People suck at technical interviews (2014)

Hiring right now is a shitshow of old wives' tales, cargo-culted practices from big name tech companies, shady recruiters, mismatched incentives, interviewers who have no experience or training in interviewing, gimmicky apps trying to somehow gamify technical interviewing and endless whining back and forth on HN and Medium.

I'm sure a lot of developers who are currently employed are put off applying elsewhere because the whole process has become so demanding and unpleasant and disrespectful.

One company I applied to for example asked to do a take-home test, maybe 2 hours. I did the test, only to be told it was the first stage of a long and gruelling process involving a further 8 hour take-home project (unpaid, of course) followed my several rounds of technical and non-technical interviews. I immediately withdrew my application. When would I have the time to do 8 hours - it was timed for some bizarre reason, so it had to be done in a single block of time - on a project? Maybe for my own projects, sure, but that's my spare time.

Interviewers and recruiters are, after all, being paid to sit there, while interviewees are - unless they're unemployed - taking precious time off to travel, maybe stay overnight in a hotel, sit through hours of gruelling interviews and tests, all for a job that may or may not offer anything much better than what they've already got. And yet the penny hasn't yet dropped that maybe your shitty process is the reason you haven't found anyone yet?

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm convinced that it wasn't this bad 5 or 10 years ago - maybe if you were interviewing at Google or Microsoft, but not if you were applying for a bog standard dev role at a startup or SME.

Me to supposed mechanic: "Can you fix my car?"

Mechanic: "Yes, of course!" - he gets up and collects loads of bits and pieces, metal bars and stuff, then starts to hammer away to create a car part.

Me: "What the hell are you doing?"

Mechanic: "I'm building the part for your car."

Me: "Don't you have a spare or something?"

Mechanic: "Well I don't, but there are spares I could order."

Me: "Then do it man, order one."

Mechanic: "Nah, I like to build everything by myself."

Anyway, using an API doesn't mean you don't have to code.

I was wrong, I learned, next time will be different.

A portfolio isn't something you just have and it does all the work for you. It's a living and evolving thing that is there to show that you can solve problems.

A portfolio says "I encountered X problem and here's what I did about it to make this other thing and therefore solved X problem."

A web dev is a very easy job to create a portfolio for because the product can be your portfolio but when I say 'portfolio' I'm not talking about a GitHub repo of some code you've written, I'm talking about something bigger than that.

I'm talking about having examples of your code, things you've made, perhaps technical writing, perhaps a personal project, perhaps video or other 'evidence' of the programmers work/approach. If that involves making a personal embedded hardware project to show your approach then that's what's needed.

Perhaps another important attitude change needs to be established...

In a creative technical art you are not really selling your 'product' to customers. You are selling yourself. You're selling your ability to solve problems and it's incumbent on the individual to prove their ability. Web devs aren't 'selling' their previously created websites, they're 'selling' their ability to create those past projects.

It's a crucial distinction and programmers would do well to adopt this distinction - they're not 'selling' their GitHub repo for instance, they're using that as an example of how they (their mind?) work to solve problems.

For sure there will be times you work on proprietary/secret stuff or on systems of such scale you can't possibly make an equivalent scale of personal project.

But you can demonstrate your ability and sell yourself, and that's really the key to it all. You have to get to the point in a creative career where you realise you aren't just selling your final product, you're selling yourself, your approach and your way of solving a problem.

Finding a way to do that is how you get the job ahead of someone else.

Wow. I used to know Haseeb during his poker days 8-10 years ago, when he was still playing for dimes/quarters and we were all still using MSN. Can't believe I'm hearing his name again in this context, I had no idea he got into software.

He's probably a bad example to make your point with. Haseeb had some moral failings, but he is truly on another level in terms of intellect/drive/vision, and the interviewers at Airbnb probably didn't have a hard time recognizing that.

I can't stress enough how smart that guy is. He leaves an impression.

> Don't hire for a fancy degree.

There are some companied coming to my college for hiring. The first criteria they put was 70% aggregate marks (60% for some companies).

I have seen people who doesn’t know how to write even a small program getting hired, while people with good programming skills are not even eligible to attend the interview.

Going through 200-300 candidates in an interview might be a tedious job, I am not sure. What other choice do they have?