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Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

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Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#141

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

beforeolives wrote: post #92
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier 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?

> can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen

You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)".

Listening is a little bit more difficult to quantify, but we're mostly looking at people who know how to follow the flow of a conversation (a good friend once told me it's like a battle, their side shoots a little bit, we shoot a little bit back and back and forth)

Edit: Some people don't have personal projects and that's fine, you can ask what they would like to learn or if they want to learn something. Someone who just rolls in to write some code for a paycheck is perfectly fine but if someone has a desire to learn something, it's a good trailing indicator.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#142

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

d2ncal wrote: post #113
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier 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…

How do you probe for these skills? Are there any questions that help you to identify them?

You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)".

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#143

Post by Mc91 »

riffic wrote: post #81

> Undue pressure to accept an offer letter These are called "exploding offers". It's horrendously shady. edit: I once got one with a limit of one hour before expiration. I was completely naive and took the position anyways. What a complete nightmare.

One piece of advice I saw recently - if you are interviewing, FAANG companies supposedly have a longer offer acceptance window. Smaller startups often have a smaller window. Also FAANG companies and larger companies and organization usually have a longer interview process. So the advice was to interview at the larger companies first, and then at the smaller startups who can turn on a dime quickly. It makes a lot of sense, but I never thought about it until recently.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#144

Post by peruvian »

rsj_hn wrote: post #9

This is at least the third time this thing has been posted to hacker news. Previous dupes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24482119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555

HN never gets tired of the interview debate. I've seen the exact same set of comments for years now.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#145

Post by wyldfire »

devmunchies wrote: post #116
bob33212 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a second round with the CEO of a small startup on zoom. 5 times in a 45 minute interview he said "Sorry hold that thought, just responding to a customer email real quick" It was tempting to tell him that we should just wrap this up if he had more important things to do.

if he was personally trying to guarantee quick response times to customers, then that sounds like his priorities are right. Especially at a "small startup", this is a good sign. Makes me think there was more work than employees which is why the CEO was interviewing and doing customer support.

Don't make the appointment if you can't dedicate your attention. If the CEO is too busy, they shouldn't be a part of the interview.

If something comes up, find a new host or give the candidate a mid-session break.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#146

Post by peruvian »

aerovistae wrote: post #87

I'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?

Once you pass 3-4 years of experience, it is not difficult to get at least a recruiter interview and phone screen in the US for a standard software engineer role. And that's with YOU applying — people get messaged by recruiters on LinkedIn all the time.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#147

Post by wutbrodo »

beforeolives wrote: post #92
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier 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?

It seems like a fool's errand to me to stamp out 100% of bias. Any bar that requires subjective assessment creates an opening for bias, and not every job can be assessed entirely by a completely mechanical rubric.

This is what things like representation are for, as they attack the problem for a different angle.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#148

Post by deathcalibur »

beforeolives wrote: post #92
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier 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?

Usually the qualities that matter most cannot be quantified (un)fortunately... One way to combat this is to have the interviewing team consist of people with different backgrounds. For example, if you want to hire more women, it probably makes sense to have women involved as interviewers for all candidates. If you don't have the ability to do this, then I'm not sure what the solution is.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#149

Post by duxup »

kmonsen wrote: post #103
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For sure, seem like they will treat lots of other things the same. What about comp? Promotions?

The company was large and paid well, outside of very few situations HR didn't actually decide what people got paid, they just clogged up the recruiting, interview, and actually finalizing the OK to hire someone process.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#150

Post by castlecrasher2 »

austinl wrote: post #53

There's definitely a mindset thing to this that I need to work on, but my last experience going through the interview process was so draining that I didn't recover for several months. It was my first time interviewing for "senior" roles — I did 5 on-sites (maybe 8 screens, starting from 15 phone calls?) while working full-time. I'm naturally pretty high-stress before interviews, and I felt like I needed to constantly…

>Any advice from experienced interviewers for the next time around?

I'm not an expert, but during the interviews of my last couple roles I hammered home better how I thought my skills would be useful to the company, and used phrases at the end of conversations such as "if you hire me, you won't regret it." I've also stripped down my LinkedIn profile to simple words describing what I do rather than a book-style narrative I had before.

Previously, I guess I'd assumed my resume and talents spoke for themselves when I'm more comfortable with my strengths, like simplicity. With this comes the confidence to not give a damn if I don't get a role, which usually helps my anxiety.

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