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.

1. 60 minutes interview with the CTO.

2. At home coding challenge. Candidates can pick one from 2 coding challenges. But we try to keep them engaging and fun, but still complex in details. Sometimes people don’t want to invest this time. That’s acceptable, but in this case you have to show os some of your work from the past, so we can discuss this.

3. Interview with 2 engineers from the team. We are doing coding challenges as a base for this interview. It’s just a way to get people talking with each other on technology and how they work.

4. Make an offer or say no to the candidate. Everyone involved in this process from our side has a veto right. So if one person says no - it’s a No.

5. Send contract to the candidate, if they accept the offer. This is the first time in the process where HR is involved. Everything else before was done by the Dev Team.

I think this is the most important part, show respect by taking care of the process by yourself and communicating with the candidate.

another way to say this: focus on aptitude. in my hiring funnel, this is a core tenet. you need to be able to capture polyglots and systems thinkers. its still pretty hard to design a process that balances this all very well. combine that with an absolute glut of applicants and you have a very challenging problem.

Failing a take-home is an entirely different thing. It's a huge loss in time and mental energy.

I've only done 3 of those in my career and only because the projects sounded interesting. 1 of those 3 resulted in a job offer which I can now confidently say in hindsight was the worst job in my career (...so far!).

I'm now leaning towards just filtering out companies that do take-homes because it signals to me that they don't care about their candidate's time and how a company treats its candidates is usually a good indicator of how they treat their employees.

No, it doesn't matter that much what task the candidate is doing in the interview. It matters what the interviewer is looking at. I'm sure plenty of interviewers don't understand this, and I think this is often missed when people debate about Leetcode interviews - including in this article.

> most interview questions have very little to do with day-to-day responsibilities

You're missing what the interview questions are. Yes, one part of the interview is "here is a puzzle, can you solve it?", but many of the other questions should be things like "explain why this doesn't work", "why did you start with this approach?" and "are you sure that is the best name for that function?"

Leetcode interviews are perfectly "applicable", as long as the interviewer is using them as a convenient frame to see how you think, communicate, and write/read/edit code and isn't trying purely to assess your skill at quickly solving leetcode puzzles.

> cannot distinguish a senior programmer from a marketer using chatGPT

This is empirically false, because companies haven't suddenly lost all their hiring signal since ChatGPT came out. But if a company has this problem, they suck at interviewing.

(I admit the style of interviewing I'm describing has its own problems, and in particular doesn't address what I think is the biggest issue: the fact you're partly testing people's ability to (appear to) perform under acute pressure.)

If you get nervous, the main thing you can do is more interviews. My personal anxiety peaks right before the start time, luckily my bathroom is next door to my office! But after doing dozens of interviews I settle in once it gets rolling.

If you hate leetcode, well just get good at it. Yeah it is kinda dumb but it is straightforward to practice. And there is a lot more to a leetcode interview than knowing tricks - you need to communicate well.

Take homes? Yeah they are time consuming. If you really need a job do them, otherwise pass on the company!

Overall as a candidate you really need to try and go one level up on selling yourself - not just why you are a great candidate (which you are of course!), but why you would succeed at this role in particular.

Oral exams, live coding exams, system architecture exams, take-home exams, behavioral examinations, code review exams, extended essay writing exams, case study exams, sample work trials.

You can't be a real professional if you have to take exams in every job change.

In serious professions, people take exams early in their careers for being certified. Sometimes they take additional exams to renew their certificates. And that's all.

They don't take exams from random people in random companies that know nothing about evaluating knowledge. They take official, standardized exams prepared by professional testers/educators.

Engineering jobs can't be standardized. Engineering and required skills and knowledge is too broad for that.

An interview is not an exam. It's a meeting. The interviewer asks questions to learn about the candidate. The interviewer may ask some questions to learn about the company and the position. That's all. That's the universal definition of a job interview. All the other things are additional tests and exams.

Do they need to do those exams for better selection? Probably not. Their "hiring process"es are not backed by any science. Then why are they doing that? They have to filter somehow. If there are 1 to 100s ratio of candidates for each position, they need to filter hard. Exams are the standard method for ranking and filtering.

But we are professional engineers, not students.

Before the interview, you clone the repo and get the app running on your machine.

For the first half of the interview, you review a pull request in real time. There's a mix of obvious and non-obvious callouts. And the second half, you actually implement your suggestions.

Honestly the code review portion alone is a great indicator of a dev's experience and soft skills.

There's a trade-off: if a company spends more time / requires more effort on an interview process, they can get a better signal on the candidate's abilities, but then they'll lose out on candidates who are unwilling / unable to commit this time. This might just be a hard trade-off in recruiting.

Then I was trying to get someone to do my taxes. So I've been asking every applicant to do my taxes from last year so I can see if they really know what they are doing. I mean sure, they've done taxes for years, but these are my taxes. I've even tried giving them math puzzles around asset depreciation, but people just keep hanging up the phone.

And then, I wanted to add a wing added to my house and I've been trying to get these entitled contractors to come build a shed in my backyard so I can see if they really know how to use nail guns. I've heard people are just big'ol lairs lately, and I need to see how they work. I mean, sure these guys have built many houses in the past, but we have high standards here and only hire A players.

I've only been getting horrible candidates! No one is worth hiring! There is a huge shortage of qualified people.

If only there was a way to fix this.

This can spark so many interesting discussions, from syntax, architecture, cs, product etc

It is literally the job that engineers do 99% of their time yet we don't interview on this.

It helped that it was 90 days contract to hire.

I won't forget the in-person interview round where I coded a frontend visualization for a data graph (tracking global shipping), then fielded a post-work general interview round from the whole company (~10 ppl) about specifics and "choices" made during a rush to finish. I ended up not going due to comp, but they were acquired months later. Life is funny.

But a 9-hours interview process seems just too much... I think you will only ever know a candidates true fit once you start actually working together and 2-3 short sessions with someone is enough to get that go/no go feeling.

You can't hire without taking risks.

Where I live, you usually have a 3-months probation time in which both sides can quit within a 7 days period... so the risk is manageable.

Just feel a candidates fit and then go for it... and adjust when necessary. Don't overthink it.

Let’s face the reality that most developers will never be able to write original software and just put text to screen using a tool or framework. Don’t call these people engineers. These people are the assembly line of software. Measure them according to desired patterns. They are copy/paste but smarter than data entry and understand some of the restrictions in place. Expectations are low and compatibility and replacement are the key business values.

Next are the people who test software, the QA. We expect more from these people and then work them harder for less money at a lower level of reputation.

Next are the people who evaluate software. These people are closer to engineers. These people include accessibility, security, and performance experts. These people are more like a combination of QA and senior developers. Evaluate these people on these criteria: written essay, technical knowledge, force them to measure things in real time and see how they perform.

Next are the people who actually write software applications. Let’s call these people solution delivery. These people are similar to junior architects and actually build things. These people should be evaluated only on the basis of organizational capabilities above that of the engineers that measure things.

Finally are the software owners. These people resemble a combination of project management and junior architects. They must have the experience to know how to build original software, like the junior architects, but also a planning vision to push though demands from competing stakeholders. There is busy savvy to this comes from a solid engineering planning vision plus superior communication skills most lesser software people never honed. Think of these people as senior principals with real authority. Evaluate these people on their delivery experience, using numbers, and reputation.

Part of what lead to it I think is we hired largely straight out of college and doing a 9-hour interview with someone with little experience is a waste of time.

It worked great. In my five years there we only had a couple people not make it past the probationary period.

A lot of the time, technical interviews and take-home exercises turn into 100 iterations of "Do you prefer vanilla ice cream or chocolate?" or "Do you prefer vi or emacs?"

A good employee will figure out the subjective tastes, biases, and cultural quirks of a workplace, and fit in. A senior engineer will have done it perhaps half a dozen times in their career. -- And yet, companies insist on putting interviewees in a situation of having to basically mind-read those subjective tastes and biases to try to tell interviewers what they want to hear, because they'll reject a candidate on the false premise that a vi guy will never fit into an emacs shop.

"How do you feel about unit tests?" I really don't have any feelings about them whatsoever. Just tell me, if you want me to write them or not. Instead you're asking me to mind-read and trigger some hidden trauma in you. I just don't know whether the trauma is that codebase that required breaking production every single day, because there was no way to test it. Or whether the trauma is that one guy that you hired who never got any work done because he obsessed over refactoring the codebase for optimal testability instead.

Eventually, enough time passed that the talent pool grew considerably and most people are baseline competent.

Consequently, I now find that respect and time efficiency matter a lot more.

No system is perfect, but I have a 100% success rate with the engineers that have been hired using this model, and several years of data to back it up.

[1] It actually has a few subtle bugs in it that I'm always curious to see if they'll catch.

[2] The job in question requires working on a Python web app, and so I assume some basic Python knowledge.

now they just use the interview gauntlet to test your will

its like those japanese game shows where they have 10 rounds of humiliation to see how far you can make it

What has worked for me, honestly, is being directly involved with my hiring pipeline and having conversations.

It seems like common sense, but there's a lot of reasons not to do this and people will make good arguments to prevent it. "What about bias", "your time is more important" etc;

However, bias is an unfortunate consequence of selecting for value fit anyway and I can't think of a more important task than selecting the members that will be the future of the company.

I've had some positions that were open for a weekend where I got 400 applicants, and yes, it was daunting to go through and give each of them an honest shot, but you know: I had to do it. What's the alternative? I might miss a fantastic candidate because someone didn't understand what I actually need.

Evaluating programmers and "devops" people is just insanely hard, technologies are mostly fungible. If you can write one C-like language you can learn the others in about a month, but what can't be taught is what your values are, if you think in a systemic way, if you're easy to work with and respect others.

So, my solution is to have a conversation, challenge what they know, see how they react when challenged, see how they react when they reach the end of their knowledge and see what they're most proud of and if they get excited by it.

No gotchas, no esoteric internal handshake, just: are you defensive? Are you curious? Are you passionate? Can you communicate effectively and are you intelligent.

If you hit those, you can do anything.

"How do you even know who to interview?"

This is a hard question, for me there's not a lot of candidates that are physically located in my region, so those go through as long as they have something on the CV that looks relevant. For others it's a combination of: would it be easy for them to move, have they worked remote (and can do it in a region where I have a tax entity) and how strong of a fit to the role is the CV, lots of experience in games would be what I expect since I work in video games - but if you're going for a backend programming role then: what have you built and what do you list as your responsibility to achieve it?

With this mindset I managed to build a high performing, high trust team that executed very well on (literally) impossible demands. If the ownership of the company was better that team would have easily been world class.

We also exceeded dunbars second (clan) number with the size of the team, so it wasn't intrinsic to small teams (80+).

The worst ones were the leetcode interviews I couldn’t pass

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this (flawed) argument, I’d be rich and would no longer have to sell ads on my Hacker News comments. I’m going to get hate for this unpopular opinion but here we go.

So often, “But Leetcode isn’t like REAL programming” is the siren song of the programmer who probably overestimates their coding skills and experience.

Yes, I hate to say it - live coding is actually one of the best signals you can get on a candidate’s seniority and ability to program a computer (and more importantly, their core computer science skills). A good interviewer is trained to know how to probe your CS knowledge during this, and will watch how you structure code, break down problems, debug, and think about testing. They will even ask you to make changes to see how coachable you are and what you might be like to work with. It’s not about inverting a binary tree while sharing your screen, it’s about showing me how you solve a problem, then translate what’s in your head to code.

Take home exercises provide little to no signal, and screen out people who have families (who wouldn’t bother with a 4 hour take home exercise after work). I don’t want to see how you Google, I want to see how you think.

These candidates always want some version of, “But trust me, bro! Hire me: I’m a senior engineer, I don’t remember how to Leetcode! I’m good, I promise!” But what they won’t admit to themselves is that a good senior engineer is able to do all the things a junior can do PLUS all the things a senior can do.

It’s not perfect, but I won’t hire anyone that can’t pass a live coding round.

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Why would you do this given the expected average tenure is probably like 18 months to 2 years?