Slashdot Mirror
Selecting Against Experience - Do Employers Know?
IBitOBear asks: "A couple days ago I did 'the interview loop' at that leading online retailer. Over the course of six hours I was repeatedly introduced to a guy in his early twenties, who would then ask me to write out code on a white-board for a problem that you might find in the study guide for a 200-level computer science class. I have 20 years of experience in programming and systems design. And in several cases the interviewers were vague, semantically incorrect, or self-contradictory. Interviewer blunders included not understanding that non-normal forms in databases -can be- more correct or efficient when the domain of a data is extremely limited; or choosing a leader among N candidates -is- a byzantine agreement problem. In short, the loop would have been perfect to weed out some guy getting his first job fresh out of school, but it definitely exerted selection pressure towards excluding experienced candidates. So employers, what are you doing to make sure that you are not culling out candidates with the low-ball? Job seekers, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?"
They probably know they are leaning towards fresh blood, and probably will pass on more experienced and stronger candidates. I know quite a few people who work "there", and inside, they are one of the top IT shops, bar none.
Also, there are a few things to be aware of... part of the interview process intentionally (from talking to insiders there, and at Microsoft) introduces vagueness, incorrectness, and other troubling aspects to problem solving. One of the things they're trying to observe is how a candidate deals with the obstacles.
A friend at Microsoft told me if a candidate got flustered and angry at an intractable "problem" he (or she) was pretty much disqualified on the spot. At Microsoft, you could tell your job was "no go" if it didn't last the entire day. (Mine did, sigh... and I got the job, sigh again.) Typically they "nice" way was to tell the candidate the next interviewer got caught up in some responsibilities, and that would be that.
My personal opinion, not that it amounts to a hill of beans for these companies, they sell themselves more short than they might realize. Business is about numbers games and businesses play the curve within one sigma, that's it.
As for what to do when trapped in a sophomore study group, that sophomore group pretty much holds all of the cards. Candidates would be wise to suck it up, be friendly, and at least pretend not to be bothered by their seeming snobbery. (Also, by the way, the snobbery at Microsoft is real.)
Some are better than others selecting excellent candidates (that online retailer comes to mind), but I think there's a slew of mediocre companies out there that would be better performers with a bit more appetite for investing in "old timers". Of course, coming from an old timer, I'm probably introducing my own bias.
(ASIDE, and By The Way... you said over the course of six hours you were repeatedly introduced to a guy in his early twenties... If management had any of their wits about them, they'd consider getting rid of that guy... he should have been recognizing you by the 2nd or 3rd introduction. Sheesh.)
Job seekers, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?
Walk away. An interview is a two-way street: they're evaluating your ability to do the job but you're also evaluating their ability to provide a worthwhile work environment. If they fail your test, walk away.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Probably you want to realize the company doesn't care enough about its hiring practices to have a bright future, and move on.
If you're an employer, you want to make sure that your interviewers have a strong enough grasp of the interview questions not to be wrong about possible valid answers. Allowing inexperienced developers to interview candidates is a recipe for disaster. You don't build a quality company by delegating this task to the inexperienced. You accept that this is work that is best done by your most experienced people, and that it is one of the most valuable uses of their time that you can make.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
20 years experience doesn't mean much. I have heard/seen candidates bullying interviewers with their credintials (I've got a PhD in Computer Science) or experience (I've been coding since you were in diapers) and yet still fail to reverse a linked list in-place, or fail to explain the basic idea of hashing.
It bothers me, as an engineer with some experience, to be subjected to the humiliation of 'the interview loop', yet having been involved in hiring I absoluately see why it is needed -- people, well, inflate their credentials when it comes to looking for work. So companies essentially ignore past work experience and ask questions relating to specific engineering problems to try to see what kind of developer you are. Sometimes the interviewer is bad, but that's why it's a "loop" there are at least 4 of them, and one of them should be a more 'senior' interviewer who holds more sway (that is if i'm guessing correctly at your 'leading online retailer').
True, the system isn't perfect. You could be a brilliant engineer, but can't reverse a string. But with the amount of money that is invested into an engineer by the company as high as it is, they company doesn't want to be wrong.
Make sure to make fun of any bogus information in a way that makes it clear any braindead moron should know better. Follow up with a story about a previous co-worker who got fired for thinking that exact same thing. Lastly make it clear that you are glad you have an interview at a competitor later and look forward to helping to crush their inept company. Adding that you will enjoy buying some of their used furniture at the firesale is a nice touch.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Having not interviewed at that leading online retailer, I don't know if the situation is the same there; but my impression at that leading search engine was that my interviewers were very quick to recognize that I was more qualified than they were and to adapt their interviewing appropriately.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I would already be looking to weed you out. Your disdain for the younger employees with junior technical skills is pretty obvious. As a manager, I would immediately wonder how you would treat those junior employees, and I would worry that you would regular belittle their knowledge, deride them for their mistakes and restort to intimidation to squelch a junior employee's idea that you happen to dislike.
Of course, I worked with someone who acted in the manner I describe. He actually managed to cost the company we both worked for many hours of my time, as he chose to display his extensive knowledge at every opportunity, and I found myself translating what he was saying into something that the junior employees could understand. Oh, and thanks - I had never heard of the Byzantine Generals problem. But your reference to it is something that I would take as a warning sign.
So, like previous posters, my suggestion is: just walk away. You are not built to work for a company like that.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
I didn't get the job. And after I thought about the interview I didn't really want the job. So it was a push. I took a job offer that I had gotten from another company the day before the interview loop.
Also, I have done hiring. I appreciate the need to ask some simple coding questions because it isn't that uncommon to get people in who _can't_ write a bsearch and who cannot demonstrate a mastery of the simple language syntax. But you only really need to walk that mountaiside once in the interview process.
Then again, when you write some code on a white-board and the interviewer cannot understand it (q.v. "I don't understand... why are you checking the value of the pointer and then the contents of the pointer") and then that interviewer helps build the group decision that "we should get someone more technical", you are entering the realm of high comedy.
I actually laughed when the recruiter told me about their rationale.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You read to much into my question. I wasn't "outraged" I was bored to tears and disapointed. I didn't say "I have 20 years of experience" to them. I said that to you, the reader of the article, to give you some basis for my position. In a slashdot lead article you only get so much space and editorial attention to make the interesting points and spur on the discussion.
I did answer the questions posed. No hissy fit, no condecension. I liked the people and we got along OK.
The mire comes, however. One of the responses, for instance, was "I've never seen it done that way before" followed by a thats-impossible shake of the head and an "why are you comparing the pointers and then the contents of the pointers like that" when I explained how this second tier (e.g. more complex) question was still soluable in O(log(n)) time using the method presented.
Several interviewers said in the interviews that they didn't understand the code as written etc, then the group consensus was that they needed someone "more technical".
ASIDE: I will fully credit that a good percentage of the lack of understanding may well have been introduced by my crappy white-board penmenship. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I'll present a candidate with a real problem in the danger room (our term for the isolated test center where we diagnose stuff and load test network setups without screwing with the blades&racks that are live) and screw something up, then have them try to fix it. I'm more interested in their methodology than their solution. Our test network works, but it's a mess; if they can innovate before my eyes and tell me how to clean things up while being tactful then they're hired. My predecessor did this and so do I.
I expect to be corrected if I (intentionally, for the most part) say something wrong, but I expect tact and respect, and I'll tell them those guidelines up front. BS artists have that look when they don't know something, and they get very vague. I don't need to play games with them. Someone who knows their stuff will appreciate the honesty and show their true competent colors.
I send BS artists out the door with a pretty precise explanation of where they went wrong. Hell, I even suggest where they need to get training so they don't have to BS their way through the next interview. This way they won't bother another employer with their BS attempts, or at least they'll know why they got rejected.
If you know it, you know it, if not, then you don't, that's my motto. No need to trip people up, the losers will always get culled from the herd as soon as they open their mouths.
Playing games with applicants sucks, IMHO.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The last time I saw production code that reversed a linked list, it was because someone wanted the last element of the list. So they reversed the list and extracted the head. After reading the code for a while, I realized that I was looking at C code written by a LISP programmer. I finally rewrote the thing to use C++ collection classes. A list wasn't even the right structure; a C++ vector was, because the collection was built once and then used millions of times.
Be suspicious of code that does elaborate munging on pointers. Stuff like that should be encapsulated in general-purpose routines. If you see it in application-specific code, somebody is probably doing something wrong. And it's very likely that such code will be broken during maintenance.
Programmers should know how to reverse a list, but shouldn't actually do it.
Part of having 20 years experience is being able to control more than just code... It means you should have learned how to wrangle people as well!
/them/ draw the witeboard diagrams. It wasn't hard, it's just a way of dealing with people, something I have learned over the years:
...so then I follow with explaination of what would happen if two threads reached the inside of the if statement at the same time ... ... next start a discussion about synchronization, maybe get into Java's serious double-check-lock bug/feature (and show them with pseudo-code how the HotSpot compiler can illogically re-order execution without you ever realizing it) and then discuss how one could fix it with the new ReentrantLock class, or some of the other .concurrent.lock.* packages.
I went to those exact same interviews that you did, the same kinds of introductory questions, the ones looking to weed out the html "programmers" who suddenly decide they can do real programming since it looks so easy.
So, what happened to me? Basically, I was able to turn the interview on it's head, and before too long *I* was the one having
Interviewer: "How would you make a singleton in java?"
Me: "Well, how does this look:"
public class Foo {
private static final Foo _foo = null;
private Foo() {}
public static Foo getInstance() {
if (_foo == null) {
_foo = new Foo();
}
return _foo;
}
}
Interviewer: "Ok, good job next question..."
Me: "Hold on a sec... Look closer at what I wrote, what did I just do wrong?"
Interviewer: "Huh? You mean that's wrong somehow?"
Interviewer: "Ooooh, threading, of course. I have heard of that!"
Me: "Yeah, so, now how could we fix it? Here's the pen, show me what could be done..."
Maybe ask if they can think of a way to implement any kind of locking without using synchronization, have them use the whiteboard and show you what they are thinking in an more abstract form, and then show them how Sun did it with the thread scheduler magic...
And before you know it, you've stretched a thirty minute interview into a threee hour programming discussion and you get offers to join before you leave the room.
THAT is what "experience" should have taught you, everything else you can read in a book.
The parent makes an excellent point, in that what Skreems and co. really seem to be testing for is people who match their approach. The implicit assumption that their approach is (a) the only one that works, or (b) better than everyone else's, is not going to help improve their business.
There is also the problem that interview processes are two-way things. You don't know me, so let's assume for the sake of argument that I am a good programmer who knows his stuff. The moment I walk up to the building of a prospective employer I am sizing the company up. The moment someone greets me (or leaves me hanging around in reception for ten minutes) I am gauging how much value the people at the company really place on colleagues. And when we get to the technical questions, I am definitely judging the technical competence of those who would hire me, and the quality of the code produced by the existing staff if I see any.
So, dear interviewers of the world, let me put this simply. I am interviewing you, too, and I expect you to know your stuff. I would not be here if I wasn't interested in your business, but I am confident of my own abilities, including my ability to find another job quickly if yours isn't up to scratch. And it will cost me a lot less than it will cost you if today is a waste of time.
What does this mean in practice? Well, everyone's different. Personally, I think vague questions are fine and expected. I'll seek clarification without a second thought, because that's how the game works. But if the interviewer is a smart-ass, or repeatedly makes elementary mistakes, I won't take it upon myself to educate them. I will simply judge them incompetent, and not take a job working with them.
Now, perhaps a lot of companies wouldn't want to hire someone like me. (They probably wouldn't like my non-negotiable rules on IP and my expectation that I will work the hours in my contract and not give them 50% more for free, either.) That's their decision, and I accept that my principles here will rule out some companies that I might have been happy working for. But just as an employer usually gets enough applications not to worry about missing the odd good one because there will be others, so it goes with good people and finding jobs.
As they say, first impressions count. This is particularly true of interviews, because you'll never really know whether someone is a good candidate or an employer is a good place to work until a few days into the job, so the recruitment process is really just an attempt to make the guesses more educated. In this context, I'd advise any employer who wants to recruit people who are good rather than merely young and enthusiastic (now) to stick to sensible interview techniques, and avoid the time-wasting and trick questions. You aren't really hurting anyone but yourselves with that kind of stuff.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.