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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

#221

Post by MathYouF »

mrfusion wrote: post #183
allenu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that sense of "domination" come out in interviews as well. I remember long ago having one interview where the interviewer was asking me to code something which I knew would be impossible to complete in the time allotted. It just seemed so ridiculous to me that I was supposed to write this complete solution in about 30 minutes. I remember how superior he was acting at the start of the interview too, and…

Incompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us. Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.

Asking a doctor who had completed their 12 years of medical school and residency basic biology questions would be a bit absurd.

Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer.

Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so many basics of CS who have finished degrees, bootcamps, or have been employed in those roles for years.

Doctors simply aren't able to get accreditation or employment with the same ease as software developers.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#222

Post by bogwog »

treis wrote: post #209
vanusa wrote: post #2

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…

>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 Perhaps it's just me, but I took a look and I'm not convinced. Nothing jumps out to me as overwhelming proof of programming ability.

Can you explain why? To me it's obvious that this guy knows how to code, and he's probably better at it than most of the engineers I've met.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#223

Post by gilbetron »

arthur6667 wrote: post #205
gilbetron wrote: post #28

Interviewing is really tough. The OP replaced some coding questions with other questions and if he were to interview a bunch of people with them, we'd get another set of blog posts complaining how ridiculous his interview questions were. "Why is it bad to write a file to the disk one byte at a time?" What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts? "Here's a stack trace from an open source project, can you tel…

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, but I think those are some pretty excellent interview questions. The first one, it's exactly about the thing I find a lot of developers lack in: a fundamental understanding about computers and processing. I've had 'experienced' developers write algorithms where every intermediate value was written to a cache/disk only to pull it out on the next line. I feel asking some…

I was being sarcastic with the question responses - the point being, for any question you ask in an interview, there is a significant population of candidates that will think it is a terrible question.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#225

Post by ghaff »

aigo wrote: post #215
ghaff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please go off in a corner and ponder why such casual ageism is as unwelcome as casual racism or sexism and maybe just stay there until you come up with an answer. Substitute woman for boomer in that sentence and listen to what it sounds like.

I could substitute it for child, another group of people who are broadly less likely to know where the setting is, and it wouldn't be offensive that way either.

Yeah. Go ahead and double down. If you don't see the difference you're just the sort of person who I wish would just get out of tech.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#226

Post by sdiupIGPWEfh »

> Coderpad must work for some people since companies are able to hire a nonzero number of engineers, but it is definitely not a good fit for me.

Seems everywhere I've applied recently has been using Coderpad.

Lately I've been accepting interview requests for principle roles from on-site recruiters, and I've been consistently rejected after these Coderpad tech screens. What's bugging me, however, is the "challenges" have all been softball questions. Reverse a string. Demonstrate an understanding of closures. Write a function that tests if two strings are anagrams. Write some basic React. Create an interactive form. I breeze through well enough, then it's either an immediate rejection or else they ghost me. Not once do I get farther than that. I'm not even mad, just confused as hell.

This is coming from the perspective of someone who was getting used to offers from the first job they applied to. If there's something off-putting about me lately, I wish I knew.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#227

Post by codingdave »

Jach wrote: post #212
codingdave wrote: post #192

> In theory a phone screen is supposed to evaluate whether a) this person would be good at the job being hired for and b) whether it's worth investing another five hours in trying to hire this person. They also screen whether or not you communicate well, your motivations for looking for work and whether that matches the role and future growth of the role, whether there are any logistical or compensation-based blocker…

It's hard to get meaningful answers to these really general properties you're after: > communicate well This has so many elements and is really only fully visible after you work with someone for a while. Sure you'll catch some red flag issues, but such issues likely to be caught are also likely to be caught no matter what you're talking about, so this can't be the primary purpose of the screen. > motivations for look…

I think you and I probably agree on much of, this so take all this as discussion, not argument... that being said --

Wanting to trade services for money is not enough. Everyone wants that. But good candidates want more nuance to it. More autonomy, more meaningful work, more leadership. Or less of all those things. If I just need a code monkey who will crank out the tasks, I don't want a visionary tech lead. I may want a code monkey who aspires to be a visionary tech lead as we grow. And vice-versa. If I need someone to come in, lead, and build a team, I don't want a code monkey who is looking to just coast doing easy corporate CRUD apps. Software dev roles have a massive variety in their levels of autonomy, leadership, and growth. So do the candidates. The phone screen may miss many things, but you can at least match up on those factors.

> If they're too low, a good candidate might go through with things anyway and try to negotiate beyond the range.

This struck me as an interesting take. I tend to envision good candidates as the one who command enough market value to simply filter low salary ranges out. Why bother negotiating past their range, instead of finding a role that is in my range. There is no lack of job opps out there right now. I've even done that just in the last few months - found jobs that sounded ideal, but declined to continue once I realized the salary was too low. I did so politely, and invited them to call me if they ever have roles at a higher salary.

I also agree that more could be done in emails and phone calls, making the phone screen less critical and better for all involved. But I believe the key to making that world is to fully lose the concept of a "full round" of interviews. Especially now that everyone has remote work experience, lets make the process more fluid - more calls and emails, less massive half-day interview marathons.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#228

Post by saxonww »

joelbluminator wrote: post #219
saxonww wrote: post #200

I read about three paragraphs in and then stopped. Coderpad tests where you're encouraged not to write tests, can't hit the run button, and can't use reference material? Worthless. Most people - not just the author - are going to fail those, and they are not representative of the work environment, so what's the point? We use Coderpad for one of the 3 interviews we give candidates. We do a tech screen first, then the…

> Overall I'm not sure how much value we get out of coderpad Well so you're pretty much in agreement with the author it seems. He's just more convinvced than you that coderpad is actually more bad than good that's all, you have a bit more doubts.

Maybe. I know we've hired people who did objectively poorly on our coderpad and they've been effective - although in one case not as an IC, IMO - while other people who did objectively great were just not.

I think my feedback is that the coderpad is not about whether you can solve tricky brain teasers correctly. It's just one signal along with several others: can you understand directions, can you demonstrate familiarity with a coding environment, and does it seem like you can think through (again: simple) problems in a way that we can compare to more real-world stuff.

Personally, my favorite challenge stuff when I was last interviewing were take-home problems that were more representative of the type of work the position would be doing. I could take my time, and idk I felt like I was doing something meaningful and holistic instead of implementing an algorithm. I've brought this up enough to realize that it's a controversial idea though; a lot of people either want that scheduled hour coderpad because they are taking their personal time for it and that's what fits in their schedule, or I've also heard people say that if they are going to do work then they expect to get paid for it, so a take-home assignment doesn't work for them. Of course there's also the possibility that someone will just copy an answer from somewhere and submit it.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#229

Post by ip26 »

mrfusion wrote: post #183
allenu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that sense of "domination" come out in interviews as well. I remember long ago having one interview where the interviewer was asking me to code something which I knew would be impossible to complete in the time allotted. It just seemed so ridiculous to me that I was supposed to write this complete solution in about 30 minutes. I remember how superior he was acting at the start of the interview too, and…

Incompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us. Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.

What? Doctors have residency- a three or more year internship/working interview.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#230

Post by chiph »

aigo wrote: post #215
ghaff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please go off in a corner and ponder why such casual ageism is as unwelcome as casual racism or sexism and maybe just stay there until you come up with an answer. Substitute woman for boomer in that sentence and listen to what it sounds like.

I could substitute it for child, another group of people who are broadly less likely to know where the setting is, and it wouldn't be offensive that way either.

As someone who was born before the moon landing and saw one of the last IMPs get installed on the ARPANET, yeah that was offensive. You should apologize.

Knowing to silence your phone in meetings is a matter of having manners, not age.

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