191–200 of 337 posts
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That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper. And (hopefully) how well they did in the phone screen...?
If you phone screen people and don't call them in for an interview, you are still rejecting them.
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Man, this country is really messed up sometimes...
What's really messed up is that companies can lose a case in court, and then still not admit guilt or wrong doing. At that point, hasn't the court basically overruled them? They lost the court case. End of story (?)
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I completely agree. I would include supporting open source projects as another way to practice sustainable development. Many kinds of personalities wilt in corporate environments that could work (for relatively cheap wages) on open source projects that benefit everyone.
I read Michael Church's blog and from reading that I am convinced that we are our own worst enemy. We spend our spare time writing open source code, which then businesses can profit from without having to pay any of their own staff. I think companies should allow staff to spend some time on open source. It could even benefit the company by having their name associated with it, making it seem like a cool place to work…
I don't have statistics for this, but I can easily cite a lot of examples.
On the other hand, there are also a lot of contributors that do it for free but they are not doing it purely out of the goodness of their own heart either. A lot of them are doing it either because they are heavy users of the project and/or to practice and build up their portfolio (read: Github profile) to help them get a job.
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I find that > 90% of interviews to be the latter, unfortunately. The ones where I got the job were the former! I am stronger at concepts than memory.
The worst is when you have to go through one of those interviews with some smug hoser across from you whose face is contorted into a rictus grin because you couldn't recall, immediately from memory, some obscure Junior Year Computer Science thing. It's just amazing how bad the hiring situation is - It makes me a lot less likely to look around because I just don't want to go through that.
"Good question, while I think about that, can I give you an interesting brain-teaser from my last interview?"
Figuring out if the tech lead who'll manage you is a jerk is a major task in being interviewed.
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Yet the number of interviewees with a CS degree that can't even explain a basic algorithm, like traversing linked lists or binary search, is staggering.
It's amazing how the brain can totally blank in stressful situations.
Also, for trivial algorithms and data structures, mind blanking is a potentially bad sign. Like, if you cannot explain the idea of garbage collection (not necessarily implementation details), then I gotta question your understanding of your environment.
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Man, this country is really messed up sometimes...
What's really messed up is that companies can lose a case in court, and then still not admit guilt or wrong doing. At that point, hasn't the court basically overruled them? They lost the court case. End of story (?)
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A debate can only happen if you continue to entertain their followups with responses. If someone is silly enough to claim they know how to program (or some other critical skill) when their interview demonstrated that they could not, you can simply stop answering their email. It's sufficient to have given them one explanation for why they're not getting the job; that's more than most potential employers offer.
> "if you continue entertain their followups with responses" That was, incidentally, sekasi's point #3, several parent references up: "3. Always respond to requests for more information" No. :)
"3. Within reason, always respond to requests for more information."
Many communication "rules" require the ability to moderate one's interpretation of the rule. I don't think this is any different. It's a good thing to give candidates feedback and if they're confused, the feedback did no good so you should be willing to help them understand. But if they're just unwilling to see the world or themselves for what they are, it's out of your hands and you should leave it well enough alone.
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Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…
I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…
Maybe your company sucks at interviewing? Maybe you're lucky and all of your candidates are good enough to do the work so you can cherry pick the ones that "fit"?
I've interviewed a reasonably large number of people, and I've worked with some folks who were good at interviewing, and there were many times where it took most of a day to figure out whether or not someone was worth hiring.
What I've found is that credentials, like a CS degree, are generally garbage and bear no relation to whether or not someone can code or problem solve. Experience and resumes can be misleading as well and rarely tell you for certain whether or not someone can actually do the work. Maybe something like half to 2/3 of the time it's obvious within the earliest portion of an interview that someone just doesn't have the skills. The remainder often takes a lot of work to suss out skill levels. Rarely someone will knock it out of the park and be an obvious hire. More often than not it'll take several interviewers concentrating on a few weak spots to see how weak they truly are and figure out if they're still a good hire. Not to mention the problems of trying to gauge someone's skill level in a high pressure environment where they will absolutely not be at their best.
Increasingly I get the impression that silicon valley is becoming like a giant frat house where companies just hire people they like and then bang out horrible code and fail to execute on projects until the VC money dries up or they get pity-acquihired.
So, here is my answer to the question, "What do we owe the people who we do not hire?"
- Information on where they stand.
- An explanation of what they are doing wrong.
- Help improving.
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I believe one of your legal rights is you can't be compelled to sign away your legal rights in exchange for something like a chance at employment.
The idea would be that its optional, and the company would still treat candidates choosing either optional equally during the hiring process - it would not be a condition of applying. So, you aren't signing away your legal rights in exchange for a chance at the job, you get that either way. You are agreeing not to exercise some legal rights in exchange for feedback, not in exchange for your application to be consider…
Imagine you check the box, you don't get the job, and your feedback turns out to be "You're a man and we don't like to hire men." You have no recourse because you agreed not to sue.
You can argue that that's obviously illegal hiring criteria and you should be able to sue anyway, but then you're back to square one.