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Are Brain Teasers Good Hiring Criteria?
theodp writes "Your brain teaser prowess may win you a job at Google, but the folks at 37signals don't hire programmers based on puzzles, API quizzes, math riddles, or other parlor tricks. 'The only reliable gauge I've found for future programmer success,' explains 37signals' David Heinemeier Hansson, 'is looking at real code they've written, talking through bigger picture issues, and, if all that is swell, trying them out for size.'"
Those of you who have hired employees: have you seen correlation between interview puzzle success and job competency? How should an interviewee best handle these questions?
If someone is giving you one, they're probably not very intelligent.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Needless to say unless you spend time puzzling over this specific type of problem you don't have the skills to answer them.
The impression I had was they were going through a dog and pony show of "trying to find a candidate" for their position. I am not sure what they were up to. Whatever it was, they weren't looking for a candidate for the advertised position.
There was an absolute reek of duplicity, insincerity and dishonesty about every single employee I met on that interview, starting with the prostitute-cum-receptionist who greeted me to the project manager who wouldn't look me in the eye to the interviewer who looked over my resume (which had only a distant physics class) and said "we're not going to ask you about programming, I can see you've got that down, we want you to solve some puzzles" and sprang on me some physics puzzles I could only solve if I were a physics major.
I couldn't wait to get out of there.
I saw that ad for a few more months online. I always wondered what they were up to.
The brainteasers are there to see if someone is smart. Could the employee escape from a paper bag if necessary? I'd say these puzzles are important for finding creative problem solving and would be just as useful if not more useful in a manufacturing/fabrication/maker type of job.
Think of that American drilling team that drilled the hole to free the Chilean miners. That engineer's rig wasn't meant to do what he did with it. Can't aim it? He aimed it with a hack. Hole's plugged? Fixed it with a hack? Don't have a 28" drill head for this rig? Let's hack one together in a week. If that guy with the big brain didn't pick up the phone and say "hey"...those 33 guys would probably have been entombed for half a year if not forever.
Dude did it in one month with a toolbox full of hacks. Fucking brilliant.
Google isn't giving brain teasers to find good programmers.
Google does *not* give brain teasers for engineering positions, and haven't been for the last 5+ years.
The WSJ article is based on urban legends, and *very* dated information.
I actually wrote a blog post on this very subject this morning (I pushed up the publishing when I saw this). The post
In short, I disagree. I find brain teasers invaluable. But not in determining skill, but in determining personality and how a candidate behaves when they are faced with a challenge that they aren't familiar with...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Actually, I would wager they are giving brain teasers as an amusing way to cut down the number of applicants. I think programmers and hiring managers tend to like the questions because they are fun to give, but they are also a quick way to sort through people who look pretty similar on paper. When you have that kind of application volume, figuring out how to reduce it becomes pretty important for one's sanity, but like any other HR technique, it is designed to reduce the pile, not find the best applicants.
But the idea isn't to get an answer - and I am very up front that I don't care about the answer, and I already know it anyway. What I do want to see is how someone approaches a problem that they don't know how to solve. I had one candidate ask me the answer, I already know it after all - immediately top of my hiring list, and she was an awesome hire. Another asked if they could use google on their phone - again a pretty much perfect answer. The puzzle is completely irrelevant, the ability to question, put forward ideas and not just say 'I don't know' or, even worse, go completely silent and get embarrassed that you don't know, is pretty fucking critical. IMHO.
I also look at samples of previous work, and we make all candidates carry out real world tasks along side us.
The best is the enemy of the good
There's a technical ladder? Anywhere I've ever worked, it's more like a stool - start a decent distance off the floor, then go nowhere.
That's a function of the size of the company and industry you are in. In general, the technical ladder (or stool) becomes steep very quickly. And as you climb it up, you start to see that you do more management than actual hands-on thingie-building. But do not delude yourself into thinking that this type of management is of a non-technical nature.
Software Architect. Enterprise Architect. Technical Lead. Principal Engineer. Technical Director. Chief Scientist. Let's call these upper-stool technical positions.
These types of positions require you to do less hands-on stuff, but the management you will have to do must be technical-oriented. How you assign technical tasks to people and teams will depend on whether tasks are technical feasible, on identifying the technical capabilities of your team, on understanding the resources required to complete technical tasks.
Granted that a lot of people who get into these positions let go of themselves, gradually detaching themselves from the technical realities on the ground, where the pedal hits the metal. And as a result, their decisions are no longer technical, with technical consequences that is beyond their grasp. But those are examples of doing a bad job in their positions. And that exists at all levels, from the uber-chief of technical reality down to the lowest code monkey.
These are the fabled paper tigers.
That is, being detached of technical realities is not an inevitability of working so high up the ladder/stool. Good technical people remain strategically and tactically technical always, regardless of their pecking order. A good above-the-clouds architect can drop back to code with only a few days to clear the mental cobwebs. A good technical foot soldier can extrapolate the reasons behind good high-level technical decisions, even if he/she does not have the management experience (which naturally they don't at their entry level of their careers.)
My suggestion to people who find themselves staring at the technical stool: put another stool over it, secure it with nails, crazy glue or some other good shit, and then climb it. That is, like a good engineer, you need to engineer and build your technical ladder.
This can only be done without realizing first that to climb it, you will have to gradually move away from hands-on work without losing your technical wits. You cannot allow yourself to become a paper-tiger.
This will also means that when you find yourself at a company where there is nowhere else to go but down (because the stool cannot go any higher for whatever reasons), then it is time to go somewhere else where there is a chance to nail/glue another stool over the one you have built so far.
Interviewer: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down...
Applicant: What one?
Interviewer: What?
Applicant: What desert?
Interviewer: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical.
Applicant: But, how come I'd be there?
Interviewer: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you...
Applicant: Tortoise? What's that?
Interviewer: You know what a turtle is?
Applicant: Of course!
Interviewer: Same thing.
Applicant: I've never seen a turtle... But I understand what you mean.
Interviewer: You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back.
Applicant: Do you make up these questions? Or do they write 'em down for you?
Interviewer: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Applicant: What do you mean, I'm not helping?
Interviewer: I mean: you're not helping! Why is that?
Interviewer: They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, they're written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response... Shall we continue?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I once applied as a programmer to work on a server infrastructure for a next-generation search engine. They were looking in particular for people with great expertise in the C++ language and in the Boost libraries, areas in which I was a very good candidate.
They asked me to perform a task and send the result by email before meeting me in person.
The task was to write a program that would take an integer n, and display the nth integer that satisfies a particular condition involving primes (I have forgotten what the exact condition was). I was told I would be judged on the performance on my program.
It was obvious that what they wanted was for me to know the mathematics about primes so that I would know the right formulae to compute the nth value quickly. As I didn't know them, it was irrelevant to the job I was applying for, and I didn't want to spend time researching it on the Internet, I chose to fit their requirements differently.
I computed all the values beforehand, and simply made the program return the nth value of a table. Technically, it fitted the specifications they had given me exactly, and was the fastest solution possible.
Yet they chose not to make me go to the next stage.
Looks like brain teasers don't like being beaten at their own game...
(Another funny thing about this event is that I sent the code to the person as a tarball, and he was unable to open it and asked me to send him a zip instead.)