This is exactly the type of question that is the worst for interviews. It's a completely uncalibrated, completely subjective, esoteric type of question where you can't say exactly why you liked a candidate or why you didn't like her. There's no data underneath it except for "I liked how the conversation went."
It completely gives an advantage to candidates who know 3D and completely gives a disadvantage to candidates that know nothing about it. Even worse, they are relying on YOU to explain it to them. Who's to say you are sufficiently qualified to teach people the basics of 3D graphics enough such that they can answer your questions? Have you been calibrated or judged on your ability to teach even the basics of 3D graphics? Or are you assuming that you're good enough?
It's completely inappropriate and relying completely on you to determine a candidate's qualifications based on nothing except your feelings. It's a horrible question and I seriously hope this is not entertained at all at your company.
You have some good points, but can you please make your good points without crossing into personal attack? I'm sure you didn't mean to, and I'm sure you have good reason to feel strongly, but what you posted here is already aggressive and a step away from what the HN guidelines call for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://qht.co/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:
I do not believe the hard data you are looking for exist for real.
Interviewing is assessing what value an individual will bring to a project. Ideally we want this assessment to not depend on the interviewer and as a unidimensional real number so it's easy to do comparisons.
But the reality is:
- future performance depends on the team (and more largely on everything else in the business) and that varries unpredictably and is usually not part of the evaluation anyway.
- future performance also depends on how the project itself is going to evolve, which is hard enough to evaluate in itself (not just the timeline but oftentimes the involved technologies)
- assessing the value of anything is its whole can of worms (it's intrinsically subjective, you can't measure a physical "value" in SI units)
I prefer data over opinions like everyone else, but this may be a case where it is eventually safer to rely on as many as possible individual opinions and weight them, with just the amount of process in place to avoid common biases? (friends-of-friends, judging on look, country of origin, gender, ...)
I've seen big companies that takes hiring very seriously rely equaly on some preset metrics (based on prewritten questions thus easily gamed) as well as the gut feeling of several interviewers who are free to ask whatever additional questions, and I think it's the correct approach.
So I'm not a part of this world at all and I'm super fascinated by this perspective. I hear your point entirely. How do you counter the issue with pre-structured interviews where the questions get distributed and you end up with candidates who learn how to answer your exact question (but lack the skills to actually be dynamic in their job, or even do their job)?
I used to interview for a big company, and I could tell some candidates already knew the questions, but I'm a bad interviewer myself as I tend to rate most candidates as 7+/10, I very rarely found coding-illiterate candidates.
When I detected the candidate knew the questions, I'd switch order, introduce new questions I didn't usually ask.
The interview we did was quite extensive on the java basics and if the candidate somehow managed to learn all that stuff by knowing the questions, that was a pretty good sign anyway.
It was just this one time I found a candidate who aced every question I asked, even OOP, Design Patterns, I made up on the spot a code-design challenge, the guy suddenly was not so brilliant, but still managed to hold his own and I didn't penalize him for my impression that he knew the questions, he was way better than the usual candidate anyway.
Perhaps the stakes were not so high as in the USA, but I can say I've never found someone who would have failed without knowing the questions in advance; I did fail people who were trying to cheat on the phone interview, but those were rare cases.
My impression is technical interviews just filter programming-illiterate programmers and people who don't give a f#ck -- as a general rule.
There's also the 30% of cases where the interview is made up to show the candidate he's not really all that senior as he thinks and to lowball his salary request.
And some companies have very high technical interview standards because of some cultural inferiority complex (we are just like Google, you see...).
If I could answer that question, I would be a billionaire already.
Programming interviews are almost exactly akin to actor's auditions. Just because you flunk an audition doesn't mean that you're a bad actor. Also, auditioning takes a special skill and it's not very much like being a real actor. But they still do it to this day. Programming interviews are similar.
The best hiring model I can come up with is the Netflix model. Pay top of the market, hire and fire people quickly if they don't meet expectations, with a generous severance. Have high expectations, reward the ones that can fulfill those expectations, and quickly get rid of those that don't. It's ruthless, but the Netflix engineers I know love working there.
Yeah, I would say a much bigger issue than algorithm questions in interviews are interviewers who assume all programmers follow a particular path (usually the one they followed) and discriminate against those-that-did-not-follow-particular-path.
Computer science is a massive field that people enter through many different and unique ways. If you're trying to gatekeep and force everyone to enter through the same gate that you entered, you should not be an interviewer.
3D graphics is not a good moat, I agree.
There are much better moats -- such as recursion, there's no way I'd let someone in my team if the don't get recursion, even though we almost never use it :)
It completely gives an advantage to candidates who know 3D and completely gives a disadvantage to candidates that know nothing about it. Even worse, they are relying on YOU to explain it to them. Who's to say you are sufficiently qualified to teach people the basics of 3D graphics enough such that they can answer your questions? Have you been calibrated or judged on your ability to teach even the basics of 3D graphics? Or are you assuming that you're good enough?
It's completely inappropriate and relying completely on you to determine a candidate's qualifications based on nothing except your feelings. It's a horrible question and I seriously hope this is not entertained at all at your company.