alt Hacker NewsJust talk to people. Seriously. If you're "an expert", then >80% of the time you can figure out if someone is an expert in the same topic just by talking to them. See how they think and problem solve. That's the skills they'll be using on the job anyways.
Here's the traditional engineering interview script:
Ask the candidate how they'd solve a problem you either recently solved or are currently working on. Where does their mind go? What questions do they ask? Do they make the same mistakes you made? Are they different? Do those complement one another? Are they excited?
Honestly, one of the best things to do is get people to talk about their passions. For a lot of engineers their passion is related to their work. You WANT this as a business. They'll work hard because they're having fun doing the work. They'll learn more on the side and get a lot of expertise and ideas you wouldn't have on your own. If you make the job interesting and fun, they'll stay despite offers of higher pay too! But all of that depends on managers. A good manager participates and their most important job is preventing engineers from spending too much time in rabbit holes. You need to go down some but some unravel forever and your engineer will get stuck in an infinite loop.
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I agree. I've interviewed loads of people, without ever giving a job to someone who couldn't do the work.
I just have a deep technical conversation. If they run out of things to say, they are not right for the job. They run out of BS, because I keep the conversation on specific things that you can't make up, yet keep it open enough that you have to bring your own experience.
That's it, (spoiler alert!) it's like the great reveal in Kung Fu Panda.
> For a lot of engineers their passion is related to their work.
This is the guy you find with this method. He can talk forever, because he loves what he does and can't not keep doing it.
No my passion isn’t my job. I have a long list of things I do for fun. Sitting at a computer is not one of them. My job is transactional - an exchange of labor for money.
I can’t exchange “passion” for food clothes or shelter.
I’m 51 now and can afford to choose work life balance over money. But if I were younger and it’s advice I give all younger graduates in CS is to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG (or equivalent paying company)” and by pay I mean cash and RSUs in publicly traded companies not “equity” that will statistically be worthless.
individual manager discretion produces widely variable outcomes at scale, a lot of (most?) managers are promoted “by default” because the company is growing quickly, or lost a key person, and there is no better choice available, and it would be hard work to go find and recruit a better choice and nobody wants to do that work. So we add process and structure to help underqualified personnel not totally screw it up, which produces fine results for a while until hierarchy and process gets too heavy and marginal returns start to decay, and viola. Leetcode and AI screening.
But if you need someone to show up and code every day, you also need someone who is willing and able to do that. I don’t think a passionate chat can demonstrate that.
Probably unpopular opinion on this forum but with this strategy you'll quickly realize that nobody who's applying is an expert and then you're back to basically testing for iq which is what your typical interview challenges are actually doing
I’ve interviewed enough people to staff a company and I disagree.
You really really need to go through an actual code exercise with them. It’s staggering how many people I’ve interviewed who can talk the talk but when confronted with with a 50 line class full of glaring issues for a code review exercise, they can’t find any of the actual problems. The great thing about it is that the good people will spot the super obvious ones in about 5 seconds and you can just move on from it very quickly.
We’re talking c++ programmers with a decade of experience not spotting basic RAII, missing pointer checks and straight up logic bugs for the domain that we interview for and hire in (games).