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I will not do a tech interview

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Re: I will not do a tech interview

#311

Post by jimbobimbo »

untog wrote: post #72
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 the…

I can't speak for the particular interviewer at hand, but when I was interviewing people with whiteboard questions, I was interested not in the result, but in the way they think and approach the solution. So, if I were you in that particular situation, I'd start with simply laying out how do I think CSS rules will work out for the problem at hand, maybe used a marker to draw a simple style inheritance diagram for the particular DOM tree, etc., and would just turn the whole thing into a conversation.

If the interviewer would demand exact solution for the problem on the whiteboard, then probably it's time to part your ways and go to the interview with another company.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#312

Post by Bartweiss »

bmj wrote: post #110
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…

Doing contract work via take home seems like a nice balance here as even people with kids have 2-3 hours free after kids go to bed. Done over a few nights in a week makes much more sense. Initially, I was going to react negatively to this (as a father of two kids under the age of 11), but the more I think I about it, the more I like it. I assume that if I was scheduled for a technical interview, I'd likely spend at l…

For me this part about preparation is the hidden value of this approach. For most interviewees the interview isn't a 2 hour process, it's far more time spent in potentially-irrelevant preparation. It seems like companies might as well turn that time into a more direct skills evaluation.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#313

Post by Ologn »

edw519 wrote: post #88

Ike, I understand your reasoning and admire the stand you've taken, but please don't do this. You're hurting yourself and the rest of us, too. Let me explain... I may be one of the most contrary programmers here on HN when it comes to this subject. I have never shared code or given references before a job offer and I never will. I believe that reviewing code that's already been written has far too much risk for any b…

> I have never shared code or given references before a job offer and I never will.

Yes, I think our concerns are different than the OP's.

A scenario that has played out for me is that I get an e-mail or call from a headhunter. They want to send my resume to a company. The company likes my resume so I get an interview. Right away they want three (or sometimes more) references. Often they say they prefer, or even require, that they be managers. Obviously this means I have to contact my former managers and co-workers. I have to make sure I still have current contact info for them for one thing. I also want to give them a heads-up that someone might be calling them for a reference.

Perhaps I'm not asking for a big favor but I'm still asking for a favor. So every time I go on a job interview, I have to ask several people I know for a favor. Some of whom I might not have had much contact with in the subsequent years. Then I have to contact them out of the blue and ask them if they can give me a reference (I usually do keep in contact with people, but don't want every other contact being me asking for a reference or a favor).

Like you, I think it's understandable if the company is about to offer me the job and as a last step want to get some references. But I have people telling me they want to talk to my former managers before I've even had an in-person interview.

Compared with this, someone grilling me on data structures, or paging, or TCP/IP behavior, or whatever is pretty minor.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#314

Post by j_baker »

nkuttler wrote: post #258
j_baker wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very bizarre that you don't see a need to keep out people who are overconfident. Are you afraid of people less confident than you? Would that deter you even if they demonstrate "superior technical skills" (whatever that means)? Confidence gives you the strength to get up and go to the interview. It tells you you're competent enough to get the job even if you freeze a couple of times. Overconfidence tells yo…

Oh well, if you think that everybody who doesn't freeze up in a job interview is automatically overconfident this discussion can't go anywhere.

It seems like you're focusing on the specifics of what I said without getting the general idea of what I said. The key phrase in my original comment was "or having similar problems". I'm not saying that you must freeze up to be hired by me. All I'm saying is that I consider it to be a good thing if a candidate shows some signs of inconfidence (one of which may be freezing up). That means they're taking the interview seriously and that they're not (too) cocky.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#315

Post by fieldforceapp »

Perhaps it's already been mentioned, but GroupTalent [1] has set up a business to offer this type of 'small project as an interview,' or what they call "Date a Company" to help guide primarily freelancers to full-time employment:

They did a pivot after acquiring Kyle's TinyProj [2] customer base, which included us. Wondering if anyone has any good experience with GroupTalent?

[1] https://grouptalent.com/welcome/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/16/tinyproj-shuts-down-users-s...

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#316

Post by integraton »

tyree732 wrote: post #296
clavalle wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a negotiation but it is a very asymmetrical one. That by itself might be the root cause of a lot of the anxiety.

Companies are chock full of asymmetric negotiations. Aside from obvious things like discussions with your manager, companies have all sorts of structured and unstructured power asymmetries.

If employees are continuously forced to justify their employment through impractical challenges with failure resulting in summary dismissal, that would be a toxic work environment. The power dynamics are not the same, and it's disingenuous to equate them.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#317

Post by Bartweiss »

mikevm wrote: post #263
16s wrote: post #73

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 descri…

> So don't feel bad, people who interview applicants a lot know this. They do, and they will count it against you. (A few people in this thread have actually said this)

In addition to the people overtly saying this makes you a no-hire, it's almost impossible not to use this even if you try. Someone smooth and mistake-less will make a better impression on you, and like with most fallacies, you're left flying blind on how much to adjust your expectations to counteract it.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#318

Post by victoriap »

tyree732 wrote: post #296
clavalle wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a negotiation but it is a very asymmetrical one. That by itself might be the root cause of a lot of the anxiety.

Companies are chock full of asymmetric negotiations. Aside from obvious things like discussions with your manager, companies have all sorts of structured and unstructured power asymmetries.

What s funnier is, senior people may exchange roles in interviews asymmetrically where sometime A interviews B and sometimes B, A.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#319

Post by Swannie »

geebee wrote: post #150

One good thing about reading/browsing HN is that you can get an impression of the ideas that are starting to emerge. One thing that seems to be emerging now is that people are rethinking the grueling technical interview process. There was a huge emphasis on avoiding false positives in the interview process - largely because a single bad hire can do great damage to a software development team. But people seem to be le…

HN has its fashionable topics. Interview bashing is popular at the moment. It's also a suggestion to me that maybe there are more people looking for work right now. That's not a particularly good sign. Either the benefits to job swapping are too great to ignore, or there are too many failed startups, and companies failing to retain their staff.

Edit: Or it could be that "school's out for summer", and there are a fresh new batch of grads, masters grads and PhD's on the market.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#320

Post by merijnv »

mikevm wrote: post #263
16s wrote: post #73

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 descri…

> So don't feel bad, people who interview applicants a lot know this. They do, and they will count it against you. (A few people in this thread have actually said this)

I think those people are the vocal minority. In my experience most interviewers will go out of your way to get you to feel comfortable and relax during the interview process.
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