241–247 of 247 posts
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>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
No, the offer might be good, but I’m just not willing to wait a month as there are other candidates in the pipeline.
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No, the offer might be good, but I’m just not willing to wait a month as there are other candidates in the pipeline.
Might be but if you aren't willing to let them hear their other offers and negotiate you probably aren't willing to hire the best people.
Fun fact, that when I’m looking for a job I will be arguing like you.
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I have doubts that someone stepping in for 2 hours of interviews can consistently and accurately determine whether or not the company in question is in the deathgrip of stack overflow fads and dumb blog posts. In anything but the most egregious cases, anyone making such an assertion tells me more about themselves, than it does about their interviewers. In the rest, the correct judgement to make after a bad interview…
Yeh you can - gets easier with age and experience
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A few years back, I built out a team of about 30-ish technical people and had a similar experience, but I phrased it a bit differently: Aptitude and Enthusiasm were the best predictors of success, and I phrased most of my questions in a way to get a gauge of those two metrics. "Aptitude" correlates strongly to your "ability to learn," "enthusiasm" correlates loosely to your "curiosity." I think "ability to listen" is…
How do you easily test an interviewee's "Aptitude"? Especially in a developer sense. I struggled with how to do this when asked to help with interviews in the past.
Anyway, to answer your actual question: One thing I'd always ask at some point is, "Can you tell me about a time where you solved a hard problem?"
They'll think you're trying to gauge their problem solving abilities, but their answer will give you much more valuable insights regarding their aptitude and enthusiasm. While they're answering, you'll get to ponder:
"What does this person think is hard?"
"How well can they communicate a complex topic?"
"Does solving hard problems excite them?" etc
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I'd completely fail your interviews and that's not a criticism to you. I am fairly experienced and I can simulate stuff in my head quite quickly but this often has a detrimental effect -- I get a few ideas, see all their flaws and get an analysis paralysis. I flunked one otherwise promising interview by doing this. Sometimes you just freeze, you know. I have confidence of having excellent problem-solving skills but t…
Well, it's hard to tell. You don't know the difficulty of the task, I don't know your tendency to stress and freeze. But the puzzle I use is really just a bit more complex than fizz-buzz. So much so, that when I learned about fizz-buzz years after I started using this one, I was kind of relieved. Because they way I've gotten into using it is that I had to interview a guy to help me with a freelancing project (for a l…
Oh. We kind of talked past each other then. Sorry!
Just today I had ~15 minutes to craft a basic SQL update statement generator based on an (almost) arbitrary JSON input. Save for me misunderstanding the requirements initially, I aced it and the interviewer was impressed.
General problem-solving and chatting about real problems that the company has I found to be the best format of technical interviews. One experienced programmer can extremely easily call out BS if the candidate is faking their expertise.
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As for me freezing, yeah, it can happen but I accepted it. I can't have all the IT problem space in my head all the time. I expect the interviewer to be flexible in these cases. If not, oh well, life goes on.
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How is this a good question? The only acceptable answer is "yes" otherwise the interview is over.
Because the only acceptable answer is actually “it depends” and the point of the question is to find what it depends on.
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72 hours is quick. A week is more reasonable. I had one company try to pull a 48 hour decision on me and I straight up told them I was declining the offer if they didn't give me more time to consider it. They backed down. This is a decision that will impact my career trajectory, and I may have other offers coming. So yes, I want enough time to consider all options before making a decision with ramifications that will…
I'm not sure it's so much time to consider as time to tell any others companies you're also through some part of the process with (especially if you're already through interviews) that they need to make a formal offer to you now or you're going elsewhere. Maybe it's just me but if you just have one offer letter in hand and have probably already thought about what it would take to take an offer, I can almost certainly…
But seriously, if you are in a business that has been around a while (20-30 year range) and likes folks to stay a long time - you just are not as interested in hiring the type of folks who want to set off bidding wars, drag out offers, counteroffers, job hop etc.
If the candidate is great, can always just say, would love to talk through an offer that would work for you. If they are reasonable - bingo - everyone is happy. Again though, these offers end up with a short expiration so I can get to next person if you don't want position after all that.
But I also pull down posting pretty promptly, do a quick 5 minute phone screen with lots of folks right away (same or next day after application) etc. so they can move on too.