jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Hiring
Other tags: | Hiring: Other | Hiring: Creating a Job Description |
Hire Good Writers, ”Getting Real”, Basecamp A short, thought provoking section from an interesting write up on building web applications by Basecamp. “If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer…. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone elses’ shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are qualities you need.” Breaking ties when hiring is genuinely hard, and I’m going to take...
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Picking problems for programming interviews - Will Larson If you do do coding as part of your interviews, it’s tough to find something that is relevant, hard enough to successfully distinguish between candidates, but easy enough to be doable. Here Larson plays with a few examples (one of which is a particular kind of data munging: something broadly relevant to our needs). His suggestions are to aim for problems that: Support simple initial solutions and compounding requirements Are solvable with a few dozen lines of...
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Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance? - Behroozi, Shirolkar, Barik & Parnin Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills - Chris Parnin & Matt Shipman, NC State Whiteboard coding interviews are not widely loved by candidates. I don’t have interviewees live code but do I like watching candidates work through similar kinds of problems on a whiteboard. This study may finally make me rethink this. It’s a small study (N=48) where interviewees were assessed on their coding skills and randomized into two arms....
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Series: Unpacking Interview Questions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss This series of questions ties in very nicely with last week’s discsussion of evaluating against requirements. Kaplan-Moss has five interview questions that he covers - maybe they’d be good for your roles, maybe not - with very carefully thought out rubrics for each: The value or skill that the question is designed to measure. The question itself Follow-ups to ask Behaviors to look for Positive signs / red flags in the answer Getting to this level for your...
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My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups - Marco Rogers, First Round Review Here we have a collection of interlocking articles and resources on interviewing for technology jobs. The parallels between startups and research computing aren’t made explicit as often as they should be. There’s a lot of need for tolerating uncertainty - in both cases, people are defining the problem while working on a solution. And with a small team but many changing things to do, everyone has to be adaptable enough...
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Why the best way to hire is incredibly boring - Laszlo Bock, humu Again - management isn’t complicated, it doesn’t require profound insights into the human condition or the right personality type - it consists of nothing more than the discipline of attending to the details. Bock despairs of the “one weird interview question” genre of articles that promises to give you that profound insight into a candidate without having to do any real work. But hiring doesn’t work like that. When hiring a human...
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Work Sample Tests - Jacob Kaplan-Moss One of the things we can do to make ourselves more successful hiring is having really clear goals for what we’re hiring for - what a successful hire would be doing day to day in the job. Then we can perform principled and transparent evaluations of the candidate’s ability to start doing those things. In the first resource, Kaplan-Moss has fleshed out his series on what does and doesn’t make a good work sample test in technology. There are...
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Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews - Adam Storm Storm’s piece is related to the discussion last month on hiring criteria, and matching evaluation to what people would actually be doing on the job. Senior developers spend a more time deciding what to code than doing on-the-fly coding, and putting them into a whiteboard coding interview is stressful, unfamiliar, and doesn’t measure what you care about. Storm emphasizes this point, and suggest that if you really want to see if they can code or not...
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Are your hiring filters working? - Jonathan Hall Once you are clear on the nature of candidates you’re trying to hire, it’s a lot easier to evaluate hiring processes - and once you have a documented repeatable process, you can evaluate and update iteratively. As Hall points out, everything we do in the process - from the job ad to the application form questions and onward - is a hiring filter. But is it a good filter? Does it enrich for the candidates we actually...
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Don’t Hire for Culture Fit - Ruchika Tulshyan, SHRM Executive Network I agree with everything in this article; “Culture Fit” too often means “like us”. So when people don’t give any better reason than “culture fit” for not wanting to hire a candidate, it ends up being wildly exclusionary. It’s also counterproductive! When you’re hiring, you want to grow the team not just in numbers but in capability, and hiring more of the same doesn’t get you there. As Tulshyan says, culture add is a...
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How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code - Freaking Rectangle We know code is read more than it’s written, and that debugging, code maintenance, and incremental addition is more common and time consuming than “green field” code development. And yet, the entire software development community tends to vastly over-value writing code from scratch over understanding existing code. That’s true of research software development, too, which famously almost never starts completely from scratch. Here the article’s author recommends focusing a “coding” interview...
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TinyBird Tech Test - Javi Santana, TinyBird With a clear understanding of a role, it’s much easier to understand how to evaluate against that profile when you’re interviewing. Santana provides one real take-home problem they use at TinyBird, a company that builds real-time data processing tools. It involves writing up how you would solve a data ingest-plus-expose-an-API problem, and describes the rubric they use to answer it (it’s almost all about the communications, not the technical beauty of the proposed solution).
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I really like this documented hiring process by 18F in the US Government. It’s a well thought out process, and it’s written in a way that you could send to candidates so they know exactly what to expect. It’s even in GitHub. I also really like their technical pre-work - it’s either to provide some code they’ve worked on, or to do one of four exercises. The exercises are simple but non-trivial get-and-process-data exercises that would give a lot more confidence about ability to do...
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