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There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

(workweave.dev)
263 points mooreds | 1 comments | 30 Sep 25 03:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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Cornbilly ◴[30 Sep 25 04:08 UTC] No.45421796[source]▶
When I hire juniors, I try to give them problems that I know they likely won't be able to solve in the interview because I want to see how they think about things. The problem has become that a lot of kids coming out of college have done little more than memorize Leetcode problems and outsourced classwork to AI. I've also seen less and less passion for the career as the years go by (ie. less computer nerds).

Unless the company is doing something that requires almost no special domain knowledge, it's almost inevitable that it's going to take a good while for them to on-board. For us, it usually takes about year to get them to the point that they can contribute without some form of handholding. However, that also mostly holds true for seniors coming to us from other industries.

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rich_sasha ◴[30 Sep 25 04:39 UTC] No.45421943[source]▶
Interesting - I see the appeal of this approach. Equally, I do the opposite - I give easy problems which can be solved quickly. I find people either can do them pretty quickly, or not at all.

I used to ask harder problems, like you, but found two failure modes: either smart people who panic and can't think straight in an interview, or people who can do high level thinking but then can't swap two variables in actual code.

That said, thinking back on my recent hires, I'm not sure this method has yielded any improvements.

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1. Cornbilly ◴[30 Sep 25 13:36 UTC] No.45425276[source]▶
I get where you’re coming from. I’ve have experienced the “smart person who panics”.

I usually tell them upfront that I’m not looking for the correct answer and that I just want to see how they break the problem down. I also try to reiterate that it’s okay to fail (at least at my employer) and that’s the point of having a team.

Usually, that calms them down enough to get the interview going. If they don’t calm down, I’ll try to simplify the problem or give them small ideas.

We’ve also resorted to having a follow up interview with the candidate if we get the sense that they were overly nervous. I have a couple teammates that are very good at getting people to relax and we’ve had a good amount of success with letting them lead the follow up (instead of myself since I know I can come across fairly cold).