181–190 of 651 posts
I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history. I do have one technical question that st…
I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. That discussion went on for a good few minutes and by the end of it I was teetering on leaving because the fit wasn't go…
Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer. Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language di…
What I want to know from an interview is if you can be presented an abstract problem and collaboratively work with others on it. After that, getting the “right” answer to my contrived interview question is barely even icing on the cake.
If you complain about having to have a discussion about how to solve the problem, I no longer care about actually solving the problem, because you’ve already failed the test.
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Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
Who are these "most people"? School was over 10 years ago for me when schoolwork was not posted on GitHub nor is it relevant to my current job anymore, and I don't do hobby coding since I have other hobbies and responsibilities. WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a…
The result is that I don't think I've written anything longer than about a ten-line shell or python or JS script for my personal use in... a decade or more.
Frankly I probably think you shouldn't be paying anyone to do the thing you're wanting to pay me to do, because computers are likely just an expensive distraction that management's pursuing because the promise of legibility, even if in-fact pointless in this case, is incredibly enticing to them, but also I like money and will build the thing you shouldn't be building for you if you pay me. I'll even do it well, if you let me. But I don't make the same mistake (much) in my own life, any more.
Would I write a bunch of code on my own if I thought it'd be worth it? Yes, but that'd almost certainly mean I had a product idea. If I were any good at thinking of product ideas, I'd long since have had my own business. I'm terrible at it. That's literally the only reason I'm applying for a job. If I had a pile of decent code to show you, it'd be because I didn't need your job.
The problem with it is the same curse that has rotted so much of software culture—the need for a scalable process with high throughput. "We need to run through hundreds of candidates per position, not a half dozen, are you crazy? It doesn't matter if the net result is better, it's the metrics along the way that matter!"
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> Also, the best (albeit the most expensive) selection process is simply letting the new person to do the actual work for a few weeks. What kind of desperate candidate would agree to that? Also, what do you expect to see from the person in a few weeks? Usual onboarding (company + project) will take like 2-3 months before a person is efficient.
Candidate would be compensated, obviously. That's why it's expensive. You don't need him to become efficient. Also I don't think it is always necessary to have such long onboarding. I'll never understand why a new hire (at least in senior position) can't start contributing after a week.
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What is the functional difference between copying an AI answer and copying a StackOverflow answer, in terms of it being "cheating" during an interview? I think the entire question is missing the forest for the trees. I have never asked a candidate to write code in any fashion during an interview. I talk to them. I ask them how they would solve problems, chase down bugs, or implement new features. I ask about concepts…
> Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. This is like "learning a natural language is just 'cramming vocabulary and grammar' - voila, you've become a fluent C1 speaker". :-) Seriously: if you argue this way, you have only seen a very biased set of programming languages, and additionally, your knowledge of these programming languages is very superficial (i.e. you have never gotten to the "inte…
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Candidate would be compensated, obviously. That's why it's expensive. You don't need him to become efficient. Also I don't think it is always necessary to have such long onboarding. I'll never understand why a new hire (at least in senior position) can't start contributing after a week.
And so that self-selects for people who already are unemployed then, right? Most developers I know (including myself) look for a new job while still having a job, as to not create a financial hole in-between. I'd be curious if that doesn't then end up with lower quality candidates who ended up unemployed to begin with?
You can say that about all forms of hiring process. If you're unemployed, you obviously have more time: to spend more time on the take-home assignments (which I hate, see another thread [1]), to add more stuff to your GitHub profile, to go to more interviews, etc.
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Candidate would be compensated, obviously. That's why it's expensive. You don't need him to become efficient. Also I don't think it is always necessary to have such long onboarding. I'll never understand why a new hire (at least in senior position) can't start contributing after a week.
And so that self-selects for people who already are unemployed then, right? Most developers I know (including myself) look for a new job while still having a job, as to not create a financial hole in-between. I'd be curious if that doesn't then end up with lower quality candidates who ended up unemployed to begin with?
Code reviews. Teams are really sleeping on code reviews as an assessment tool. As in having the candidate review code. A junior, mid, senior, staff are going to see very different things in the same codebase. Not only that, as AI generated code becomes more common, teams might want to actively select for devs that can efficiently review code for quality and correctness. I went through one interview with a YC company…
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> Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. This is like "learning a natural language is just 'cramming vocabulary and grammar' - voila, you've become a fluent C1 speaker". :-) Seriously: if you argue this way, you have only seen a very biased set of programming languages, and additionally, your knowledge of these programming languages is very superficial (i.e. you have never gotten to the "inte…
I think the argument is that for a good chunk of business work, you don't need to use the "interesting"/"deep" concepts. Sure, you'll need time to adapt to the idioms of the language you're using, but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.
This is not something nice to say about the colleagues. :-)