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From: EuAndreh <eu@euandre.org>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2025 02:17:12 -0300
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+= How not to interview engineers
+:updatedat: 2020-10-24
+
+:bad-article: https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers
+:satire-comment: https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-interview-engineers/comments#comment-599996
+:double-down: https://twitter.com/spakhm/status/1315754730740617216
+:poes-law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
+:hn-comment-1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24757511
+
+This is a response to Slava's "{bad-article}[How to interview engineers]"
+article.  I initially thought it was a satire, {satire-comment}[as have others],
+but he has [doubled down on it]:
+
+____
+(...) Some parts are slightly exaggerated for sure, but the essay isn't meant as
+a joke.
+____
+
+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.
+
+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 {poes-law}[Poe's
+law].
+
+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 {hn-comment-1}[this comment]:
+
+____
+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.
+
+== What not to do
+
+=== Time candidates
+
+:hammock-driven-talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
+
+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.
+
+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.  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.
+
+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 specifically plan for including spaced pauses, and call it
+"{hammock-driven-talk}[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.
+
+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.
+
+=== Pay attention to typing speed
+
+:dijkstra-typing: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD512.html
+:speech-to-text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY
+:j-lang: https://www.jsoftware.com/#/
+
+Typing is speed in never the bottleneck of a programmer, no matter how great
+they are.
+
+As {dijkstra-typing}[Dijkstra said]:
+
+____
+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 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}[speech-to-text]?  Make them all use {j-lang}[J] 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.
+
+=== IQ
+
+:determination-article: https://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html
+:scihub-article: https://sci-hub.do/https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F1076-8971.6.1.33
+
+For "building an extraordinary team at a hard technology startup",
+intelligence is not the most important,
+{determination-article}[determination is].
+
+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
+{scihub-article}[still true today].
+
+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.  Saying high IQ correlates with great programming is a stretch, at
+best.
+
+=== Ditch HR
+
+Slava tangentially 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?
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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?".
+
+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
+
+:bad-apple: https://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html
+:be-good: https://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
+
+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 {bad-apple}[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 beyond "don't be evil" with a better motto:
+"{be-good}[be good]".
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+=== 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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+=== More cargo culting
+
+:cult: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
+:cult-archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20201003090303/https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
+
+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, 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?
+
+Isn't that definitionally also
+{cult}[cargo-culting]footnote:cargo-cult[
+  {cult-archived}[Archived version].
+]?  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.
+
+== What to do
+
+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.
+
+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 engineering 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 employer'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.
-- 
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