91–100 of 448 posts
My weirdest experience is still the one where 6 people in a room have me go through my entire education starting with grade school. For a senior SWE role. Even the body shop recruiter was agast.
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This has been my experience as well. The more hoops a company made me jump through the less they were offering to begin with, and the culture was not great. My last gig was great in that aspect. My client found my LinkedIn, we had a quick 15 minute call to discuss the project and I was working for them the next day.
Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a 15 minute (okay 15 is a bit short unless someone vouches for you or you're a well known open source contributor etc, maybe 1 hour or 1.5 hour, hell even 2 hour) technical conversation and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard. Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to sniff out a pretender vs someone who can…
When I was interviewing for both junior and senior positions, my typical tack was to look through their resume and look for something interesting that I have some kind of background knowledge of. Or, alternatively, just ask them "what's the coolest project you've worked on?" From there I'd just let it be a pretty organic conversation where I'd just keep asking for more details until we've either gotten to the bottom of the tech implementation or have gotten to the point where they can say "I don't know, someone else worked on that".
So far I haven't been disappointed with any of the outcomes from that process; there was one where my conclusion was "no hire" and then down the road they were hired anyway... and it turned out pretty much how I figured it would. Good surface technical knowledge with a super scattered implementation.
My weirdest experience is still the one where 6 people in a room have me go through my entire education starting with grade school. For a senior SWE role. Even the body shop recruiter was agast.
(Mostly jokingly) Paranoia tells me they were trying to get more of your personal information to crack security questions on your accounts.
Besides, jokes on them, childhood is repressed from trauma.
I once had a SW interview with a job that had a 2-hour long personality test. No tech questions. Just random questions to test my personality. It started out simple, like 'what was the last book you read' to more in-depth situations that had nothing to do with the job. The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted…
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Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a 15 minute (okay 15 is a bit short unless someone vouches for you or you're a well known open source contributor etc, maybe 1 hour or 1.5 hour, hell even 2 hour) technical conversation and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard. Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to sniff out a pretender vs someone who can…
> Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a 15 minute technical conversation and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard. When I was interviewing for both junior and senior positions, my typical tack was to look through their resume and look for something interesting that I have some kind of background knowledge of. Or, alternatively, just ask them "what's the coolest p…
This is the first question I ask followed by, "What's the worst project you've worked on?" The answers are pretty insightful.
Bizarre really don't capture how other-worldly (other than the lets-not-be-racist purple people) this test is. Take the fourth image, of the person (or two people) with two emotions on the couch. How are you supposed to identify if that image as a whole is "me" or not? I would be baffled at how to respond to that. Some of the images I can kind of understand (watching TV while you have laundry to fold? LAZY!), but how…
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It seems to me that what you are getting is people who are both decently clever and fairly dishonest. Which is an awful combination to select for, imo
Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest. You'd rather clever enough but defiant employees? Or not clever and some other combo? Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. Pretending that your ability to call out weaknesses in the interview process makes you the best candid…
"Is it ever ok to steal?" If you answer anything but "NEVER, and thieves should be publicly drawn and quartered", you won't get the job, even if you have no particular foibles with e.g. inmates in death camps stealing from their captors, etc.
Either you're too stupid to recognize the difficulty in expressing complete and coherent moral directives in 10 words or less, or you're sufficiently coerced by your economic circumstances to bend some of your own ethics.
Obviously, what they want is for you to infer "is it ever ok to steal from your employer?", but again, this is complicated, because every single company that I've taken one of these tests for had robust anti-union rhetoric as part of their onboarding "training, and "be completely ready to work when you clock in", "your whole checklist must be complete before leaving" and "you must clock in and out only at the designated time" in their stated expectations for all workers. In other words, making any attempt to receive all the wages you are entitled to under the law is considered "theft" by the company, and they'll frequently have such rhetoric in the same training packet as the anti-union rhetoric.
These personality tests are perverse-incentive city, and clearly nobody requiring them has a high enough opinion of the people expected to take them to recognize that.
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Yep - companies will continue to use these bizarre hiring criteria/tests unless or until enough people refuse to participate; but as long as their is a line of people behind you willing to do 'whatever' for the chance at the job, not much will change.
Unfortunately companies have found a loophole: They just say "we couldn't find anyone who is acceptable for the role locally so instead we'll hire overseas for a fraction of the cost, darn" Almost like the unnecessarily complex hiring processes are built that way on purpose.
The ones at a fraction of the cost aren't very good. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
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> Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats. You do realize you’re replying to a comment showing it _is_ possible right?
I don't realize that. We know that there was a short chat, and that it resulted in filling a position. We don't know whether it's an effective way to filter out poor candidates. Have you done it? What's your success rate?