Earlier quoted context omitted.
MUMPS?
Very close, yes. And yes to the parent comment. ;)
So it was Perl?
A hiring test I'd like to run
141–150 of 203 posts
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#142I interviewed at Twilio. My resume and phone chats made it abundantly clear that my professional experience was 95% backend in languages like Java and Go. I looked at their Glassdoor where people wrote they were heavily biased to the algorithm type questions, for better or worse. In reality I was given only a single coding interview my whole onsite, and it was to build a JavaScript SPA, including routing/linking, wit…
I don't do much hiring, but when I do I make an active effort to avoid reading candidates resumes. I've found it's not possible for me to enter an interview with an unbiased mind having read a resume.
I don’t get it. Isn’t that the entire point of resumes?
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't do much hiring, but when I do I make an active effort to avoid reading candidates resumes. I've found it's not possible for me to enter an interview with an unbiased mind having read a resume.
This feels weird to me. If you have advertised a job and I've given you my resume, it is to give you some information you can use to avoid wasting your time and my time. Just like I would hope your advertisement is accurate and useful enough to let me decide if it is a good use of time for me to send you a resume (e.g., saw an ad for "react developer" -- got to the interview and they were looking for a "server side j…
> It feels like the path that leads to you asking a Java/Go programmer to do a Javascript coding challenge in 50 minutes, which is a waste of everyone's time.
Depends, we always give someone a super small coding challenge (literally write 4 lines if you know how to, and the longest I’ve seen is something like 15), and any decent Java/Go dev could do that even if they had to learn JS on the spot (probably not necessary, but...).
But yeah, I agree with your main point. Not reading a resume is rude.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it sounds like you're not a very good person to be interviewing candidates We agree on that one, but the alternatives are worse. Would you like to take my place interviewing? It's a time consuming task I'd love to delegate to someone more experienced.
I would honestly love to take a job that was 100% focused on interviewing and hiring technical people. I have been through so many bad interviews (on both sides of the desk) that I think it really should be a dedicated position staffed by people who actually understand the major defects in the industry.
I hate interviewing (on both sides of the table), but I’d much rather do it than have someone else do it because I hope I can make it marginally less harrowing for the candidates.
I guess I’m a terrible interviewer, but so far the candidates we hired have worked out.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#145Haha, that's funny, and an awful idea. At a previous employer, as a hiring manager, I offered candidates an option of bringing in their fully-configured IDE in their own laptop with the language of their choice and I'd give them the problem to solve. Essentially, act in the environment that you've already mastered.
Only one guy did (I had maybe 10 a month) and for some inexplicable reason he couldn't figure out how to create his `main` equivalent in his language in his IDE. He must have been incredibly nervous because we tried "perhaps you could sketch out your thoughts in broad strokes and then we can return to the IDE" etc.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#146I just got interested in the way the school 42 works. Especially the month-long "test" that they have to accept tuition free students.
The idea is to make you complete a lot of programming projects in languages and tools you normally don't know at all. When you start. The evaluation does not only take into account if you finished project but also if you helped others, knew how to look for help (basically: google or other students). Its goal is to select students who would work well in a peer-learning project-based-learning paradigm. This, in my opinion, is much closer to real-life conditions than any academic test.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#147I'm a mechanical engineer by training and still occasionally do some entry level hiring in it. My favorite question in recent years has been posing an advanced project - not unreasonably difficult, but one I know they won't have covered in school. Make it clear I don't expect them to have the answer, but have them talk through their approach to this project with me. "How would you get started?" "What would you need t…
I'm an electrical engineer, and I have a similar question that I ask my entry level candidates - "How would you measure the voltage coming out of a wall socket?"
It's familiar enough to be accessible, but technically just far enough out of their reach that they don't know exactly how to do it. We talk about approaches, tools they could use, some potential problems or issues they'd need to overcome.
If they get flustered about where to start, I laugh, and say "Don't worry - I don't know the right answer. I'm actually afraid of AC mains electricity." Never fails to calm them down, because, well, it's kind of funny to hear an electrical engineer admit that they're afraid of electricity!
It's a question that I've gotten a lot of mileage on.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#148There must be a serious dearth of candidates in my area, because the last time I was subjected to a time-constrained test was almost three years ago, and it was a Codility challenge, so I had some time to prepare for it.
I quit my job recently, and in order to find another I went full-auto with the applications - I've sent close to thirty of them I think, so a long series of recruitment processes followed.
They were all mostly the same - I either received some homework to do or had a 1-2h technical interview during which I was asked a set of questions which were easy for the most part. And that was it.
My point being: I've discovered that I can't really relate to the stories other people posted in this thread. Does this mean I wasn't ambitious enough regarding my applications, or are the others subjected to a difficult job market? Maybe both? Or none? I really don't know.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#149At my previous company, the technical interview was 2 hours long. The candidate was given a choice of about 10 very small, simple projects. Then we sat at a pairing station and paired on the problem. The candidate can use google, their favorite editor, write tests, anything they want. The goal is not to finish the project, but just code with them for 2 hours. It's the best technical assessment I've yet seen in an int…
I did an interview once at a company that is religious about pair programming. I found the exercise unsettling: would they evaluate technical ability or culture fit more? If they were focusing on the former, I should take the wheel and try to demonstrate my chops (perhaps making me appear arrogant); if the latter, I should try to demonstrate how I can collaborate with the other developer to make both of us better (pe…
> would they evaluate technical ability or culture fit more?
Why not ask them that? "What are the roles in this roleplaying game? Am I a driver and you are evaluating me? Are you a client? Are we colleagues?" Or even more directly what you asked: "Are you evaluating technical ability or culture fit more? "
I don't think there would be a point in keeping that a secret.
Re: A hiring test I'd like to run
#150We do this at retriever.co for our virtual assistants, in two areas:
1. we have applicants do a data transform with an esoteric excel function that they've /almost surely/ never used, and prompt them to find videos / tutorials on how to use it if they don't know (which, we assume, they wont)
2. we have people answer fake customer support tickets that require them to do some on-the-job learning about the Internet Service Provider industry -- to a level of detail that requires that they read through and grok a page on wikipedia explaining up-time calculation.
While neither of these pieces of knowledge are necessary for their day-to-day at Retriever, they allow us to stratify candidates' ability to learn new skills and grok new information.
100% would recommend!