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authorEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2020-11-03 17:22:08 -0300
committerEuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>2020-11-03 17:27:04 -0300
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+#
+msgid ""
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"title: How not to interview engineers\n"
+"date: 2020-10-20\n"
+"updated_at: 2020-10-24\n"
+"layout: post\n"
+"lang: en\n"
+"ref: how-not-to-interview-engineers"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"This is a response to Slava's \"[How to interview "
+"engineers](https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers)\" "
+"article. I initially thought it was a satire, [as have "
+"others](https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-"
+"engineers/comments#comment-599996), but he has [doubled down on "
+"it](https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1315754730740617216):"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"(...) Some parts are slightly exaggerated for sure, but the essay isn't "
+"meant as a joke."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"That being true, he completely misses the point on how to improve hiring, "
+"and proposes a worse alternative on many aspects. It doesn't qualify as "
+"provocative, it is just wrong."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"In this piece, I will argument against his view, and propose an alternative "
+"approach to improve hiring."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"It is common to find people saying how broken technical hiring is, as well "
+"put in words by a phrase on [this "
+"comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24757511):"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "What not to do"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Time candidates"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Timing the candidate shows up on the \"talent\" and \"judgment\" sections, "
+"and they are both bad ideas for the same reason: programming is not a "
+"performance."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"What do e-sports, musicians, actors and athletes have in common: performance"
+" psychologists."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"That is also applicable to athletes, where the execution during a "
+"competition makes them sink or swim, regardless of how all the training was."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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. A composer "
+"may have a deadline to finish a song in five weeks, but 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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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*."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Some specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it \"[Hammock "
+"Driven Development](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)\", which is"
+" just artist's \"creative idleness\" for hackers."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Although 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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Pay attention to typing speed"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Typing is speed in never the bottleneck of a programmer, no matter how great"
+" they are."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"As [Dijkstra "
+"said](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD512.html):"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "In other words, programming is not about typing, it is about thinking."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Also, why stop there? A good touch typist can do 90 WPM (words per minute), "
+"and a great one can do 120 WPM, but with a stenography keyboard they get to "
+"200 WPM+. That is double the productivity! Why not try [speech-to-"
+"text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY)? Make them all use "
+"[J](https://www.jsoftware.com/#/) so they all need to type less! How come "
+"nobody thought of that?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "IQ"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"For \"building an extraordinary team at a hard technology startup\", "
+"intelligence is not the most important, [determination "
+"is](http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html)."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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](https://sci-"
+"hub.do/https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F1076-8971.6.1.33)."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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*."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Not to say about everything else that a programmer does that is not purely "
+"programming. Saying high IQ correlates with great programming is a stretch, "
+"at best."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Ditch HR"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Slava tangentially picks on HR, and I will digress on that a bit:"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"In other words: is the question not signaling because the one asking is from"
+" HR, or because the one asking is an intern? If the latter, than he's just "
+"arguing that interns have no place in interviewing, but if the former than "
+"he was picking on HR."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Extrapolating that, it is common to find people who don't value HR's work, "
+"and only see them as inferiors doing unpleasant work, and who aren't capable"
+" enough (or *smart* enough) to learn programming."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"This is equivalent to people who work primarily 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?\"."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"I don't attribute this world view to Slava, this is only an extrapolation of"
+" a snippet of the article."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Draconian mistreating of candidates"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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](http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html):"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Paul Graham goes beyond \"don't be evil\" with a better motto: \"[be "
+"good](http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html)\"."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Abusing the asymmetric 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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Personality tests"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"That is also true within the same language. If a test is shown to work in "
+"England, it may not work in New Zealand, in spite of both speaking english. "
+"The cultural context difference is influent to the point of invalidating a "
+"test and making it be no longer valid."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Irregardless of the validity of the proposed \"big five\" 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, after all it has been proven to work\" shows he throws all of that "
+"background away."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"So much as applying personality tests themselves is not a trivial task, and "
+"psychologists do need special training to become able to effectively apply "
+"one."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "More cargo culting"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"He calls the ill-defined \"industry standard\" to be cargo-culting, but his "
+"proposal isn't sound enough to not become one."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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, "
+"judgment 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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Isn't that definitionally also [cargo-"
+"culting](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)[^cargo-"
+"culting-archive]? Isn't he just repeating whatever he found to work form "
+"him, without understanding why?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "What Feynman proposes is actually the opposite:"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"What Slava did was just another form of cargo culting, but this was one that"
+" he believed to work."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"[^cargo-culting-archive]: [Archived "
+"version](https://web.archive.org/web/20201003090303/http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm)."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "What to do"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"I will not give you a list of things that \"worked for me, thus they are "
+"correct\". I won't either critique the current \"industry standard\", nor "
+"what I've learned from interviewing engineers."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Instead, I'd like to invite you to learn from history, and from what other "
+"professionals have to teach us."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"So here is the key idea: what people did *before* software engineering?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"What hiring is like for engineers in other areas? Don't civil, electrical "
+"and other types of engineering exist for much, much longer than software "
+"engineering does? What have those centuries of accumulated experience "
+"thought the world about technical hiring?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"What studies were performed on the different success rate of interviewing "
+"strategies? What have they done right and what have they done wrong?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"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?"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid "Conclusion"
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"If all I've said makes me a \"no hire\" in the proposed framework, I'm "
+"really glad."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"This says less about my programming skills, and more about the employer's "
+"world view, and I hope not to be fooled into applying for a company that "
+"adopts this one."
+msgstr ""
+
+msgid ""
+"Claiming to be selecting \"extraordinary engineers\" isn't an excuse to "
+"reinvent the wheel, poorly."
+msgstr ""