Before I ask someone to come, I check his online stuff: github account, twitter, personal website, Linkedin. If with that I'm not enough sure I don't bother to interview anyone.
So you a priori don't believe what is stated in the resume. Why?
I will not do a tech interview
431–440 of 554 posts
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#432The smartest hacker I know was approached by Google, apparently they found that he was working on some interesting stuff on LinkedIn. They asked him if he'd come in for an interivew and he told them "I'm not going to do an interview for you guys. You can either hire me based on my previous experience and sample work, or I'm not interested."
A week or two goes by, and they hired him without doing an interview.
On a separate note, I've always had the test anxiety problem so I could understand how an interview is more of an acquired skill and less of an indication of your coding ability. I can code, and I have no problem with understanding the material, but when it comes to taking a timed test and using a pencil and paper for something that I usually use a completely different input for (a keyboard and a monitor), I struggle with it. Some people dismiss it and say "well you obviously didn't know the material if you couldn't get it on a test," but I never agreed with that.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#433Earlier 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.
You can figure out by discussing past experience, projects.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#434Earlier 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.
It is asymmetrical in a way that disadvantages both parties. For every candidate thinking "I hope they give me a job" there as an interviewer thinking "I hope we can hire this guy." For every candidate hoping they don't have to dig too deep into why they left their last job, there's a company hoping nobody asks too many questions about why the last guy quit.
I get that interviewers often have anxiety about the process, but your statement isn't really true.
In a given interview, sure, he's hoping that he can hire that person, but how many people get interviewed before the position is filled? I'm certain the average is much higher than one.
No matter how much anxiety he might have, he's doesn't have to worry about stuff like paying rent, keeping his car in working order, or feeding his family, because he already has a job.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can get anything I need to done in JS and I have no idea what a closure is. I've even written an emulator in it. Took me a little while reading to figure out what it is. Apparently it's just using vatiables in a lambda that are from a scope higher than it. I do that all the time, I just didn't know it had a special name. To be fair, I didn't know JS could do lambdas. I've only used them in C# and possibly Python. W…
Which is why when I want to know that you actually understand something as basic as closures in Javascript, I don't ask for the definition. I ask you to demonstrate it.
But if you don't know what it's called, or what the term means, then you're not going to be able to do that either.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview. Stressful situations happen a lot more than never in the real world (and sometimes they even involve talking to people, like customers) -- I don't want to have coworkers who can't handle that.
I have trouble with interviews, but I've had a much easier time interacting with clients. With a client, I don't feel like I'm defending myself, I feel like I'm helping somebody solve a problem of mutual interest. It's a totally different mindset. Freezing up in interviews would probably be a red flag for a job where you're doing cold calls or something like that. I wouldn't accept that kind of job, let alone intervi…
Once I started thinking about interviews in terms of 1) do we want to work together (not do they want me to work for them) and 2) how can I help them solve a problem, I found they went a lot better. In my cover letters, I'll often even say, "I think I can help" rather than "I think I'd be a good fit for this position". It makes me feel better about it anyway :-)
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#437Granted, 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/…
Freezing up in an interview doesn't necessarily indicate that the person won't be able to communicate in a normal business setting.
Imagine you've been applying to jobs for over half a year (180ish days is the average time it takes for someone to find a job these days), maybe you've had a couple of interviews, maybe this one is your first. You have burned through your savings, maxed out your credit cards, and you are less than a month away from missing your rent payment. When you're in such a situation, every interview becomes the single most important event in your life. If you fuck it up, you might not be able to put enough gas into your car, which you very well may be living in, in order to get to the next one. Trust me, if you've ever been in this situation, it's pretty easy to get freaked out and sound like a fucking idiot in the middle of an interview. It doesn't say anything about a person's ability to communicate in a routine business scenario.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#438I do most the interviewing for our tech team. I will rarely even ask a technical question. I look for passion, confidence and that they can keep a dialog on the topic of tech going. If I cannot have a conversation with someone for 30 minutes, how would I work on a project with them for months? I personally loathe logic and algorithm questions. If I ever get asked them myself on an interview I will actually ask for a different set of questions. I dont think it adds any value.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#439This is how Automattic / WordPress.com has done interviews for 5 years now. There are some tweaks to do it well that we've learned over time, but there is nothing like seeing someone's actual work to see how they're actually going to work.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#440> I politely suggest that a short contract job might be the best option for a company to evaluate a senior developer. This article reeks of privilege, namely that of location. The suggested is horrendously unfair to people that would need to relocate (possibly even internationally) to get a job. I am currently interviewing for a large tech. company in Silicon Valley. I am living in England. It would take a substantia…
The contract work could be done off-site.