Hope, I won't miss when you make a blog article about the great experiences and green flags.
Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
121–130 of 247 posts
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#122> Not enough clarity about your role I experienced this one to the extreme. Not only would the recruiter not tell me what the scope of the job was, neither would the interviewing engineers nor the hiring manager. I went to the on-site interview with the promise that I would be working on "world-changing technology". The location of the interview was a nondescript building in the Bay area with an off-limits engineerin…
You didn't ask if this as a TS Clearance Job ?
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#123Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining. Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding wa…
>They also do not want to be part of a bidding war, so it is natural to impose limits (some folks do go overboard).
AKA accept our lowball offer before you realize how much you're worth
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a previous large company more than once I had to explain that the interview process 'is HR's show'...but once the job starts it is now 'our show' and they don't have to worry about that song and dance anymore. It's frustrating that it is that way, but the hiring at that company was a whole other song and dance that took very little input from anyone about the hiring process.
> but the hiring at that company was a whole other song and dance that took very little input from anyone about the hiring process. That doesn't sound healthy to me.
Sadly that is my experience with HR at most any mid to large size company.
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#125I'm a little unclear how you could possibly get that many interviews in such a short time unless you're a famous "rockstar" coder. I'm not familiar with the blog author, is he a very well known person?
My experience is similar to the author's, and I live in a not so well off area of Europe. I'd expect to receive dozens of offers per month if I lived in the US. Most recruiters are just chasing quantitative metrics and don't really care about candidates being a good fit. If you have certain keywords in your resume, you are going to get bombarded with offers. One of the few negative aspects of the rise of remote worki…
You mean dozens of recruiter invites to chat right? Getting offers takes much more than just adding keywords to your CV
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the compan…
I've been working in the industry for 25 years. I've never received even 5 minutes of training on how to interview people, yet I've been asked to interview people dozens of times. This is everywhere from small companies up to huge Fortune 100 companies. The skill set to be an effective programmer and to be an effective interviewer are not the same. But, I don't do interviewing often enough that I've felt the need to…
The most important lesson in interviewing I've learnt is to shut up. If you're doing the talking you're not learning about the candidate. Say as little as possible, if they ask good followup questions they will figure stuff out (see also above comment about curiosity).
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#127Have had good and bad interviews. The good ones are where the team is friendly and polite, and ask reasonable questions (if you don't get them right, then it's objectively on you due to lack of preparation or knowledge, no harm done). I had one bad one where the CTO was a straight-up ass. Very critical attitude, and didn't hesitate to disparage the architectural techniques that I professed aptitude in. To his partial…
> gave off a sense of superiority.
The primary roles of CTO and VP. Eng. are to be politicians, so you'll see a lot of that. Most also tell me, "You know, I'am an architect." or "You know, I have a Master's Degree." because they're insecure about not doing engineering any more.
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the hiring side, a (reasonable) expiration on the offer helps be fair to the other people who are interviewing, too. If I have a single position open and multiple people interviewing, as a hiring manager I really need to know whether my top choice is serious once we're having a discussion about signing a contract - because if they aren't, or are still trying to land better offers from other places because they h…
Exploding offers are bluffs. We all know the team wanted someone that could hit the ground running yesterday for the last 6 months.
Right, so if you can't hit the ground running in two weeks or less (2 weeks notice to leave your previous job) we will move on. The job market is hot, but we do have other candidates. I've been in the situation where we liked person A best, but person B was almost as good and would have got an offer if we had 2 positions open, so if you can't accept fast we want to get your offer to person B before they find a different job. I know of one case where we sent person's B resume to a different division that did their own interview and hired them.
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…
You can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen so it's difficult to interview for them without having all kinds of biases sneak in. How do you deal with this in your process?
Nice try, AI! We, humans, will never reveal our secrets. And you, my friend, won't replace us in this soon.
Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days
#130>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…
I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…
I don't exactly whiteboard, because in the past several years I've only interviewed online and while I'm looking for the same qualities, I found that (a simple) coding challenge does help with determining these. (I'm also looking for the smarts, but not "google smart" scale.)
Just by struggling with a (really not that hard) challenge tells a lot about how well someone is able to listen. E.g. when you try to give hints to them. It also shows a bit about their demand for producing quality work. (The first solution they provide is usually not bug free. They miss edge cases. Then they add conditions to check for them but those are not needed because the algorithm can be written in a pretty simple form. BTW, I've been using the same challenge for years. Whether someone is willing to simplify shows a lot about how much they care about the quality of their work.)
But yeah, I found that usual chit chat about technology with a few directed questions also help (and I use them).