The fREW Schmidt Interview Experience

I keep reading tweets about how interviews should be done, almost entirely from the job seeker point of view. Having done (by my coarse count in google calendar) nearly ninety interviews at ZipRecruiter, I think that I can speak from a bit more experience than most about the interview process. I am not going to expose all of the gory details of the ZipRecruiter interview process, just how I (and my interview partner) administer it.

The first technical question we ask is almost FizzBuzz level of simplicity, but it adds a tiny bit extra (some object-orientation, some testing,) and what I like best: you use a real laptop. There are a couple major reasons Ryan and I decided to switch from whiteboard, to optional laptop, to required laptop. First off there were enough times that handwriting got in the way that I got sick of having to give people a pass because of that. I want to know if you will confuse a { with ( in real life. Second, I want to see how the candidate struggles with whatever compiler they have chosen. Fighting wth the computer is almost all we ever do as engineers and seeing how a candidate handles the error messages is worth so much. That brings us directly to the second technical question.

I came up with this question after a conversation with my wife and brother, while driving from Ocean Springs to the New Orleans airport and am very pleased with it. I took a real-life confusing bug and distilled it down to a simple Perl web application.

We show the candidate the bug in the application and ask them to figure out the cause, the fix, and dive a little deeper if they complete it before time runs out. Unlike the coding question above, this one requires a lot more experience running because the candidate spread is so different.

I am super enamored with this question, but I did come up with it myself. At some point I’d like to write a system administrator version that has some weird live configuration or forkbomb situation.

Note again that this uses a real laptop. While doing the classic “dungeon master” style of interview for this works, I personally really enjoy seeing the candidate directly interface with the computer.

🔗 Basic Inversion

The one other thing that we try to do is allow the candidate to ask us questions at the beginning of the interview. Normally this is reserved for the end, but the nature of the questions above tend to make candidates nervous so we try to put them at ease by putting them in the driver’s seat for a bit. I don’t think it works very well.

🔗 Whiteboarding and Tradeoffs

The above probably sounds amazing to most job seekers. I see so much on twitter railing against whiteboarding and algorithms and weird puzzles. The problem is that the above interview process is a huge hassle. You have to make sure that the laptop can somehow connect to a shared screen for interviewers to see; you have to ensure that the language compiler, runtime, and at least a few common editors are installed. We allow candidates to use whatever language they want for the first question so we have the tooling installed for all kinds of popular languages on the laptop. It’s a good thing we live in the future, because getting C# support on an OSX laptop would have been much harder just a few years ago.

On top of the above, even though job seekers will almost universally say they prefer coding on a laptop to a whiteboard, job seekers underestimate how much they will be thrown by being given a laptop that is not exactly what they are used to (operating system, keyboard, etc.) This is not a major hurdle but it’s another issue that whiteboarding skips entirely.

One other, much harder interview style I’ve seen done, which most engineers (myself included) are not well equipped to run, is an “expanding dungeon.” The idea is that you let them design a system on the whiteboard or whatever, and then dig in asking questions about parts of the system to get a more holistic view of what the candidate knows. This works great if your interview is basically taking an already vetted candidate and finding out which team they should be a part of, but the interviewer needs pretty good experience to be able to run it, and it ends up being pretty silly with junior candidates.

Ultimately interviewing is really hard. People love to say: “just let me do what I’d do at work!” If the candidate is just graduating from college or university that’s almost surely impossible, as they won’t know Perl, and even if they are a more senior candidate they likely will not know most of our stack. As with all things in software engineering (and maybe all of life) it is a question of tradeoffs.

Every interview question you ask is going to be somewhat irrelevant to the job or somehow ill-suited to the job seeker being interviewed. As far as I know there is no magic way around this. You just have to decide what matters to you in a candidate and try your best to measure that.

Posted Mon, Feb 27, 2017

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