People suck at technical interviews - <AUTHOR> http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/08/26/you_suck_at_technical_interviews <comment><USER3> My primary criteria when interviewing junior candidates are:

1) Do you have basic problem solving skills?

2) Can you communicate clearly?

3) Do I want to sit next to you for the next 6 months or longer?

If you don't know Ruby, I can teach you. If you don't know Elasticsearch, I can teach you. What I can't and don't have time to teach you is how to solve a problem on your own without me holding your hand, and I especially don't have time to waste trying to communicate poorly with you.

And obviously, I want to work with someone who is pleasant and interesting. I don't wanna sit next to someone for 40 hours a week who stinks or is rude or can't carry a conversation.

If you meet those three criteria, you've beaten 90% of candidates that walk through the door. The last 10% is what gets you the job. (Obviously, if you DO know Ruby or Elasticsearch, that's a huge plus... but it's not one of the bare minimum requirements.)

<comment><USER4> As a junior developer, I find myself confused by your comment. It seems as if a large proportion of the posts on HN claim that, when looking to hire someone, they focus on problem solving abilities and and culture fit.

However, in May when I was interviewing with companies (including YC backed startups), almost every company focused on quizzing me about trivia [1]. I was actually given a paper quiz by one of the companies on equality comparisons in Javascript (e.g. "Does 4 == '4'?"), which I found pointless, as I can test that within _seconds_ at a computer.

[1] The major exception was 42Debut. Even though they didn't give me an offer (just stopped replying to my emails, but c'est la vie), I was treated with respect throughout the whole process, and the interview was very well done, with challenging questions that forced me to think, and didn't rely on language trivia. I would recommend the company to any of my friends, whereas I can't say that about almost any other company I interviewed with.

<comment><USER5> _I was treated with respect throughout the whole process, and the interview was very well done, with challenging questions that forced me to think, and didn 't rely on language trivia. I would recommend the company to any of my friends, whereas I can't say that about almost any other company I interviewed with._

This is a really important point to remember for interviewers. The interview process isn't just to help you find good candidates, it can be a great branding/marketing vehicle as well. I've gotten many good people from former candidates who enjoyed our process and spoke highly of our team.

I wouldn't have just stopped replying to emails though. An interviewer should always reply, even to politely decline. And it can help to add a reason why you are declining a candidate too, since it can help them improve and perhaps return for another interview in the future (I've hired a few people that I originally passed on too).

<comment><USER6> Of the many companies that have rejected me, Suitable Technologies (makers of Beam robot doubles) were the best. The biggest thing was that they rejected me _as soon as they knew they had rejected me_. Within a few hours.

Which hurt, in the short term, because I am a human being. But it was better than many other companies that would say "we'll tell you later today" and then wait a week, or wait for two weeks since my last interview and then reject me in the middle of the CTF they are running and I'm participating in (what, did my answers in the CTF suck?) and then invite me to apply for a job at the end of the CTF after rejecting me. That's _really_ yanking my chain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For my first job out of uni, I was asked to write pseudocode on a whiteboard to solve a simple scripting problem (call an executable repeatedly, changing the command line args). My background is nuclear engineering, and I was interviewing at a cloud/networking business, so I was already slightly outside my experience comfort zone[0]. I was explaining my thought process while writing on the whiteboard, trying my best to be transparent about how I was thinking, when the interviewer interrupted me.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing at the whiteboard.

"...pseudocode?" I replied, hesitantly, frantically looking for some mistake where he was pointing.

"That's not pseudocode..." he said as he started to berate me for _not writing bash_.

After that (I did not get an offer), every interview I went to when someone asked me to write pseudocode I'd always clarify "Is there any particular language you want me to use?" because I never want to relive that experience again.

[0] I had previous experience interning at Cisco.

<comment><USER8> Expecting pseudocode to be in a particular language is objectively wrong. It's annoying that you lost a job opportunity because your interviewer was incompetent, but I would recommend not asking "Is there any particular language you want me to use?" when they ask you to write pseudocode. They might think you don't know what the word means, which isn't that big of a deal, but leaves a bad impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am an instructor at a coding bootcamp and I conduct technical interviews of our applicants pretty regularly. I have recently been very concerned with tackling the idea the author first addresses: not hiring (or in my case admitting) for what people already know. Our program only has 12 weeks with the students and so what I am most concerned with is the applicant's ability to pick up new concepts quickly.

In the past we have tested students on the little bit of Ruby or Javascript they had studied to prepare for the interview. I am of the belief that that method has helped determine who knows a little bit of Ruby but _not_ who can ramp up on complicated topics quickly during the program. My attempts to address this have led me to doing a 15 minute lesson on something totally new to the applicant and then having them answer questions based off of that lesson. So far I've found it to be useful.

Technical interviews are hard. It's easy to suck at them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fizzbuzz isn't supposed to be a test of your knowledge of the modulo operator. It's supposed to be a very low bar that can filter out a large percentage of candidates who have no business being there.

If you spend 20 minutes on Fizzbuzz, you're doing it wrong. It should take 10 tops, and be limited by how quickly the candidate can write.

<comment><USER11> It isn't _supposed_ to be a test of whether you know the modulo operator but in practice it works out that way.

True story; my wife was going over her (correct) answers to a coding test with the interviewer and he asked her "What's this?" in reference to the modulus operator. The interviewer didn't recognize it.

I use the modulus operator almost daily so it _seems_ obvious to me but I realize that everyone has different experiences or things they are ignorant about. IMO, fizzbuzz is a test of whether you know the modulus operator "trick".

<comment><USER12> > It isn't supposed to be a test of whether you know the modulo operator but > in practice it works out that way.

Yep. And at HN, actually knowing this or anything else assures that you will be downvoted with a probability of 1.

> I use the modulus operator almost daily so it seems obvious to me but I > realize that everyone has different experiences or things they are ignorant > about.

I see the modulo operator applied to a common undergraduate math question -- if a given date lands on a Tuesday, and if you add 500 days, what day of the week does the result land on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm just about to finish a B.S. in CS, so I've recently been on the other side of the table. I like to think I'm "aware" enough to give good feedback about my experiences.

I've interviewed with two of the large "top" companies. They were two very different experiences.

One decided to have me do multiple interviews, with whiteboard coding. The first interviewer was my favorite, because we got to talk about the design of my internship project, how it could be extended, pitfalls to consider, etc. That actually let me stretch my legs a bit and show that I can make intelligent software decisions. The rest of the interviews were basically worthless; the classic small algorithm problem that I could easily figure out with a bit more time or by working with another more experienced engineer. The code I wrote on the board showed that I could write for loops and use a standard library; it was very difficult to modify or refactor if we saw an issue with what I wrote. Why not at least a laptop, basic text editor, and a projector?

The other company gave me a few hours to write up a solution, in an IDE, to a somewhat beefy problem. We had a couple of discussions about my approach, potential pitfalls, cases that I couldn't handle, optimality, etc. I liked this, since it was much closer to being representative of real software work; collaboration, discussion, and I also got to show how I would actually create a solution.

That's a stark contrast. I'm sure there are flaws in the latter approach, but it is if nothing else a much lesser evil that will likely bring in more valuable engineers.

<comment><USER14> My favorite interview, ever, was a phone screen. Untimed. They gave me a weekend to solve two not really difficult problems, with well defined interfaces. The catch was to write it in a production ready style. That is, do everything I would do for actual production code. Documentation, test suites, write the code to be as elegant as possible, while failing as cleanly as possible if invariants failed.

I have no idea their results with that, and I ended up taking a job before the in person interview, but I enjoyed the screener a lot.

<comment><USER13> I'd probably fail that from lack of experience, but it does seem to be a great approach for someone a bit more seasoned. That shows a lot more about someone's software engineering capabilities than short tricky problems.

<comment><USER15> Some one more seasoned would not work for free at a weekend.

<comment><USER14> Some one more seasoned would not work for free during a weekday.

See, I can play that game too.

Besides, this was a contrived problem. If you want to say "I refuse to solve any coding problems while interviewing for a software position", then fair enough. Good luck finding one. I think this was a total of perhaps 3 hours of my time, and was good enough to get an onsite? And it was time I -enjoyed-. Unlike most phone screens, timed interviews, etc.

<comment><USER8> I think the grandparent is reacting to "Untimed. They gave me a weekend" which made it sound as if the interview took all weekend which a more seasoned programmer would be less likely to do.

<comment><USER15> And in a lot of cases in Anglo Saxon employment law working for some one else with out authorisation is a breech of employment law.

It was the they wanted production ready code that set alarm bells ringing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having just had a 3h long technical interview for Google Deepmind, I cannot agree more with a lot of points raised in this post.

Deepmind being a machine learning/statistics/maths/computer science fuelled company, it made sense for the interview process to follow this simple organisation.

I was however very disappointed by the questions asked for each part. Not a single one of the ~100 questions asked during these 3h of my life demanded some "problem solving" skills, only encyclopaedic knowledge (describe this algorithm, what is a Jaccobian matrix, define what an artificial neural network is, what is polymorphism, give examples of classifiers, what are the conditions to apply a t-test...)

So what if someone doesn't remember every definition of the stats/ML/CS/Maths respective bibles as long as they're clever enough to look it up and understand quickly what's needed?

I mean, I get it these are very basic questions but as a highly qualified interviewee who necessarily has other offers given this set of skills, this fastidious, back to school, time wasting process does not reflect well on the company and makes me consider my other options even more seriously.

<comment><USER17> Do you think mathematicians start over from learning how to count everytime they encounter a new problem? That's different from looking up the 10th digit of pi: that's encyclopedic.

Knowing what a classifier is is simply more than encyclopedic knowledge that you should probably know before joining an AI company.

<comment><USER16> As I said before, yes these are very basic questions... and I'm not complaining that the questions were too hard or anything, I'm saying that finding someone who will be able to answer 100% of these "definition" questions will not tell you anything about how competent that person is...

Making them face a simple stats/CS/maths/ML problem and see if he/she is able to come up with the relevant concepts is far more interesting.

<comment><USER17> Ah, I see. Personally I think I could have taken the "give an example of a classifier" question into a deep dive of their competency (talk about how one would build that classifier, etc.) but they might get so many completely unqualified candidates that don't know those things that they need to have those sorts of hurdles before they start really evaluating you for more holistic problem solving traits.

But if you don't think they did that at all then I guess that's bad!

I generally am for the "look things up" argument, but so many people in tech take that to an extreme of "I can fully understand an entire discipline by looking at the Wikipedia page for 5 minutes".

<comment><USER16> I completely agree with you. Also to be fair towards Deepmind I should mention that this was the first round of interview. Hopefully the following steps will prove more stimulating, in which case 3h for the first step was maybe slightly too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first technical interview they asked me to write a constructor and I completely panicked. It still haunts me to this day that I think the guys in the room thought I was some sort of idiot.

<comment><USER19> I have this issue as well. I get extremely nervous and forget very basic things during phone and in person interviews.

I like reading these kinds of articles because they make me feel like less of an idiot, but that's not going to help me get over the issue.

I think the next time I'm actively looking for a job I'll have to just buckle down and practice interviewing and whiteboarding code, which unfortunately is time I would rather be spending building real things instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Technical interviews are a glaring example of a problem we don't really recognize: being stereotypically "male technical smart" is a disability.

Having smart people try to determine if another person matches their same definition of "smartness" is fraught with peril. There are a dozen dimensions to "smartness," and not everybody aligns properly.

It's similar to the quote "You have to be twice as smart to fix broken code as you were when you wrote it." Extremely clever code with bugs is provably unfixable. Extremely clever interviews are almost provably bad filter criteria.

But, in the context of interviewing, evaluating _a person_ isn't the same as evaluating _their immediate output_. Evaluating the future output of a person isn't the same as evaluating "can this person replicate intro-to-CS exercises they haven't touched in 12 years?"

Correct interviews require, _gasp_ , strong compassionate people skills in addition to domain knowledge where you can challenge candidates. You've always got to figure out what they actually know versus what they think they know versus what they say they can do versus what they can actually do.

 _Then_ there's an entire other issue of "Smart People" versus "Capable People." Most people in power end up being "smart," but not necessarily capable any longer (by "failing upward" and now having magic protections). Some people end up being decision makers with little actual creation responsibilities (read: anything they could actually be judged against), so they are free to just be amazing with little detriment for their decisions. But, sometimes you need a number of "smart but not capable" people to balance out half a company being head-down technically but not necessarily aware of larger issues plaguing them. (Did I just invent managers?)

</comment><comment><USER21> These essays make me think I don't understand why people are doing technical interviews. I give a (brief) technical question/coding question interview when I'm asked to, and I suspect it's the kind the author doesn't like. But all I'm looking for is:

If candidate lists lots of skills/experience, I do a self-assessment where I get them to claim that they're really good at something, then ask them to do something that requires bare-minimum skills in it. The idea is not that they need these skills to do the job, but that if you claim a CS degree, eight years work experience, and being a python expert, but you can't crack out a basic, non-trick whiteboard coding exercise blindfolded, something smells bad.

If a candidate doesn't have much experience, I'm trying to figure out just how green they are; low-experience candidates cover a _huge_ range of skill all the way down to knowing literally nothing but a few buzzwords. If you don't know a language or a library or a technology I can teach you, but if you don't know _anything_ it's going to be years before I can get anything shippable out of you.

I wish these weren't a major worry but the majority of people who come in the door (after a resume and phone screen!) don't pass.

What do those of you who are doing intensive whiteboard-coding interviews think you're getting out of it?

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been interviewed by seldo before, when he was at awe.sm. It was a good technical interview. His questions were relevant and forced me to think. I like interviews in which I walk away learning something and I definitely did learn something in this case.

As for interviewing, I cringe when I think about the poor questions I have asked and the poor decisions I have made, and I try to learn from them. We ended up not hiring qualified people because of bad interviews, although that wasn't obvious to us at the time.

I was thinking for a future interview the candidate and I would try to learn some new technology and try to build something together during the interview or talk about it at least.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm currently studying for multiple interviews at "established" tech companies, and I wonder where the interviewers like the author are. I've already finished a few, and between having to implement a linked list, analyze a matrix, describe hashmaps and regurgitate sorting algorithms, the questions have not had much to do with everyday coding.

I'd be really happy to discuss how to implement feature X in an app, or how to design the moving parts of Y for a particular infrastructure and talk about the tradeoffs each implies. But I guess I'll get back at implementing a queue using 2 stacks, because that's what technical interviews seem to be for.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the most god damn cathartic thread I have read on this site after taking 1.5 years out to work on my own stuff and having failed 4 interviews getting back into the workforce, with the most random god damn shit technical tests.

<comment><USER25> I see this all the time... people who have CS Degrees, worked as programmers for 5, 6 or 7 years and then they go and start interviewing and flunk over and over again.

Unfortunately, almost everybody feels overconfident and ignores our advice to prepare and practice for tech interviews: [http://www.quora.com/Whats-the- best-way-to-prepare-for-a-sof...](http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to- prepare-for-a-software-engineering-job-interview)

<comment><USER26> I know I have a minority opinion here, but I fell that if a technical interview is such an exceptional event that I have to put that much preparation into it, there is something wrong with the interview process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh _how_ I agree with this post. And I've been the asshole on the hiring end before - but I (hope) have learned my lesson.

I recently interviewed with a consultancy (role was UK-based) that is desperate (quite literally) to hire experienced developers in the technical area I have experience in. I came highly recommended by a recent senior hire of theirs (he had been my manager).

The technical filter question in the face-to-face interview was (paraphrased and simplified): "write an algorithm on the whiteboard to check for mismatched braces".

I described an approximate solution aloud, but did not complete the solution in the interview.

As it happens I solved it in my sleep the following night - but of course they will never, ever know that.

Now everyone will have their pet theories as to why this is a good or bad question, but these are frankly moot because I am confident the hiring developer had _no idea_ what he was testing for with it. He may have a vague "I know the answer, so he should too" mindset, but not much more.

What _does_ this question, presented verbally in an interview really test? A recursive solution sprung to mind, but I can recall implementing recursive solutions in production code only a few tens of times over a ten year career. The question does not test for experience with the technology they are hiring for. It certainly filters out developers who cannot come up with an algorithm while standing at a whiteboard infront of a hostile audience. I could go on, but the biases implicit in this question are as numerous as they are irrelevant.

After a few years in the industry you typically get to work direct with these so-called "top end" consultancies anyway, so you get to know what these kind of questions _don 't_ filter for. I can say with confidence and from experience they don't filter for ability to create high quality software.

The thing is, this 'clever' 'does he know recursion?!' question is almost insultingly trivial when compared to the type of problems most development teams face.

Like the fact that although "Joe" has an IQ of 150, he speaks in sentences so impossibly convoluted he may as well be mute. Or "Alice" the sole domain expert, who begrudges her position in some way and will only communicate after you have negotiated the massive chip on her shoulder.

Hell, most organisations can't even provision accurate testing environments and force their developers to run underpowered Windows laptops.

Let's walk before we can run yeah?

<comment><USER28> > A recursive solution springs to mind, but I can recall implementing > recursive solutions in production code only a few tens of times over a ten > year career.

If you are not comfortable with recursion, just remember: Recursion is really just a free stack. To use your example:

Whenever you see an opening brace, push onto the stack. (Or, make a recursive call, which goes onto the call stack...)

Whenever you see a closing brace, pop off the stack. (Or, return from the recursive call, which then pops off the call stack...)

If the stack isn't empty at end of input, then there are mismatched opening braces. If you ever try to pop from an empty stack, then there are mismatched closing braces.

<comment><USER27> Thank you for the helpful comment. I can't help but feel you miss the point of my post though. I can solve the problem. Verbally, (but admittedly less eloquently and less complete) I approximately gave your answer in the interview. Give me a quiet Monday morning, a pair of headphones and a compiler/interpreter and I can solve it well.

It's the fact that it is being used as a filter when the person filtering doesn't know what is being filtered in and out.

All in all, it's a spectacular waste of time and money.

<comment><USER28> I understood your post. I didn't comment on your other points because I didn't feel I had anything to add. I was just trying to be helpful in regards to the particular problem you posted, and for anyone having trouble with recursive problems in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I disagree with author about coding question. In my experience if somebody is not able to code quickly a simple task (like fizzbuz, reverse a string), it's a terrible sign. It's a simple objective test that filter out a lot of candidates.

Yeah they may be able to be productive in some specific environment (e.g. deep in some framework, writing templates), but in general they likely don't have solid programming foundation and will produce code of lower quality.

<comment><USER30> > In my experience

That is exactly the problem. Your experience is biased and by definition not transferable to hiring in general. This is why thousands of academic articles exist about research practices and good indicators for future performance, as tokenadult's post nicely highlights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a really excellent post. It talks about a bunch of things that are hobby-horses of mine (I help run recruiting for a large software security firm), and I find myself agreeing with more of it than I disagree with.

I would go a little further than Laurie does. I think several of the goals he sets up for his process are not in reality achievable in an interview process.

Starting axiom: job interviews are among the most hostile experiences professionals endure in our industry. I think back to my own interviews, and compare them to public speaking, professional disasters, death march projects with insane deadlines, intractable politics, and it's pretty much the interviews alone that increase my heart rate. For the past two years, I've tried to make an effort to peek in on the interviews we do here at Matasano, and what I've seen corroborates the belief. Several of our best hires were _physically shaking_ during their interviews. And we try to be nice! In no other common situation does a tech worker find themselves interrogated by a panel of strangers whose implicit goal is to knock them out of contention.

Given that interviews are a psychologically challenging experience, and thinking about things like the concept of "depletion" of ego or willpower, it's straightforward to see some severe limitations to what can be accomplished in an interview setting. If you're spending lots of energy trying to keep from jumping out of your skin in an unpleasant situation, it's much harder to solve problems that themselves require lots of energy.

Past that, a hypothesis, which is unpleasant for some tech workers to hear (cold comfort: I'm 100% certain it applies to me as well). Software developers are not, as a cohort, particularly effective intuitive psychologists. Virtually none of us have any training in the subject. We tend sharply towards introversion. We train our brains day-in and day-out by repeating tasks that do nothing to developer our ability to read in-person social cues. For that matter, we tend as a group to eschew forms of communication in which tone of voice, body language, and emotional cues are even transmitted!

But several of the objectives Laurie sets out demand exactly that kind of analysis. "Can the candidate intelligently discuss technology?" Well, that's subjective, and worse, vague and abstract. Laurie tries to nail "intelligently" down, but I think we can all see that there are other ways in which someone can be "intelligent" about technology that evade those criteria. Since we all intuitively know that, we substitute our own cognitive biases for "intelligently". All of the sudden, we're gauging "confidence" and "comfort level"... we've decided to be psychologists instead of engineers.

So, two changes I would urgently suggest Laurie consider for his process:

* Audit the whole process for tasks that could generate false positives from a nervous candidate. You aren't interviewing people to determine how good they are at interviewing, because interviewing doesn't generate money for your company. Try to build a process that is immune to discomfort and lack of confidence. It can be done! Another thing that we've found very effective: "prime" candidates early and repeatedly with non-adversarial conversations that aim to disarm them. We start our whole (multi-week) process with an hour-long version of this. We also try to innoculate our process by communicating in as much excruciating detail as we can what it will entail.

* Eliminate all subjective questions and standardize what you're left with. Engineers, in my experience, fucking hate this. But it's the right thing to do: ask every candidate, as much as possible, the same set of questions. We have a question structure that minimizes open-ended questions but has some structured "exercise" questions that give the candidate some freedom to move around --- the results of those questions can be put on a scoresheet and, to some extent, compared apples-apples to other candidates.

<comment><USER32> > job interviews are among the most hostile experiences professionals endure > in our industry

I don't find being questioned during an interview hostile, although I do feel I need to be prepared to be tested.

The most bothersome part for me is companies asking for me to list several references, often specifically asking for previous managers. I am usually given a standard application form to write their names, phone numbers, e-mails etc. before I've even talked to anyone about the position.

An interview is just something I'm involved in. Since I have to hand over contact details of several former managers/coworkers before I even talk to anyone, I have to call up and ask a number of people for the favor of giving me a reference before applying for a job.

Due to this, I almost never apply for one job in a one-off sense. I usually work a few years, then decide I definitely am going to get a new job. I line up my references then apply to jobs until I get one. Then I'm completely off the market for another few years.

I could just not hand over the references until later in the interview process, even though they're requesting them from me before I meet anyone, but that starts things off on the wrong foot. As if I had something to hide.

Of course, there may be legal reasons for companies to ask for everything up front. Asking for references too early is the biggest thing that puts me off from looking around. I'm not going to ask several former managers/co-workers for a favor unless I am seriously looking.

<comment><USER33> I just don't fill in questions on the application form I don't want to answer. Particularly references. They are unavailable -- since I can only impose upon them so often -- until after all interviews and a salary discussion and a serious decision that I want the job, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >> Somebody who can intelligently discuss technology >> Somebody who knows what they don't know

I believe in these principles especially. Most of my interview questions are vague (and I tell the candidate this up-front, and explain why). For instance, I'll ask them to explain how they would debug a very slow cluster, or to explain everything happens between me hitting the keys 'google.com' to me viewing the web page. This gives them a huge range of topics to cover in as much detail as they want. If they know a lot about Linux administration, or how hardware interfaces with the OS, or a lot about network protocols, they have a chance to show it off. I'll drill deeper into wherever they take the conversation, and a person scores major points with me if I drill down far enough that they get lost and say "I don't know, but my guess would be... and I would confirm that by...". I've found it to work exceptionally well.

<comment><USER35> Oh god, a question like the Google one would have me not knowing what to say... I mean, to give a reasonably complete answer would take hours and hours! What do you do if someone really goes into detail and can't even get to the part where the packet leaves the local network in a practical amount of time? Is that viewed as inappropriate overkill or a poor understanding of the question?

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't fault anyone for being able to go into so much breadth and depth that we ran out of time. I would suggest they just dive into the part they think if most interesting, or the part most relevant to the position. When we're out of time, we're out of time, but the point is just to stimulate enough technical conversation for me to evaluate the candidates knowledge, passion, communication skills, strengths, interests, etc.

edit: For instance, I actually got this question asked to me in an interview and adopted the practice several years later. It was scheduled for an hour, they asked me this immediately, and I was talking for most of the hour. I got through the whole process but didn't go into as much detail as I could've along the way. Several times I was stopped and asked to clarify some details, some of which I didn't know. That was that, and the interviewer just said "very good" and left. Looking back, I think he was doing the exact same thing I do now - giving me the freedom to show off what I knew, seeing if I would be honest when I reached my limit, and probing a bit to see if I could communicate about interesting problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I read the comments already posted in this thread before I read the fine blog post. Almost everybody sucks at interviewing. Research shows that even though job applicants think that an interview is one of the more fair procedures for hiring a new worker for almost any kind of a job, it is one of the least effective.

There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. Company hiring procedures and their effectiveness is a heavily researched topic in industrial and organizational psychology, but most hiring managers and most job applicants haven't looked up much of the research. After reading the blog post kindly submitted here, I'll make some comments on its tl;dr summary at the end of the post.

1\. many interview techniques test skills that are at best irrelevant to real working life

Yep, that's why you want your company hiring procedures to be based on research and what really matters for finding good workers.

2\. you want somebody who knows enough to do the job right now

That's the ideal. That's why work-sample tests are, by replicated research, a very good hiring procedure, one of the best possible hiring procedures.

3\. or somebody smart and motivated enough that they can learn the job quickly

Yep, and that's why tests of "general mental ability" are also a very effective hiring procedure, although there are some legal requirements surrounding use of those that you have to be careful about in the United States.

4\. you want somebody who keeps getting better at what they do

For sure, as that is the only way your company can meet new challenges as they come up in the company's business.

5\. your interview should be a collaborative conversations, not a combative interrogation

I'm not sure that the author here has provided evidence for the "should" statement in this summary, although I actually don't disagree as a matter of how I do job interviews.

6\. you also want somebody who you will enjoy working with

Basically, almost all hiring managers fall victim to overemphasizing likability and underemphasizing ability to get the job done, but, yeah, you don't want to hire someone who makes the workplace miserable--that might cost you losing other good workers.

7\. it's important to separate "enjoy working with" from "enjoy hanging out with"

Absolutely. The best worker in your company may not be the same person you go out with socially after work.

8\. don't hire assholes, no matter how good they are

The trick here is to figure out how much annoying behavior qualifies a person as an "asshole" in a particular context, and that is not easy.

9\. if your team isn't diverse, your team is worse than it needed to be

There is an increasing body of research to back up this idea.

10\. accept that hiring takes a really long time and is really, really hard

Hiring is hard. It may or may not be time-consuming, depending on how efficiently you do it.

The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings,"[1] Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the _huge_ peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.[2]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, with its legal rules about hiring, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work- sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case[3] interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in various books about hiring procedures,[4] and some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.[5]

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures"[6] (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

[1]

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

[2]

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

[3]

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

[4]

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv- GZkw6TEC](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC)

[5]

[http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full](http://intl- pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full)

[http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf)

[6]

[http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni- giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

<comment><USER37> Thanks for posting this - some real food for thought here. Can you explain exactly what you mean by a "work-sample test", in particular how that might differ from a pair programming or take-home coding exercise?

<comment><USER36> _Can you explain exactly what you mean by a "work-sample test", in particular how that might differ from a pair programming or take-home coding exercise?_

This HN search for comments by Thomas Ptacek on the topic of work-sample tests

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Atptacek+work- sample#!/comment...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=by%3Atptacek+work- sample#!/comment/forever/0/by%3Atptacek%20work-sample)

will lead to better descriptions of work-sample tests useful in a Hacker News context than anything I have yet written on the topic. I'm grateful to him for contextualizing that issue for this community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think there are some good points here, but I would argue that a lot of these are essentially points for hiring more junior engineers. There are cases where hiring for what someone already knows DOES matter.

I have come across too many codebases that were clearly written by folks who were in the "get stuff done" mentality. Frankly, when you're learning a new technology in addition to trying to do your job, your code/architecture just isn't going to be that good off the bat. If the company had instead hired someone who knew what they were doing from the get go, they could have started with a more solid foundation and potentially avoided pain down the road.

<comment><USER39> IMO this is a red herring. Even ignoring shifts in language and such, I'd imagine/hope that just about everyone would cringe a bit if they looked back at code they wrote some time in the past. It's natural - we're constantly learning and constantly improving.

I've changed languages multiple times in my career and yeah sure, one isn't writing idiomatic code right away but with a little breadth of knowledge and armed with modern tools such as stackoverflow it's really not a long transition period. If you add in a strong team and a strong culture of code reviews, the really egregiously non-idiomatic code will never make it in the codebase anyways (not to mention, the newbie will learn along the way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> One of the things done right at one place where I did a great many interviews for technical candidates was at a late phase to break out the technical interview and the management interview.

This allowed a group of potential peers to have a friendly discussion of varying depths about not only the recent work and advertised skills of the candidate but about current events and community engagement.

We became adept at evaluating candidates based on how they answered problems we presented, whether we believed they actually had the skills and experience on their CV, and how committed and engaged they were to the profession.

This is especially important for security related careers because community engagement is vital, most people can't talk in detail about previous work and may not have been able to publish public material, and work is highly specialized. It is tough to evaluate someone on skills and knowledge they have and you don't, but we got good at it.

And then the managers could talk to the candidate in a separate panel and ask ... well I have no idea to this day, actually :)

I say more about all of this a presentation I did in February, Breaking Into Security: some InfoSec Career tips, presented at DC404, slides here: [http://www.atlbbs.com/sharkin/breakin- dc404.pdf](http://www.atlbbs.com/sharkin/breakin-dc404.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER41> Instead of technical interviews, I would _love_ to just pay a potentially great candidate to come in and work for the day. Not only would it give them an opportunity to demonstrate what they know and show off their other skills, it would give our team a chance to see if they're a good fit. And, there would be some real financial incentive for them to give us a try.

But, trying to get management and HR to change from the conventions is extremely difficult. I have not been successful.

<comment><USER42> The biggest problem with a "work there for a day" interview IMO is that there's no time to do anything useful. You can't get familiar with a codebase of any size in a day.

<comment><USER43> Welcome to pair programming. Unlike real pair programming, don't let the noob touch the keyboard for the entire day. Talk talk talk. Don't expect either to really get much work done. But pretending to work all day is a heck of an interview.

This works outside of programming. Over a decade ago when I was doing network stuff, I did "pair router work" with a couple people. You don't give a noob enable CLI on a production router on his first day, or during an interview, either. Even if on paper, or in reality, he is better at this than you are.

If you hire them, you'll be spending the first couple days like this, anyway, unless you go all sink or swim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Followup question: Where can I find a list of companies (other than npm and Matasano) that _don 't_ interview with the stupid "write code on the whiteboard" method?

I've got some (1.5 years) experience, and I can write code. But put a whiteboard marker in my hand and ask me questions you know the answers to, in a high-stakes, high-pressure environment, and I fall apart.

Case in point: a recent technical interview I did, I did reasonably well until the last 1 hour session, which was the "code on the whiteboard" problem. I got code that functioned but wasn't fast enough. At home, after 1 google search and a few minutes, I solved the problem.

I'm definitely in favor of the "do a small project" type of code interview. It has its own pitfalls, but it's way better, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER44> While I can see potential danger in hiring friends, I think it's wrong to say outright that it's a bad idea.

Most bad hiring of friends comes from being bad at hiring in general. If you hire someone BECAUSE they're your friend, then you're doing it wrong. The idea is to hire people who are qualified and who you know to be quality over a long period of time.

Used properly, friendship can just be considered a source for good references in this case, and potentially some additional glue during tough times.

It's true there are risks to hiring friends, especially if it's done poorly or for the wrong reasons, but it's also true that there can be extraordinary benefits.

</comment><comment><USER45> My go-to question for technical interviews is "how would you write Scrabble?". It's very open-ended. I expect them to ask me questions like "what do you mean, write Scrabble?", to draw out some class diagrams, and to implement some scoring. It shows how self-directed they are and how much they trust themselves to develop architecture.

I hate questions about bit-twiddling and sorting algorithms. I wouldn't remember that stuff because I never do it. I do expect candidates to be able to analyze an algorithm for time and space requirements, because that's important for pretty much any coding job.

<comment><USER46> I would fail this. I know of Scrabble, but I have not played it. On top of that, from having had to build scoring for things previously, I would say that it's non-trivial, which would compound the fact that I don't know what goes on on a scrabble board

<comment><USER45> If you didn't know Scrabble I'd ask you to code another game. The fact that it's non-trivial is kind of the point; you have to ask questions (gather requirements) to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've interviewed with dozens and dozens of startups in NYC. I'm an entry level Front-End Dev with passion for a lot of things I (in hindsight) probably should have gone to college for. For example, my current side-project is a completely client-side image metadata reader/writer that has forced me to learn new things like parsing Binary, Endianness, Meta and a lot of things about organizing JS because I've never built this large of a project completely by myself even though it is very, very small. A weekend project for most of you.

Throughout all of my interviews I've noticed one common trait.

Either I do exceptionally well on the personal questions during the interview, or I do really well on the technical questions. There is no in-between.

Most of my interviews could be broken up into 2 sections. The first section is usually where they open up and try to make things more comfortable. Asking me where I'm from, how long I've been writing code, what kind of side-projects I'm working on, etc...

The second part of the interview is when they try to figure out how much I know. Usually we start off by just talking about technology and this is where they try to figure out if I'm BS'ing my way through things. If you can maintain a fluent conversation about technology; you're good-to-go. After that they will generally try to slip in a few questions, usually about event delegation in Javascript.

The problem for me comes from when we switch from personal questions to technical ones, or vice-versa. I will pass either one with flying colors but I will rarely, if ever, pass both. If that particular day I can't sell my personal story very well, I do very well on the technical questions. If I do well on the personal questions, I do terrible on the technical questions. I believe there is a vast cognitive gap when you go from an emotional conversation talking about significant things in your past (like side- projects, old employers, hometown, etc..) and then jump to such rigid topics like code where there is no emotion, it's purely analytical thinking.

What I would prefer is for a company to pay me $100 to come into the office and work a half day. If I can keep up, I get the job.

<comment><USER25> Not one company has invited you to come onsite for a day-long interview to code alongside the team?

You should be upfront with the employer. "I think the best way for me to showcase my skills would be to come onsite for a day, and tackle whatever projects you're working on currently. After 8 hours, you'll have a good assessment as to whether or not it's a fit, and vice-versa."

<comment><USER47> Not one company has asked me to write code on a computer.

Also important to note these are almost all fully funded companies with solid dev teams. I've had great offers that just never worked out due to fit (or rather lack of passion from the dev teams).

I've thrown the offer out there on several occasions but it's always refused or delayed to the point where contact drops. One time the senior engineer told me my offer to come in and code on my own dime was "nonsense" and If I knew better I wouldnt be offering my work for free, because that would hurt the "startup economy".

My faith in the NY Tech Scene is pretty much non-existent to the point I'd rather make hourly wage in manual labor and hack on projects in my own time, as opposed to burning myself out around people like noted above.

\--edit-- Which is exactly what I do

<comment><USER48> Offering to pay for it probably puts people off.

You're suggesting a quite legitimate (if not common) method of assessing your skills. You're already paying for it with your time, as are they.

If they think it's a novel idea and worth their time to give it a shot, they might go for it. Or possibly give you homework as a decent compromise.

But the upfront suggestion of money exchanging hands does add a certain ridiculousness to the idea on the face of it.

Just ask for a coding assignment or a trial day at the office on an actual problem to work on without cash and it might work better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > I used to ask people to write code in interviews. This is terrible.

Bull! Last time I interviewed someone, they looked good on paper and decent on the phone. When it got down to solving a _simple_ problem on the whiteboard, he totally flopped. This is a totally realistic situation; we get together at least weekly and hammer out a solution on the whiteboard. Nerves could be an issue, but a good candidate should be able to solve an easy problem in a handful of minutes in an interview. (I'm talking _super_ easy, like joining one SQL table to another after saying that you are proficient)

<comment><USER31> He didn't say _coding_ was bad. He said _coding on a whiteboard_ is bad. And, if you evaluated 100 strong developers by comparing their performance at a terminal and a whiteboard, my guess is that you'd quickly see that he's absolutely right about that --- not only would everyone outperform the whiteboard with a terminal, but that the whiteboard deficit would be highly irregular, defying any attempt to "handicap" for it.

<comment><USER50> I would rather hire the strong developer that can code without autocomplete and write without spellcheck.

<comment><USER31> That'll come in handy when the inevitable days-long autocomplete and spellcheck outage strikes.

<comment><USER51> Or if the firm only uses Emacs.

<comment><USER31> You use Emacs without autocomplete? That's not snark: I'm just here to tell you that Emacs has fantastic autocomplete and you should definitely look into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is one of the best write-ups over tech hiring I've seen in a while. For me is about "get the job done, don't be a dick", problem is how to test for that under time and other constraints.

</comment><comment><USER53> Not sure if this is off-topic but my concern is related to technical interviews.

How do software engineers/devs/etc "stay in shape" for technical interviews? Let's say I wanna switch jobs and the first hurdle to cross is inevitably algorithms and data structures (for dev-centric roles) or something like operating systems/networks/whatever. How does one stay sharp on those _fundamental_ skills on a regular basis while working on a job, to avoid cramming everything in one week before the interview?

</comment><comment><USER54> The other side to that story: I'm scared like shit whenever (and that's often enough) I consider applying for a new thing. And back out, don't even try.

Most of the reasons are listed in the article, but let's be honest: I'd face most of these things.. So the pipe dream atm is to find some time for personal projects, foss contributions and .. use that to get to more reasonable opportunities. Reaching ten years with this company here, these interview stories might keep me here for another decade.

<comment><USER33> If it helps: when I interview, I really really want the candidate to succeed because he or she is solving a problem for me. I need more competent hands. I don't know if this helps, but it's true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm not sure I agree with the "team fit" thing. I get his point - most people don't understand what team fit is or can't separate it from personal bias. But here's my counter-argument.

Every company and team has different core values. "Team fit" means matching company and team values. For example, I work on educational software for teacher and students. My definition of "team fit" (for this particular team/company) is that the person care about improving quality of education. If you're applying just because you need a job but don't care about what it is we're making, I don't care about any of the other criteria listed in this article - I'm not hiring you. You may be smart, able to learn, and a great communicator - but you don't care about what we're building so you don't have the same core values as the rest of the company and team.

This is what "team fit" means - not what they look like, what they do in their off time, or anything else; "team fit" is "do they personally value the same things we value as a team"?

If you value transparency and collaboration and they prefer to work as a lone gunman, they're not a team fit. If you value rapid iteration and user feedback and they don't want to release anything until it's 100% perfect in their eyes, they're not a team fit. So on and so forth with the examples.

<comment><USER56> Most people are fully able to work in both 100% done and release flawed but soon scenarios. Most people simply adjust to company they work in just fine. Almost all are also can work in both team and lone gunman settings - <USER2> they will have preference there.

Unless you are very careful, you can select out very good candidates basically based on how companies they previously worked in performed in those scenarios.

<comment><USER55> There's a difference between what you CAN do and what you VALUE doing. Yes, people can put up with conditions they find undesirable, but they'll be unhappy and cause others working with them to be unhappy as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> > _Variation across teams in big companies is enormous. Just because a company > was successful doesn 't mean your candidate had anything to do with that._

This might seem to be an over generalisation. It's probably true enough at large consulting body-shops but I'd certainly punt on a lower-end ex google dev comparing favourably to the industry average.

</comment><comment><USER58> All of these exact same points (including a very similar title) have been floating around my head as an idea for an article I wanted to write. I was so pleased to find that you had basically written my article for me. Very well said on all accounts :D

</comment><comment><USER59> As someone who recently graduated from college, by far the best interview I ever had was just question all day and asked about projects I would want to work on and asked to explain how I would go about designing my project on the whiteboard. No I didn't get that job; I screwed up the last part (well I did answer some questions incorrectly but I think they didn't care much about that). For what it is worth, the position has to do with security research and engineering. The coding part I had to go through was fairly quickly (but the interviewer, IMO, didn't do a good job at it and caused me a lot of trouble). Geesh, I wish I was given a offer, but looking back I wasn't ready to deliver ANYTHING valuable as an [researcher]engineer yet.

When people just say a bunch of smart words like async and parallelism, ask them to define them with concrete examples. Ask them further to break down their "textbook knowledge." That's by far, IMHO, the best way to evaluate whether a junior prospective engineer knew a lot than average or not. You want a hard question? Just ask people to go as deep as they can to explain to you what happen after a URL is entered into a HTTP client such as browser or curl.

I am terrible at coding under pressure. Actually, I am terrible at coding. I constantly read books and github projects and I end up asking a lot of questions: is this a good practice to do such. You see, I am all for style and I want to be better writing code close to what people prefer to write. I went to talks and learned tips how to write better code and I will immediately employe those new techniques in my new projects.

I will end up with questions and I always wish someone could be around and help. I usually go to IRC or stackoverflow for opinion but I hope when I do get a job soon, I will be able to ask my senior colleague and hope they could provide feedback.

I haven't done everything like some superstar already have at my age. I suck and I am sorry, but I think I am one smart ass person capable of delivering a project with some guidance and day-to-day meeting and mentorship.

In fact there are senior engineers I've met or worked very very briefly during hackathon and when I asked them certain design question they will blur about their ideas and don't really know how to contribute, or up to me to explore what could be done. In essence, neither of us know everything. Senior knows more because they have done more, almost certainly something repetitive. It is like asking me to write hello world every day and I will have no problem responding to it. Sometimes when you look at code written by senior engineers their code smell even worse than what I write (but there are definitely the good one I can always use as reference).

Conclusion is: when you want to hire a new engineer, especially a junior engineer, ask yourself: are you ready to be a mentor and is there anyone ready to believe they can be a good mentor. Actually, when you hire someone, ask your co-workers whether they are ready to be each other's mentor. I don't want to work at a company where everyone is hiding in a cave and think everyone is smart and autonomous. There are times you need to be there to guide someone through his or her obstacle. A company encourages brownbag and training will be ideal for me.

I am serious; don't ask me to code quick sort. I am not going to do it. I know I am just going to memorize it and after I've written one a dozen time it will just become hello world. No, I am kidding. I need a job so I will do it. I will, but feeling a time bomb ticking next to me. I will either fail or go on with another few rounds writing more quick sort.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think a more apt title is "technical interviews suck", and speaking personally, I have entirely given up on them. (I would say that I gave up on them after two decades, but the truth is that I gave up on them a decade ago -- and I really tried hard in that first decade to develop the perfect technical interview.)

My belief has become that the only way to hire the traits that I'm looking for (high technical ability, sufficient education, predisposition to rigor, and -- most importantly -- indefatigable persistence) is by judging a candidate on their work, not their performance in an interview. (After all, software engineering isn't done via pop quiz -- and it's not even a timed test.)

The problem then becomes: how do you judge the works of someone you've never worked with before? Three ways that have worked for me:

(1) Rolodex. This is an easy way to hire reliably: someone on the team has worked with the person in the past, and vouches for them as one of the tribe. Assuming that you trust the person vouching for them, the interview consists of you selling them, not them selling you. This method has high fidelity (though is still fallible), but also suffers from obvious limitations in terms of scale and breadth.

(2) Known curricula. There are some schools where I know (or someone on the team knows) the computer science curriculum very well, and can assess a student simply by the courses that they have taken (or, better, TA'd), the labs they have worked in, or the professors that they have worked for. The fidelity of this method will depend on the school, how well one knows the curriculum, etc. -- and it has all of the strengths and weaknesses of hiring university grads. (It also suffers from serious scale problems and runs the risk of creating monoculture.)

(3) Open source. If you lead open source projects that attract community contributors, you may find it surprisingly easy to coax the best of those contributors into working for you full-time. While I know that this isn't a fit for every company, it has become my preferred way to hire: you are hiring someone who can obviously do the work (because, um, they're already doing it) and who has demonstrated interested in the problem space (especially if their contributions have come during their free time). Importantly, you are also not limiting yourself to a particular geographic area or school or company history or whatever; the people I have hired via open source are people I never would have found otherwise. And, it must be said, they have proven (without exception, actually) to be great hires. There are obvious problems with this as well in terms of scale and (especially) predictability, but I view open source as the farm system for software engineering: it's a way to find and develop talent at lowest opportunity cost.

Edit: I forgot a fourth method that has actually worked for me.

(4) Homework. When interviewing someone who I don't know and who is otherwise a stranger, I will ask them some exceedingly basic questions to assess technical viability, and then proceed to discuss the problems that we're solving and why I personally find them exciting. If they are sufficiently interested at the end of this conversation (which is really more me selling them than them selling me), I will assign homework -- which is generally to take some fixed amount of time (I have usually said no more than eight total hours) to build something fun in one of the technologies that we have built or otherwise use. (When node.js was new, this was to build something in node.js -- but more recently, it's been to build something fun with Manta.[1]) If a candidate comes back with completed homework, you each know something about the other: they were sufficiently interested in you to actually play around (and they like playing around to begin with -- which is essential for us) and you now have some works by which to judge them.

[1] [http://www.joyent.com/blog/introducing-kartlytics-mario- kart...](http://www.joyent.com/blog/introducing-kartlytics-mario- kart-64-analytics)

<comment><USER61> Homework is great, but only if a job offer is guaranteed if submitting a sufficient project. It is hubris to think someone will care enough about your company to spend 8 hours of their time for the _small chance_ to be hired. Presumably you are giving the same assignment to a handful of other candidates. You are simply outsourcing much of the investment of hiring to the candidates. This is simply unethical (one of many tests for ethics is "if everyone did X, would the scenario be tenable"\--in this case the answer is obviously no).

<comment><USER60> It's not a small chance at all -- and it only comes after a conversation where I have done basic vetting and where I have explained why the problems that we're solving are exciting to me. (That is, if you're not ginned up to do the homework, I haven't done my job -- or it's not a fit.)

And as an aside, your test for ethics is entirely asinine, as it renders anything of sub-infinite scale unethical. (Among its more obvious failings, anyone who chooses not to have children is behaving unethically -- as is anyone who has children, for that matter.)

<comment><USER62> > And as an aside, your test for ethics is entirely asinine, as it renders > anything of sub-infinite scale unethical.

That's not his test, that's Kant's Categorical Imperative :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Mostly do!

<comment><USER64> If anyone can suggest a non-baity title, we'll happily change it beyond s/you/people/.

<comment><USER65> Actually I would have preferred the original title because then I would have known that I didn't want to click the link.

<comment><USER64> That's a pretty good argument that I don't think I've heard before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> > The famous fizzbuzz test simply asks "are you aware of the modulo operator?

No it doesn't. It could be implemented with counters you reset when needed. Didn't really read any further, I don't think this person should really be giving technical interviews anyway.

<comment><USER67> Yeah, but not knowing the mod operator would get you dinged.

<comment><USER39> I thought the point of the FizzBuzz was that the asker doesn't care about 'clever' (for some definition of clever) answers, but rather, "Can this person actually write something which solves the problem, no matter how brain dead a solution"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> From my experience this is how everyone is hiring... sounds like you've had some bad experiences.</comment>


The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2019/04/24/treaty-new-echota/ <comment><USER2> It was not until 1924 that all Native Americans became US citizens. Prior to that they first had to give up tribal affiliation to gain US citizenship.

<comment><USER3> Native Americans had Spanish citizenship almost 300 years earlier and also retained their lands, affiliation, and culture under the law of the Spanish Empire.

<comment><USER4> Incorrect. For example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Indians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Indians)

"Spanish explorers arrived on California's coasts as early as the mid-16th century. In 1769 the first Spanish Franciscan mission was built in San Diego. Local tribes were relocated and conscripted into forced labor on the mission, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Disease, starvation, over work and torture decimated these tribes."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anything changed? The man who signed and implemented this lopsided "agreement" was president and is still celebrated by many. His nickname was "the Indian killer". His portrait hangs in the Oval Office.

<comment><USER6> George Washington's nickname was Town Destroyer ( for wiping out native american towns ).

[https://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/06/27/tow...](https://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/06/27/town- destroyer-versus-the-iroquois-indians)

Thomas Jefferson on exterminating the natives.

"This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate."

General Sherman on exterminating natives

"After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, Sherman wrote Grant that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman)

The first governor of california - Peter Burnett.

Instead, the greed for gold wealth led to a second option which was, literally, termed a "war of extermination" by Governor Peter Burnett who declared warfare would not cease with Native Americans "until the Indian race becomes extinct"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hardeman_Burnett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hardeman_Burnett)

The inescapable truth is this country ( and before if we include the pilgrims ) was subdued with conquest and series of genocides. Pretty much everyone political, academic and business leader implicitly or explicitly supported genocide. Of course some ( like Jefferson ) wanted to negotiate first but when push came to shove, they all supported explusion and/or genocide.

But they also did a lot of great things. You have to take the good with the bad. Else we are in an untenable position. Columbus was far more brutal to the natives and he didn't contribute anything to the growth of america ( like andrew jackson did ). George Washington was also far more brutal against the natives. What should we do? Rename Washington DC ( District of Columbia )?

The only reason Andrew Jackson is being targeted by the establishment today is because he was the most anti-central bank president we've ever had.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_War)

In terms of his racist views and policies, he wasn't anything exceptional ( especially during the 1800s ). If we have to remove him, then we have to remove Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Sherman and an unending list of public figures. Where does it end? We should teach and accept that genocide and slavery was part of the making of america rather than try to hide it. And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs.

<comment><USER7> But, I think that's the tricky part:

"And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs."

How do you convince people that current portraits, monuments, etc aren't praising the good and bad OR (and I think this is much more the case) are praising the good and turning a blind eye to the bad?

It sounds like we need new portraits, monuments, etc to replace what we have currently.

<comment><USER8> Or maybe present them as they were, perhaps through explanatory plaques to go along with the statues, portraits and monuments: "To someone who did a lot of good for America through A, B and C, but also ratified/genocided/did whatever else we now know to be bad".

It probably wouldn't hurt to have commemorative objects of Indian leaders and country-shapers as well (of which I have no doubt there a good number), to present something more "complete" regarding American history (which, like any nation's history, is complicated and more like a series of connected creeks and streams than a single river sequence of events).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what things would be like if the European settlers hadn't displaced the indigenous Americans. (If the American Indian way of life evolved and was still predominant today.)

It's an interesting mental exercise.

<comment><USER10> There are still millions of native Americans today, some full blood. Go visit the rez. Their culture is beautiful.

<comment><USER11> I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids.

My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One good book on this topic is Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People by Thurman Wilkins.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, out of curiosity, do these treaties belong to the public domain now?

<comment> shaki-dora That depends on the meaning of "these treaties". The texts have probably been in the PD forever, assuming they were drafted by government lawyers (somewhat likely judging by the content), because everything created by the federal government is. Barring that, copyright would have long expired. So go ahead, I really want to see an adaptation of Indian law to VC term sheets.

The physical documents are not PD, because the concept has no meaning in the physical realm.

Photographs are works separate from the objects they show, but the same limitation as to government works as above applies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> FYI There is a malware text pop up that just appeared on this site saying "your device has been compromised".

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems clear to me that the treaty violates the U.S. Constitution and as such, the property in question still belongs to the Cherokee People.

It may take some time for the Supreme Court eventually to rule on the matter, but the current property "owners" are criminal trespassers in my view.

<comment><USER16> > the treaty violates the U.S. Constitution

I am not a constitutional law expert, but I believe that under article 6 section 2 (the supremacy clause) treaties are held to be equal to the constitution. Thus, there is a very high bar for a treaty to by nullified based on contradicting the constitution. There is very little case law on this, and I believe the only instance in which an international executive agreement (not a treaty) was thrown out by the Supreme Court was Reid vs Covert. In that case, it was throw out on the grounds that it violated 5th and 6th amendment protections of Americans in foreign countries.

<comment><USER17> In this specific case, the supreme Court ruled that the removal of the Cherokee was unconstitutional in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia [0].

Andrew Jackson said "John Marshall has made its decision, now let them enforce it" [1], violating the Court's decision and ordering the Trail of Tears.

He committed treason, this country was founded in genocide, and Jackson's portrait is proudly hung in the Oval Office. This is why I'm ashamed to be an American.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia)

1\. [https://sustainatlanta.com/2015/04/02/remembering-the- time-a...](https://sustainatlanta.com/2015/04/02/remembering-the-time-andrew- jackson-decided-to-ignore-the-supreme-court-in-the-name-of-georgias-right-to- cherokee-land/)

<comment><USER18> > This is why I'm ashamed to be an American.

Then don't be. No one is forcing you. Just leave.

Yes, terrible things were done in the founding of America, but terrible things happened all over the world throughout history (including between warring native tribes). But what we need to take from this isn't that our ancestors were horrible human beings, but that they did wrong things and more importantly, we need to strive to learn from it, not repeat their mistakes and generally be better people.

> the current property "owners" are criminal trespassers in my view.

Then pretty much every single American is a trespassers because basically the entire United States (or North America in general) was settled by native American before the Europeans "discovered" it, and in most cases, they didn't sell them their land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Somebody mentioned "genocide and slavery was part of the making of america rather than try to hide it" but it disturbs the narrative of the shining beacon on the hill and Thanksgiving.

Virtue and compassion are not geographical traits.

<comment><USER15> A lot of us have desisted from full-throated celebration of Thanksgiving. It's a start.

We're still a work in progress and deeply divided on the subject of colonial occupation and its legal and historical meaning.</comment></comment>


Uber to Brussels government: please stop lying and playing games - <AUTHOR> http://tech.eu/news/uber-brussels-government-please-stop-spreading-misinformation-playing-games/

<comment><USER2> I have read both this article and the Uber blog post. Although I don't follow closely what is happening (I'm from Belgium), it seems the blog post is short on "facts".

They state they have been in contact, not that their activity was deemed legal by the authorities. They state their will to launch but that's it. A week or two ago I have heard on the news that the cabinet said to Uber that they needed to comply with local laws (and that it was not the case).

Uber blog post failed to say if they received any authorization (they probably didn't), or if they feel they are not doing something illegal.

Uber seems to be illegal in Belgium because they don't comply with rules regarding paid ride. For instance drivers need to receive authorization before offering paid ride.</comment>


More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday - <AUTHOR> http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14303473

<comment><USER2> When voters reject a tax increase, it isn't unusual for a city (or even a school district) to make cuts in those services that inflict the _maximum_ pain in the most visible way [1,2,4].

Businesses, of course, do the opposite when facing a budget crisis. They cut as far back as possible while still delivering as many of the things that their customers care about as they can [3].

It always seems silly to me when people worry about private sector pseudo- monopolies when we haven't figured out how to fix the incentives of that singular cartel that currently controls about half of our GDP.

[1] In part they are just living up to the implicit promises they make when asking for the tax hike. The message is never, "we need to raise taxes or else we'll be forced to cut the salaries and benefits of overpaid bureaucrats and work to operate more efficiently." No, it's always, "we need to raise taxes or else the lights will go out, and you _wouldn't_ want that." You wouldn't expect them to let people down?

[2] Another commenter here usefully pointed out that this is an example of the Washington Monument Syndrome:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome>

[3] When I say 'businesses' above, I'm principally referring to the millions of private companies in the US, not the handful of attention-grabbing public firms where management can extract wealth from the shareholders (and the government, in the case of GM and the banks). There is a different set of perverse incentives operating there. An entrenched (government-supported) monopoly could act the same way, as could (to some degree) a politically entrenched department head of a private organization. The bad incentives derive from high switching costs resulting in monopoly economics.

[4] Regarding rigor (questioned below): 1) my claim about what is usual in these circumstances is based on my own personal observations working with local governments; 2) I cited the Wikipedia article for naming of the phenomenon, not for rigorous support of its existence (be your own judge for that), and 3) this is already more rigorous than I intended to be for a simple comment about a common phenomenon that others have observed and noted long before the internet was available for us to debate every ontological question at length.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's as deliberately evil as that. It's probably more along the lines of someone one thinking, "Do I cut my own salary or drop a fire fighter? Hmmm... My house hasn't caught on fire yet!"

<comment><USER4> Or, maybe, it's a move by a number of officials that are as frustrated by the situation as everyone else, and doubly so since nobody else really knows the situation as well as they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The lights out Denver actually sounds like a _better_ Denver -- Bravo! No more wasting water on grass. We are facing a real water crisis in the world. No more redundant street lights to pollute the night sky. My car already has headlights and I'd rather see stars and fewer wasted kilowatts and less pollution in the air..

Insurance protects people against loss due to fire and if you are relying on the fireman to save you, you're not very wise. I've watched homes burn to the ground right along side the fire crews. We've already crossed the line into police state, so reduction there probably will have little effect. If you want to reduce the need for cops, make fewer things illegal. Isn't dope already legal in Denver?

<comment><USER6> I'm with you on the grass (there're movements to use water-saving native American foliage instead of grass, which is suited to a wet England-like climate), and _MAYBE_ with you on the streetlights if they intelligently do it so that pedestrian safety is not impaired.

But not firefighters (but they only cut 3 fighters, so it's probably going to be OK). Fire insurance premiums assume the presence of a firefighters. W/o a good firefighting force, a fire that burns down one house will probably end up burning down 100.

You watched _a_ house burn down but did you notice that none of the _others_ burned down?

<comment><USER7> "Fire insurance premiums assume the presence of firefighters."

Excellent point. I highly encourage any insurers in that area to hire some firefighters to reduce their liability.

<comment><USER5> For some number of home owners _n_ it will be more economical for them to all chip in and buy a fireman or two than to pay the additional premiums that result from the cut.

Capitalism can work here. Taxes don't need to buy firemen.

<comment><USER6> Since you're the one advocating a system different from the status quo, the burden is on you to provide a serious analysis instead of a glib hypothesis.

To use an Internet/cellphone analogy, sometimes is cheaper for the provider to just provide an "unlimited" plan instead of tracking usage. I'm almost certain the current system of universal firefighting coverage evolved from a previous system of privately purchased firefighters.

In other words, I strongly suspect that the 'n' value here is "whole city".

<comment><USER7> No problem, I'm completely cool with any business plan that does not include clauses such as "And in this case, we take all your stuff and lock you in a cage."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is refreshing to see a city being realistic about their budget problems. From what I have read a lot of other American cities seem to just be digging themselves a bigger hole.

<comment><USER9>
        s/a lot of other American cities seem/America seems/

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I lived in CS for two years - nice little town but the industries there are having a hard time. Intel shut down their fab and the 'Garden of the Gods' business complex is full of huge carcases from other business that have left the area.

<comment><USER7> Heh, back in the '80s I worked at that Garden of the Gods biz complex, for Hewlett-Packard.

<comment><USER10> Nice area no? The sky is always so blue there (literally).

<comment><USER7> You got that right. Great hiking too, along the foothills and all the way up Pike's Peak. And speaking of "fourteeners," the Collegiate Range is pretty spectacular too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Flagged

What is it today with these troll bait stories -- there is no interesting discussion about this topic.

Votes decide not to enact tax, government cuts services that effect citizens the most -- this has happened throughout history; it's called the Washington Monument Strategy

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome>

<comment><USER12> that's one of the thinnest wikipedia articles i've ever seen. C'mon, outside of the hysterical NRO articles it has at the bottom, can you show me another example of it "happening throughout history?"

<comment><USER11> Here's a few more uses from google:

"I think it's unfortunate when some use what has often been called the Washington Monument strategy," Mr. Pataki said at a news conference. "When you make a cut, you immediately say you are going to cut the Washington Monument because it is the most visible way to get public attention." [http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/15/nyregion/suny-trustees- pla...](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/15/nyregion/suny-trustees-plan-cuts- under-pataki-s-budget-plan.html)

[http://writteninfo.com/2009/04/fire-department-in-fairfax- co...](http://writteninfo.com/2009/04/fire-department-in-fairfax-county-va- caught-in-corrupt-spending-uses-washington-monument-strategy/)

<http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/24528.html>

[http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/07/15/the-washington- mon...](http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/07/15/the-washington-monument- syndrome-backfires-in-massachusetts/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I lived in Colorado Springs for 6 years. I highly encourage anyone who cares about parks there to put up some money and buy the land from the city.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for a cloud/hosted version of an open source project? - <AUTHOR> Hello fellow HN-ers,
Let me put some context: I'm running a free service, mainly focused to the developers and tech savvy. I want to monetize it, of course, but I already made it open source from day-1, under BSD license, and I don't want people think I'm a dick, also, there are some people already contributed to the project.
I'm thinking of rolling out a paid plan for using cloud version of it, and if people don't feel like they should pay me, they could always host it themselves on their own server.
The paid plan will also contains some exclusive features that will not be available in the open-sourced version.
Do you think this is a reasonable approach, and if you're my user, would you willing to pay for it? <comment><USER2> It sounds like a reasonable approach to me.

I wouldn't personally be willing to pay for it, but that's because I'm allergic to using cloud services, not because of the paying. But I'm clearly in the minority when it comes to cloudy things, so this shouldn't affect your decision-making.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! Yes, there's some large percent of users asking for it, so I think it's might be a good way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you have some sort of user community? A slack or discord or whatever? Just ask your users. The ones who say yes will also be a good set of beta testers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but mainly because I don't want to bring this up to them too early, so I asked here first :D

<comment><USER3> Fair enough -- then I'd recommend contacting the few most active users through DM/private messaging etc.

There really is no substitute for talking 1-1 to potential customers.

Good luck :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MeetUp Spins Off from WeWork - <AUTHOR> https://www.meetup.com//blog/the-next-chapter-of-meetuP <comment><USER2> Well, good luck when we hit a full lock down</comment>


Share HN: Cemetery of ideas - <AUTHOR>

We all have several ideas that we all wanted to build but for some reason we wont do it. Maybe because we have better ideas or more profitable ones.
For example I wanted to create an app that helps you decide what to eat.
whats yours? <comment><USER2> Virtual Currency promoted by Whoopi Goldberg</comment>


Rosetta end-of-mission update - <AUTHOR> http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2016/09091029-rosetta-end-of-mission-update.html <comment><AUTHOR> There is also a study that says complex organic molecules have been discovered on the comet.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19320.html)</comment>


Who picks the music you hear at the mall? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/11/28/165947927/who-picks-the-music-you-hear-at-the-mall <comment><USER2> Ha ha, "at the mall."</comment>


Karma CSS - <AUTHOR> http://karmacss.com <comment><AUTHOR> Release 1.3.3 - 20-Jul-2017

Added 3 new mixin to build buttons.

\- button

\- button-color-variation

\- button-hover

Created sample blog and thumbnail listing page</comment>


Why The Killer Tablet App Is The Browser  - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/03/22/9-reasons-why-the-killer-tablet-app-is-the-browser/?isalt=0

<comment><USER2> The web beat native on PCs - it would be bizarre if the same thing didn't happen on tablets.

My opinion is that apps dominate right now because user input is clumsy. For the web to work, it needs to be easy to type urls. But tablets (so far) are pretty uncomfortable to type on.

<comment><USER3> I think part of the reason the web beat native desktop apps was the notion of the app being "available everywhere". This certainly made web based mail clients the initial killer web apps.

Native mobile apps don't suffer from this as much given people carry the app with them wherever they go. As well as the prevalence of cloud based apps we're seeing native apps for each platform interconnecting.

Certainly the ROI for building a single web app rather than two or three mobiles apps is better, but I believe at the moment the UX is better for multiple native apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> the flip side is, we live in a multi device world. so even though the devices do get carried everywhere, we switch devices now. mo devices, mo problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Part of what makes an app an app is the encapsulated experience with a "desktop" icon to launch it, and the appstore focal point for finding new apps. Before HTML 5 can be a true replacement, somebody needs to create an appstore-like experience for HTML 5 apps.

With Android and WP7 this could be as simple as a HTML5 shell project that wraps a particular HTML5 site so that it looks like an app on the device. Then HTML5 apps can be fed into the frameworks of the existing app stores, including the approval process and "desktop" icon.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure I agree - I put a lot of effort keeping as few desktop icons visible as possible, I like the cleaner interface. On my work desktop, I have one icon - my browser. There are a few other pieces of software I use, but I navigate the menu or hit alt-F2 to find them. When HTML5 becomes ubiquitous, I will probably very rarely use the app store. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I doubt I'm completely alone.

For me, a browser with my most often visited sites (whether they be html5 'apps' or otherwise) and bookmarks on the launch page would be a more natural extension of how I use the device.

<comment><USER4> I was speaking from the perspective of devices, namely phones. The way to launch apps is by clicking a "desktop" icon.

More broadly stated, you need a way to hook into the local environment so that HTML5 sites aren't distinguishable from locally-run/stored apps.

<comment><USER5> That does make sense. What I'm saying is that the way I currently use my desktop is mostly for web based apps which don't have any local hook (other than the browser itself) and that when I can do the same thing on my phone, I will.

For me, the lack of a local hook outside of the browser doesn't detract from the experience or my productivity, and in fact makes it easier to find the local apps that I do have, because I don't have to scroll through all of the hooks to the web apps.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two Special Data Validations - <AUTHOR> https://www.datafix.com.au/BASHing/2019-03-03.html <comment><USER2> By the time I'm thinking about doing complex data validations in BASH, I would hope I'd be thinking about why I havent switched to a more appropriate programming language already.</comment>


OpenTable's New CEO Sees a Shakeout Looming for U.S. Restaurants - ajay-d https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-12/opentable-s-new-ceo-sees-a-shakeout-looming-for-u-s-restaurants <comment><AUTHOR> For many restaurant owners, it may well be cheaper to shut down some locations, file for the entity's bankruptcy liquidation, break its leases and renege on its financial obligations, fire its employees, and let its lenders take over its remaining assets... than to continue personally putting money into the entity month after month after month to fund operating losses.

Many would-be-diners seem to be waiting until there's a proven-safe vaccine and/or until Covid-19's longer-term health consequences are better understood before going back to indoor restaurants (e.g., inside malls, office buildings, etc.) as they did before the pandemic.</comment>