Show HN: Anonymous interview evals of strong software/ML engineering candidates

I have personally been in interviews in the past to be interviewed by a "software scientist" for a role that was primarily high level business logic based, but, because of the interviewers background, the interview was full of puzzles, algorithms and whiteboard tests, completely divorced from the actual role that was being hired for. I.e, he was interviewing for a software scientist (like himself) where the company clearly needed someone with experience in building products.

This is basically my biggest gripe with interviews in the past ten or so years, companies who think they are Google, hiring like they are Google but are not solving anything near the scope of what Google does.

You should look for people with the portfolio. If someone has made a project in TensorFlow to paint in Picasso style then you should hire them regardless of education.

This is an unpopular opinion. You cannot become good in software engineering if you only read HN and work 9-5.

My ideas for interview:

  1. Ask the candidate to bring a laptop, people running Linux +1
  2. Pick random testing framework and ask if the candidate can setup and run some tests for fizzbuzz.
  3. Ask a difficult question on system design, CAP theorem, compilers and OS internals. They should not be able to answer these. 
  4. If they lasted so far, make them comfortable before the finale. Pat theirs ego a bit.  
  5. Confront the candidate, essentially troll them a bit. For example: Describe fictional homemade crypto system build in PHP. Judge their response.

The meat of the form is the "Engineer Attributes" radio button scale for 14 different topics, not one of which was backed by a concrete example from the interview, a resume, a portfolio, etc. Those need to read "Agree, because ___," or "Disagree, because ___." Without that, these metrics undermine the credibility of the whole thing.

I wouldn't use this service in its current form.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-... [1]https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/blind-hiring-increases-wo...

I didn't see much substance with respect to problem solving, especially in the context of machine learning or data science, analytical thinking in terms of systems or anything else that would benefit me were I hiring manager using these reports from my team to inform my decision about moving forward.

If the first interviewer were on my team our next one on one would have some time devoted to what "engineering" means to the person, and over time if it didn't stop being synonymous with "can regurgitate CS trivia" the interviewer would be removed from the pool of interviewers I select from to interview candidates.

The second interviewer needs to include more detail regarding the questions asked and the discussions that followed. It's far too vague to really have any weight attached to it.

These kinds of snap judgements I find very problematic. As if anyone -- even if they're an "industry leader", even if they've interviewed hundreds of candidates; heck, even if they're a truly towering figure in their field (or otherwise a truly brilliant person that no one knows about yet) -- can make that kind of an assessment from a (highly contrived and stressful) 45-minute or so interaction with someone.

Maybe after working alongside someone for several months, you could say that. But from their off-the-cuff answers to your made up puzzle problems (or even from unstructured conversation)? I just don't buy it.

BTW you should be doing a lot more to anonymize these profiles. Blurring the school name is a good start, but you definitely should not include company names either; and the gender should be obscured, as well. Even from just a small tuple of attributes like these, it wouldn't be too hard to identify, and perhaps cause considerable harm to some of these candidates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_sort

My impression is that going through a mock interview in this way has pulled back the curtain on a process that a select few have been able to shake their network (school alumni, etc.) to do something similar privately.

For the first-you can't asses leadership ability just out of the blue since each company has different set of values and approaches there. (For example Army vs Google leadership styles)

For the second-you need some 3rd person who has relatively low understanding of the field you testing person for, then you need to ask candidate to explain something to that person and then ask the 3rd person to tell you what did they learn or understood from this conversation. So far I see no other way about it, if you have better ideas, please share.

And third, well only time can show such attribute as reliability as a team players. There is way too many thing could go wrong in chemistry between team and the candidate.

1. Always use HE, even if it is a SHE. (1)

2. We test our candidates with custom-made case studies that help them SHINE and not focused on making them FAIL. This mindset has helped us evaluate candidates, in the waters they currently swim, than to throw them into our reality. It is the job of the interviewer to retrofit our problems into the candidate's universe. We have heard from candidates, both from hired and not-hired pools, that their stress level is reduced a lot by this approach.

(1) https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...