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I will not do a tech interview

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Re: I will not do a tech interview

#71

Post by anonymoushn »

jlees wrote: post #43
chollida1 wrote: post #22

> I politely suggest that a short contract job might be the best option for a company to evaluate a senior developer I like the twist of doing the contract off site on the developers own time. Every time I see someone on hacker news saying, "we've solved the interview problem. We just require every new hire to give up their old job and contract with us for a week to see if they are a good fit", I often wonder about t…

I've seen companies do a "challenge" style interview, where it's less of a contract and more of a "take this problem home, code something up to solve it, push to github and let us know when you're done". Then the interview portion is discussing the solution. It means you can calibrate across candidates better, but I think the advantage of an onsite contract job is the two-way feedback, especially in a smaller company…

My current company does this. It seems to work pretty well, but it has some of the same problems as other methods. In particular, the standards applied to the solution vary greatly from "Does it work and run at most 40x slower than expected?" to "It heap-allocates things that could be stack-allocated, so we should pass".

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#72

Post by untog »

crazygringo wrote: post #62

Granted, there are a lot of bad tech interviews out there (asking about algorithms that nobody ever uses) ... but I do not understand this. Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed. I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/…

Maybe somebody can explain this better to me -- but if you freeze up in interviews, are you also going to freeze up in developer meetings? During code reviews? When you're in the room with clients?

Of course not. Interview situations are very, very different than the others. Meetings and code reviews are with co-workers, whom you know and trust. Meetings with clients could be nerve-wracking for other reasons, but they're unlikely to challenge your depth of coding knowledge.

For my own personal example, I once interviewed at a place where the interviewer wrote up some HTML on a whiteboard, and then asked me to write out the CSS next to it that would turn it into a horizontal drop down menu.

I don't work that way. I sit with my editor in one screen and a browser window in the other, and I piece together the layout as I go along. I assure you, it works just fine. But the interview situation was so far divorced from any every-day working situation that it felt very unnatural.

I opted out of returning for the second round of interviews. The next place I interviewed I sat down, in front of a computer, with the interviewer, and we talked through code as I wrote it. I took the job.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#73

Post by 16s »

Lot's of very skilled people interview poorly. Nervousness, social stress, anxiety etc. So don't feel bad, people who interview applicants a lot know this. It's not a mark against you. If they are interested in you, they'll find a way to learn if you have the knowledge/skills they require for the job.

If I don't know the answer to a question or if it is ambiguious, I tell them. For example, I was once asked to describe how a TCP sessions ends. Well, that's implementation defined. What OS? Are we talking FIN ACKs or do TCP resets count as ending a session too? The RFC may say this, but in the real-world, software sometimes does it like that. Etc, etc.

And, many times the questions aren't made to be answered, but to draw things out of you (like the one above). And in these cases, you can turn the questions back on them. Put them on the answering end ;) and that's OK, those exchanges tell both sides a lot about the other.

I do like a few black and white questions. Like, "How many bits are in an IPv4 address" or "What data structure is a C++ set typically implemented in" and if candidates have no idea on an answer, then I do have concern over that. However, if they do not know the answer, but understand types and their sizes and data structures and their pros/cons, then that's good enough in some cases as well.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#74

Post by walshemj »

tocomment wrote: post #37
300bps wrote: post #27

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.

Well I would want contractor rates >$550 perdiem for this short term contract and via my company so I can reap the tax benefit.

Trouble is most employed people will have restrictions on outside work and if its related work the current employer will own that IP.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#75

Post by jnbiche »

VladRussian2 wrote: post #63
jnbiche wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not understand that there might be people who can complete your task easily, yet who have extreme anxiety about interviews? I actually understand this issue -- I've been trying to switch careers into programming for the past year. I've know several languages well (Python, JavaScript, some C), can use git, and have a few decently impressive projects on my Github profile. I also contribute to a pretty well-know…

>Programming interviews seem incredibly confrontational compared to my current profession. Interviewers seem to be out to trick you at something, or else to prove how much smarter they are than you. well, welcome to software engineering. The interviews are for the reason, they let you peek into your future job. If you can't manage that environment for 4 hours of the interviews, how you're expecting to manage it for m…

I hear what you're saying, and to a certain extent I agree. However, maybe that's the other benefit of doing these kind of pre-hiring contract jobs. They let me see what kind of an organization I would be working with.

In any case, what are you doing now, having left your company because of the environment that you see as plaguing software engineering? Did you change professions, start up your own company, or find a company that didn't have these issues?

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#76

Post by mikeash »

taway2012 wrote: post #34
pja wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google recently revealed that going back over the data they kept about past hires demonstrated that an individual's GPA was completely independent of the quality of their future contributions to the company. Why should Oracle be any different?

There is a diff between what the parent said and what you said. They aren't opposites, hence they can both can be true. IMHO. What I understood from parent was: good college + good GPA => meets minimum hiring criteria, so make them an offer. What you are saying is: (good college, good GPA) is not correlated with magnitude of performance among PEOPLE ALREADY HIRED INTO GOOGLE .

I bet height correlates very weakly with basketball ability among top NBA players, too.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#77

Post by toomuchtodo »

chaostheory wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pass. I spend enough time at the office writing code that I can't show to the world because my employer owns it. I don't need to justify my six figure salary to my next employer by writing even more code on my off time just to prove I can write said code.

Well then how am I going to figure out whether or not you can code? The only thing I can think of is an expensive two week trial period which doesn't make sense since I feel that most programmers will either submit work or submit to a pop quiz.

Good developers cost, what, $120K-150K/year?

If a two week trial period is "expensive" to you, you don't have the budget for someone in that pay range.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#78

Post by kamaal »

edent wrote: post #70

If you get nervous under the pressure of an interview - how will you react when $CriticalSystem breaks during $BusyPeriod? Do I want to hire a person who is great when things are going well but who goes to pieces under pressure? Learning how to be interviewed is as useful a skill as learning how to code.

There is a common theme but an interview and a crisis situation are not the same.

Its like attending an exam, its not the same getting work done in the real world.

>>Learning how to be interviewed is as useful a skill as learning how to code.

No, learning how to build is a useful skill. Learning how to be interviewed is mastering the art of being the best rat in the rat race.

The whole point is even if you win, you still remain a rat.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#79

Post by misiti3780 »

ctb_mg wrote: post #42
300bps wrote: post #27

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.

Agree with this. There's a definite stigma with contract-to-hire, at least in my group of tech friends. No one desires to be in a contract limbo where they aren't sure if they're going to be hired for real or or if they're doing the job search all over again in a few weeks. Further, as soon as you use contract work to determine hiring criteria -- you've added your management into the mix. Are expectations made clear?…

disclaimer: i am 1/2 two members of the management team at my company - if it was larger - this could be a problem I agree

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#80

Post by jaegerpicker »

tocomment wrote: post #37
300bps wrote: post #27

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.

Nearly all of the high quality developers I know aren't interested in contract-to-hire, I know I'm not at all. To many things can go wrong in a short contract window, and regardless of the reality, most immediate hires feel they have a much stronger connection to the employer.
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