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0 pointsjoshuamorton7y ago0 comments

>This is simply false. You don’t need context to understand if the breakdown of a technical problem into constituent trade-offs was appropriate or not — by definition that very breakdown into constituent technical details is the context.

I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important. You're asking for the context you need to assess someone's technical competency from the person whose technical competency you're attempting to assess. They have every incentive to lie, mislead, or stretch the truth to make the context they give you highlight their skills more than the real context did. And no, you can't verify that.

>If someone tells me something like that, I’ll ask them what did that other person find when they investigated? If you say anything like, “I don’t know; that was their job not mine,” then you’ve lost credibility because you didn’t put that other person’s conclusions through strong skepticism until you were satisfied you knew the details well enough that you could own or support them if you had to. That is exactly the sort of thing that indicates bullshitting.

But now you're punishing someone for organizational things possibly beyond their control. If my job was to build a thing that made use of some blackbox algorithm, and John developed the algorithm, why should I put the algorithm under strong skepticism, perhaps that's how things work in your workplace, but there's no clear reason that mine work the same way. This is just a bias against people whose development practices aren't the same as yours.

>This approach is far less biased or subjective than appraising “how a candidate thinks” while they solve tricky puzzles in a foreign environment with unrealistic time pressure.

Except that, as I've literally just proven, you've failed to verify the authenticity of me because you've wrongly concluded that I'm not authentic. This comment thread exactly demonstrates just how you can fail to identify a good candidate with this method because if you dislike what they're saying, you'll unconsciously convert that to them being less authentic.

So again, either you take the candidate at face value in a situation where they have every incentive to lie to you, or you attempt to verify their authenticity, at which point that analysis is subject to a multitude of biases that have nothing to do with the candidates skill level.

You've just demonstrated this perfectly.

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mlthoughts20187y ago

> “I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important.”

No, you definitely don’t need to come into it knowing about this, and even if you don’t know about this ahead of time, it won’t imply “just trusting” the candidate or being overly subjective. You will ask the candidate to explain why various decisions were important, and not stop at the top line answer but recursively probe into it, breaking it down into concepts and trade-offs that are universal in any kind of applied problem solving.

> “But now you're punishing someone for organizational things possibly beyond their control. If my job was to build a thing that made use of some blackbox algorithm, and John developed the algorithm, why should I put the algorithm under strong skepticism, perhaps that's how things work in your workplace, but there's no clear reason that mine work the same way.”

I’m sorry but this also just isn’t true. If you are describing your contributions to projects and all that keeps happening is you hit walls in your explanation where someome else did the work and you did not review that work at a high level of depth, then you’re just being misleading about your contributions at work.

Your job as an engineer in a company is to solve problems for your stakeholders, whether that means building tooling for other engineers, assisting designers with prototypes, designing algorithms for core product functionality, sales engineering for client stakeholders, etc.

It doesn’t matter how your company is structured, it doesn’t matter how the work was divided up. Your job is to know about the stakeholder problem you are solving, at a deep level, and when you represent your work to other people and you fail to offer technical depth about the trade-offs needed to solve stakeholder problems, that’s a clear mark against you as a candidate.

It’s bewildering to me that anyone would think that the way their current employer organizes assignments should reduce their burden of knowing how to represent their projects in significant technical depth. That is an always-on, never mitigated, constant responsibility for all employees anywhere. You’re not holding anything against someone if they can’t provide that in an interview... no, you’re just uncovering what they’ve lied about or embellished on a resume.

> “Except that, as I've literally just proven, you've failed to verify the authenticity of me because you've wrongly concluded that I'm not authentic.”

I see no such proof at all, and the cheeky rhetoric just makes me feel more entrenched that you are bullshitting hugely in this thread.

> “So again, either you take the candidate at face value in a situation where they have every incentive to lie to you, or you attempt to verify their authenticity, at which point that analysis is subject to a multitude of biases that have nothing to do with the candidates skill level.”

You are doing nothing but gainsaying here. You’ve made no argument that would support any of these strong conclusions, especially not any reason why this interview method faces the false dilemma between either just trusting the candidate or else succumbing to biases.

You are just asserting things, but they do not seem to be connected to or bolstered by any of the other things you’ve written.

joshuamortonOP7y ago

> You are just asserting things, but they do not seem to be connected to or bolstered by any of the other things you’ve written.

Let me lay it out clearly: I asserted that I can, and have, inflated my abilities to people who have technical know how. This was in response to you stating that "I’m sorry but you cannot do what you are claiming."

So to be clear, at this point, one of two things is true:

1. You are wrong

2. I am a liar

To you, it is clear that point 2 is the true one. To most readers, this is not as obvious. Once you have decided that (2) is true and I am a liar, nothing I say can or will convince you otherwise. But you haven't decided that based on anything factual. In fact, (1) is true here. I am not lying. I can, and have, done the things I claim to have done in this case.

I'm using this to demonstrate that your ideas about such a conversational interview don't work, by pointing out that in the conversational interview that we are having right now, you've decided, based on a preconception, that what I say cannot be true! I could be the world's most successful conman, but because you're preconceptions lead you to believe that your preferred interview process is effective and is less biased than your non-preferred one, you won't accept evidence to the contrary.

>I see no such proof at all, and the cheeky rhetoric just makes me feel more entrenched that you are bullshitting hugely in this thread.

Right, and my point is you're wrong and unwilling to accept that. And that is a demonstration of you not being able to effectively figure out whether or not someone is bullshitting from a conversation with them. You've decided that I'm bullshitting because the alternative would require you to do a lot of introspection about how and why you analyze candidates the way you do. So it's easier to just say "you're bullshitting" and then not put in the effort. And that's certainly your prerogative, but its not at all a good look for your interviewing capabilities.

That you're so prone to cognitive biases that you're willing to completely write off someone's experience because it forces you to rethink something you hold dear is not a selling point of the process you espouse. It demonstrates, like I've said, that the process is prone to cognitive bias and is therefore decidedly not objective.

That is, there are two possibilities:

1. You are wrong, and you're refusal to accept that is coloring your perceptions of our interactions in such a way that you are not able to be objective about my experiences and abilities, as I claim.

2. I'm completely making everything I've said up and haven't ever been able to inflate my abilities to anyone. Your person-analytical skills are infallible and you've caught me.

I subscribe to (1), you continue to wrongly believe (2). This is expected, its why your process isn't as objective as you claim.

>It doesn’t matter how your company is structured, it doesn’t matter how the work was divided up. Your job is to know about the stakeholder problem you are solving, at a deep level, and when you represent your work to other people and you fail to offer technical depth about the trade-offs needed to solve stakeholder problems, that’s a clear mark against you as a candidate.

This is, again, your opinion of how engineering should be done. Not every engineer has the opportunity to work in a workplace where that's how things work. Are you going to write off everyone whose experience has been in a PM led environment because they haven't had the opportunity to develop using the process you prefer? If so that's again your prerogative, but you're probably filtering out a bunch of good engineers.

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