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The Hiring Post

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11–20 of 266 posts

Re: The Hiring Post

#11

As somebody who agrees in theory with tptacek's posts and now this blog post, what I find very funny is how I perceive typical technical hiring, with the interview gauntlet, to still be way better than what some other industries must do. How the hell does anybody hire a teacher?

I also agree with the sentiment of this post and have always been surprised how poorly prepared most engineers are to fairly conduct interviews. I'm reasonably convinced it's contributing seriously to inequality issues and the "tech labor shortage", and I'm absolutely convinced it's the reason I don't job hop more then I do (hrm, maybe that's part of why the system still sucks?)

That said, my wife happens to be a teacher. The process from what I can tell in private schools is pretty similar. Usually a recruiter ("placement agency") sends a bunch of resumes (CVs) to a hiring manager (department lead or school head). They pick some based on how they feel that day and conduct phone screens. Successful applicants then come in to do the equivalent of a whiteboard interview -- they are evaluated on their ability to teach a classroom of students they've never met a lesson plan they've probably not seen more then a day or two in advance (although at least they get that much warning!)

edit On reflection I hope that teachers are at least a little more capable of objectively evaluating candidates then your average sysadmin/software engineer (how often are you asked to assess someones ability outside a handful of interviews?), but believe me the sample lesson causes as much stress on the candidate as a whiteboard interview. It also stresses the teacher whose class is being "donated" to candidates and depending on the length of the process can derail what's usually a carefully planned out quarter/semester/etc.

Re: The Hiring Post

#12
> The majority of people who can code can’t do it well in an interview.

Major citation needed. I don't have any real data either way, but I find this extremely hard to believe.

Re: The Hiring Post

#13

Great post. I hate interviewing. I think a lot about it since I'm the type of person who performs horribly in an interview call when some person I've never met is asking me trivia questions on speaker phone... One thing I wonder. Why are people being interviewed for technical positions in a google doc or whatever fake coding environment? Servers are cheap. If you have to go the way of the technical phone interview, d…

You know, screen share is a thing...

I do that on all remote interviews. Code a simple-ish thing that doesn't require that you've read about it before and show me how you'd do it. Complete with the build & run command.

Re: The Hiring Post

#14
post #5

Great post. I hate interviewing. I think a lot about it since I'm the type of person who performs horribly in an interview call when some person I've never met is asking me trivia questions on speaker phone... One thing I wonder. Why are people being interviewed for technical positions in a google doc or whatever fake coding environment? Servers are cheap. If you have to go the way of the technical phone interview, d…

We use HackerRank, which has an in-browser IDE that can runs pretty much every language, has highlighting, etc. I can't believe anyone would use Google Docs. Even if you don't care about your interviewees' experience, huge waste of dev time.

I just interviewed with Google and they use Google Docs.

Re: The Hiring Post

#15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a phone interview wherein I was required to write some code and then read it to the interviewer (character by character!) over the phone. I asked him whether it would make more sense for us to use etherpad (this was maybe five years ago), but he said no.

Be carful not to forget reading off a semi-colon. Syntax counts!

Just imagine if it were a whitespace sensitive language like Coffeescript.

"Newline. Tab. Tab. Tab. Tab."

Re: The Hiring Post

#16
I have a friend who is a good programmer, and likes learning, and is easy to work with, but he is terrible at technical interviews. He stresses about them to no end. This sounds like a much better process.

Re: The Hiring Post

#17
I found it a funny coincidence that the current top two links (this and a comment on the Holman post[1]) take opposing viewpoints on programmers as soldiers: "Infantry are what most people are." and some are "Commandos" vs Tom's "Engineering teams are not infantry squads. They aren’t selected for their ability to perform under unnatural stress."

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=9159398

Re: The Hiring Post

#18
This article seems to put forward a good theory on interviewing someone who you want to lock in room with a problem and have code come out the other end. Unfortunately, most of us work in the real world, where that's a very limited portion of the engineering job.

When the author says selecting for: "people who have the social skills to actively listen to someone else’s technical points, to guide a discussion with questions of their own, or to spot opportunities to redirect a tough question back to familiar territory." is a mistake, because some of them can't code. I know how to turn someone who can't code into someone who can. I don't know how to turn someone who fails at dealing with humans into someone who succeeds. And, at least in my job, engineers spend a whole lot more time dealing with people than with code.

Re: The Hiring Post

#19
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a phone interview wherein I was required to write some code and then read it to the interviewer (character by character!) over the phone. I asked him whether it would make more sense for us to use etherpad (this was maybe five years ago), but he said no.

Have you ever had a productive phone screen? I think they might all be evil.

I haven't. I think they are pointless at best.

This particular phone screen was probably the most nervous I've been during any interview ever. Predictably, it was enough to disqualify me.

Re: The Hiring Post

#20
we just need to make narcissism more socially acceptable, so people are always boasting. then an interview doesn't seem so different.
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