This is just another single dimension hiring credential, that will result in limiting your hiring pool to people like yourself. My code ran on 70+ million machines last month, but I've come to decline any timed or proctored technical interviews.

It's not that I'm too good for whiteboarding or timed tests, or that my options are so open that there isn't significant cost in doing so - quite the opposite: I'm come to find the process so traumatic that going through with it isn't worth it for anyone involved: those jobs just aren't open to people like me.

I think we'll agree that there has to be _some_ interview process. iirc node's Left Pad package is downloaded like 20M/mo.

There's obviously a fundamental necessity to evaluate a candidate's technical skills directly, rather than relying on credentials - my issue is with the false expedience and conflationism of timed and artificially performative technical evaluations, and my personal difficulties with the social requirements inherent to them.

Don’t penalize people for not having OSS contributions, of course, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore them. Whatever credentials the candidate brings to the table should be taken into consideration.

Not everyone has the opportunity to go to colleges or get a first job at a well-known company. If someone chooses to prove themselves via OSS contributions, let them.

When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place.

First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process they gimme some "take home assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've never stumbled upon one.

I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are turned off by these things as well.

Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up, "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.

What I discovered was that they'd be willing to make me work 5+ hours on their assignment but wouldn't spend 5 minutes reading my code.

Though it wasn't my intention it inadvertently gave me a quick and easy way to filter companies which actively disrespect candidates' time.

Ignoring it completely also sends a signal to the candidate. IME this red flag is usually paired with 5 or 6 other red flags.

The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.

It is the norm in my line of work. I mean in my other line of work that isn't a software development.

I like programming as hobby so I choose to program outside of work. By no means is that sentiment meant to suggest any form of hostility. There isn’t even any competition implied.

I'm pretty lucky in that my wife is a stay at home mom. My sister in law has a dual income family. They basically never see eachother, because one has to work during the day during the week, and the other works nights and all weekend. They're lucky one of their jobs is so flexible.

If you are into open source you can spend 2 hours per night. Where you put that two hours is up to you, but you need to break for a scheduled meal. A scheduled meal ensures better nutrition and mental health plus some dedicated family time. This mean you program open source from 4-6pm or 8-10pm. Which ever you choose the other is dedicated time with the kids or chores around the house. Then you can spend about an hour before bed watching a show with your spouse.

You still need time to exercise and I find it’s better to do that in the morning with less mental fatigue so I will wake at about 5am.

When you need to participate in a side job that is structured time dedicated in a scheduled way, one or two weekends a month and occasional emails and a rare phone conference during the week in the evening.

Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't think any of us would consider ourselves particularly good at interviewing people.

Unpopular opinion on HN: This is actually quite common when you hire based purely on resumes or credentials. Some people are really good at interviewing and being charismatic enough to convince people to hire them. There are a lot of candidates who can talk the talk but really just want a job where they can browse Reddit and Twitter all day while writing a couple lines of code every once in a while. There are a lot of companies that are big enough for these people to blend in for years.

Take home tests in the range of 1-4 hours shouldn’t be an undue burden on any applicants, if you give sufficient time to return the test. Many candidates wouldn’t bat an eye at taking a day to interview on site, so asking them to spend a couple hours of their free time on an interview isn’t really a disproportionate ask.

Giving someone a 20-40 hour take home project would be ridiculous, of course, but reasonably sized problems are perfectly reasonable.

Totally agreed. Traditional interview processes select for people who are good talkers. That doesn't correlate well with technical skill: you over-hire glib people and under-hire people who aren't. E.g., the shy, awkward, and anxiety-prone.

When I run an interview process, I focus on making it as much like real work as possible. Some pair programming, some technical discussion, some joint product collaboration and systems design. It's my firm belief that if we want to know if people can do a thing, we should try doing the thing with them. It's not perfect, but it's way better than asking people about their 10-year career plan or having them solve Mensa puzzles.

This is true: but "technical skill" is not the ONLY hiring criteria that should be considered. (I say this as a fairly shy, awkward and anxiety-prone person, who has had his share of interviews-gone-wrong).

I'd posit that you DO want to hire people who are good talkers, and are glib. They help build teams. They help with information flow. The greatest ideas in the world are worthless if they can't be executed by a team that doesn't understand them, and the person who came up with it can't communicate that idea effectively. One might say that that is what code is for. But that's not true. If code were to communicate between the developer and the machine, we'd all be writing in machine language. Code is a communication tool for developers to collaboratively tell the machine what to do. And that has to be supplemented by human, interpersonal skills. (especially when you have collaborators who are not coders, like business and finance people who organize the teams and manage projects and programs).

I like that you focus on pair programming. One horribly toxic factor I see at way too many places is where management pits programmers against each other like it's some kind of competitive sport, and collaboration is frowned upon because "if you can't figure it out by yourself, you're a burden on the rest of us".

Basically, I think workaday collaboration and communication is a pretty different skill than on-the-spot glibness. If I'm hiring a PR person or a press secretary, glibness is a valuable skill, because an important part of their job is to talk over people, to favor sounding good over consideration or substance. But for a software team, I value more substantial engagement and communication. So no, I'm happy to hire people who are not glib. Have done before, will do again. And for those who do happen to have the gift of gab, I want to be sure they have it in check and only deploy it when necessary. A colleague who can say, "I don't know" is way better than one who glibly avoids that out of pride.

An interesting interview question could be to study the job applicant's background and then ask questions that, given the background, s/he doesn't know -- then, will s/he tell you this, or make up nonsense

As far as I can tell, any company that isn’t willing to pay contracting rates to solve real problems on their stack is likely being disengenuous with their take homes and largely biasing against experienced devs who aren’t as likely to waste their time. And worse with a take home, is that they have no skin in the game. With an in person interview they lose at least as long as the inverview. With a take home they lose nothing except short email exchanges.

If you’re constantly worried about “traps” then you might not want to work for those companies anyway. Take homes should be straightforward and similar to solving real problems.

> As far as I can tell, any company that isn’t willing to pay contracting rates to solve real problems on their stack is likely being disengenuous with their take homes

Take homes are contrived problems, not real work. Every candidate receives the same problem so they can be compared.

No company should be giving employees actual unpaid work to do as part of the interview. That’s more of an internet trope than a real problem because no rational company is going to be sending their codebase to applicants to add features to.

The biggest issue I see are people underestimating the setup time for "simple" projects. You're a big software company that doesn't start new projects regularly, I'm a developer at a big company that doesn't setup new projects regularly, why do you expect me to remember how to setup "professional quality" projects in a couple of hours?

A simple console app might test if I can code, setting up a new MVC project with authentication, unit tests, IoC, etc is testing how well I can google shit I haven't had to setup for years.

As I said it's not very hard but you can get bonus points if you come up with considerations for responsive design or stuff like that. Overall the aim is to create readable idiomatic code and not come up with something clever that no one but you can understand.

I guess that's a very specific task that's of no great use to others but the point is to have a specific problem with some blanks that can be filled out with a reasonable amount of work by the candidates. Plus the general workflow using git and such.

There were three "rounds":

1. Phone screen with actual lead developer. There were some quiz-y questions here, which I'd previously thought of as a silly outdated approach, but it honestly was a low stress filter for basic technical knowledge.

2. 90 minute pairing exercise with the same lead developer. We built a small example app together. Resources were sent over ahead of time so my environment was good to go, and the expectation was set from the start that the goal was to assess how I thought and approached code, not to see how far I could get in 90 minutes.

3. 4 hour "on site" where I talked to each developer on the team I'd be joining. No technical exercises. Each person came with their own questions, and expected me to ask mine.

What I took away from the experience was that companies are seriously overthinking and over-engineering the process. There isn't a magic heuristic you're going to discover that will identify "10x engineers." You can vet if someone is technically competent enough for the role, approaches software in a way that gels with your org, and if they have any red flags in fairly straightforward fashion that doesn't require enormous amounts of prep for them or your team.

1. Write code that takes in a rectangle, coordinate, and distance, and tells if that coordinate is within the distance of the rectangle.

2. Determine whether a string has permutations which are palindromes. (I'm of the opinion this one is too simple, but it's been fascinating seeing what mental gymnastics some developers will go through to solve this problem)

3. Write a CLI dice game (we provide the rules) in which the computer player wins 70% of the time. Make the method by which the computer cheats undetectable (of course this is impossible, but candidates just give it a best shot and we talk about their approach in the interview).

Assuming the test passes muster, we have three interviews right now, I think. One with managers to talk about the role, one with senior devs outside the team to perform the technical interview, and one with the devs in the team to talk shop.

In the technical interview, we primarily go through their test solutions (we do no whiteboard coding aside from reviewing the test and even that's very loose - not actual code). We have hired candidates before who have failed some of these tasks (mainly our candidates have trouble with #1) but who showed a capacity for being able to think on their feet and correct their mistakes during the interview. Of course a candidate who aces the test is going to have an advantage, but absent having the right answers, quick thinking/adaptability is probably the #2 trait we look for that seems to be a good predictor for developer success.

Every candidate we've hired through our process has been a success (which could be dumb luck, since none of us are super experienced/knowledgeable interviewers either, but we wing it best we can) and the take-home (and, equally importantly, the technical interview) has absolutely helped us weed out candidates with impressive CVs whose test results did not measure up.

If I understand this correctly, it's the sort of problem that's simple if you see the trick and hard if you don't. I'd expect many candidates to think that you actually want them to generate all the permutations and then get bogged down in recursion.

#1 is good, and #3 sounds interesting.

Ideally the candidate should realize that this is computationally infeasible and quickly come up with a much more efficient solution, right? Perhaps they believe that this question filters out people who 1) don't have a feel for what is computationally feasible 2) will just dive into coding without spending 10 seconds to see if there's a significant optimization.

Distance from the center of the rectangle? Easy. From the closest corner? Easy. From the closest point on the rectangle? I'm not clear how to do this.

And will the sides of the rectangle be parallel to the x and y axes?

It's easiest to think about an axis-aligned rectangle, and you can convert any problem to have an axis-aligned rectangle by rotating everything.

Quite a few pitfalls there, though. If I was doing computer graphics often, the geometry wouldn't be a problem I guess. But I've not done any such thing in decades.

If the job needs the geometry, then it might be a useful question to ask.

What's the compensation like? Stock?

> For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations

You'll also find out that the people you really want to hire are not on the market for a long time. So if they are interviewing at several places and you give them a 4 hours take-home, they'll put it on their to-do list but by the time they get to it they might be in the final rounds at 2-3 other places that brought them on-site immediately.

> It probably doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-technical

That's a much bigger issue than most assume.

> There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the interview to try and balance it out

That's a huge no from me. Final approval of a technical candidate should only be in the hands of the technical staff.

I've heard horror story of a "senior" engineer from "his country's top school" being interviewed for a technical position by several non-technical managers and HR reps. They only included an engineer in the final round, which was basically supposed to be rubberstamped anyways. He was then asked to implement something trivial like fizzbuzz or wordcount on the whiteboard. The candidate then became extremely defensive and tried to argue that such task was "beneath him", arguing for a good 15 minutes why he shouldn't have to do it.

Then the dev just left the room and said that he used this question as a warmup with new hires and it typically takes them less than 10 minutes.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

"Ok this problem is called fizzbuzz. We just need to see if you can really code."

It sounds like the situation was of course different, but situations like above have happened.

I laughed and wrote the solution on the board.

This seems to be the issue, in fact it's quite baffling to me. If you are interviewing for a technical role, why would you not perform a technical interview led by technical staff?

I'm not saying the other stuff is not important as well, but this reads to me like you are essentially leaving the core of the role out of the interview (I'm not sure what "usually a developer or two are sitting in as well" means).

We use this process at my current employer, and we've gotten mostly good feedback about it (including from people we didn't hire), though some candidates don't like it. The people we've hired using this process have been quite good, though I can't say if that's the process or something else that leads to that outcome.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with coding test. Timed with internet. The one that does not tests for algorithms, but for basic competency. For example, ask them to parse some data out of xml file and give them tons of time. That will check competency without being burden.

Yes, non tech managera sux at recognizing who is good programmer in discusion. But, so do programmers and technical people. It is easy to pretend competence if you read enough blogs and can project right attitudes.

These are mutually exclusive things. Candidates who have more free time to code are more likely to be better at it than those who don't (all else equal). Candidates who have OSS maintenance / leadership experience are more likely to work well in teams (all else equal).

If you choose not to weight those things, to balance the playing field for people who have more obligations outside of work, then you'll also have lesser quality candidates (again, generally).

So if you're struggling to hire good candidates, maybe it's a good idea to weight these things (and bias against people with less free time outside work). Once you have good candidates, and this is no longer a pressure on your business, then it might be a good time to try and balance the playing field for new hires.

But you cannot balance the playing field and also hire the best candidates. The best candidates will have unfair advantages in general. You can either lean towards having the best or lean towards balancing the playing field.

Some of the gymnastics thinking that I see seems to suggest that we’d seek to hire fluent English speakers by interviewing evenly across all populations. By all means, I’d be more than happy to hire someone fluent in English from China, but if I’m looking for a fluent English speaker, I shouldn’t spent 18.5% of my recruiting efforts/budget in China out of "fairness".

People who don't contribute to OSS typically don't do it because they don't have the ability (some OSS code is held together by duct tape) but because they don't have time, interest or think it's harder than it is.

If you have better tools to determine if someone is good at writing code for your company, why use a proxy measure that's different in many ways?

It’s rare for an interview process to provide more than 6 hours of content, some of which is non-evaluatable. Reference checks are all but useless compared to seeing actual work over time.

About 1 time in 6, you’ll interview a full standard deviation above or below your “true” ability. About 1 time in 50, you’ll turn in a +2σ (or -2σ) performance. That’s largely eliminated with personal experience, a trusted vouch, or a strong OSS portfolio.

It's a fairly clear signal of skill quality and attitude.

Reading open source commits/PRs and issue trackers tells you quite a lot about a developer which you can't see without some sort of a test (often not even then).

>it's biased against people who don't have the time

Surely any career that requires a high level of skill and practice honing that skill is biased against people who don't have the time?

What's special about open source?

Any career, especially in our field, requires a high level of skill. We try our best to level the playing field for everyone while still getting a lot of signal in the interview process so end up eschewing things like school attended, talks given, OSS contributions in evaluating candidates. Anecdotally we've seen little correlation with these sorts of things and interview ability or ability at the job after being hired.

And even more have the potential to become excellent coders but didn't have the bandwidth to develop it.

It seems peculiar to single out one quality in particular that sends a clear signal that a skill has been honed on the basis that it took time to hone that skill.

All skills take time to develop.

Besides, having a diverse experience base and pipeline (parents, non traditional developers, non traditional paths to SWE, and even single people with a ton of time and fortune to be able to do things like robust side projects) has served us particularly well in having a team with a wide breadth and depth of experience and viewpoints. Specifically weighting side projects in lieu of technical/EQ interview performance would ruin that in favor of the latter group.

Nobody said that we did.

This is about ignoring OSS contributions vs. reading them taking them into account - i.e. deliberately ignoring a signal of quality because it might, for instance, discriminate against people who chose to have kids.

I find it particularly ironic coz part of the reason I wrote open source was to save time - to skip wasteful technical interviews that it ought to be obvious are unnecessary if I have public evidence I can code well.

To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source. (Maybe if I had worked side by side with the person in a previous life would be weighted) Even if we did use that as a proxy, it doesn't really save time because people would have to inspect the work and still doesn't really tell me anything about the candidates approach to problem solving or framing of issues that I can get from pair programming or walking through some code for an hour.

I applaud all your open source contributions and appreciate them, but I wouldn't consider them in whether to hire you except perhaps at the margins. Others may disagree and that's their conscious choice or they're indexing on something different.

I did suspect that underlying your opinion was a desire to discriminate in favor of parents/against non parents.

This would fit in with the double standard I highlighted in my first comment.

This was also because you mentioned "parents" in the context of diversity (which is weirdly unique). I threw that phrase out there to see if it triggered you.

>To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source

I've not worked with a huge number of developers who have made > 3 significant pull requests to a serious OSS project but every single one has been stellar.

I've worked with a lot of developers who can do the cracking the coding interview dance who sucked and even more who interview well in other ways.

A full time job and small children for example don't leave much space for extended coding sessions on side projects, unless you're lucky enough to need little sleep.

I've worked around this by learning at my day job : read books/papers at home (this is relaxing), and look for opportunities to apply this knowledge at the office. Unfortunately, it stays at the office though, and can't be shown as proof of your skills outside of the company.

Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow.

Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways.

But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!

I'm sure a lot of people who hire developers think of themselves as people who could write open source but don't have the time.

This also accounts for why stuff like leetcode persists (the hirers were successfully selected by that process), why top colleges are often preferred and even why the profession is predominantly white/male.

Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense.

To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises.

At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.

A) I'm pretty sure almost nobody actually codes 8 hours at work.

B) Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.

The non-coding parts of work are necessary on oss projects too. In any case, programmers work being mostly coding + code review is pretty normal.

> Those two hours will be of a very different nature to "work coding" and this can lead you to learn things you wouldn't pick up at work.

That is nowhere near guaranteed and more likely to not be true. In particular, if you focus on maintaining the same software, it will be more of the same after a while.

IME a far greater % is coding. There's also a lot of OSS people involved who don't code who help out with the other stuff.

Moreover, a lot of the stuff that "isn't coding" is a strong quality signal - how the developer interacts with bug reports for instance.

>That is nowhere near guaranteed and more likely to not be true. In particular, if you focus on maintaining the same software.

It'll still be different to what you do at your day job and will necessitate picking up a different set of skills and a different perspective.

It was not my experience. In work, the proportion of coding was bigger then when I maintained open source one. Mostly because company paid people to do other stuff. In OSS, afaik, it is was more of rare to have dedicated tester or to get already analyzed input. Also, the planning, organization, documentation, keeping tickets clean, decision making and so on are all on you. The ratio of project work is the same.

> It'll still be different to what you do at your day job and will necessitate picking up a different set of skills and a different perspective.

Maybe yes, maybe not. And after a while of maintaining the same software, you already maxed out what you learned. Moreover, you can learn new stuff without having side project. It has advantages, because then you dont have to finish and polish stuff. You just learn or try what interests you.

Lastly, side project is really not that dissimilar then working on the job - meaning job+side amounts to 10 hours a day work basically. It means your hourly effectivity will go down exactly like all studies on crunch predicts. You will get tired and slow.

Or their company ships a product that has a huge dependency on that particular OSS project, so they are doing the work on company time.

Not saying your strategy is bad, just that you might miss some good candidates.