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I will not do a tech interview

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Re: I will not do a tech interview

#131
post #92
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> Its like attending an exam, its not the same getting work done in the real world. Of course it's not. Real world is much more stressful than an interview. During an interview you chat with another developer in a room with a whiteboard. In the real world you are woken up by a phone call at 4 AM to fix a critical system, knowing that if you screw up even slightly, you'll lose a very important customer. I've experienc…

I disagree. I've been in those "4AM" situations before and handled them well.

I can't interview to save my life.

These are two completely different mindsets.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#132
post #100

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/…

Just replying to state my shock at how many people are defending poor interview performance. If you freeze up during interviews because it's "high stress" then maybe you need to practice going on more interviews until it doesn't bug you any more. When you're a developer -- especially at a senior level -- you need to be able to work well under stress. Hell -- you need to be able to do that for nearly any job in the wo…

Many people, me included, experience something called "interview anxiety". It is only ever present during interviews. It may not be rational, but it's how our minds work.

It's easier to understand if you think of it like a phobia - someone may be irrationally scared of spiders, but that doesn't mean that they are going to be scared of heights, clowns, dogs, and snakes too.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#133
post #65

> 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…

It would also breach the work contract of many developers. Most work contracts tend to (1) prohibit you from taking on other paid work (2) claim copyright of the work you do while under employment (which is why the FSF & Apache foundation require employer waivers from contributors).

How would this be enforced?

I suppose it could end up being more of a problem for the hiring company after this practice became more widely known.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#134

Not quite the same, but I once had a no name company (getglue) tell me that I need to do a 3-hour programming assignment before I can interview with them. I have too much self-respect for myself to put myself through that process. I declined the "opportunity" to interview with them. The interview process is broken and many of the interviewing techniques either do not correctly judge a candidate, or place too much bur…

I once had a no name company (getglue) tell me that I need to do a 3-hour programming assignment before I can interview with them

In that case, I would think I was the subject of a psychological experiment entitled, "How far can we push developers".

Although it would be tempting to accept the offer and then write whatever code they asked for in QuickBasic 4.5 (circa 1988) telling them they need to use something more stable than the crap they're using.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#135
post #129

Not quite the same, but I once had a no name company (getglue) tell me that I need to do a 3-hour programming assignment before I can interview with them. I have too much self-respect for myself to put myself through that process. I declined the "opportunity" to interview with them. The interview process is broken and many of the interviewing techniques either do not correctly judge a candidate, or place too much bur…

I'm curious, is this a money issue, i.e., you refuse because it feels like working for free? Or is it just a principal thing? I doesn't seem unreasonable to me to ask even a senior developer to do a small coding assignment as part of the interview process unless they can show a good, relevant coding sample. If we're going to agree that whiteboard coding isn't a great way to evaluate someone, and we can't ask you to d…

I'm curious, is this a money issue, i.e., you refuse because it feels like working for free?

Not OP, but it doesn't "feel" like working for free. It is working for free.

Having someone perform work for you without paying them is illegal in the United States (see minimum wage laws).

There's a simple solution; pay them $x per hour to do your 3 hours of work. Even if you pay them $100 per hour that's a cheap way of filtering out pre-screened candidates.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#136
There is a large research base on how companies can hire to gain the best workers. The smart thing to do is ask job candidates to go through a work-sample test. An additional thing to do (which involves some special legal steps in the United States, but can be done routinely in other countries) is to give each job candidate an IQ test. Evidence to back up these statements can be found in a FAQ

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

I've posted here on HN from time to time, which I expect to add to my personal website in a while. A job candidate who doesn't want to do a work-sample test is a job candidate who doesn't want to work for a smart employer.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#137
Given the plethora of comments, this will likely get buried but I'll weigh in regardless as those who suffer from the anxiety issues the author mentioned will likely scroll through most of the comments.

Every issue the author mentioned can and should be mitigated by a decent internal recruiter or manager. Essentially whoever initiates the contact with the developer maintains a responsibility to ensure that their 'candidate' is as comfortable as possible throughout the process, regardless of who they are meeting.

I've dealt with plenty of people who suffered from the exact issues the author describes. It's a lot more common than you'd realise. I've also dealt with rare occasions where I've helped candidates with autism, aspergers and even down syndrome through the interview process.

If you form a decent rapport with your candidate and truly comprehend what they really want from a job with your company as well as 'grok' their personality type and limitations then there really is no excuse for dumping them into a situation where they feel so stressed and under pressure that they shut down.

Your responsibility doesn't end with the candidate though. It's equally important to ensure that the people who will be interviewing this person after you have a decent understanding of the type of person they are about to meet and to ensure they are equipped to deal with a situation where the person being interviewed begins to crumble.

As for references to previous submissions and comments where people claim to have "solved the interview problem", I call bullshit. Every company, every hiring manager, every team, every job and every candidate is different. The silver bullet to 'solve' the problem simply doesn't exist and never will. Sure there are companies with fantastic processes but for every 'perfect process' you show me, I can show ten companies where that process simply wouldn't work.

The best thing about these discussions is that it encourages people and companies to simply try harder and that's never a bad thing.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#138

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/…

Exactly. I am a very vehement opponent of quizzy, obscure-knowledge or high-pressure tech interviews. That said, I think a good tech interview is irreplaceable. I like to work through a complex problem with the candidate, oftentimes I don't know the answer, nor do I expect them to be able to finish the problem (this is made very clear) -- I do expect them to sink their teeth in and think out loud with me.

I would never hire someone who bowed out of a tech interview. If you can't handle thinking through problems in a collaborative, relatively low-stress interview -- you're not the kind of person I want to work with, sorry.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#139
post #65

> 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…

It would also breach the work contract of many developers. Most work contracts tend to (1) prohibit you from taking on other paid work (2) claim copyright of the work you do while under employment (which is why the FSF & Apache foundation require employer waivers from contributors).

You're a fool if you'd sign away copyrights to all work you do outside of your place of employment. Actually, that shouldn't even be legal.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#140

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/…

The article doesn't say "interviews don't work". It says "interviews don't work for me, so I get my foot in the door another way". He's not really arguing that they are a bad idea in general, but he simply suggests he'd do better with a test project.

I think you're going too far the other way. Your argument basically seems to be "if you can't pass an interview, there's something wrong with you". Which is probably true. On the other hand, there's dozens of personality quirks (some of which are worse than getting nervous in job interviews) which wouldn't show up in an interview.

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