Steve Yegge writes about the problems with technical interviews. He certainly paints a bleak picture of the current state of the art. I think the real problem is that technical interviewing is really the type of unconscious decision making that Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink. When a really good hacker walks into the room to interview a candidate he will know relatively quickly whether or not the other guy will work out. Unfortunately, he won’t know how he knows.

This is a difficult problem for the interviewer. If he goes back and tells his boss that “this guy isn’t going to work out but I don’t know why” his opinion is likely to be ignored. It is no less a problem for the candidate who would like to believe that if he answers all of the questions right he will get the job. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to get objective evidence of a person’s technical abilities during a reasonable interview process.

And this really goes to the heart of the problem. The decision making process is almost entirely intuitive and yet we persist in believing that we can obtain an objective answer if we come at the problem from a different angle. Steve thinks that there is a better interview process out there that we haven’t found yet. I don’t think that is the case. I think that we found it but don’t like the implications.

I think the best interview process is to let your best hacker chat with a candidate for 30 minutes to an hour. It doesn’t really matter what they talk about, just that they spend the time interacting. At the end of the interview if the hacker is excited about the candidate hire them without delay. If the hacker seems neutral then put the candidate’s resume in the “maybe” pile. However, if the hacker shows any reservations then the candidate is probably not a good fit. You will probably have a few bad results, but will come out ahead in the long run.

Tags: interviews, jobs