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I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

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Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#21

Post by BSousa »

claudius wrote: post #11
CmonDev wrote: post #6

"I'd love to just grab a coffee and discuss how we can work together" How do they know you are good? Do you propose they grab a coffee with every candidate?

> How do they know you are good? Do you propose they grab a coffee with every candidate? Decent grades in uni or school and/or appropriate references from your last workplace. Or do you think a handful of interviews can give a more thorough evaluation that 8 years of secondary school + 3-4 years of technical college/uni + however many years in the workforce?

Work experience yes, school wise no. Unless you are in one of the top 3 CS schools in the country and graduated top of you class, from experience, school grades have no correlation with ability.

Now, I know work experience is tricky as well (I once interviewed a DBA with 5 years experience that had trouble explaining me how to do some joins in SQL) but is more valuable than university experience.

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#23

Post by hamburglar »

I once got hired with a "just grab a coffee and discuss how we can work together" interview. It seemed great; I knew they were making a solid hire (because I'm awesome) and I got to dodge the pain of the gauntlet of technical interviews. Win-win, right? Then they continued to use this process to hire the rest of the team, which turned out to be at least 75% incompetent. I no longer think it was great.

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#24

Post by PMan74 »

claudius wrote: post #11
CmonDev wrote: post #6

"I'd love to just grab a coffee and discuss how we can work together" How do they know you are good? Do you propose they grab a coffee with every candidate?

> How do they know you are good? Do you propose they grab a coffee with every candidate? Decent grades in uni or school and/or appropriate references from your last workplace. Or do you think a handful of interviews can give a more thorough evaluation that 8 years of secondary school + 3-4 years of technical college/uni + however many years in the workforce?

> Or do you think a handful of interviews can give a more thorough evaluation

Yes, when done well

>3-4 years of technical college/uni

College performance (good or bad) is no predictor of how good you'll be as a developer.

>years in the workforce

Not all companies are the same, not all departments in big companies are the same. Managing to work for Bob in XYZ for 10 years and Bob loving you does not mean a) you're any good b) you're suited to a job with Jane in ABC

>secondary school

Are you serious?

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#25

Post by ansimionescu »

Interviews suck, as incidentally does most of higher education. They exist for very well-established reasons, though, and it might be a wiser idea to try to improve them incrementally than to self-ostracise by outright ignoring them.

Anyway (as per my other comment in this thread) I maintain a list of interview resources for programmers (oriented towards companies like G/Fb): https://github.com/andreis/interview

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#26

Post by edoceo »

My companies uses a 'gig-to-hire' process; I basically inbound my applicants, filter the ones who are "pretty good on paper" and offer them short, paid gigs on things. The 4 or 8 hour gig tells me more than any interview I've ever done. It's more cost effective too.

The best way to find out how well someone works with you is to have them work with you.

I'm building tools around this gig-to-hire process if anyone is interested http://ars.io/

Also, we're working on integrating the new JSON resume format which was mentioned on HN a few days ago.

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#27

Post by asgard1024 »

ketralnis wrote: post #7

This doesn't answer your question, but that's because I think that your question is unreasonable: I get that tech interviews can be long and thorough and at times opaque, but would you want to hire a programmer after you've just had "a coffee and discuss how we can work together"? I've worked with a lot of people that can talk the talk really well but couldn't write code to save their life and it sucks to manage them…

> but would you want to hire a programmer after you've just had "a coffee and discuss how we can work together"

I would understand that in Europe, where it can be difficult to fire people, but in the U.S.? (In my country, we have like 3 months notice period, but also 3 months test period, during which employment can be terminated at will from both parties.)

And in fact, I got my first job - at larger American company - exactly like that (including the coffee, which my interviewer - an older director of the development center I was hired to - almost didn't finish). Well, it actually was a bit more complicated, there were two stages. But I think it's just balls.

If you say getting rid of bad employee is difficult, isn't replacing that with a difficult process, through which everybody has to go, actually less efficient? Isn't it kinda like forcing everybody who buys a DVD watch those commercials about piracy?

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#28

Post by austinl »

There are a lot of startups that take a different approach to hiring. I prefer a system that places more emphasis on past work than the ability to perform in technical interviews.

One of my favorite posts by Aaron Swartz, definitely worth the read: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

Re: I want a job, but don't want to do those stupid tech interviews

#30

Post by yason »

Having been interviewing people from time to time during the past decade or so I don't think the overzealous interview processes that companies currently do actually pay off in value versus time spent. Usually it's rather obvious whether the candidate is a "hire", "no-hire", or "not really sure" (=also a "no-hire"). Alternatively the company has collected a list of up to few candidates that are kind of all right but none of them strikes as a real yes/no either, so they'll end up hiring one of them the next time they really need someone, just anyone.

I think that a short phone interview quickly followed by a cup of coffee and an on-site 1-2 hour programming task with an informal presentation and/or QA section about the task with the dev team would be enough.

Basically, hiring boils down to

a) candidate not being an asshole, and

b) candidate being able to write programs.

You can figure out a) by spending time with him/her and you can figure out b) by seeing if s/he's able to finish the programming task. Then when everything has been sorted out, the athmosphere is more casual to talk about the approach the candidate chose, about the corner cases and pros/cons that were traded off during crafting the solution which also reveals quite a lot of the candidate. And that's all based on some programming task that is known and common to both parties which gives a nice frame of reference. That is, as opposed to how usually developers want to talk about things they're working on themselves and the candidate wants to talk about things he has done so far himself.

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