11–20 of 96 posts
It's not remotely scientifically-objective, but most things in life aren't. I'd liken it more to dating. Both parties are evaluating each other on innumerable criteria through their own subjective lenses, and trying to reduce it a scientifically-quantifiable measure is dubious.
Personally I'm very defensive against more academic interview processes (like Google's) because I'm a college drop-out and feel some amount of insecurity being ranked among peers with better academic backgrounds who might excel at such tests. In truth it is a personal failure of mine, and something i'll eventually get over through study/training the next time I'm looking for a job (hopefully years from now). Sure it…
I can tell you from experience ppl with college degrees go through the exact preparation process, aren't well off because they took an algorithm course 2 decades ago.
Of course this applies more to fresh grads.
Most people hate them when they get rejected, consider them fair when they pass. Like anything, they are mostly subjective and very gameable (compare it to getting accepted at a college) It's not remotely scientifically-objective, but most things in life aren't. I'd liken it more to dating. Both parties are evaluating each other on innumerable criteria through their own subjective lenses, and trying to reduce it a sc…
If an interview process is completely detached from what it takes to succeed at a job, what good is it?
But, I'm now a dev manager so I get to sit on the other side. I've been doing interviews in the last week for a dev position and I don't subject candidates to coding. I talk with them about what they work on, one of my senior devs sits in and goes even deeper -- learning what they know without even really asking formal questions, for the most part. Past that I care more about them being smart enough and willing to learn new things, and easygoing enough to get along with the rest of the team. Hell, that's at least half of what I care about to be honest.
Whiteboarding is a waste of time in my opinion. The problems are recycled anyway (reverse singly linked list, needle in haystack search, etc). It doesn’t give you a useful signal about the person’s coding ability when they can just do rote memorization on a toy problem.
We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
As a fun aside, I've seen people send out HackerRank evaluations for entry level positions and I think that's ludicrous.
The best interview I have had was me Skyping with one of the devs and he gave me a link where we were able to share a browser session (for the life of me I can't remember the name of the site), but he described the problem and as I typed he could see what I typed. There was no emphasis on result that I can remember, just the process of writing code, talking it out loud and seeing code evolve and asking whether certain edge cases should be considered.
What's most broken, I think, is the fact that interviewing is an uneven, broken experience that's different everywhere you go because no one really knows how to interview. I haven't seen any company take metrics on whether their process is good or helpful or filters out too many people or not enough.
We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
We absolutely should. Here's what I'm doing to help change it: I'm launching a new venture that will try to help connect great engineers with great companies. Companies with great teams, competitive benefits, and the belief that engineers shouldn't have to go through bullshit interview practices and shouldn't have to study 150 hours for a round of interviews. The flow is pretty simple: a quick Skype/Hang out call to…
So your solution is to have people work a second for free with the hope that maybe they'll get a job after a while?