this article is awful. it cites a single bad coding interview as a problem with all coding interviews. as someone who gives tons of code interviews, they are absolutely invaluable, and are a strong indicator in weeding out people who can't write code. you can't blame bad interviewers for the entire process not working.
Destroy all hiring processes
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#12As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
This is pretty rough on any interviewee who already has a job as they'd have to take holiday days to interview.
Do you give them a week off in lieu if they get the job?
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tend, consciously or not, to recruit most heavily from among people like themselves (for lots of reasons which aren't necessarily bad: a lot of referrals are based on knowing someone, for example, and a lot of peoples' social circles/contacts tend to be pretty homogeneous to begin with). In other words, even on the easiest default approach (recruiting from people similar to ourselves), we suck. God help us as…
IMHO you are subconsciously profiling if that is what you're doing in your hiring i.e., making assumptions about people's skills/talent based on any of those attributes.
That's exactly what you are doing, and there is copious data out there to say that we all do it. The generally accepted term is "unconscious bias."
I saw a summary of a study recently in which people were asked to rate top character indicators of success for male and female candidates for a job, things like "aggressive," "nurturing," "outspoken," "mediator." Not surprisingly, the adjective sets for male and female candidates were substantially different.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#14As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
But how do you handle the case that candidates already have a job somewhere else? They can't take a whole week off for this.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#15As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
How would you handle the currently-employed with a such a setup? Having to either give notice or use up a week's worth of vacation days just for an extended interview at a single company sounds like a real horror show from the interviewee end.
Contract-to-hire at least gives you a couple months of fairly sure income.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#16I'm working on open source stuff for two years now. Everything I do is public for everyone to see. Including my responses to bug reports and design documents.
Yet I get the same algo/ds puzzle questions that you should've solved before in order to solve it in an interview setup. Google reached to me and said based on my profile I can skip the phone interview but I'm so afraid of the interview that I postponed it multiple times.
I'm fine with algorithm questions only if I'm solving it in the same setup as my actual work where I have access to internet and can write some quick programs to test my ideas. I was good at solving pretty much any problem I had in my actual work. Even if I had to read a paper on the topic or learn about a new concept from ground up.
Google asks questions like pots of gold[1] where it's really impossible to solve it on a whiteboard if it's your first time seeing the problem.
I'm on hiring side of equation also. I get it, it's really hard to judge people. Even when the candidate have a GitHub page. I got a candidate from Hack Reactor where he had tons of contributions. But when I looked closely at those contributions they were mostly fake. Some other candidate had exactly same codebase in their GitHub.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#17[deleted]
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#18this article is awful. it cites a single bad coding interview as a problem with all coding interviews. as someone who gives tons of code interviews, they are absolutely invaluable, and are a strong indicator in weeding out people who can't write code. you can't blame bad interviewers for the entire process not working.
I have, in the recent past, done multiple coding interviews. Thus far none of them have been useful to me, and none of them have provided information the interviewers couldn't have gotten already from my GitHub contributions. The single personal anecdote was meant to reinforce my points: from that interviewer's perspective there's a good chance that I'll be one of those "people who can't write code" who forms the basis of later stories about how great it is to use coding interviews as a filter.
Meanwhile, I do go into some detail about the issues with coding interviews in general, and the way they can affect and accidentally weed out candidates a company probably didn't want to weed out that way.
Also, the "nobody can really code, you have to do this to filter them" thing is approaching cargo-cult status at this point. Further up in the section on education I touched on some reasons why I think those situations happen.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tend, consciously or not, to recruit most heavily from among people like themselves (for lots of reasons which aren't necessarily bad: a lot of referrals are based on knowing someone, for example, and a lot of peoples' social circles/contacts tend to be pretty homogeneous to begin with). In other words, even on the easiest default approach (recruiting from people similar to ourselves), we suck. God help us as…
IMHO you are subconsciously profiling if that is what you're doing in your hiring i.e., making assumptions about people's skills/talent based on any of those attributes.
Re: Destroy all hiring processes
#20It's funny, I've tried tons of different approaches to solving this problem and the only thing I now do is spend about 30 minutes with someone then decide to hire or not (usually I'm able to express this on the spot to whomever I'm interviewing). For better or worse, my instincts about who is smart, honest and kind seem at least as good (and often better) than any other approach we've tried.