<satire>

</satire>

</really-end-satire-now>

I want to become a better interviewer myself.

I want to improve the process overall, as it's far from perfect.

I want to help candidates prepare better for their interviews.

Warning: the title of this blog entry is very slightly misleading. It really ought to be called "The Partial (At Best) and In Any Case Utterly Biased So-Called 'Truth' About Certain Restricted Kinds of Technical Interviewing By a Complete Bigoted Snobby Jerk Who Doesn't Know What He's Talking About Becuz PHP r00lZ And You Don't Need To Know Anything Else!!!!"However, that was a wee bit too long, so I shortened it. But consider yourself warned. (And yes, I like the longer title better too!)Anyhoo...An anonymous coward commented on one of my blogs:In regards to the interview chronicles regarding how someone was aweful or saved themselves during job interviews, I'd have to say you're a bit of snob aren't you? Granted the people you plan to hire will be paid substantial amounts of money to do good solid work, I think you're the kind of interviewer who tends to mold the people who work under him into little clones of him. "You must know this for me to consider you a 'true engineer' otherwise, I will boot you out the door." I think it's narrow minded and it's a wonder why more people don't go into the technical fields with the people who are currently populating it. Egoists and snobs even if it is deserved.Well said! Except for the last sentence, which is missing a verb, not to mention any semblance of intelligibility. But other than that, I think we should give this commenter a position as the Editor-In-Chief of the New York Times.As it happens, I'm in the same boat as the commenter. Really.See, I've always thought it would be cool to be an airline pilot. But I went to interview for the position, and those damn snobs wanted me to be a miniature clone of their totally biased idea of an "ideal airline pilot." They expected me to know all this crapola about meteorology and electrical engineering and other stuff that obviously has nothing to do with flying a plane. Plus I had to have all these flight hours logged, I mean you just wouldn't believe the requirements. This was obviously just an "old boys" network trying to keep honest people like me out. I'm surprised anyone gets into that field at all.So then I thought, maybe I should go be a brain surgeon. But they wouldn't even let me apply! They snobbily told me that I had to know a whole bunch more about brains, and surgery, and stuff. I've had high school biology, during which I dissected a frog, plus I'm generally a careful guy. I'm smart, and my hands don't shake much, and I can figure stuff out when I need to. And I was really motivated to do brain surgery. But they didn't consider me "true" brain surgeon material. Of all the nerve! I think those surgical interviewers are just cold-blooded snobs. They don't appreciate my true talents. They just want pathetic little clones of the existing brain surgeons out there.Those hospital and airline directors aren't the only snobs out there, either, I can tell you from personal experience. See, I can juggle five balls pretty well (here's a short video of me doing it ), and yet every time I apply for a position in Cirque du Soleil, I don't even get a reply from them! Talk about snobbery. They don't even write back. What's wrong with my juggling? Nothing! They just want a pretty little clone of Viktor Kee . Granted, they're going to pay their jugglers a lot of money to do good solid work, but I think they're the being fairly narrow-minded by not considering me.Then I wrote a bunch of letters to Hollywood movie studios, offering to be an animal trainer, since I have a Shih Tzu named Cino, and I can get him to sit sometimes. I mean, that took a lot of work! That little dog hardly listens to a word I say. So I feel pretty qualified to be an animal trainer. Sure, I've never worked directly with a bear or a tiger before, but it can't be all that different. You just shout SIT! and then throw them a biscuit when they finally do it, right? Like, a bear-biscuit or a tiger-biscuit instead of a dog biscuit, but other than that it's gonna be the same, I just know it. But those animal-trainer egoists just booted me right out the door.So I pondered it, and I thought: you know, I'm not going to go into a field full of egotistical airline pilots and brain surgeons and circus performers and animal trainers. They're just trying to sculpt little perfectly-moulded clones of themselves. Screw them!I made sure to give them an earful by commenting on all their blogs, anonymously. That'll show 'em! I feel much better for telling them what a bunch of brain animal flying juggling surgery training JERKS they all are. I also left out some verbs, just to throw 'em for a loop. Deserved ego they it even wankers.So yeah, Mr. Commenter. You've got it pegged. Snob city!Before we get started with the real blog entry, let's get this cleared up: managers aren't the only people who interview you. Most interview loops are conducted by engineers who will be working on the same team as you. Nobody works for me, but my company still makes me interview people.So we don't want little clones working for us; we want them working with us.If you want a job at a company like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, or Amazon.com, they're going to have high standards. It doesn't matter if you "know how to program". They're going to test you on algorithmic complexity analysis, advanced data structures, algorithm design, searching and sorting, internationalization techniques, network protocols, OS-level memory management, parsing and semantic analysis, recursion and mathematical induction, graph theory, combinatorics, programming language theory, machine architecture, discrete math and logic, graphics and window systems, fonts and typesetting, color spaces and representations, databases and query languages, filesystems and storage, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile and wireless protocols, and internet standards and technologies.If you're lucky, that is.If you're unlucky, they'll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they'll ask you about the darkest corners of C++ syntax.And you want to know why they'll ask you about that stuff? Because they're using it every day. They've tried hiring people who don't know this stuff. Believe me, they try all the time. They want to hire more programmers, and they're out there on the constant lookout for new meat. But when they lower their standards, they get burned. The 747 crashes, the patient dies, the juggler drops a bowling pin on someone's head, the tiger rips someone's throat out. In the software world: the service goes down for days, losing them millions; the project gets delivered late or even not at all, losing them contracts and customers; they lose the business battle to competitors who hired better engineers.Putting together a pretty Ruby on Rails site is no small feat. Learning to program is no small feat. Many people try and fail to get even that far. But it's 3- to 5-ball juggling, and it just doesn't cut it for the Cirque du Soleils and private hospitals of the software industry. I'm sure you want to be a racecar driver, a hang-gliding instructor, a corporate lawyer, a movie sound editor, a rocket scientist. But you know you don't have the requisite training or experience. Why do you think knowing a little (or even a lot) about programming automatically qualifies you to get hired at Microsoft?Software companies have excruciatingly high standards, just like any other profession. Those that don't get eaten up by those that do.Interviewers can't probe on all the important material in an interview — at least, not the way interviews are conducted in our industry today. So they use sampling. They ask a few breadth questions, to get a feel for how well you know the space we're in, and they ask a few depth questions, to see how well you can think on your feet, apply what you know, and come up with creative solutions to problems similar to the ones they encounter daily.Or so the theory goes. Interviewing is necessarily fairly artificial. I'm not a big fan of the interviewing approach everyone uses, but there's nothing I personally can do about it. So I do my best to evaluate the software equivalents of brain surgeons and rocket scientists by chatting with them for 45 minutes. I have no other choice, nor does any other interviewer out there.Well, that's not entirely true; there is one thing I can do about it: I can talk about it. I'm as open about the process as anyone I know, and I've blogged about it from time to time. I assure you that my interviewing style is not substantively different from the styles of thousands of interviewers at hundreds of high-tech companies.If anything, I'm nicer, because I count motivation (that is, the desire to improve oneself) higher than any other factor in an interview. It's how I've managed to get hired at most of my jobs: my enthusiasm showed through, and was sufficient to cover my inevitable mistakes. So I tend to go a lot easier on candidates who show me they're on an upward curve, as opposed to just coasting.But not all interviewers are nice, and I know lots and lots of interviewers, at many companies, who've decided that they can fully evaluate you based on whether you can solve some particular convex optimization problem (or graph-search problem, or logic problem, or whatever their pet Elephant Question is), and they ask every candidate this question regardless of their background or experience. In fact, I'd estimate that some 10% of all technical interviewers ask the same questions, year after year, and they could care less about your experience.You should consider yourself lucky that I talk about this process at all, because most companies treat their interviewing strategy as some sort of proprietary secret, and it's hard to get information about it, unless you want to go interview at a bunch of places.Hint to companies: you're all doing it the same way. Quit being so frigging secretive about it.The reason I write about it is that I'm very interested in the whole process:However, talking about it openly gets people amazingly upset. Many people seem to suffer from selective hearing in this space.For one thing, people want jobs, and so any hint that someone out there, somewhere, might be asking questions to which they don't know the answers sends them into a spittle-emitting rage. Oddly, they don't seem to mind that they can't get hired as a brain surgeon or an animal trainer. But they think knowing a little programming means they should be a shoo-in for any tech company in the world, and anyone who asks something they don't know is a big mean jerk! (I actually discovered this lovely sentiment after posting recently to the O'Reilly Ruby Blog , so our Anonymous Coward is far from alone in his opinion.)A friendly note to the Spittle People: Not all software development is the same. Think about that for a sec. You may be really good at web development, but that almost certainly doesn't qualify you to work on an OS kernel. Or you may be really good at OS kernels, but that almost certainly doesn't qualify you to be good at web development.Our industry has fragmented, just the way the medical industry has, and there are different job roles now. Unless you understand this, you're going to be upset whenever a technical interviewer talks about something you're unfamiliar with. If so, take a deep breath and relax, because they're not talking about your skill set. They're talking about jugglers or hang gliding or something that sounds like what you do, but it's different. You can always go find an interviewer who will probe you on what you care about.Another group of people who gets upset is other interviewers, because it's very much a stylistic thing. There are no proven techniques in interviewing, and personally I think it's something of a crapshoot. But most interviewers with a reasonable amount of experience seem to think they "have it down", and they think that when I talk about my style, I'm advocating that they change their style. And then they emit plenty of spittle too.Well, wake up, angry people! There are hundreds of companies conducting technical interviews out there. They're doing it for different job roles, including DBAs, sysadmins, web programmers, unix programmers, windows programmers, java programmers, mobile-device programmers, and many other roles besides. For any given job role, they're all doing it about the same. It's not just me. In fact, those interviewers are YOU, once you get the job.So if you think you can't get hired into a job you want, be it a software engineer at Boeing or an airline pilot for American, don't tell me about it. Whining at me isn't going to change the realities of our industry. Just go study whatever it is they want you to know.With all that said, you might wonder whether you want to work at a big software company in the first place. You need to think carefully about your motivations.If you just want to make money, you can almost certainly find a job that's less technically demanding (or that's technically demanding in different ways) than working at companies like Microsoft. To cite just one of many, many possibilities: you can pick up enough PHP and MySQL to design websites, and go find a desperate hospital or insurance company or school system in need of a web presence, and no doubt it'll pay the bills just as well as Microsoft does.If money's all you're after, you certainly don't need a computer science degree. Our industry desperately needs more programmers to crank out application code in C#, Java, PHP, Perl, C++, and other popular languages. If you go learn one or two of those languages, you're probably already a shoo-in for many companies.You should be aware that working at most large tech companies isn't very glamorous, at least not as much as it seems from the outside. For instance, I know a lot of people who love video games, so they assume that game programming must be the most fun kind of programming out there. Then they go get jobs at a huge, mainstream game publisher, only to find that it's actually a bunch of tedious, schedule-driven work, just like the work at all other software companies.The reality is, delivering good software just keeps getting harder, as customer expectations go up. That's why companies have to be so selective when they're interviewing. Big companies have serious challenges that aren't encountered by smaller companies, including the combinatorial communication (and dependencies) explosion, the need to maintain large legacy code bases, the problems of culture change as the company grows, and the need to find entirely new revenue streams in the face of pressure from Wall Street.So most big companies are looking for a combination of skills: they need a mix of junior-ish people to help keep the business alive, and senior-ish people to try to help hoist them out of the holes they've dug for themselves internally by growing too fast.Neither of those sounds very glamorous, does it? In practice, a startup is much more glamorous. You move faster; you're working on a leading-edge idea; you're burning as fast as you can to keep ahead of your competitors and your investor-imposed schedules. You can get brilliant things working, and worry about scaling them and maturing them later. All the fun part is in the startup days.The trade-off is that you take on a great deal more risk. With a big company, you've got stability, and there's something to be said for that. A few failed startups can make just about anyone pretty risk-averse, at least for a while.So you have to decide what you want. But like it or not, if you want to work as a software engineer for a big, top-tier, famous tech company, they're going to interview the living hell out of you. Even if you're really good, there's a chance you won't make it in the door.You do have a certain amount of control over the situation, and this control is NOT something you exercise by commenting angrily on my blogs.How do you participate in change? Well, first do some research. It's pretty easy to figure out what a company is interviewing for, and what the interviewers are going to be like. Just read the job descriptions on their website. They're usually pretty up-front, saying things like "B.S. in computer science, or equivalent", or they'll tell you exactly which tools and technologies they expect you to have mastered. If you're considering a particular company, then before you interview you should ask your recruiting contact there what kinds of questions to expect from the interview process.If a company's going to ask you questions that you don't think matter, then don't work there! If you're right, then they'll go out of business, eventually. Or at least you can go throw your weight behind a company that you think has priorities aligned with your own. Vote with your feet!Once you've actually started working somewhere, you'll eventually have to do interviews of your own. If you don't like their interviewing process, make a stink about it, and maybe they'll listen. Companies don't want false positives or false negatives any more than you do. If you have a great idea for improving the process, let them know. There are all kinds of minor variations you can try. Or maybe you can all agree to experiment with an entirely new process, and see how the resulting hires measure up.Well, go ahead and comment; that's why I've opened this blog up for anonymous comments. So far, anyway. But blog comments don't actually carry much weight.If you really want to make a difference, and start changing peoples' minds, go set up your own blog, and express your well-considered opinions there. It's free, and it's easy, and we ALL have access to self-publishing now. If you want to set up an alternate school of interviewing thought, well, I'm quite happy to read what you have to say. Seems like almost anything would be better than the mess we have with interviewing today.The truth about interviewing is that everyone does it their own way, and it's always about the same: people interview for what they know. Nobody's very good at interviewing for skills they don't know, so the tendency to produce clones is actually quite widespread — the commenter had at least that much right. The best most of us can do is at least try to hire high-quality, generalist clones who pose the least risk of tiger throat-ripping software outages if they're hired.But please: if you don't know something, don't go bersek on us. Just go read about it on Wikipedia. It's not as hard as you think!