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+---
+title: How to not interview engineers
+date: 2020-10-19
+layout: post
+lang: en
+ref: how-to-not-interview-engineers
+published: false
+---
+This is a response to Slava's
+"[How to interview engineers][how-to-interview-engineers]" article. I initially
+thought it was a satire, [as have others][poes-law-comment], but he has
+[doubled down on it][slava-on-satire]:
+
+> (...) Some parts are slightly exaggerated for sure, but the essay isn't meant
+> as a joke.
+
+If that is really true, and I'm still not sure if it is, he completely misses
+the point on how to improve hiring, and proposes a worse alternative on many
+aspects. It doesn't even qualify as provocative, it is just wrong.
+
+I was comfortable taking it as a satire, and I would just ignore the whole thing
+if it wasn't (except for the technical memo part), but friends of mine
+considered it to be somewhat reasonable. This is a adapted version of parts of
+the discussions we had, risking becoming a gigantic showcase of
+[Poe's law][poes-law-wiki].
+
+In this piece, I will argument against his view, and propose an alternative
+approach to improve hiring.
+
+It is common to find people saying how broken technical hiring is, as well put
+in words by a phrase on [this comment][hn-satire]:
+
+> Everyone loves to read and write about how developer interviewing is flawed,
+> but no one wants to go out on a limb and make suggestions about how to improve
+> it.
+
+I guess Slava was trying to not fall on this trap, and make a suggestion on how
+to improve instead, which all went terribly wrong.
+
+[how-to-interview-engineers]: https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers
+[poes-law-comment]: https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers/comments#comment-599996
+[slava-on-satire]: https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1315754730740617216
+[poes-law-wiki]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
+[hn-satire]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24757511
+
+## What not to do
+
+### Time candidates
+
+Timing the candidate shows up on the "talent" and "judgement" sections, and they
+are both bad ideas for the same reason: programming is not a performance.
+
+What do e-sports, musicians, actors and athletes have in common: performance
+psychologists.
+
+For a pianist, their state of mind during concerts is crucial: they not only
+must be able to deal with stage anxiety, but to become really successful they
+will have to learn how to exploit it. The time window of the concert is what
+people practice thousands of hours for, and it is what defines one's career,
+since how well all the practice went is irrelevant to the nature of the
+profession. Being able to leverage stage anxiety is an actual goal of them.
+
+That is also applicable to athletes, where the execution during a competition
+makes them sink or swim, regardless of how all the training was.
+
+The same cannot be said about composers, though. They are more like book
+writers, where the value is not on very few moments with high adrenaline, but on
+the aggregate over hours, days, weeks, months and years. Even though a given
+composer is supposed to finish a given song in five weeks, it doesn't really
+matter if it is done on a single night, every morning between 6 and 9, at the
+very last week, or any other way. No rigid time structure applies, only whatever
+fits best to the composer.
+
+Programming is more like composing than doing a concert, which is another way of
+saying that programming is not a performance. People don't practice algorithms
+for months to keep them at their fingertips, so that finally in a single
+afternoon they can sit down and write everything at once in a rigid 4 hours
+window, and launch it immediately after.
+
+Instead software is built iteratively, by making small additions, than
+refactoring the implementation, fixing bugs, writing a lot at once, *etc*.
+all while they get a firmer grasp of the problem, stop to think about it, come
+up with new ideas, *etc*.
+
+Some even specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it
+"[Hammock Driven Development][hammock-driven-development]", which is just
+artist's "creative idleness" for hackers.
+
+Unless you're hiring for a live coding group, a competitive programming team, or
+a professional live demoer, timing the candidate that way is more harmful than
+useful. This type of timing doesn't find good programmers, it finds performant
+programmers, which isn't the same thing, and you'll end up with people who can
+do great work on small problems but who might be unable to deal with big
+problems, and loose those who can very well handle huge problems, slowly. If you
+are lucky you'll get performant people who can also handle big problems on the
+long term, but maybe not.
+
+An incident is the closest to a "performance" that it gets, and yet it is still
+dramatically different. Surely it is a high stress scenario, but while people
+are trying to find a root cause and solve the problem, only the downtime itself
+is visible to the exterior. It is like being part of the support staff backstage
+during a play: even though execution matters, you're still not on the spot.
+During an incident you're doing debugging in anger rather than live coding.
+
+Even though giving a candidate the task to write a "technical memo" has
+potential to get a measure of the written communication skills of someone, doing
+so in a hard time window also misses the point for the same reasons.
+
+[hammock-driven-development]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
+
+### Pay attention to typing speed
+
+Typing is speed in never the bottleneck of a programmer, no matter how great
+they are.
+
+As [Dijkstra said][dijkstra-typing]:
+
+> But programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils
+> down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid
+> unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different
+> concerns.
+
+In other words, programming is not about typing, it is about thinking.
+
+Otherwise, the way to get those star programmers that can't type fast enough a
+huge productivity boost is to give them a touch typing course. If they are so
+productive with typing speed being a limitation, imagine what they could
+accomplish if they had razor sharp touch typing skills?
+
+Also, why stop there? A good touch typist can do 90WPM (words per minute), and a
+great one can do 120WPM, but with a stenography keyboard they get to 200WPM+.
+That is double the productivity! Why not try [speech-to-text][perl-out-loud]?
+Make them all use [J][j-lang] so they all need to type less! How come nobody
+thought of that?
+
+And if someone couldn't solve the programming puzzle in the given time window,
+but could come back in the following day with an implementation that is not only
+faster, but uses less memory, was simpler to understand and easier to read than
+anybody else? You'd be losing that person too.
+
+[dijkstra-typing]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD512.html
+[j-lang]: https://www.jsoftware.com/#/
+[perl-out-loud]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY
+
+### IQ
+
+For "building an extraordinary team at a hard technology startup", intelligence
+is not the most important, [determination is][pg-determination].
+
+And talent isn't "IQ specialized for engineers". IQ itself isn't a measure of how
+intelligent someone is. Ever since Alfred Binet with Théodore Simon started to
+formalize what would become IQ tests years later, they already acknowledged
+limitations of the technique for measuring intelligence, which is
+[still true today][scihub-paper].
+
+So having a high IQ tells only how smart people are for a particular aspect of
+intelligence, which is not representative of programming. There are numerous
+aspects of programming that are covered by IQ measurement: how to name variables
+and functions, how to create models which are compatible with schema evolution,
+how to make the system dynamic for runtime parameterization without making it
+fragile, how to measure and observe performance and availability, how to pick
+between acquiring and paying technical debt, *etc*.
+
+Not to say about everything else that a programmer does that is not purely
+programming.
+
+[pg-determination]: http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
+[scihub-paper]: https://sci-hub.do/https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F1076-8971.6.1.33
+
+### Ditch HR
+
+Slava tangently picks on HR, and I will digress on that a bit:
+
+> A good rule of thumb is that if a question could be asked by an intern in HR,
+> it's a non-differential signaling question.
+
+Stretching it, this is a rather snobbish view of HR. Why is it that an intern in
+HR can't make signaling questions? Could the same be said of an intern in
+engineering?
+
+Extrapolating that, it is common to find people who don't value HR's work, and
+only see them as inferiors doing unpleasent work, and who aren't capable enough
+(or *smart* enough) to learn programming.
+
+This is equivalent to people who work primarely on backend, and see others working on
+frontend struggling and say: "isn't it just building views and showing them on
+the browser? How could it possibly be that hard? I bet I could do it better,
+with 20% of code". As you already know, the answer to it is "well, why don't you
+go do it, then?".
+
+This sense of superiority ignores the fact that HR have actual professionals
+doing actual hard work, not unlike programmers. If HR is inferior and so easy,
+why not automate everything away and get rid of a whole department?
+
+I don't attribute this world view to Slava, this is only an extrapolation of a
+snippet of the article.
+
+### Draconian mistreating of candidates
+
+If I found out that people employed theatrics in my interview so that I could
+feel I've "earned the privilege to work at your company", I would quit.
+
+If your moral compass is so broken that you are comfortable mistreating me while
+I'm a candidate, I immediately assume you will also mistreat me as an employee,
+and that the company is not a good place to work, as
+[evil begets stupidity][evil-begets-stupidity]:
+
+> But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets
+> stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the
+> ability to win by doing better work. And it's not fun for a smart person to
+> work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that win. I think the
+> reason Google embraced "Don't be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress
+> the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
+
+Paul Graham goes as far as saying that an even better motto than "don't be evil"
+is to "[be good][pg-be-good]".
+
+Abusing the asymetric nature of an interview to increase the chance that the
+candidate will accept the offer is, well, abusive. I doubt a solid team can
+actually be built on such poor foundations, surrounded by such evil measures.
+
+And if you really want to give engineers "the measure of whoever they're going
+to be working with", there are plenty of reasonable ways of doing it that don't
+include performing fake interviews.
+
+[pg-be-good]: http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
+[evil-begets-stupidity]: http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
+
+### Personality tests
+
+Personality tests around the world need to be a) translated, b) adapted and c)
+validated. Even though a given test may be applicable and useful in a country,
+this doesn't imply it will work for other countries.
+
+Not only tests usually come with translation guidelines, but also its
+applicability needs to be validated again after the translation and adaptation
+is done to see if the test still measures what it is supposed to.
+
+That is true even within the same language. If a test is shown to work in
+England, it may not work in New Zealand, even though both speak english. The
+cultural context difference is influent to the point of invalidating a test and
+making it be no longer valid.
+
+Irregardless of the validity of the proposed "big fived" personality test,
+saying "just use attributes x, y and z this test and you'll be fine" is a rough
+simplification, much like saying "just use Raft for distributed systems, it even
+has proofs that it works" shows he throws all of that background away.
+
+Even applying personality tests themselves is not a trivial task, and
+psychologists do need special training to become able to effectively apply one.
+
+### More cargo culting
+
+He calls the ill-defined "industry standard" to be cargo-culting, but his
+proposal isn't sound enough to not become one.
+
+Even if the ideas were good, they aren't solid enough, or based on solid
+enough things to make them stand out by themselves. Why is it that talent,
+judgement and personality are required to determine the fitness of a good
+candidate? Why not 2, 5, or 20 things? Why those specific 3? Why is talent
+defined like that? Is it just because he found talent to be like that?
+
+Isn't that definitionally also [cargo-culting]? Isn't he just repeating whatever
+he found to work form him, without understanding why?
+
+What Feynman proposes is actually the opposite:
+
+> In summary, the idea is to try to give **all** of the information to help others
+> to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads
+> to judgment in one particular direction or another.
+
+What Slava did was just another form of cargo culting, but this was one that he
+believed to work.
+
+[cargo-culting]: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
+
+## What to do
+
+I will not give you a list of things that "worked for me, thus they are
+correct". I won't even critique the current "industry standard", or what I've
+learned from interviewing engineers.
+
+Instead, I'd like to invite you to learn from history, and from what other
+professionals have to teach us.
+
+Programming isn't an odd profession, where everything about it is different from
+anything else. It is just another episode in the "technology" series, which has
+seasons since before recorded history. It may be an episode where things move a
+bit faster, but it is fundamentally the same.
+
+So here is the key idea: what people did *before* software engineering?
+
+What hiring is like for engineers in other areas? Don't civil, electrical and
+other types of engineers exist for much, much longer than software engineering
+does? What have those centuries of accumulated experience thought the world
+about technical hiring?
+
+What studies were performed on the different success rate of interviewing
+strategies? What have they done right and what have they done wrong?
+
+What is the purpose of HR? Why do they even exist? Do we need them, and if so,
+what for? What is the value they bring, since everybody insist on building an HR
+department in their companies? Is the existence of HR another form of cargo
+culting?
+
+What is industrial and organizational psychology? What is that field of study?
+What do they specialize in? What have they learned since the discipline
+appeared? What have they done right and wrong over history? Is is the current
+academic consensus on that area? What is a hot debate topic in academia on that
+area? What is the current bleeding edge of research? What can they teach us
+about hiring? What can they teach us about technical hiring?
+
+## Conclusion
+
+If all I've said makes me a "no hire" in the proposed framework, I'm really
+glad.
+
+This says less about my programming skills, and more about the employee's world
+view, and I hope not to be fooled into applying for a company that adopts this
+one.
+
+Claiming to be selecting "extraordinary engineers" isn't an excuse to reinvent
+the wheel, poorly.