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Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

kevin.burke.dev

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Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#51

Post by pugworthy »

kevinburke wrote: post #41
pugworthy wrote: post #40

So here's my read on this, based on the post. The author is focused with technical review, and as such he probably fails to see just how important personal review is. Yes, you are being reviewed technically, but you are also being reviewed personally. You may know a lot of technical things, but do I want you on my team? The phone interview is what i'm going to use to make that decision. Technical we can work over lat…

I worked as a sole proprietor/consultant for several years, which involved lots of “personal review” during the sales process. I am well aware of how important that is.

Then address it and be willing to evaluate and discuss how you come across in your post.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#52

Post by slibhb »

I have sympathy because I program in a similar way as the author. Not so much with tests but with some kind of fast feedback loop where I do lots of guess-and-check. I don't know how I'd do in this kind of interview.

However...

> If I get behind or the interviewer starts interrupting to ask about the bad code I'm writing I get very stressed and have trouble both listening to the interviewer and trying to address the issues with the code.

My sense is that 90%+ of these interviews is maintaining your composure, asking questions and generally coming off as well-adjusted and personable even if you don't know the answer or get stuck.

> Certainly there are a lot of confident, mediocre tall white men in the tech industry

That's some chip on his shoulder.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#53

Post by kevinburke »

pugworthy wrote: post #51
kevinburke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as a sole proprietor/consultant for several years, which involved lots of “personal review” during the sales process. I am well aware of how important that is.

Then address it and be willing to evaluate and discuss how you come across in your post.

I’m very confident that I come across in interviews as someone that you want on your team.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#54

Post by pugworthy »

kevinburke wrote: post #53
pugworthy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then address it and be willing to evaluate and discuss how you come across in your post.

I’m very confident that I come across in interviews as someone that you want on your team.

And yet...

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#55

Post by phendrenad2 »

properdine wrote: post #5

I 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.

I think that staying employed as a software developer for 10+ years is a good indication of skill, far better than any random coding assignment.

Put another way, if someone has 10+ years of experience, in an ideal world there isn't much point in quizzing them on algorithms or giving them homework. They've done all of that before, passed, were promoted, etc. You can see that on their resume, and you can verify that with a few phonecalls.

Of course, in reality, you have to quiz everyone equally, and hire based on this objective metric, because even a whiff of non-objective hiring is dangerous.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#56

Post by colmvp »

pugworthy wrote: post #40

So here's my read on this, based on the post. The author is focused with technical review, and as such he probably fails to see just how important personal review is. Yes, you are being reviewed technically, but you are also being reviewed personally. You may know a lot of technical things, but do I want you on my team? The phone interview is what i'm going to use to make that decision. Technical we can work over lat…

> "They look like a great fit for the team and our goals, and let's give them a chance to learn the tech"

I wish more were like you.

I've definitely had my fair share of interviews that bombed so I feel like I have a good bearing of when I don't leave a good impression, but it's always the worst feeling to have an interview that you think went well based on the overall mood/feeling, only to receive the eventual rejection later in the day that they went with someone more senior or that they wanted someone with more experience in x.

My mentor who didn't got to a well-known college once told me he joined a very solid company not knowing anything about the frontend framework they used but they gave him documentation and let him learn it for weeks without touching the code base. He said it was honestly one of the strongest engineering teams he's worked on in his career. The idea of managers seeing potential in someone and thinking "let's go with that person who has never done x" seems so foreign to me.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#57

Post by [deleted] »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

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 a…

[deleted]

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#58

Post by jackblemming »

adamzerner wrote: post #23

> I'm not fast at reasoning about code, and I often make trivial mistakes just trying to get a "first draft" of a program out. If I get behind or the interviewer starts interrupting to ask about the bad code I'm writing I get very stressed and have trouble both listening to the interviewer and trying to address the issues with the code. Sounds to me that the author likes to program by "sketching". I do too! Paul Grah…

>IMHO, it doesn't matter. The goal is to predict who will perform well on the job, and if having a large favorite number does this, it should be incorporated.

What if it was skin color, how ethnic your name is, or your gender? Did you know the majority of developers are men? Should we throw all the female applications in the trash because they're statistically not as likely to be developers?

Yeesh. Sorry if I sound hostile but... jeez. Correlation is not causation, etc etc.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#59

Post by Supermancho »

spoonjim wrote: post #36
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

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 a…

Well he could also be pissed off that he’s interviewing someone who claims to be an expert in something he can’t even install.

I can easily write tests for Cypress without knowing anything about react because Cypress doesn't require react. Strange filter.

https://www.cypress.io/

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#60

Post by echelon »

ericbarrett wrote: post #21
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

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 a…

I still recall an interview I did at a recently public company in New York, for a DevOps position. 4/5 of the interviews went sailingly, with heavy emphasis on networking, scripting, and AWS knowledge. Then the lead engineer sailed in, five minutes late. He gave me an algorithm question straight from the Google playbook (I don't remember the question, sadly), then after I asked for a few minutes to ponder, proceeded…

What an ass. I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers.

Maybe some tech media company will do hidden camera interviews and publish a scathing rebuke of the practice.

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