This makes me feel so much better about myself.
I'm not alone.
I will not do a tech interview
521–530 of 554 posts
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#522I'd go so far to say that most interviews do not seem to serve much purpose other than to boost the interviewer's egos. The more that a company is full of engineers who feel trapped in their jobs or lives, the more that this seems to be the case. The other irritating thing is that people seem to prefer selecting people who are technically more intelligent than they are, but who are less socially apt that they are. It…
I read things like this and I just wonder... Who are these people talking on the Internet, and what universe do they actually occupy? Because they have some decent points about how the interviews they've been in have been flubbed by the people conducting the interview, but they seem ENTIRELY inconsistent with my experience at any place I've interviewed ever, and I don't think it's my experience any time I've conducte…
I'd rather let the thread die down a bit before I respond.
I think I hold the record for bad interviews amongst my friends when I was asked to write my traditional Chinese name on the whiteboard. I'm not going to pull any punches here. I've simply lost faith in the interview process, and in the way we vet each other, and the way that we manage and communicate with each other, and I think that a core root of it is how we approach the interview process. The valley was supposed to be a collegiate and egalitarian environment, and I hope we keep it that way.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an anonymous function not a closure. A closure references non-local environments and can "access those non-local variables even when invoked outside of its immediate lexical scope" as Wikipedia puts.
I don't understand your contradiction to the parent poster. All JavaScript functions are closures, including anonymous functions that don't reference any lexically-scoped variables, and even named functions at the top level, which close over the global environment[1]. Also, callback functions don't have to be anonymous functions, you can just as easily pass named functions. 1: http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/20…
I know that confusing anonymous functions with closures is a common misconception. I also know that callback functions don't need to be anonymous, but a lot of the times they are, at least in the JavaScript code that I've seen.
Thank you for the clarification that all JavaScript functions are closures though.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#524Fish oil will help with anxiety issues.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#525Did I just read that employers read potential employee's tweeter accounts? This is odd. What does that have to do with coding? I hope they meant the employee's work related tweeter account, which they got from the employee.
Anyways, the article is good, but mostly for very experienced developers who can demand certain accommodations.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never ever hold it against someone if they say they need to look something up. No one should nor can memorize all the things we developers need to remember.
“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein
Which, today, almost means never memorize anything.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#527Maybe I'm the only one here, but I actually like technical interviews. Granted, I've done a handful of terrible interviews (either because of the questions or because the interviewers weren't prepared), but I think good tech interviews are very productive. I've been on both sides of the table: from the interviewee's side, a good interview allows you to show off your strengths and show the team how you work; from the employer's side, it's important to get inside the candidate's head and see exactly how they work and how the solve problems.
Now, a good interview isn't one where you ask question about the technical details of a language or a framework or how HTTP works or anything like that. Sure, good technical knowledge is necessary for most positions, especially senior ones, but information is really easy to pick up as you go, whereas real talent is not. Good interviews ask more broad, open-ended questions. "If you wanted to build X, how would you build it?" "If your app was really slow, where would you look to fix it?" "What do you think about framework/language/tool X in relation to tool Y?" Etc, etc. These kinds of questions let you really get into the candidate's head and figure out if he's a good fit, while still allowing him room to go in a different direction and play to his own strengths.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant "sales" in the sense that "all jobs are sales jobs." Selling your team on a particular technical approach. Selling your boss on a raise. Heck, even selling a member of the appropriate gender on hooking up is "sales"; you're just the product you're selling in that case.
>"all jobs are sales jobs." some jobs... more than others. If an employer can find a programmer or sysadmin who can't get a job elsewhere because of poor sales skills, well, it sounds like they could either pay less or get someone with better technical skills than they could otherwise. (That and my personal feeling? the guys who are 'always selling' are hard to deal with. I can handle maybe one day a week, if that, d…
>Quite often it makes sense to take a hit on social skills if it gets you someone who is better technically.
Yes and no.
If it's just about being socially awkward, that's something that can be dealt with. But at the same time that socially awkward kid can potentially cause conflicts on the team.
But what I see far more often is someone who has poor communication skills. If I tell someone to do XYZ and they come back with XAB because they didn't quite understand and were too shy to ask for clarification, then I've just wasted time and money because they couldn't talk to me.
And I think it's very rare for someone with good communication skills to not have basic sales skills.
I guess I have yet to meet the perfect introvert with poor social skills who can understand everything that I ask him (or her) to do, who gets the work done quickly.
Honestly, I think that the myth of the really awesome social introvert/recluse is far more rare than it would otherwise appear. And that the costs of working with people like that may actually be higher than the benefits in a lot of cases. I say that as someone who previously was one of those social introverts, but who decided it was valuable to learn some social skills.
The moral of the story is that it's valuable to learn how to talk to people. And how to get dates.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein
Which, today, almost means never memorize anything .
It'd be interesting why Einstein said this. I'm guessing because it takes time and effort to memorize something, not because he thought the brain had finite memory capacity.
Re: I will not do a tech interview
#530the point of technical interviews is to see how you think about problems, getting it correct isn't even that important. i can understand why people really hate this stuff if they did not come from a cs background, but it is a knowledge gap that they should look to bridge eventually...
>> to see how you think about problems ..
That is the noble goal. Then it goes horribly wrong along the way because many (very many by this river of comments) don't think the same way during interviews as they did while doing amazing work just the very day before. It's gone too far and it's presently HR "conventional wisdom".
>> getting it correct isn't even that important .. Perfectly proving the point. Coding the day before, you're aggressively focused on getting it right and shipping a quality product. Suddenly you're in an interview and you're doing the opposite, coding just so much irrelevant nonsense that doesn't really matter and being judged out of context. Wasted time, effort, angst, in short a potentially bad start to what might be a great relationship.