: The reason I am asking is I am thinking of starting a service that provides resources for companies that want to hire technical talent but are not able to suitably test candidates for technical competency. These interviews would be tailored to specific needs. But I am not sure if there is a need for it in the industry.

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 25.5 ms ] thread
victorhugo31337
I tend to prefer the following:

1) Phone screen

2) In person interview with 3-4 people

3) Take home coding question

chrisbennet
As a candidate, I use the interview process to determine if I want to work for the company.

Part of the way I judge a company is wether they value my time as much as their own. When a hiring manager calls me up or emails me, he's "doing the work" and I will always respect that. The phone screen is something that costs them as much time as it does me.

I don't think I've ever jumped through any hoops before talking to the hiring manager. Why should jump through hoops for a company that hasn't convinced me that I might want to work for them?

I'm not sure if that's helpful or not. Good luck.

rosspackard
I am in the process of building a service like that too. Mainly because I want it for vetting the candidates that I am trying to hire (I am a principle engineer who also manages).

My focus has been on these things:

-easily distributing and receiving challenges privately (not through github or email)

-tool to help easily and quickly manually review code

-a library of challenges that aren't algorithms based (think like a challenge to fix a bug in a moderately sized system, building a feature onto an existing codebase... I have many ideas for these)

-example qualitative scoring systems (the idea of which comes from Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow')

pthreads
Neat. I hadn't thought about distributing and receiving challenges privately as I was planning to basically interview candidates on site. But I see the value in your idea as not all candidates will be able to spend half a day on site. The library of challenges is equally useful.
rosspackard
I also think that onsite technical challenges don't represent a candidates strengths. Due to nerves or insecurity. They may think googling for something simple in front of you is deemed bad (and it can be seen that way by inexperienced interviewers).

If you want to discuss more feel free to use my gmail, its my username with an extra r in front.