Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing.

Just looking at this guy's repo and his writing style -- you'd be foolish to waste his time or yours on leetcode-style hazing. Your conversation should be strictly high-level. If you must, pick a file at random from one his larger projects, and ask a few straightforward quetions ("I'm new to Go - can you explain why I would use this datastructure here?") just to make sure the repo isn't a copy of someone else's, and he isn't outright trolling you. Apologizing as you're doing so, of course ("Sorry, but do you mind if I ask a silly-sounding question or two about something in your repo?").

That's all you need to do. Most candidates won't have work samples that are quite as slam-dunk, of course. But still, your own "smell test" can save you tons and tons of time (and the candidate, agony). It's really, really hard to fake one's way through questions like these -- and really easy to tell if someone is trying to do so.

Put another way, your basic mindset should be: "Trust, but verify". Not: "Joel Spolsky wrote that post 20 years ago claiming that 99.5 percent of all candidates are utterly incompetent. Therefore I need to torture this guy until he confesses."

At least as far as answering the "can he/she code?" question is concerned.

I have 15 years of experience, and seem to woo teams every time we do screening calls.

Could be how he describes the problem. Most of the time during code screens they don't want you to perfectly solve it. Talk it out. Someone who feels that perfect or bust is the only way to go will fail most of the time. Idk feels like something is missing. He's right, feedback loops suck.

Question is... Can he practice doing a phone screening with a friend? Does he know anyone who interviews? Does his current job allow him to interview or sit in some? Just being part of it can give great interview experience.

Around 10 years of experience is when I learned a ton of interview skills. Interviewing is indeed a skill in itself.

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well.

Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo and he floundered the entire time). One of my coworkers took some pot shots at the candidate, being deeply critical and rude, cutting the candidate off mid-sentence, etc. I was honestly embarrassed to be on the call and I thought it reflected poorly on my company. I’d never seen my coworker act like this before and it changed the way I felt about him.

I wonder how much of the leetcode interviewing culture is rooted in this desire to dominate candidates, since ICs rarely have opportunities to wield such power over others.

I have 25 years of experience and I spent a year looking for a job, getting rejected after complex, time-wasting tests and endless voice interviews that went nowhere. At one point I had to take a cognitive test which I actually failed.

I eventually found something but it was really discouraging there for a long time.

How do you feel about collaborative problem solving? A big reason talking-it-out is popular is because it provides signal on your communication, problem solving and collaboration skills.

If you sit there for 30 minutes banging out a solution in silence, I get a bit of signal. If you sit there for 30 minutes in silence doing nothing, then you're stuck and you've failed the interview as I didn't get the opportunity to assist.

Talking through is so important.