51–60 of 554 posts
The whole point of tech interviews is to see if the candidate actually has the requisite skills for the job. Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want my employees to have to learn everything just-in-time. By that logic, the people you hire wouldn't need to know anything. In addition, they don't know what they don't know, so they may not even know that they need a btree index.
>I don't want my employees to have to learn everything just-in-time. You can require knowledge without using dealbreakers like "you must know b-trees". A better alternative would be to say "you need to know 30% of the following group of things: b-trees, tcp/ip vs udp, ..." and so on.
I have passed a bunch of job interviews in the past - but I feel the exact same away and hire this way these days. I really do not see the point of brainteasers or white board coding questions if you have a budget where you can just pay out a contract like this. Also, I believe there was an article posted here a few weeks back that indicated Google's brainteasers did not lead to quality candidates - I know I am cherr…
Yes, false negatives, people with horrible IP agreements get screwed, etc. False positives are much worse than false negatives in the common business wisdom.
The whole point of tech interviews is to see if the candidate actually has the requisite skills for the job. Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.
Easy solution to that is to discuss the work/code in the interview.
The whole point of tech interviews is to see if the candidate actually has the requisite skills for the job. Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.
Also, after they have submitted it, go into detail with them as to why they did this, or why they did that. Tech interviews with puzzles, quizzes, and logic are just a massive waste of everyones time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach I agree with most of what you said, but one way you can lose if you insist on contract-to-hire is that you are filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates who are only interested in immediate full time hiring.
I don't think many candidates are interested in "immediate" hiring. Most people I know need to take extra time to wait for other offers to come in. It also gives the candidate a way to see what kind of problems he'd be working with, and the quality of the code-base, working conditions, etc. I think it's a win-win.
The whole point of tech interviews is to see if the candidate actually has the requisite skills for the job. Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach I agree with most of what you said, but one way you can lose if you insist on contract-to-hire is that you are filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates who are only interested in immediate full time hiring.
>filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates if you're not able to easily spot such a candidate without attempting to make him/her to jump through the gimmicks (brainteasers, contract-to-hire, etc..) - well, it indicates the issue with your company and hiring practices in particular are deeper than just what gimmicks to apply.
I'm not sure if this is a joke, but I'll bite.
The entire problem with hiring is that no-one, I repeat, NO-ONE is capable of determining who are the best candidates. If they could then everyone would the same formula and this would be a solved issue.
GOOG and MSFT have tonnes of hiring data and they admit they can't do this very well. It seems very presumptuous of you to assume you can and anyone who can't is somehow an outlier.