With all due respect for Max Howell, his response is a defense mechanism. "invert a binary tree" is an ill defined question (maybe he was joking, I don't know), perhaps he didn't even understand what he was asked and didn't bother inquiring. He was not told WHY he wasn't accepted - it might have been for displaying a "rock star better than though" attitude which some places reward but Google does not.
I do not disqualify people who cannot reverse a list (as long as they demonstrate critical thinking skills and reasonable capability). I do disqualify people who get up in arms like Howell did, and I dare say this tweet does show Howell to be a bad match for many teams, regardless of his technical skills; He is likely not a competent team player. (As much as can be inferred from the tweetstorm that happened 2 years ago, and as much as I can remember it).
Howell's actual competence or the particulars of his interview are out of our scope. His tweet could have been a petulant defense mechanism or it could have been eminently justified; we have no way of knowing. (And if we're paying him due respect, let's leave out speculation about rock-star attitudes or his competence as a team player entirely please.)
All I'm talking about is the predictive power of the "please rejigger this data structure" interview question, and how much faith people place in it. I mean, if someone looks at the Howell thing and says, "well, any interview can have false negatives, but questions like this are still good predictors of competence", I'd certainly have no argument with that.
But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built". When someone says that, they're implicitly claiming that "passed an interview question" is a better predictor of programmer competence than "built and maintained one of the world's more popular developer tools". Doesn't that strike you as a pretty extreme amount of faith to put in an interview question?
> But a lot of people looked at it and said, "Nope, if he failed a question like that then he's not a competent programmer, regardless of what he's built".
The responses I remember (memory bias possible) were along the lines of "well, he might have built that but is not a good match for google if he failed a question like that".
I have actually calibrated my interview in the past on friends, colleagues, employees and students, and I know that it has predictive power for the kind of work I do (which does NOT include, e.g. CRUD or the simple if-then-query logic which is often referred to as "business logic").
With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out, but will say that the attitude he displayed on twitter would disqualify him from a lot of places, regardless of his technical merits. (And as for the real reason he was disqualified - it was pure speculation on his side).
The response that stuck in my memory was from Jonathan Blow (whom I greatly admire, apart from the following), and amounted to "then you're not a very good programmer".
Personally, I strongly suspect that the predictive power of interview questions depends ~90% on the knowledge and experience of the interviewer, and the specific questions aren't that important. I reckon the disconnect here is that you and JBlow are judging things as the guy had failed the interview question as you would have administered it. And it's possible that that's roughly the case, but it's also possible that he failed the interview as administered by a bad interviewer - who, say, cut him off after the first trivial error rather than suggesting he check his answer for bugs, or whatever.
As such, I take no issue with data structure questions per se, I just find it hard to buy this idea that they're massively predictive - compared to, say, having shipped lots of good code for a long time.
> With respect to Max Howell - I will, indeed, leave speculation out..
This would read better if it wasn't followed by speculating where the guy's qualified to work (based on memories of a tweet from three years ago!) and then speculating what he does and doesn't know about an interview he was in.
> This would read better if it wasn't followed by speculating where the guy's qualified to work (based on memories of a tweet from three years ago!) and then speculating what he does and doesn't know about an interview he was in.
The process at Google (of which I'm not intimately familiar with, I admit, but I have read a lot about) is such that if you are rejected, you are very rarely told why (I know of one case in about 30, and it was an offer that was rescinded based on some bureaucratic reasons). It might have been the reason, for sure; but it is extremely unlikely that this is what he was told, thus I infer speculation on his side. By accounts from Googlers I know (and some who commented on those threads at the time), it should be considered truism, not speculation, that he was not told the reason.
Also, I'm not speculating about where the guy is qualified to work. I was referring to several places I know for sure (some high profile, mostly in finance) where such a rant on Twitter is enough to disqualify you (and get you fired if you're already employed). I don't know Yelp specifically, but it seems like one of those places[0]
> It might have been the reason, for sure; but it is extremely unlikely that this is what he was told, thus I infer speculation on his side.
Nobody's suggesting HR sent him a letter - presumably he formed his conclusion based on what was said in the interviews. It may be that he did so unreasonably, as a defense mechanism, and it may be that whatever was said left little doubt why he wouldn't be getting an offer. All we know is that he felt there was enough information to form a conclusion, and the principle of charity compels us to assume that such may be the case.
Honestly, I'm not trying to pick an argument or anything here. I just think your confidence judging this guy's character and hirability and so on is way out of whack considering that it's based on a three year-old recollection of a tweet.
I do not disqualify people who cannot reverse a list (as long as they demonstrate critical thinking skills and reasonable capability). I do disqualify people who get up in arms like Howell did, and I dare say this tweet does show Howell to be a bad match for many teams, regardless of his technical skills; He is likely not a competent team player. (As much as can be inferred from the tweetstorm that happened 2 years ago, and as much as I can remember it).