531–540 of 651 posts
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I loved the idea of code reviews interviews, i've had several good ones, until yesterday when I had my first bad code review interview. They asked me to review a function for a residential housing payment workflow, which I'm unfamiliar with. From an actual snippet of their bad production code (which has since been rewritten). In Go which I've never used (I've never professionally used the language that doesn't have e…
Honestly this sounds like a successful "bad fit" signal (assuming that they work with go and payment systems mostly). Language and domain experience are things id like to know after an interview process.
They don’t work mostly in Go. Even the interviewer said that he’s vaguely familiar with this area of the code, but he doesn’t work and Go. They work mostly in Kotlin and they explicitly are advertising for solid generalists.
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There's even more overhead on the people being provisionally hired. Yes, sometimes things just don't work out. But, if someone quits a job and maybe relocates, that's a big personal cost. It's just the way things work in some limited contexts (e.g. professional sports) but it's not and shouldn't be the norm. I suppose you can give a huge sign-on bonus with no claw-back provision, but that's never going to happen in m…
I'm fully convinced the way to make better hires is to invest more, which will be more expensive. Which wouldn't be a problem unless we expected something else. It starts with quitting pretending the current process is working, or even close to optimal.
But, in many cases, I'm not sure how I, as a candidate for a tech job, would feel about a company offering me $200K--no strings attached--with the proviso that I statistically only had a 25% chance of making it through the next 6 months. (And is that really long enough anyway?)
There are tournament-style professions. But I'm not convinced most professional jobs are or should be among them in general.
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Is closing deals on the golf course even still a thing these days? I suppose it probably is in some circles but I haven't seen it in a couple of decades of tech industry life when it was more likely to be fun runs or skiing.
closing deals with your boss? what does that even mean.
But my broader point was that golf course socializing seems like mostly a different world today, at least in my tech circles, relative to other venues.
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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. First: they might have private code , but not necessarily code to show (I, for example, am rather not willing to show quite some of the code that I wrote privately). Second: the kind of "code" that I tend to write privately (and into which I invest quite a l…
The objective in an interview like this shouldn't be to grade the quality of the code you bring in any sort of scale, but to have a discussion about the options you took. In that sense, it really matters very little what you present as long as we can do a small back-and-forth that lets me into what sort of person you are.
I can clearly state that this is not I commonly think about code that I write privately (and also for code that I write for the job only if I must). For private code, I rather commonly start with a "gut feeling" about some unexpected symmetry that the problem that I am working on likely has, then try to formulate these "gut feelings" as mathematical properties, and later theorems. At the end, everything "fits (for outsiders: unexpectly) together".
Thus, there is hardly ever a "option that I took", but rather a "I let everything flow: from the source [my gut feeling] to the sea [which is - ironically - the source (code)]".
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What exactly does "scalable" mean here? If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?
In a small company, you can tell your buddy “just have a chat with the candidate and if you like them and you think they can do the job, hire them”. If the person interviewing your candidates messes up, you’ll know soon enough. In a large company, the bad people will take over and your company is dying a slow death. That approach doesn’t work on a large scale. Some interviewers are too nitpicky, elitist, others appro…
However, I do feel like there is perhaps some amount of truth to the thought behind the interview questions, no? As in, I would imagine someone that could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard could probably learn React. However, I am not sure everyone that can learn React can invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard.
However, maybe I am projecting my own insecurities because I wish I could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard as well as being able to solve all those other problems.
The best interview process I've ever been a part of involved pair programming with the person for a couple hours, after doing the tech screening having a phone call with a member of the team. You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job, and be a good coworker. This process worked so well, it created the best team, most productive team I've worked on in 20+ years in the industry,…
>The best interview process I've ever been a part of involved pair programming with the person for a couple hours... You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job There is something funny about the "best interview process" taking "a couple hours" despite giving you the answer "within a few minutes". Seems like even the best process is a little broken.
Nor am I saying it was a perfect system, just the best I've seen in terms of results.