The Ledger, every show

“People who are fresh out of university and boot camps actually in many cases, because they've been practicing, are better at the kind of problem that gets asked in an interview than your very senior, you know, eight, 10 years of experience at that large compan…”

“If you have five years of experience, it's just flat out easier to pass an interview. You will get a job offer You know, after a worse performance”

“A pretty interesting stat we dug up is I compared the rate of agreement between interviewers at companies with a data set of users reviewing movies online, right? And the numbers were actually, were basically, and the integrator agreement was equivalent.”

“Asking pretty easy interview questions is often more generally predictive than asking harder interview questions.”

“If you've worked with someone for a week, you have a far better read of their skill than I think anyone can get during a three to four hour interview. The problem is that there's a pretty strong bias in who's willing to do trial employment. And that's, it's ad…”

“Whiteboard coding tends to skew toward the academic. It tends to Give preference to people who are really good at breaking their thoughts down into this sort of structured academic way and writing with a small amount of code. So you often have people who are a…”

“We tried scoring engineers, and I had to have them talk about past projects. And scoring them and trying, like, even go, even like a full hour, like going into depth in the project, talking technical details, scoring it just talking skill. Ability to spin a ta…”

“Bootcamps versus CS degree, I don't think are all that different.”

“If you just take a bunch of candidates and in a controlled setting, have them all answer, you know, three or four of these questions, you'll see there's just, you know, there's some correlation, but there's way less correlation than you would think.”

“One thing, one number we have that's interesting is that the engineers who do the best At companies go on to pass, ah, about 80% of their interviews, but not a hundred. No, almost no one passes more than 80% of their interviews at companies.”

“So companies, Don't actually pay very much attention to side projects. Except for at the screening stage. So resume screen, you know, candidate applies to company, the company decides if they're going to interview the person at all. And there's some adverse se…”

“It's actually, it's startlingly hard to look at a big bit of code and decide if you think the programmer who wrote it is skilled. Just again, like, there's so much context, you can't tell what bugs they spend hours over, like, finding, like, finding bugs, like…”

“So like to come, just like to make sure that you're asking everyone the same question and make sure that you're evaluating them in the same way. And I think that's more important than what you're actually asking, right?”

“I truly believe that, like, 80% of what's written out about interviewing just doesn't actually hold up.”

“I'm generally Against cutting interviews short, actually, I think it's, I think, except in the case where the interview where the candidate is in pain, I think it's not worth doing. I think you save some time, but you damage your reputation, you know, they rea…”

“Most companies think that they are trying to hire good engineers. That's, that, that's what they say to themselves. And that, and they, what they don't realize is that, you know, Company A's definition of a good engineer is significantly different from Company…”

“For companies at a bit of a larger stage, I think the obvious answer is you want to hire both those people. And so it's about building a process that can identify more broadly different types of skill.”

“When people are interviewing an engineer, they tend to ask about the things that they Are the best at. There's this overlap between the things that you're the best at and the things that you think are the most important. Every engineer thinks the things that t…”

“And I think this does a great job of solving some of those problems, basically, because the, you know, this is a skill that, that comes from experience that is often missed by more, more, more traditional interviews.”

“Bigger companies care more about measuring your innate ability and less about measuring whether you can jump into their particular code base and be productive on day one. So it's way more likely that a smaller company is going to say, we're using, you know, Ru…”

“A surprising percentage of a new question ends up being Slightly obscured applications of sort of those, especially sort of, you know, hash tables and breadth first search. Those two things by themselves represent probably 40% of the questions that are asked b…”

“Hard application, you know, sort of practical application of a computer science topic represents The significant majority of questions at big companies.”

“The reason it's the right decision is that most engineers don't have side projects. Most engineers have been, have, you know, been working at a company, and it's all proprietary code, and there's very little they can show. That's, you know, eight out of 10 eng…”

“Big companies don't care at all where you're based. They have, they fly people in, you know, by the hundreds every week.”

“Smaller companies Do show a slight preference to local candidates. And so if your goal is to work at a small, let's say sub, you know, 20 person startup you're probably at a I don't know, 10 to 20% advantage if you're based in the Bay Area.”

“Very few companies, especially only, generally only smaller ones, are like directly evaluating flashy new tech.”

“And a trick that, that we use that I think helps in that case is to sort of, in the case where a candidate is totally failing the interview, like, flipping a switch in your brain and going from, like, evaluation mode into teaching mode. You know, you're like, …”

“Like an interview panel definitely increases the stress. So we max out at two to one. So it's, training is important, right? So if you're trying to keep it consistent, you need to have Continue across, like, across, and people need to watch each other's interv…”

“Google, you know, has, intentionally or unintentionally, grown very much in a computer science direction, and that's obviously worked out, you know, very well for them.”

“Cracking the Coding Interview has a pretty good list of questions. It's, the other advice in that book I don't think really applies to startups very much but the questions are good.”

“Facebook, for example, has started providing a sort of an interview prep class to everyone who applies so that they're sort of going over the material.”