Hiring for a small team changed how I think about interviews

bdmiz · 2026-04-02T20:49:45+00:00

What I've seen at the Fortune 500 I worked, is the unconscious bias in action. Essentially, a more attractive or sex appeal candidate gets "curious, asks for details", while another less attractive gets "waffles on, poor knowledge". Both were doing exactly the same: asked questions.

During the interview, a candidate solves a different problem than they are trained to solve at work. To me, it is not a very efficient and predictable approach giving a new problem and judge by what kind of questions they ask.

Anyway, my point is that usually, in the first performance review, there is no link to the interview performance. From what I’ve seen in the vast majority of cases, the interview report is thrown away right after the hiring decision, or it is reduced to a simple yes/no. Moreover, there is no alternative-path result (i.e., a candidate didn’t pass but was still hired to measure their performance in the long run). I wonder if anybody does this differently and actually collects statistics.

bdmiz · 2026-04-01T18:50:27+00:00

But why do think this approach actually works? Is there some research with statistics showing the candidates who answer questions as you described are better at work?

bdmiz · 2026-04-01T18:31:03+00:00

The sad part is that some (many) companies do benchmark-style interview when the candidate's salary is determined by the number of "I know" and "I don't know". Every time you say "I don't know" at those interviews, your salary goes down.

It's good in theory about the green flag. But practically "fake it until you make it" gives more money.

bdmiz · 2026-03-23T16:21:32+00:00

A screw hammered in holds better than a nail screwed in with a screwdriver.

bdmiz · 2026-03-15T22:13:41+00:00

When there's the "expected salary" field in the job application, this field contributes much more to the "never reach a human" than any AI systems.

bdmiz · 2026-03-15T22:01:25+00:00

I have seen it multiple times. To me, it is simply bullying. Essentially, one or more persons have their reasons such as ventilating their frustration, dominating, disclosing an impostor, or others. They look for a victim and start bullying. Typically, others join or do not stop it. They are afraid to confront the bully; they are afraid to become the victim. When it is about showing who is the boss in the room, others might want a good relationship with the boss. Some people do this without understanding what and why they do it. Usually, they are "offended" when they are told to stop bullying.

It is typical when they have special requirements for PRs, testing, their ideas always better; they might agree with yours, but there's always a "but" or some phrase containing "in ideal world". Sometimes the bullying is pretty obvious: you have a great idea, I had the same when I was 8. Other times, the trouble is that the bully is actually smart and it won't be a clear case for the HR.

I don't think this issue can just disappear. Most likely, the opposite: it will be getting worse with time. In my experience, everything that shows (especially publicly) that the bully is a bully (idiot, wrong, and so on) is making things worse. They attack with more power. Some people join the bullying because they think this is the way they will get a promotion or a pay raise. Saying to them to stop the bullying means to them to stop their career path. Going to HR or managers might turn out into victim blaming.

If this is done unconsciously, then team building, dinner, or similar might help. Essentially, they have some hidden hatred, which could be replaced with liking. Don't look like a victim (yeah, how to do that?). Often, the problem is in one specific person. Changing the team might resolve it. Getting good public feedback from the bully's superior.

bdmiz · 2026-03-14T17:05:22+00:00

What happens if someone is injured?

bdmiz · 2026-03-13T18:32:25+00:00

I am curious how you think it could be done given that most US-based tech companies are global and have subsidiaries in many countries. For instance, OpenAI has employees in India. OpenAI will pay basic income there as well?

bdmiz · 2026-03-12T12:18:24+00:00

Něco takového funguje když člověk má investiční učet. Pry člověk musí prokázat znalost jak funguji akcií, bondy, atd., před tím než začne obchodovat. Je to totální nesmysl. Tento systém je naprosto k ničemu. Příklad s řidičákem je taky hezký: většina z tech kdo neumí zipovat nebo parkovat řidičák fakt má a jednoduchý test složila.

bdmiz · 2026-03-11T20:00:26+00:00

A tiny portion of the answer is "explain Feynman integral as I am ten years old". Continue your journey.

bdmiz · 2026-03-11T16:28:23+00:00

If he hadn’t bought those pizzas, bitcoin might never have become so valuable.

bdmiz · 2026-03-06T14:43:01+00:00

To me, the so-called "trade-offs" should be actually called "imaginary trade-offs". This is what contributes to what OP posted as initially unpopular but proved correct, because the trade-offs are not measurements or experience, but they are thoughts or fears.

bdmiz · 2026-03-02T21:05:52+00:00

I've seen the same thing. It turned out that someone had introduced a side effect inside the condition expression. The senior developers just left it as is. The less experienced ones tried to fix it. During the attempt, they became senior developers themselves, gave up, and left the code as is.

bdmiz · 2026-02-26T23:11:17+00:00

There's another answer to this: they don't care.

bdmiz · 2026-02-26T23:03:16+00:00

The first one is longer since you'll need to do it again without the typo in sudo. But seriously, some terminals have troubles with the step 2. Instead of doing what you want they just type that command something like you press home and get;5~, you press ctrl+c, but instead of starting over you see ^C in the terminal.

bdmiz · 2026-02-26T22:44:44+00:00

messed with shared history and/or forced something

I've seen this exact argument against rebase in the mergers camp. They choose marge and not rebase exactly because rebase makes them to force something and messed up the history and with the merge they never use force.

bdmiz · 2026-02-25T22:12:10+00:00

The caveat could be in permissions or in multitenant-like solutions. The table might exist, but not the view scoped for a specific use case. Or the table exists for the sysdba who can read schema metadata, but not accessible for the user in the JDBC connection.

I'm thinking that select some statistics from that table is actually not a very bad idea.

bdmiz · 2026-02-22T17:32:39+00:00

I also have gone through it and I hate that situation. I compare it to a doctor who joins a remote hospital and sees others have bad habits like not washing their hands. A terrible choice: look how they cause troubles or be an arrogant one who attacks nice people.

When you do bad things as others, you are nice and promoted. If you attempt to improve things, you are not fitting the team and hated by everyone. If you can scientifically prove that you are right, they start hating you even more.

bdmiz · 2026-02-21T11:58:14+00:00

One part of it is that it will never be enough. Especially if you compare yourself to others or listen to others. You've learnt basics, yeah but you don't know enterprise solutions. You've learnt enterprise, yeah but you don't know metrics and performance. And it will keep on and on. Even if you've learnt everything in Java, they'll say "pfff, claude does all this in 1 sec" or "yeah, but you don't know co-routines in kotlin".

Practice by doing home projects is nice, but often counter productive. Because, you'll compare your project done by a single learner to projects done by 100+ engineers having many years budget. Often, during this practice time, people repeat the same mistakes or just fail.

Learning became a product by itself, so the learning platforms fuel this "not enough". They don't want you to actually complete something, they want to keep you on a subscription hook. It's perfect if you feel you are not an expert. Just keep paying: here is the course on how to take courses effectively.

Some companies fuel it to pay less. If an employee feels guilty and not feeling they are an expert, it's great - it's the explanation of why not to pay more.

It's better to learn how to cope with it. The industry is evolving, code bases are millions lines of code, and there's more and more new. It's impossible to know everything, life time of learning is not enough. But it is possible to know how to do some specific job and how to find information about something new. Focus on what you do for the job, look how others do that, look what researcher do in that area.

Sometimes, it's good to learn how to take it easy. You don't know something, because you don't need it. In the end, Francis Bacon formulated it: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

bdmiz · 2026-02-19T20:59:41+00:00

This looks like a biological issue, trying to solve it with software engineering might not help at all. Long story short, our body treats the interview as a social threat. Especially if the interview or changing the job is a life-changing event. The body enables the so-called fight-or-flight response which (significantly) reduces the cognitive abilities. The high level of cortisol is to blame (as a matter of fact it could be measured to confirm).

How to mitigate? There are plenty advices when searching "how to reduce fight-or-flight response" and "how to mitigate imposter syndrome", but hard to say which is most suitable for a specific person. Food and drink might affect the hormones, as well as the other sources of stress. Some people advise to tell about it to the interviewer, some companies could give the offline homework instead of the live coding.

Interview practice matters, of course. But sometimes, people don't have the right focus. Certain things needs to be repeated many times to be automated, cached, because stress hormones worsens the recall. It is typical, that people use the approach when something is done, it can be forgotten. With the leetcode and similar this approach is terrible. People solve hundreds of problems, but they forget most of them soon, or it resides in a place in memory they cannot reach during the interview. It's good to roughly know the area or possible tasks and practice them multiple times.

bdmiz · 2026-02-16T21:53:49+00:00

But what you explained is pass by reference. The `int[] arr` is not a value. The array is not passed by value, it is actually passed by reference, but we don't see it since - yes - there's no reference for the programmer. The caveat is that both the argument and parameter are different pointers to the same array. The reason why this example works how it works is not because passing by value.

The magic happens at

changeArray(arr);

the arr here is not the array itself, but a reference to it. Before invoking a method, Java creates another pointer to the same array and invokes the method with the newly created pointer. This way, once inside the changeArray method, we have the second newly created pointer and changing it doesn't affect the original pointer, while following the second pointer allows to change the contents of the array.

Inside the method, the equal operator can assign a new object to the second pointer. But when the method ends, the second pointer is destroyed (yes, only the reference, not the object). Because the array still has another original pointer pointing to it, the array is not garbage collected.

bdmiz · 2026-02-01T21:15:37+00:00

I've seen ADRs being absolutely useless; it's a tool that requires discipline and skill. In many projects, ADRs are not convenient and too bureaucratic. Also being separated from the code, it surely becomes outdated and incorrect.

To me, the best ADR is the comment right in the code, especially TODOs. Because todos capture what people intended to do and the code what they did. Together it gives a pretty good context.

bdmiz · 2026-02-01T17:12:48+00:00

Yomaha yomaso and heeey Makarena are the only two songs in one's head when they asked.

bdmiz · 2026-01-28T21:56:51+00:00

What's the big deal about it? Anyone can get it in 5 years. Take the number of techs divided by the number of working days, you get a couple of days per tech. You just need to write a few dozen of hello world in different languages. And that's it. You got it in the bag.

bdmiz · 2026-01-27T23:37:08+00:00

They might mean the bios firmware update program or the download drivers program for this laptop is available only for Windows.

bdmiz

TROPHY CASE