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Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

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Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#81

Post by BiteCode_dev »

anonzzzies wrote: post #71
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!

I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.

I wish there were no detector guarding supermarket doors and google would not make me go through shenanigans every time I use a different device to login as well.

But we can't have nice things because of the proverbial bad apples.

You are free to reject the job offer, but thinking it will make any difference and that employers won't keep trying to protect themselves against being scammed is wishful thinking.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#82

Post by PheonixPharts »

phkahler wrote: post #24

I agree with most of it but not this: "Interviewees are often told to use “I” to get credit for work done, but “we” is probably a more realistic depiction of how work gets done." I've had too many candidates talk about "we" and the general project, or what the team they were on did. But when I try to get at what they specifically did I get nothing. Sure we need team players, but not just cheerleaders. Take credit for…

I realized in an interview that I have a "bad" habit of talking about my projects in terms of "we" because I naturally want to give the team credit even for projects that are almost entirely my work.

Personally it comes from my experience that really talented, passionate people work together they tend to share credit since the real goal is to accomplish great things. For me, over focusing on "this is mine" can be a bad sign of a candidate that is just there to get theirs and get out.

However I have been on the other side of the interview process only to realize that not everyone is driven by passion and excitement for the problems. I have had candidates that listed numerous things on their resume that they clearly only heard about during meetings and couldn't describe the most minor of technical details.

Which to me means the real solution isn't to enforce better phrasing of "I" vs "we", but dive into the technical details. People that are truly active contributors will understand every detail of the inner working of a project, whether they built it themselves entirely and just like to share credit with a team or they worked so closely with another it's impossible for them to disambiguate who did what.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#83

Post by ProjectArcturis »

anonzzzies wrote: post #71
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!

I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.

It's not personal, it's a natural and inevitable result of the fact that there are a ton of scammers out there. If you maintain that attitude you will be selecting for naive and/or slow-to-adapt companies.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#85

Post by mardifoufs »

Lapsa wrote: post #32
phkahler wrote: post #24

I agree with most of it but not this: "Interviewees are often told to use “I” to get credit for work done, but “we” is probably a more realistic depiction of how work gets done." I've had too many candidates talk about "we" and the general project, or what the team they were on did. But when I try to get at what they specifically did I get nothing. Sure we need team players, but not just cheerleaders. Take credit for…

more relevant in States. rest of the world isn't as obsessed with managing their egos

I see you've never been to Europe then, or just don't realize how worse it is there? I'd rather take the "ego management" of the US than the crazy rigid hierarchies in Europe.

At least you can take credit for your own work, which is better than never being able to get into management (say, become a "cadre" in France) just because you didn't go to a certain school, no matter how good you are or how much experience you have built up. Ivy league elitism exists in the US too, but it's not even close to how prevalent it is in a country like France. To me that's a much worse form of ego brain rot than America's.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#86

Post by adhesive_wombat »

anonzzzies wrote: post #71
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!

I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.

I mean, I have never done or assigned a take-home or standardised test and never willingly will.

But at the first line, either CVs of unvouched-for engineers are pretty ruthlessly culled by active engineers based on "I don't think these skills are even genuine" or its done by others like HR or management based on some kind of universal system everyone takes. I don't agree with the second method, but I can see why it's done because I know people who give too much credit in the first way and waste days interviewing people for senior roles who think C# and C are "basically the same thing anyway" (that's a quote, by the way).

Personally, I'd rather just not proceed to interview rather then insult everyone's intelligence with game-able and non-representative tests like leetcode. Usually you can decide if a full interview is a good idea or not out of a phone call where you ask a few unstructured technical questions that are specifically appropriate for the role and/or based on previous experience.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#87

Post by BiteCode_dev »

logicalmonster wrote: post #63
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #47

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a div…

> I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, Is it out of place for a chef to critique the hiring process for a head chef position with a restaurant owner that's largely clueless about what happens in the kitchen? Most people would say that the chef might have a better clue about ovens and quiche recipes than the restaurant owner, right? > Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of…

Of course, and we were badly treated in the 90, so over-compensating is fair.

But I find that all those posts and articles about hiring usually come from the beautiful world of fairy-tales in the head of the authors, as they never had to solve the problem themselves.

There is no doubt that hiring suck, and you can't want capitalism and suddenly be surprised the market balances out in favor of the other side when demands of devs exceed supplies.

But the arrogance of my colleagues, many of them never having taken a professional risk in their entire life, is still astonishing me.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#88

Post by izacus »

francoisdevlin wrote: post #62
eterm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a data leak could literally destroy a company overnight Source? I'm sure we "wish" that were true, but data leaks haven't even destroyed companies whose entire existence is predicated on storing data such as Equifax.

A data point - the capital one AWS breach ended up costing $270M[1]. While they weren't destroyed, it wasn't cheap either. 1. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cybersecurity/capital-one-...

That is peanuts for AWS. The OPs point stands: pretty much no engineer or software company suffered serious consequences over their security practices. The worst was some internet drama and slightly lower *profit*.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#89

Post by dublinben »

bheadmaster wrote: post #21
chii wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's like dating ... Hiding who you really are to 'pass' is a bad foundation. you'd be surprised at the amount of people who fake themselves for the date.

To be fair, not all of us can be socially competent mentally healthy people who enjoy life and regularly stop to smell the flowers. Some of us just suck, some of us are miserable, so we have to put on a fake persona in order to entertain the other person enough for them to actually give us a chance. In a way, dating is all about entertaining and being entertained. It's either that or stay lonely.

The better alternative is to work on yourself to become a better person, who is worthy of dating without deception.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#90

Post by brianmcc »

eterm wrote: post #48
logicalmonster wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. I don't mind being asked a leetcode style question or two in an interview. Even if somebody struggles with solving an unfamiliar problem off the cuff, you can see if they they take some logical problem solving approaches. But it's frustrating that no practical web-development questions are ever asked for those kinds of jobs. For instance, security is r…

> a data leak could literally destroy a company overnight Source? I'm sure we "wish" that were true, but data leaks haven't even destroyed companies whose entire existence is predicated on storing data such as Equifax.

Pretty sure it was the end of Ashley Madison a few years back?

https://securityboulevard.com/2022/07/a-retrospective-on-the...

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