I really love those suggested questions. I made a note to come back to this next time I have to do some interviews.
Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
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Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#12It's tricky to interview people lacking experience, but with >=decade of experience just do deep dives into past projects. You're basically talking to one of if not the authority on whatever it was they worked on, let them tell you all about it, down to the weeds. If they can't, then you've probably got a problem.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#13I 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.
Companies are really bad at interviewing. They toss the task to programmers and engineers who have never been trained in it, and expect them to not suck.
The best way, as always, is to connect with people you already know and have them short-circuit the broken process via existing trust.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#14This 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…
> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…
So a screening system that only allows devs with your writing style in is valid why?
I'm just like them, only my ide is notepad++.
My code never compiles on first attempt, and never runs correctly on the first attempt.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#15This 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…
> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…
I use Vim, it's just different learning and development styles, I think.
I’m very capable of focusing when there is a lot of money on the line.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#16I conceptually like the idea of dropping coding screens, etc - but how do you objectively identify what you're looking for in a candidate without adding bias to the process? I.e., at least with a coding question, you can set up objective criteria. If you ask someone about their work, it might be a good experience but you're also setting yourself up to bias towards people who talk/think like you.
If you really want to test someone's coding, let them do some coding in their own time with their own tools and send it to you. This isn't ideal, since it can be time consuming, but I think it's more humane than live coding in some weird environment.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#17This 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…
> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…
Looks like he has ADHD.
That sounds ad-hominem. I found the post perfectly readable.
Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got trapped mentally in those?
Maybe he just thinks differently than you do? His body of work is not suggestive of someone "trapped" in an IDE or other dysfunctional midset.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#18This 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…
> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…
I generally write some naïve code and if it doesn't work, get out the debugger and fix it from there. I can work a lot faster when everything is laid out and I don't have to guess about what the data structures are going to look like. If it's performance sensitive like some tests I've seen, I'd use a profiler. I often use the jetbrains find and replace tool, as well as the search tool, I also like that I can click into the source code for libraries that I use, so I don't have to guess about the interface or implementation. Stuff like coderpad takes away a good portion of my tools that I would use day to day, I taught myself to code in notepad, but I purchased the full suite of jetbrains tools years ago so I wouldn't have to fumble around with inferior tools.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#19This 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…
> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…
His description of how he works sounds heavy weight…by his own design to work efficiently. That’s a good thing.
Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
#20One 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 a…
Those ICs are either sociopathic or they're channeling the sociopathy of their managers.