Item — HN Reader

The problem with interviews that rely on discussions of experience alone is that they aren't effective.

It's easy for candidates to exaggerate or misrepresent their accomplishments. This is especially true when they worked on large team projects. For example, if they say "I was part of the team that built Google Search", that could be a really impressive thing if they played a key leadership or technical role, or it could be a really unimpressive thing if they hung out while others did the heavy lifting, and it's very hard to tell the difference.

1 comments

Yeah this is the common excuse for torturous technical interviews but it just doesn't fly with me. What is the end game of the interviewer who is lying? They'll get found out when asked to deliver and lose their job eventually. This is not without cost to the employer, but it gets harder to explain so much turnover in your resume as you accumulate early exits.

In addition, there are levels of technical chats that become very difficult to fake, further reducing the pool of lying interviewees people claim to be defending against.

To be clear, at Firebase, we held these kinds of discussions in addition to the technical assessment. A portion of my section of the interview process was usually to do a deep dive on a recent interesting project that the candidate had worked on, either sourced from their resume or just by asking. You're right that you can often tell their level of involvement by seeing how quickly the well of details dries up.

There are tradeoffs, but I found it to be an overall net positive in addition to the technical assessment. Doing this effectively requires that the interviewer have a pretty broad exposure to lots of different technology, otherwise you can't distinguish between someone BSing their role vs something you just don't know a lot about / can't ask intelligent questions about. It's also incredibly subjective, which would make me hesitant to rely on it without more objective criteria.

> What is the end game of the interviewer who is lying? They'll get found out when asked to deliver and lose their job eventually. This is not without cost to the employer, but it gets harder to explain so much turnover in your resume as you accumulate early exits.

That's a pretty idealistic view of people. Most people exaggerate on their resume. The most reliable tool (at the moment) to cut through and establish some common metrics is the technical test. How do you compare technical "chats" between individuals? Duration of call? Gut feel? How do you ensure that the person on the phone has the breadth and depth of experience to thoroughly discuss any and all projects on the phone with the interviewee? Is it the same person on all of these calls? It can't be, so how would you compare between two interviewers' subjective feedback?

> This is not without cost to the employer...

This is a HUGE cost, especially at a startup. A mis-hire at a startup can sink the entire ship.

I do think that your approach has merit, and I personally dislike technical interviewing, but for a startup the OP's approach is, IMO, the best tradeoff.

> They'll get found out when asked to deliver and lose their job eventually.

It's the "eventually" part that's problematic, since it can be long, uncomfortable, and expensive to the company.

I read that comment differently. The idea is to look at the candidate's work history, and if there's a large number of short stints you can use that as a red flag that previous employers found them lacking.