Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one.
Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview performance) to subsequently get promoted. So, hiring mission accomplished, end of story. They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.
But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.
At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
This same process can be applied on a community/country level.
Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
Everyone knows who committed which piece of code. It's much less clear the origin of ideas. Did my comments spark an idea in your head? Did you share that with someone else who made it slightly better? If so, what's the split among me, you, and the third person for that idea?
If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
> Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.
Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.
As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.
At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now.
OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here.
Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
And it keeps going. Manager II will tell Manager III "Here are the things my org has done!" and Manager III will tell VP "Here is what my product line has achieved!" and VP will tell CEO "Here is how profitable my business unit is!" and CEO will tell the board and the world "Behold what I have done!"
Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.)
Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion.
And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
>But that means the culture is also broken. Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.
I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement.
Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
If the other companies don’t perform better, then this company has found a process that works (I mean not filtering to only select people who play leetcode is a pretty good idea, the only questionable thing is asking leetcode style questions in the first place if they don’t need that data).
If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
I would think technical employees would have an analogy closer to useful things like tools, rather than aesthetic stuff like art. But I’m not sure what the analogy is getting us here, anyway.
Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.
It may still be worth hiring those people if it prevents them going to competitors. Even if you also hire a bunch of mid-range devs that cheat or get lucky. It's a classic example of uncompetitive practices being very wasteful but lucrative to the directors.
There is another, even more cynical, interpretation. They may have been discovered to be incompetent, and promoted into a role where they can do less damage.
The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget.
Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
It is more likely that the internal evaluations process is working fine. There are >$200k salaries on offer and the challenges Amazon et al. are dealing with aren't that demanding on an absolute scale. There are a lot of smart people out there.
The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
Possibly. But if that's the case, the best thing that can happen is for bullshiters to fill up all of the positions there and drive the company down fast as possible.
I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.
It's also possible the company is setting themselves up for ethics/regulatory issues by selecting for individuals willing to cheat. I guess this should be no surprise since the culture at Amazon already sucks.
Sadly selecting for individuals who cheat might help the company navigate ethics/regulatory issues. I have seen many instances of people treating regulation as an annoying roadblock to work around, not something worth honoring.
That's something this community celebrates. Look at how much Uber and AirBNB are touted as success stories when really they were illegal enterprises allowing individuals to violate the law (taxi licenses, rental laws) for profit.
It's very easy to convince yourself that some laws are not worth respecting. (Ever drive 56 in a 55 zone?)
Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.
> And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.
I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job.
Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).
If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place? Presumably I'm hiring an expensive problem-solver with good judgment here, accumulation of past knowledge beyond some basic level of competence is useful, but secondary.
Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.
> If someone can just look it up, digest information in X minutes and come up with the same answer, then why does it matter that they didn't memorize it in the first place?
But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not.
> Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself
I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.
It seems those that have a fundamental problem with cheating are in the minority. Reading through the comments leaves me only sad.
Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire.
If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.
I’m not sure it’s a cultural trend, but I’d say users of Blind are not the typically developer. That’s not to dismiss it, but that a subset of a population will always have dishonest people.
>>Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one.
Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.
A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.
Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.
Or how about, you know, stop pretending we can evaluate someone's "intelligence" or "skill level" as if it's a one-dimensional factor that you have superhuman insight into measuring.
I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with.
The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for.
People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview.
The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.
>The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary
That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.
No, it's not like that at all. It's like saying the roofer I hired doctored his references, but then proceeded to build a roof that's objectively good enough for me to hire him again to build another roof, on a bigger house for more money.
Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof.
My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision.
> Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.
> However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one.
It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong.
> They may not have found the very best person for the job
The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal!
Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.
Best person for the job given relevant constraints, obviously. When those are "relatively quickly" and "for the price we want to pay", you still want the very best person for the job.
> They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail.
The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.
> They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail.
My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed.
At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.
TBF I don't think this is bad. The "cheating" involved seems a closer match to the actual real world conditions of the doing the job than the artificial "no internet allowed" assessment. If the candidates can get stuff done but need the internet as a reference, that's still getting stuff done. Not surprising that they are now getting promoted given they can not only get stuff done, but were resourceful enough to find a method to "cheat" and also pull it off successfully whilst being monitored.
As much as I hate the current interview process, this isn't true.
The justification foe the assessment is that the assessment is the defined set of hoops that the company who you are trying to get paid by has assigned.
That's a silly argument. There are many jobs at which being smart is an advantage. IQ tests correlate fairly well with being smart. Giving an IQ test could then give you a group of people that are more likely to be smart than the initial interviewing population. Assuming the job is not "taking IQ tests" is the assessment unjustified?
When presented with a problem she not only found a solution, but shared that solution with her peers. And has been promoted at her jobsite. As far as I can see, the interview properly assessed her abilities and found her qualified for the job.
In short, the interview process worked as intended.
Technically, it would be better if everybody had internet access.
BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber.
Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
> Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
People are just riding these organizations down as they crash, starting at the very top with the CEOs. The same feeling extends to the countries and societies where these things operate. Vultures upon a corpse.
“No internet during dev” is not a business requirement, it’s hazing
When I used to run interviews (no longer working) I’d learn the most from seeing how candidates resourcefully used google, skimmed results, found relevant info. That was immediately revealing.
I think it’s a popular approach to see the hiring process as hazing, at least in some companies. I.e. to throw random hurdles, later check who’s doing best and hire them.
I saw companies state that openly. E.g. saying: we’re all competent programmers, none of us like leetcode and we don’t use that in our actual job, but we need a way to filter candidates and this seems the best practical solution.
Again, perhaps desperate people and/or hustlers make for a good workforce, especially in some companies.
If you're willing to go to such lengths in order to be deceptive, it reflects very badly on your moral character. I wouldn't want to work with people like that and we should not reward that kind of behavior.
I am not particularly fond of this kind of moral flexibility. It's lying and the person found ways to justify themselves. This isn't the kind of person I can trust to be honest with me, they don't seem reliable either. Thanks, but no thanks.
I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks.
I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when presenting it. It's not "cheating" but it's skipping the effort and preparation in the same way.
I'm sorry, but I disagree with the analogy. If you can spitball the presentation, your time is likely spent better elsewhere than preparing for the presentation.
It leads to the modern world where "influencers" and "fake news" succeed while creators and contributors fail. It's hard to see this being the basis of a sustainable society.
It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.
If the outcome is successful with less effort how is that bad? I was just in a joint presentation with a new grad. We both had our parts. They spent hours preparing their parts of a technical demonstration. I just walked through my part of the demo and had an “open discussion”.
They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.
When has "having been there" ever been a measure for reward? In college no one gave a shit if you came to lectures, all that mattered was the exam at the end of the semester. If you learn better with books: great!
I'm suprised that so many companies are unable to measure the performance of their employees in an effective manner. This entire discussion comes down to whether management actually wants to own the product and subsequently the product development lifecycle and is then also willing to investigate potential friction, or, as is much more often the case, doesn't really care and just wants to be told what they want to hear.
You prioritize a metric (keep management happy) over actualy results. If I can improve that metric by improvising, how am I a cheater?
>It's a broken system where effort and performance isn't acknowledged and rewarded and the whole purpose of being there is undermined. At some point the whole enterprise is destructive and should be shut down.
The point of presentation is usably not to put up great presentation, but to get certain points across.
If you successfully do that with quickly thrown presentation, then its waste of time spending more on it.
What is the reward for putting in the presentation effort? If I get my salary if I spitball and I get my salary whether I put in effort, why bother?
I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.
You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation?
Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”
It probably isn't good enough. But it's hard for the audience to tell.
"Any questions?"
"How are we going to scale the data storage?"
"Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance."
"Great."
It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.
If all you need to answer that question is "we're confident that X" then that's still a problem with the asker. Why are they confident? Have we modeled the data needs over time? What data are we even storing? Basic probing questions should either uncover the lack of preparation or show that things will indeed be fine.
Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.
This is only true in a low-trust society. In a high-trust society, it's absolutely on the presenter to make their claims not only true, but realistically true, and acceptable by the average person. When people defect from that norm, they are shamed, or worse.
Aren't we talking about an environment where there are rampant cheaters? My perception was that this is by definition a low-trust company. Of course, it is always going to be easier to remove yourself from that situation and go to a company that has more rigorous interviews that would catch cheating in the first place.
The corollary of your argument is that hiring rampant cheaters produces (by definition, as you say) a low-trust company. Putting aside everything else, low-trust organizations are intrinsically dysfunctional (though it may take a while for the consequences to play out.) In them, asking more questions will not get you useful information, and you had better watch your back.
See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...
Ironic then that the real test was to see who has flexible thinking to adjust to a dynamic situation and who mindlessly follows misconstrued advice.
If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.
There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.
While it's unlikely these test results were deliberately leaked as a 'real-world' learning exercise, the principle definitely applies.
I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...
I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.
So rather than try to improve the situation by teaching them techniques for doing this winnowing and skimming, which would a) reduce the stress on their students (both in the class and in the real world), and b) increase the efficiency and productivity of the students once they were out there working, they instead chose to perpetuate the significantly more negative status quo.
Yeah, it's sadly predictable that OP is seeing this play out in the workplace. People who cheat to get hired are also likely to scheme and manipulate their way up the corporate ladder. This happens at almost every company, every day.
Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.
The solution is simple: promote from below.
Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.
When the rules of civilization change to the rules of the jungle, society collapses. Many societies have collapsed, even in modern times. It's not fun.
> I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks.
I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test?
Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed?
Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums?
Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?
It was a pretty tough assignment iirc. In my mind an assignments purpose is to learn - which I did from putting in the effort and then reviewing the solution after submitting.
You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat.
I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.
I’m curious how far you are into your career. It sounds a bit like you are treating presentations as a performance, which is natural to fall into but I think it is a bit of a trap time investment wise. If you practice improvising presentations you will eventually get good at improvising presentations which is a valuable skill to have IMO.
This is two totally different things. Not preparing for a presentation means you deliver a mediocre-to-bad presentation; you can't cheat by looking up the answer somewhere.
So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.
This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises.
If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught.
If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway.
To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat.
And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done.
Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.
It's also possible they can understand solutions provided to them and even implement but not be able to come up with solutions under strict time pressure.
I dunno, I think it's pretty hard to keep cheating as a developer. How would a developer even cheat to get promoted? I mean, a PM I can see survive for longer, but a SDE?
I actually had this issue at my current job where we hired someone who seemed great and who did really well on his interview exercises but then once he started working... well, it was pretty obvious he did not know what he was doing at all. So he was let go straight away. There was no way he could cheat his way to stick it out for longer than a month.
I'll make the obvious point that these interviews were not good predictors of success at the companies.
In general, I've found in 15 years of interviews that interviews are not highly correlated with the work at any given company. I wish we would move beyond cargo cult interview styles and base interviews (and screening, for that matter) on the actual work and culture of each company.
I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points).
My conclusion was that:
* some interview problems carried zero signal
* some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (<0.25. Correlation)
* geographic location is a medium signal (0.2)
* a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4)
* choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some.
There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.
My intuition would expect the two to be correlated.
All anecdotal evidence I've seen points to the language mattering a great deal since only those people who are enthusiastic about niche languages, tend to put more time in learning/practicing programming and all other things being equal, spending more time on a skill correlates to being better at said skill.
> It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.
> Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.
I wonder correlations eckesicle found, and what languages would fit that profile today.
Yes. Interviewees were free to pick any language to attack their problem. We found that interviewees who picked certain languages performed consistently worse during their interviews, and also received worse feedback in their 360-review after working for a year (if they passed).
The bottom languages were:
Java
C++
Php
They also made up the bulk of interviews. I suspect that Java and c++ together accounted for about 75% of all interviews.
Languages like ruby, python and golang increased your chances of passing the interview as well as getting good peer feedback one year on.
More niche languages (rust, erlang etc) didn’t have enough data points to be analysed separately, but if you grouped them they were the choice of the strongest candidates.
Sadly not. We ran the study on internal company data, so it was never published. The purpose of the study was to improve and inform on our hiring practices
It is funny. Let’s say you have an MIT PHD computer science grad with a 4.0 GPA. The 8 years of verifiable performance means nothing. The competitive coder would blow them away in an interview.
A PhD is intended to set you up for an R&D type job. It depends on what kind of education the competitive coder has of course, but if they are interviewing for the same types of positions, the scientists isn’t exploiting their competitive advantage.
Fizz buzz gets ‘em every time. The competition code stuff was more of a culture test. It’s gotten weird now because people outside that culture now memorize problems to get higher-paying jobs.
There are a few outliers, but generally, I found most candidates hired are good, if the interview process mimics the actual projects someone is going to work on in the next 3 months or so. But the downside is that interviewing is slow and cannot easily distributed across multiple teams, because the tasks are tailor made.
Due to the downsides, I guess it is easier for companies to rely on standardised tests. Even just for the reason that those are easy for anyone in the company to lead the interview. But likewise it is easy for anyone to game the system.
Or they were good predictors of success, just not in the way you expected. The individuals got the job done one way or another, just like they nailed the entry level job position.
How would you base a job interview on actual work? You have very limited time and you're trying to take a representative sample of a candidate's capabilities.
IMO interviewing is just plain hard and unpleasant. Obviously if you perfectly solve interviewing for software engineers you could rule the world, because you could afford to offer all of your hires $1M/yr which is far less than the best engineers are worth, but more than what everyone else offers.
There is no such thing as "cheating" once you're out of school and the sooner new grads realize that the better off they will be. The real world is very much "fake it till you make it", "do whatever is necessary" because we're all just trying to make money to live and retire.
Even within the school system. I intend to teach my kids the only problem with cheating is the punishment that might result. Cheating has a price along with a weighted chance of that price applying. Is what you might gain worth the expected price?
The greatest regret of my life is not lying blatantly to get admissions and scholarships to university.
I’m a pretty firm believer in first learning the rules and only then, learning when it’s “OK” to break them. You’re probably not doing your kids any favors by skipping the first step.
If the companies wanted a fair interview they would ask questions and have a discussion that only a skilled engineer with real world experience could have.
How is cheating risky? You get caught, you don't get the job. End of story.
On the other hand, not cheating means it will be harder to get the job. This seems to be the riskier strategy (but, I'd argue, has the greater reward.)
I don't think it's the "best advice". The problem with lies is that one lie begets another, and you end up trying to defend a whole bunch of lies that don't necessarily weave together coherently.
I guess I have low appetite for risk.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive."
I do think this is an even bigger indictment of the interview process. If they're actually more competent in the role and not getting PIP'd and getting promotions, it means the interview was worthless to start, it would filter out a good candidate and pass a candidate who may only know how to do toy problems without any engineering skill.
Maybe a good candidate in this organization is one that will leverage every edge they have to produce a desired result. Resourcefulness and risk tolerance are a potent pair.
I've done a lot of screening interviews and cheating does happen. Some of my favorites:
* developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer.
* developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow.
* the glorious mechanical keyboard, as they google for an answer.
* interviewed one person and had a different one show up.
Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out fraud was committed, the benefit payout is guaranteed after two years.
The implication being that after 2 years the immediate risk of death the insurance company wants to protect itself against did not come to pass, so the policy holder should not have the risk of losing their policy to a post mortem determination of fraud from the insurer despite believing they were insured.
Taken back to the fraud in interviews, you could make the same argument that after some time working on the job and not gettimg fired, the risk of getting someone not actually qualified did not come to pass, so its more useful to look at the employees current performance than their original fraudulent interview.
But the bar for firing is below the bar for hiring.
This is true not only because of status quo bias, sunk cost etc., but also because employers will often try really hard and be very patient, in the hope that an employee's performance will improve.
Sounds similar to how (most? all?) life insurance policies will pay out for suicide after a two-year waiting period - the idea being that those who are dedicated enough to plan out that far in advance don't actually end up going through with it, or it's a rounding error.
So perhaps the medical exam stuff should be swapped around; everyone can get life insurance, but if you want payout for certain things to kick in before two years, you get a medical and pass.
I think any insurance company would have a lifelong suicide exclusion if they could. I’m pretty sure they are legally obligated to pay after two years, as it’s be too easy for nearly any insurance company to claim most deaths were possibly a suicide. The main point being that you can’t pay the mortgage on your house, which may be the sole reason you got life insurance, if the benefits aren’t being paid out.
Also, there are some policies that do have limited benefits the first two years. This is especially common for any type of insurance that doesn’t require a medical exam. They tend to be very expensive for the amount of insurance they provide, but maybe have a manageable monthly payment because the amount of coverage is relatively low. This type of insurance is usually “I can’t qualify for anything else” coverage, or it’s for a very specific purpose, like paying for funeral expenses when for some reason the person didn’t have the desire to just save that money in the bank.
The problem for the industry with the "no questions asked" plans is the only people who sign up for them are the ones who have no other option, which makes them more expensive, which makes the only people who sign up for them ... etc etc etc.
> I think any insurance company would have a lifelong suicide exclusion if they could
I suspect you're right.
There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.
There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.
There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.
There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.
There’s also probably some social bias. In the US, we have a strong bias towards self-determinism and saying someone did something because (in-effect) they are pre-wired to make that deterministic action flies in the face of social conventions about individual free will. There are always some policies that are shot down because they run against social normative ideas, even if those ideas are shown to be false.
(The free will vs determinism is obviously overly simplistic above)
I let any of my interviewees know that it is ok to use google, I just want to know what they searched for. I'm not running a trivia contest, so if they forgot the name of something or need a little refresh, that's fine.
The way I combat this is by asking questions about their current jobs, then diving deep into the technical problems they faced. It requires a lot more preparation for each candidate, but it ensures it’s not a trivia test but a discussion.
One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him about it and how he would troubleshoot, then asked him to come back on Monday with a solution. On Monday, the site was fixed, and he explained to me what happened in AWS, how he figured it out, etc. So he was hired, going on 2 years now and doing very well.
I don’t need robots who can recite what a b-tree is (ChatGPT can do that). I need people who will work hard, can understand the big picture and how to approach problems, while being a good personality on the team.
I've only ever had to hire one person to work beneath me, but that sounds like how I ran the interview.
We were hiring students for a temp position. We're a Controls Engineering company, but my department is dealing with more traditional languages for supporting applications and needed extra help for a bigger project. I know the tech we use isn't standard in the university so the interview was asking students about how they approached their major projects and their methodology for learning new tools/languages.
The first guy who straight up said "I already know enough of C++ and Java, I suppose I'd just google how to do x in c# and branch from there" got the job. Because...yeah, that's about it. We talked about a 4th year project and what his responsibilities in the team where, problems faced, solutions found, etc.
My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?"
The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP?
It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.
That's what I do (instead of curl, with a browser).
MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong.
I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any of the details they want.
Ah, I am so happy I am not the only one who invented this interview method :-)
Thanks for this. Looks like it's going deep into "client side".
Thing about "Google.com" (I used Facebook/Gmail) is that when server side stuff is of interest (as it was for this cloud engineer job), then I also want to hear about geo DNS, reverse proxies, LBs, CDNs, eventual consistency, distributed storage, etc, all the complexity that is happening once that cat video appears in the browser.
Then again we can go back to JS, CSS, JIT and others' space
I have a "greenfield" scenario I ask SRE candidates. I give them unlimited time, resources and money to build whatever systems they want to ensure that code is production ready before it goes to prod. The only constraint is that they will be the only person who ever has a pager, 24x7x365. Tell me how you make that work with high confidence that your life won't be ruined. It's not verbatim but that's the gist. So many paths to explore and I think it does a great job of leveling people.
This is how I was interviewed when I was a scientist/engineer and how I got interviewed at gov labs when I switched to programming. I still refreshed material for my interviews but they were focused on the actual job areas. I was really shocked that this was not common in the software world and feels weird that as an AI research people are asking me about leet code and not about mathematical formulas, limitations, and analysis of architectures or my own research. PhD scientist interviews (at labs and universities) are essentially a short form of people's discretions with a focus on Q&A. It's always appeared successful to me and I figured that the leet code was always because 1) momentum and 2) there's so many applications that an arbitrary filter has no realistic effect on outcomes other than reducing the number of candidates (due to the difficulties of measuring merit). (Similar to university admissions) But I think we all have to admit that meritocracy is not realistic and act under this belief. It's fine to have arbitrary filters if we recognize them as arbitrary but not if we go around and tout superiority for passing these. But I guess that's a corollary to Goodhart's Law
Because those fields are currently too limited and that would only work for researchers that are exactly in the field the company wants talent for.
Researchers' fields/interests are too narrow, by far, for companies to find enough candidates. Machine learning departments go from low thousands (FANG) to maybe a dozen individuals on the low end (small regional banks, ...). That adds up to let's say 40.000 jobs worldwide.
Plus there's the non-cheating cheating. The majority of conferences (including ICLR/NIPS/CVPR) are still presentations by companies about how they "innovated" by letting an intern use 10-year old techniques, in an established library (ie. not pytorch, but an "integrated" solution, sometimes going as far as an Oracle tool) to look at their own proprietary data (in medical, social sciences, sometimes chemistry). This then delivers them a "paper", goes into the conference proceedings, and they make sure this delivers dozens, sometimes hundreds of citations for all individuals involved.
Don't get me wrong. Delivering a major paper at those conferences is a major, incredible accomplishment that's beyond me, for example. But there's 20-30 people on a yearly basis that "really"/honestly do that and over 5000 total presentations at those conferences. And there's 10000 or more candidates needed to fill positions at companies.
And then the question is: who would you rather hire? A math phd, or frankly even a CS master with no relevant machine learning papers, or that intern?
The fact that most employers aren’t like you is keeping me from starting interviewing for a job after nearly 2 years of sabbatical. I simply refuse to participate in the typical interviewing process where I simply cannot show my skillset, 20+ years of experience and my diligence.
They are out there - when I was looking a few years back I would ask what the interview process is like. If whiteboard, I politely refused and tactfully said why. You won't be taking any FANGG positions, but there are plenty of positions out there that pay FANGG money minus the interview overhead. I've had some pretty great interviews when it turns into a conversation about a previous solution, or a project I'm working on, which have led to almost 100% offers. In contrast, I would do absolutely horrid in whiteboard or quiz-like interviews. Some people are built for it, but that's not me.
I had several bad experiences right out of school - I would regularly do programming exercises for recruiters and wasted a lot of my time I will never get back. Some of those exercises would take 3 to 5 hours, and I was told I was one of the faster candidates :/
Once I was able to build a resume and show off projects I told myself I would never go through that experience again.
I don't know if this comment will help you at all, but good luck to you! If you are in the Midwest area I know of a recruiter or two that are great people and can help get you pointed in the right direction. My email is in my profile.
Thank you, I appreciate you sharing your experience, it hits close home. I have moved back to Europe, but am actually looking at remote positions in the US. And thank you for your offer, I’ll take you up on that!
The problem is no matter how much training or systems a company has for its interviewing process, employees won’t read it and will inconsistently interview candidates (couldn’t remember List method == red flag; another interviewer rightly wouldn’t ding someone for this). I think interviewers really need to develop their critical thinking skills in how they judge talent. I’d rather have someone who wasn’t able to solve part three of an interview problem but high leveled some decent approaches that indicate, given more time, they’d be able to solve it. It’s interesting to me that we place this artificial time barrier on many interviews when in reality work is not chunked out that way and often takes quite a bit of thinking to come up with good solutions to things. On the other hand, I don’t think take home tests are a good solution for interviewing either. I think a lot of interviewers just end up copy catting whoever they trained with when watching interviews as a shadow (if they even had this opportunity).
I expect my interviewees to use Google and am disappointed if they don't. It's more important to me that they know how to find the right answer than it is that they just know it off the top of their head. 90% of their time is going to be spent figuring out how to solve all the known-unknowns they're going to come across.
Ditto, 20 years on and I research and read articles when I start any new project because in one year there can be entire paradigm shifts in tooling and best practices.
Yup! If I see them struggling to answer a question or admit to not knowing something I will ask them "well, how would you find the answer?", to which they always half-jokingly answer "I'd Google it". That's when I'll let them know that I want to see some of that too!
Because people administering tests always have weird or arbitrary assumptions and restrictions. Part of getting through school is jumping through all the contrived hoops they place before you, even when it'd be much easier to just walk around the hoops. Job interviews are no different; different interviewers have different expectations, and many don't want you consulting outside information sources.
I always gave open book exams to my students. They don't need to memorize details, but show understanding. Questions would range between "find the page in the book" to "can't answer it if you don't understand the subject matter."
Interviewing is a bit different, since there's no book, but when we looked for a junior dev, the applicants got a laptop with VS Code, the common browsers, internet access and an empty (macOS guest) account, and a few (short!) tasks to show if they understood the questions and were able to start formulating an answer. We also looked for a personality match (we're a small company) and signs of general intelligence. Worked out reasonably well.
I really dislike the more extreme approaches to interviewing that one sometimes comes across, like leet code scores. That's just too disconnected from the actual work. Unless you need your employee to grind leet code questions, of course.
yeah same. it's not a recitation / memorization challenge, it's an honest "if you ran into X at work, show me what would you do" exercise. It's hard to imagine an answer that doesn't start with "I'd probably google it." How do you evaluate the quality of the search results? How would you scan a page to quickly find the salient details? How would you test what you'd found to determine whether it was an effective solution? etc.
I'm so curious about that last one. You interviewed and accepted one person, but a different person showed up to actually work? If so, that's incredibly bizarre.
Apparently this is moderately common especially during remote Covid work; there were some discussions of it on HN, even to where the person interviewed and accepted was not the person working, and apparently the work was being done by an entire group of people.
Been remote since 2015 and not gonna lie, thought about finding contractors on Fiverr or e-Lance (or whatever e-Lance is called these days) to do just that.
Basically become a PM for a team of four Vietenamese kids and pull in pay from 3 gigs.
I later did some contracting on the side of a full-time job in 2018 and it was hard -- confusion and burnout set in quickly. But still think about the offshoring approach sometimes...
There's any number of stories about it being done, but anyone who has tried working this way realizes that you either need very skilled underlings or you spend most of the time managing it anyway and could have done it yourself quicker.
Yup. We did a couple phone screens. Person we interviewed knocked it out of the park. Solid answers with historical background on it, we liked the way they solved problems. Most of the team was part of the interview process.
The new person started and we realized the person that came in had no more information on what/how we had talked about in the interviews than we did. What was done easily over a screen share was well outside of what this person was capable of. In the interview, solid yanking/putting in VIM - in person, unable to save/close, for example. He was present -- we did wonder if the recruiter we worked with had a paperwork mistake, so asked a few bits about our interview and while he could parrot bits of the answer and our discussion, he could not come close to actually hitting the why or next steps like he did in the interview.
That was the point where a camera was required for the interview, for us.
I hired on during the pandemic for what would be considered a ‘ginormous’ organization. I never went on-site for about 2 years. I believe my employer tried to mitigate it through more extensive reference checks and a very long probationary period.
>interviewed one person and had a different one show up
I'm always amazed at the extent people go to to cheat. It gets to the point that you're putting in more effort than you would have to be successful without cheating.
I sometimes feel some people simply enjoy cheating too much. Its not about accomplishing a goal by any means necessary, its something about doing something wrong that certain people seem to enjoy.
In the pandemic when hiring was remote this was very prevalent in my country.
This became kind of a business where a person sells his services to help you cheat by appearing instead of you in the video interview and also helps you with the work after you got the job.
There are different issues of "is this an honest interviewee?" and "is this a good interview?" and you're welcome to argue the latter all you like but the solution to a bad interviewer isn't just to cheat because you don't like it.
Context matters. If you're looking to see "have you really done security stuff?" by mentioning some OWASP Top 10 vulns and asking for a quick description, for somebody that has indeed done any security at all that will be trivially easy and anybody else will need to google it. Can they skim google and get you an intelligeable answer? Maybe but that's not what you're looking for, the question itself is a proxy for something else.
For most of my interviews I tell folk up front to google whatever they need to. But at the very very earliest stage of the interview loop we do a quick "programmer is a big field, what kind are you?" round so we know how to place people and the questions we use for it are all trivially easy for somebody even remotely familiar with the fields we're looking at and also trivially googleable for anybody else. The goal with that piece isn't to challenge people it's just to round their skillset to the nearest role that we have. I've caught people retyping code, pretending to be inventing it, from what's clearly the first article they found when they googled the keywords. It was never intended to be a hard problem, just something to quickly tell an infrastructure from a frontend engineer. It was more or less bitwise identical to the article they were retyping from and they couldn't explain the code or modify it. That doesn't even accomplish what they want, even if it worked we'd then go on to interview them for a job they couldn't do.
Again you can argue about whether that's a good practise or not but it's still not licence to simply cheat on it. You're conflating these and and I think it's not the right thing to do.
- Modern problems require modern solutions. This sounds creative and ballsy. I'd be intrigued to see more.
- If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate
- People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod
- This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria
when i took my quantum mechanics qualifier, i studied for a month, i was honest, i worked so hard. The exam was so tough (I passed), but as I was walking out I saw a student who had all the old exam questions with solutions printed out on his "table of integrals". Sure, maybe I "learned" some quantum mechanics more than that guy. But it's a topic I have never used (I do geophysics and machine learning) so I don't think I remember much of anything about quantum mechanics. So what was the lesson learned there? "Work smart, not hard"? "Do whatever the minimum is because that is all that gets assessed"? "The goal is all that matters"? "The ends justify the means"? "Worry about yourself"?
There’s something seemingly dysfunctional in academia that made you get the best degree in quantum physics and then not work in quantum physics.
I mean it is really common and not your fault, but people end up getting a PhD in these really advanced subjects all the time and then just leverage the ancillary coding and data analysis skills they happened to pick up on the way to get high paying tech jobs in unrelated fields. It seems like a massive waste of brain power that we could target more effectively.
The most interesting example that I read about was a Facebook employee trying to get a new job. They hadn’t done any Leetcode in many years and struggled with it as it was so unrelated to their work. I’m surprised that companies don’t re evaluate people on Leetcode on a regular basis given the amount of weight placed on this.
And this is how you realize real life is not a board game. And this is how you're left with an impostor syndrome after a career based on google-fu and stackoverflow copy pasta.
Seems more and more that the people who cut corners get ahead. Lie, cheat, and steal is the path to success these days. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that we are slipping in national rankings and the top desired jobs are performers and influencers.
Nobody seems to care anymore. I am reminded about this constantly at my work where I travel to lots of different offices and meet lots of managers. Nobody cares this author worked hard to be honest. Nobody cares that the other interviewees cheated. There's not much accountability. All anybody who has a say in anything seems to care is if they don't caught in a scandal. As long as it doesn't cause a scandal, mediocre work, dishonesty and/or neglect is widely acceptable in today's workforce.
one way to get around this is to effectively say someone's work belongs to them, and to take it is to infringe on that. however many techies do not find that acceptable.
another way solution is to install what is effectively malware on candidates' computer to ensure honesty. however techies complain about privacy.
yet another is to make it so interviews are in person, and to begin to end remote work, as it is obviously easier to cheat and do things like be overemployed when you're remote. again, not acceptable.
so of course this kind of things happens. it is what it is
We all know that interviews can focus on knowledge not applicable to the job, leading to candidates excelling in interviews but failing at their job, or vice versa.
I don't hold a firm ethical view on whether this justifies cheating in interviews. However, as noted on Blind, people do succeed in their roles after cheating. Some could even make the argument that those who deliver business value fulfil the primary expectation an employer has of them, and whatever happens at the interview might be almost irrelevant.
From my experience leading teams, people with gumption, perseverance, and great learning skills almost always outperform others long-term, making entry-level skills a worse indicator of future performance in comparison. I've never regretted hiring someone with these values.
When entering tech, I performed poorly on some technical interviews, which I'm ashamed of. Still, I received competitive offers based on potential. Some companies even skip technical panels/whiteboards for candidates with poor initial performance in technical tests but good growth potential. While unconventional and you should not expect that a company will do this for you, this approach seems more sensible than crazy to me.
Somehow I've not yet heard of FAGMAN. Very humorous, just like the idea that they hold everyone to the same bar!
But to speak seriously for a moment, some will do it with exceptional candidates. Probably not FAANG, the attitude and level of competition is different there.
The thing is clearing the interviews is much harder than doing the day to day job in any of these companies. In all of big tech, most people are working on trivial crud apps or trivial services passing data around. The skills to succeed are similar to cheating in interviews. Most people I know in all of big tech have never used any data structure more complex than a resizable array. Very few people in big tech work on the real hard problems. The interview process difficulty and the day to day job difficulty are just not related, not to mention that in day to day job being able to get solutions from others is a very important skill for you to succeed.
One thing the interview process does is to weed out totally incompetent candidates. Even one such candidate, once inside, can be extremely harmful to the morale of a team.
Your last point is an important one. There are a large number of incompetent applicants. Prior to the most recent round of tech layoffs, I would go so far as to say that the majority of applicants were incompetent. That's not to say the majority of programmers are incompetent, but because the interview filter processes tend to not select the incompetent, they accumulate in the applicant pool.
Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.
> Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.
I would like to see some distinction between people who apply cold, and people who have been reached out to by a company.
I'm an experienced, employed engineer, and if a company reaches out to me, I expect to not be treated in an interview like "gotta see if you are a faker! You could be coasting for 15 years! We get soooo many applicants."
That's the (in-house) recruiter's job, or hiring manager's. Don't waste my damn time like this.
I think there are three categories rather than just two. Cold application, reached out to by a recruiter, or referred by a former colleague. Seeing how internal recruiting or "sourcing" works, I don't see it as being vastly different from a cold application. Someone dredged up your profile on LinkedIn and reached out to you based on a keyword search (in all likelihood). Once you responded, they passed you off to the recruiting pipeline. There's not much more signal in you having a keyword on LinkedIn as having a keyword on your resume.
Only the third, a referral from an actual ex-colleague, would I skip any of the basic vetting steps. (Said differently, I agree "that's the (in-house) recruiter's job, or hiring manager's"; this is them doing it...)
100% agreed! That's why I specified "from an actual ex-colleague" rather than "from someone they once got a LinkedIn request from but knows nothing about and couldn't pick out of a police lineup".
I’m going to go out on a limb here and be “that guy”.
But in my experience, there’s a big difference between perspectives on cheating in the US vs perspectives in… let’s just say broadly… “some other nations”. I say this as an American who has lived overseas much of my life and, lest you think I’m just a flag waving parrot for the US, prob prefer living overseas and am more than willing to criticize the heck out of the US on a range of topics when relevant.
I prob shouldn’t be afraid of listing out these specific cultures where cheating is not just ok but encouraged- as these are things that come from multiple occasions of direct experience- but I’d rather not make this look like a racist judgement on certain cultures.
I’m not saying here that there aren’t Americans who cheat and I’d be lying if I said I had never cheated on an exam in undergrad. And there are certainly cultures outside of the US that on average are at least as intolerant of cheating or more so.
But I think the big difference between that and a lot of the opinions I’ve seen in comments here and in the article is that- at least in my case- these were slipups done in moments of desperation and I damn sure wouldn’t be bragging about it on a message board and am overall somewhat ashamed at having done it.
The difference between the United States and other countries is how we internalize things. We're very much guilt or shame driven because of the heavy influences of puritanical, fundamentalist, and catholic religions.
It's not that Americans don't cheat/indulge/whatever, it's that they feel bad about doing it. And that doesn't stop Americans from doing things, they just try to hide or repent for what they've done.
* Thinking about it a little more, there are also people here with a strong sense of entitlement and bewildering moral fortitude. They'll break down in tears or want to start a fight if you cuss in their presence but have no qualms about "moving" to Florida to dodge paying taxes or vehicle registration fees.
Agree that the US can be pretty puritanical, so some of the aversion to cheating is driven by guilt/shame. But on the other hand, when you grow up without the necessity to lie/cheat, and when it isn't normalized, you never learn the methods to get away with it, and sometimes that's enough of a deterrent.
There are things in my life I'd rather lie about, but I don't because I never learned to lie convincingly. The same with cheating. Figuring out how to cheat on a test/interview sounds like a way more effortful and stressful experience than acting honestly (I shudder to imagine how it compounds imposter syndrome).
Imo "moving" to Florida (and similar tactics) got normalized, so it's easier for people to learn how to do it from a friend etc. so they do it more. No moralizing necessary.
> Figuring out how to cheat on a test/interview sounds like a way more effortful and stressful experience than acting honestly
That's easier said than done when the market is expecting unrealistic job experience, requiring coding tests of knowledge that won't be leverages for the job, and asking candidates to participate in ridiculous interview processes.
For someone with an established resume it's manageable but for candidates fresh out of school without much work experience they're faced with a hostile hiring process.
It's reasonable to understand that they would feel the need to cheat to even get a foot in the door.
My Russian friend frequently mentions that bribery and cheating is a national sport over there. If you want to get anything done that is. I am sure countries where it is prevalent know so.
In my country, India, cheating in university is rampant. But there were more than a few of my classmates, who didn't. On average, it sad to see all that cheating. Aren't you saying you are incompetent by cheating?
You are actually being very astute. One of the reasons (there are of course more reasons) that America does so well is that most common citizens are relatively honest. Consequently in many third world countries corruption is rife, not only is it tolerated it is often encouraged.
In some countries, cheating/gaming the system is seen as a noble thing. It is seen as a big "fuck you" to the system / the man / whatever. If you get away with it, it is not you who are wrong - it is simply the system that is too poorly designed.
In other countries, cheating is just too normalized because the stakes are so high, and the competition is too great. I'm just going to throw out India and China - not because everyone there cheats, but because every "edge" you can gain against your competition is fair game. The reward is not only life changing for you, but for your whole family. Maybe even your neighbors.
And it is not to say that they would cheat each other directly, like scamming money off the other guy - but if you're the competition, then the gloves are off.
And here I am refusing to do whiteboarding, stuck doing menial API plumbing because all of the SMBs think they should interview like FAANG without the respective compensation. Maybe I should start cheating.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadLook at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview performance) to subsequently get promoted. So, hiring mission accomplished, end of story. They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.
At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.
It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them.
As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.
Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.
I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon
If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.
Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.
As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.
At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.
OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.
Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.
It's credit-taking all the way up.
Not the people deciding rankings and promotions.
Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.)
Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion.
And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.
/s
I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement.
Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.
If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...
Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.
The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget.
Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.
The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.
I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.
Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.
I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job.
Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).
Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.
But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not.
> Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself
I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.
Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire.
If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.
Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything.
Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.
Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.
A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.
Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.
I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with.
The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for.
People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview.
The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.
That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.
I hate jumping through hoops too, but have you seen other industries (LSAT, mcat, etc)?
If you've never done it before leetcode style problems are bound to teach you something useful to your work.
The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more.
But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.
Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof.
My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision.
> Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.
If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.
It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong.
> They may not have found the very best person for the job
The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal!
Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.
No you don't! Or else you'd never hire anybody because how can you be sure anyone is the best person for the job?
You want to hire the person in front of you who is good enough to be likely enough to be able to do the job.
The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.
My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed.
At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.
The justification foe the assessment is that the assessment is the defined set of hoops that the company who you are trying to get paid by has assigned.
1. They are considered high performers (maybe promotions are on a schedule?)
2. They are actually high performers (some people can bullshit their way through a job for years).
3. They are outperforming a hypothetical person who didn't cheat on the test and would have been hired instead of them with an honest assessment.
In short, the interview process worked as intended.
Maybe to the interviewer. But for the applicant the goal is to achieve an outcome.
I can assess his abilities either way.
BUT, it means that Amazon creating a selection pressure for people who cheat. Long term this will be corrosive to the organizational fiber of the corporation as idiotic unrealistic leetcode questions are to the technical fiber.
Amazon has become way buggier for me over the last few years and so has Google. I think this is intimately connected to their organizational dysfunctions.
People are just riding these organizations down as they crash, starting at the very top with the CEOs. The same feeling extends to the countries and societies where these things operate. Vultures upon a corpse.
So maybe features will get implemented but rules and laws not necessarily respected.
And perhaps that’s useful for some companies.
When I used to run interviews (no longer working) I’d learn the most from seeing how candidates resourcefully used google, skimmed results, found relevant info. That was immediately revealing.
"OK, take two weeks and create a feature."
"No, not like that."
Two weeks worth of contractor rates for a finished feature as an interview? Sign me up!
I saw companies state that openly. E.g. saying: we’re all competent programmers, none of us like leetcode and we don’t use that in our actual job, but we need a way to filter candidates and this seems the best practical solution.
Again, perhaps desperate people and/or hustlers make for a good workforce, especially in some companies.
And yet rarely reciprocated beyond what's explicitly required by law.
</ Tangent >
I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when presenting it. It's not "cheating" but it's skipping the effort and preparation in the same way.
- No country for old men
When the easier money dries up, that will change.
They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.
I'm suprised that so many companies are unable to measure the performance of their employees in an effective manner. This entire discussion comes down to whether management actually wants to own the product and subsequently the product development lifecycle and is then also willing to investigate potential friction, or, as is much more often the case, doesn't really care and just wants to be told what they want to hear.
You prioritize a metric (keep management happy) over actualy results. If I can improve that metric by improvising, how am I a cheater?
The point of presentation is usably not to put up great presentation, but to get certain points across.
If you successfully do that with quickly thrown presentation, then its waste of time spending more on it.
I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.
Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”
"Any questions?"
"How are we going to scale the data storage?"
"Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance."
"Great."
It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.
Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.
See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...
If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.
There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.
I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...
I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.
EDIT typo
That sounds like bad professors to me.
Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.
The solution is simple: promote from below.
Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.
Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a co-op dev studio that was based on 18th century pirate charters (https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...).
I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test?
Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed?
Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums?
Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?
You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat.
I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.
So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.
This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises.
If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught.
If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway.
To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat.
And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done.
Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.
It is interesting that the form of cheating would be defeated with in person interviews / testing.
I do wonder if you cheat your way into Amazon wouldn’t you get caught being bad on the job after you are hired?
Or are we talking about people who are generally qualified but look better than others because they cheated?
Bingo. The cheaters will get the job because they will look better than similarly qualified candidates.
Sure, they cheated to get in, but then once in they found out it wasn't that hard to stay and get promoted.
I actually had this issue at my current job where we hired someone who seemed great and who did really well on his interview exercises but then once he started working... well, it was pretty obvious he did not know what he was doing at all. So he was let go straight away. There was no way he could cheat his way to stick it out for longer than a month.
In general, I've found in 15 years of interviews that interviews are not highly correlated with the work at any given company. I wish we would move beyond cargo cult interview styles and base interviews (and screening, for that matter) on the actual work and culture of each company.
My conclusion was that:
* some interview problems carried zero signal
* some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal (<0.25. Correlation)
* geographic location is a medium signal (0.2)
* a relevant degree is a strong signal (0.4)
* choice of programming language is the strongest signal (>0.8 correlation (or anti-) for some languages, and some.
There is some selection bias though since candidates who were rejected did not get a chance at the job so we didn’t have a rating for them.
Can you elaborate?
All anecdotal evidence I've seen points to the language mattering a great deal since only those people who are enthusiastic about niche languages, tend to put more time in learning/practicing programming and all other things being equal, spending more time on a skill correlates to being better at said skill.
> It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.
> Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.
I wonder correlations eckesicle found, and what languages would fit that profile today.
I would've put Clojure on the list around 2010.
Elixir feels like a right answer today. Maybe Zig, too?
The bottom languages were: Java C++ Php
They also made up the bulk of interviews. I suspect that Java and c++ together accounted for about 75% of all interviews.
Languages like ruby, python and golang increased your chances of passing the interview as well as getting good peer feedback one year on.
More niche languages (rust, erlang etc) didn’t have enough data points to be analysed separately, but if you grouped them they were the choice of the strongest candidates.
Due to the downsides, I guess it is easier for companies to rely on standardised tests. Even just for the reason that those are easy for anyone in the company to lead the interview. But likewise it is easy for anyone to game the system.
How would you base a job interview on actual work? You have very limited time and you're trying to take a representative sample of a candidate's capabilities.
IMO interviewing is just plain hard and unpleasant. Obviously if you perfectly solve interviewing for software engineers you could rule the world, because you could afford to offer all of your hires $1M/yr which is far less than the best engineers are worth, but more than what everyone else offers.
The greatest regret of my life is not lying blatantly to get admissions and scholarships to university.
How is it surprising that they're the ones getting raises? Clearly they're willing to risk more than you are for the reward.
Only getting caught cheating guarantees loss.
Playing fair does not guarantee winning.
Calling it “risk taking” seems overly reductive.
On the other hand, not cheating means it will be harder to get the job. This seems to be the riskier strategy (but, I'd argue, has the greater reward.)
I guess I have low appetite for risk.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive."
* developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer.
* developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow.
* the glorious mechanical keyboard, as they google for an answer.
* interviewed one person and had a different one show up.
Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out fraud was committed, the benefit payout is guaranteed after two years.
Taken back to the fraud in interviews, you could make the same argument that after some time working on the job and not gettimg fired, the risk of getting someone not actually qualified did not come to pass, so its more useful to look at the employees current performance than their original fraudulent interview.
This is true not only because of status quo bias, sunk cost etc., but also because employers will often try really hard and be very patient, in the hope that an employee's performance will improve.
So perhaps the medical exam stuff should be swapped around; everyone can get life insurance, but if you want payout for certain things to kick in before two years, you get a medical and pass.
Also, there are some policies that do have limited benefits the first two years. This is especially common for any type of insurance that doesn’t require a medical exam. They tend to be very expensive for the amount of insurance they provide, but maybe have a manageable monthly payment because the amount of coverage is relatively low. This type of insurance is usually “I can’t qualify for anything else” coverage, or it’s for a very specific purpose, like paying for funeral expenses when for some reason the person didn’t have the desire to just save that money in the bank.
- higher premiums for everyone because the pool of applicants aren’t that healthy
- the super sick people simply die in the first two years
- the semi sick people can hang on for years, but weak health may me limited ability to pay because of limited employment prospects
- the not sick people will find better prices or simply realize the insurance is overpriced and cancel it
I suspect you're right.
There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.
There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.
There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.
There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.
(The free will vs determinism is obviously overly simplistic above)
One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him about it and how he would troubleshoot, then asked him to come back on Monday with a solution. On Monday, the site was fixed, and he explained to me what happened in AWS, how he figured it out, etc. So he was hired, going on 2 years now and doing very well.
I don’t need robots who can recite what a b-tree is (ChatGPT can do that). I need people who will work hard, can understand the big picture and how to approach problems, while being a good personality on the team.
We were hiring students for a temp position. We're a Controls Engineering company, but my department is dealing with more traditional languages for supporting applications and needed extra help for a bigger project. I know the tech we use isn't standard in the university so the interview was asking students about how they approached their major projects and their methodology for learning new tools/languages.
The first guy who straight up said "I already know enough of C++ and Java, I suppose I'd just google how to do x in c# and branch from there" got the job. Because...yeah, that's about it. We talked about a 4th year project and what his responsibilities in the team where, problems faced, solutions found, etc.
My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?"
The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP?
It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.
MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong.
I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any of the details they want.
Ah, I am so happy I am not the only one who invented this interview method :-)
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
Thing about "Google.com" (I used Facebook/Gmail) is that when server side stuff is of interest (as it was for this cloud engineer job), then I also want to hear about geo DNS, reverse proxies, LBs, CDNs, eventual consistency, distributed storage, etc, all the complexity that is happening once that cat video appears in the browser.
Then again we can go back to JS, CSS, JIT and others' space
Researchers' fields/interests are too narrow, by far, for companies to find enough candidates. Machine learning departments go from low thousands (FANG) to maybe a dozen individuals on the low end (small regional banks, ...). That adds up to let's say 40.000 jobs worldwide.
Plus there's the non-cheating cheating. The majority of conferences (including ICLR/NIPS/CVPR) are still presentations by companies about how they "innovated" by letting an intern use 10-year old techniques, in an established library (ie. not pytorch, but an "integrated" solution, sometimes going as far as an Oracle tool) to look at their own proprietary data (in medical, social sciences, sometimes chemistry). This then delivers them a "paper", goes into the conference proceedings, and they make sure this delivers dozens, sometimes hundreds of citations for all individuals involved.
Don't get me wrong. Delivering a major paper at those conferences is a major, incredible accomplishment that's beyond me, for example. But there's 20-30 people on a yearly basis that "really"/honestly do that and over 5000 total presentations at those conferences. And there's 10000 or more candidates needed to fill positions at companies.
And then the question is: who would you rather hire? A math phd, or frankly even a CS master with no relevant machine learning papers, or that intern?
I had several bad experiences right out of school - I would regularly do programming exercises for recruiters and wasted a lot of my time I will never get back. Some of those exercises would take 3 to 5 hours, and I was told I was one of the faster candidates :/
Once I was able to build a resume and show off projects I told myself I would never go through that experience again.
I don't know if this comment will help you at all, but good luck to you! If you are in the Midwest area I know of a recruiter or two that are great people and can help get you pointed in the right direction. My email is in my profile.
Interviewing is a bit different, since there's no book, but when we looked for a junior dev, the applicants got a laptop with VS Code, the common browsers, internet access and an empty (macOS guest) account, and a few (short!) tasks to show if they understood the questions and were able to start formulating an answer. We also looked for a personality match (we're a small company) and signs of general intelligence. Worked out reasonably well.
I really dislike the more extreme approaches to interviewing that one sometimes comes across, like leet code scores. That's just too disconnected from the actual work. Unless you need your employee to grind leet code questions, of course.
Basically become a PM for a team of four Vietenamese kids and pull in pay from 3 gigs.
I later did some contracting on the side of a full-time job in 2018 and it was hard -- confusion and burnout set in quickly. But still think about the offshoring approach sometimes...
The new person started and we realized the person that came in had no more information on what/how we had talked about in the interviews than we did. What was done easily over a screen share was well outside of what this person was capable of. In the interview, solid yanking/putting in VIM - in person, unable to save/close, for example. He was present -- we did wonder if the recruiter we worked with had a paperwork mistake, so asked a few bits about our interview and while he could parrot bits of the answer and our discussion, he could not come close to actually hitting the why or next steps like he did in the interview.
That was the point where a camera was required for the interview, for us.
What happens during the actual in-person interview that follows ??
Google Meet is cheaper than a flight & hotel room.
I'm always amazed at the extent people go to to cheat. It gets to the point that you're putting in more effort than you would have to be successful without cheating.
I sometimes feel some people simply enjoy cheating too much. Its not about accomplishing a goal by any means necessary, its something about doing something wrong that certain people seem to enjoy.
This became kind of a business where a person sells his services to help you cheat by appearing instead of you in the video interview and also helps you with the work after you got the job.
If they can still answer the question and show evidence that they understand it, what's wrong with reference materials and googling?
Context matters. If you're looking to see "have you really done security stuff?" by mentioning some OWASP Top 10 vulns and asking for a quick description, for somebody that has indeed done any security at all that will be trivially easy and anybody else will need to google it. Can they skim google and get you an intelligeable answer? Maybe but that's not what you're looking for, the question itself is a proxy for something else.
For most of my interviews I tell folk up front to google whatever they need to. But at the very very earliest stage of the interview loop we do a quick "programmer is a big field, what kind are you?" round so we know how to place people and the questions we use for it are all trivially easy for somebody even remotely familiar with the fields we're looking at and also trivially googleable for anybody else. The goal with that piece isn't to challenge people it's just to round their skillset to the nearest role that we have. I've caught people retyping code, pretending to be inventing it, from what's clearly the first article they found when they googled the keywords. It was never intended to be a hard problem, just something to quickly tell an infrastructure from a frontend engineer. It was more or less bitwise identical to the article they were retyping from and they couldn't explain the code or modify it. That doesn't even accomplish what they want, even if it worked we'd then go on to interview them for a job they couldn't do.
Again you can argue about whether that's a good practise or not but it's still not licence to simply cheat on it. You're conflating these and and I think it's not the right thing to do.
- If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate
- People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod
- This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria
I mean it is really common and not your fault, but people end up getting a PhD in these really advanced subjects all the time and then just leverage the ancillary coding and data analysis skills they happened to pick up on the way to get high paying tech jobs in unrelated fields. It seems like a massive waste of brain power that we could target more effectively.
The following article is the best example of the above quote.
https://nautil.us/what-does-any-of-this-have-to-do-with-phys... What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics? Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out.
YMMV
another way solution is to install what is effectively malware on candidates' computer to ensure honesty. however techies complain about privacy.
yet another is to make it so interviews are in person, and to begin to end remote work, as it is obviously easier to cheat and do things like be overemployed when you're remote. again, not acceptable.
so of course this kind of things happens. it is what it is
I don't hold a firm ethical view on whether this justifies cheating in interviews. However, as noted on Blind, people do succeed in their roles after cheating. Some could even make the argument that those who deliver business value fulfil the primary expectation an employer has of them, and whatever happens at the interview might be almost irrelevant.
From my experience leading teams, people with gumption, perseverance, and great learning skills almost always outperform others long-term, making entry-level skills a worse indicator of future performance in comparison. I've never regretted hiring someone with these values.
When entering tech, I performed poorly on some technical interviews, which I'm ashamed of. Still, I received competitive offers based on potential. Some companies even skip technical panels/whiteboards for candidates with poor initial performance in technical tests but good growth potential. While unconventional and you should not expect that a company will do this for you, this approach seems more sensible than crazy to me.
But to speak seriously for a moment, some will do it with exceptional candidates. Probably not FAANG, the attitude and level of competition is different there.
One thing the interview process does is to weed out totally incompetent candidates. Even one such candidate, once inside, can be extremely harmful to the morale of a team.
Any "fix" to the interview process has to accommodate the reality that the left half of the applicant pool distribution is of terribly low levels of ability.
I would like to see some distinction between people who apply cold, and people who have been reached out to by a company.
I'm an experienced, employed engineer, and if a company reaches out to me, I expect to not be treated in an interview like "gotta see if you are a faker! You could be coasting for 15 years! We get soooo many applicants."
That's the (in-house) recruiter's job, or hiring manager's. Don't waste my damn time like this.
Only the third, a referral from an actual ex-colleague, would I skip any of the basic vetting steps. (Said differently, I agree "that's the (in-house) recruiter's job, or hiring manager's"; this is them doing it...)
But it is good to know what kind of people are in charge in those organizations, thanks for the info.
But in my experience, there’s a big difference between perspectives on cheating in the US vs perspectives in… let’s just say broadly… “some other nations”. I say this as an American who has lived overseas much of my life and, lest you think I’m just a flag waving parrot for the US, prob prefer living overseas and am more than willing to criticize the heck out of the US on a range of topics when relevant.
I prob shouldn’t be afraid of listing out these specific cultures where cheating is not just ok but encouraged- as these are things that come from multiple occasions of direct experience- but I’d rather not make this look like a racist judgement on certain cultures.
I’m not saying here that there aren’t Americans who cheat and I’d be lying if I said I had never cheated on an exam in undergrad. And there are certainly cultures outside of the US that on average are at least as intolerant of cheating or more so.
But I think the big difference between that and a lot of the opinions I’ve seen in comments here and in the article is that- at least in my case- these were slipups done in moments of desperation and I damn sure wouldn’t be bragging about it on a message board and am overall somewhat ashamed at having done it.
Feel free to downvote me or call me a moron…
Here's my take...
The difference between the United States and other countries is how we internalize things. We're very much guilt or shame driven because of the heavy influences of puritanical, fundamentalist, and catholic religions.
It's not that Americans don't cheat/indulge/whatever, it's that they feel bad about doing it. And that doesn't stop Americans from doing things, they just try to hide or repent for what they've done.
* Thinking about it a little more, there are also people here with a strong sense of entitlement and bewildering moral fortitude. They'll break down in tears or want to start a fight if you cuss in their presence but have no qualms about "moving" to Florida to dodge paying taxes or vehicle registration fees.
There are things in my life I'd rather lie about, but I don't because I never learned to lie convincingly. The same with cheating. Figuring out how to cheat on a test/interview sounds like a way more effortful and stressful experience than acting honestly (I shudder to imagine how it compounds imposter syndrome).
Imo "moving" to Florida (and similar tactics) got normalized, so it's easier for people to learn how to do it from a friend etc. so they do it more. No moralizing necessary.
That's easier said than done when the market is expecting unrealistic job experience, requiring coding tests of knowledge that won't be leverages for the job, and asking candidates to participate in ridiculous interview processes.
For someone with an established resume it's manageable but for candidates fresh out of school without much work experience they're faced with a hostile hiring process.
It's reasonable to understand that they would feel the need to cheat to even get a foot in the door.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hirings-new-red-line-why-newc...
I imagine if I had to I would have probably paid for them. By the laws of the land I'm a cheater. And so be it.
Or you don’t believe this material/test will affect your future.
You are actually being very astute. One of the reasons (there are of course more reasons) that America does so well is that most common citizens are relatively honest. Consequently in many third world countries corruption is rife, not only is it tolerated it is often encouraged.
In some countries, cheating/gaming the system is seen as a noble thing. It is seen as a big "fuck you" to the system / the man / whatever. If you get away with it, it is not you who are wrong - it is simply the system that is too poorly designed.
In other countries, cheating is just too normalized because the stakes are so high, and the competition is too great. I'm just going to throw out India and China - not because everyone there cheats, but because every "edge" you can gain against your competition is fair game. The reward is not only life changing for you, but for your whole family. Maybe even your neighbors.
And it is not to say that they would cheat each other directly, like scamming money off the other guy - but if you're the competition, then the gloves are off.