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I will not do a tech interview

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Re: I will not do a tech interview

#41

Post by VladRussian2 »

300bps wrote: post #27
misiti3780 wrote: post #16

I have passed a bunch of job interviews in the past - but I feel the exact same away and hire this way these days. I really do not see the point of brainteasers or white board coding questions if you have a budget where you can just pay out a contract like this. Also, I believe there was an article posted here a few weeks back that indicated Google's brainteasers did not lead to quality candidates - I know I am cherr…

I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach I agree with most of what you said, but one way you can lose if you insist on contract-to-hire is that you are filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates who are only interested in immediate full time hiring.

>filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates

if you're not able to easily spot such a candidate without attempting to make him/her to jump through the gimmicks (brainteasers, contract-to-hire, etc..) - well, it indicates the issue with your company and hiring practices in particular are deeper than just what gimmicks to apply.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#42

Post by ctb_mg »

300bps wrote: post #27
misiti3780 wrote: post #16

I have passed a bunch of job interviews in the past - but I feel the exact same away and hire this way these days. I really do not see the point of brainteasers or white board coding questions if you have a budget where you can just pay out a contract like this. Also, I believe there was an article posted here a few weeks back that indicated Google's brainteasers did not lead to quality candidates - I know I am cherr…

I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach I agree with most of what you said, but one way you can lose if you insist on contract-to-hire is that you are filtering out a portion of the highest quality candidates who are only interested in immediate full time hiring.

Agree with this. There's a definite stigma with contract-to-hire, at least in my group of tech friends.

No one desires to be in a contract limbo where they aren't sure if they're going to be hired for real or or if they're doing the job search all over again in a few weeks.

Further, as soon as you use contract work to determine hiring criteria -- you've added your management into the mix. Are expectations made clear? Is the person's time managed efficiently? If management fails at any point then it's detrimental to the prospective employee's future, likely not by their own fault.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#43

Post by jlees »

chollida1 wrote: post #22

> I politely suggest that a short contract job might be the best option for a company to evaluate a senior developer I like the twist of doing the contract off site on the developers own time. Every time I see someone on hacker news saying, "we've solved the interview problem. We just require every new hire to give up their old job and contract with us for a week to see if they are a good fit", I often wonder about t…

I've seen companies do a "challenge" style interview, where it's less of a contract and more of a "take this problem home, code something up to solve it, push to github and let us know when you're done". Then the interview portion is discussing the solution. It means you can calibrate across candidates better, but I think the advantage of an onsite contract job is the two-way feedback, especially in a smaller company.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#44

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

pja wrote: post #17
icn2 wrote: post #8

I like oracle way of hiring. You got a degree from a decent college with decent GPA you are in. Very clear and straight forward. If you got in a decent college and graduated with a decent GPA - you are smart and somewhat hardworking, you should be doing well in your job.

Google recently revealed that going back over the data they kept about past hires demonstrated that an individual's GPA was completely independent of the quality of their future contributions to the company. Why should Oracle be any different?

Have you considered that Google might be lying?

Many larger firms with technical employees are worried about their lack of diversity, and the relevant legal risks. They may have to bend their effective practices to mitigate this risk.

Beyond making this claim as an ulterior rationalization, mendaciously spreading it might help trip up competitors.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#46

Post by bitwize »

The whole point of tech interviews is to see if the candidate actually has the requisite skills for the job.

Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#47

Post by chaostheory »

taopao wrote: post #9
chaostheory wrote: post #5

well you better have something to show then such as a public github repo.

If this approach became popular enough, it seems like this method could be easily gamed via outsourcing.

Good point but it's better than nothing. Besides asking the supposed author about their work could probably uncover whether or not they actually wrote it. If they worked on a big open source project, it'll probably be less likely that they were faking.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#48

Post by jnbiche »

TeeWEE wrote: post #4

Well, I need to interview candidates because I need to know if they are up for the job when systems breaks. If a table query fails because it needs a btree index due to range searches, I want the candidate to know how a btree index works and why it fixes the issue. Also If somebody cant tell me the difference between http udp and tcp, its a no hire for me. So for me, I really want to interview somebody before he can…

Can you not understand that there might be people who can complete your task easily, yet who have extreme anxiety about interviews? I actually understand this issue -- I've been trying to switch careers into programming for the past year. I've know several languages well (Python, JavaScript, some C), can use git, and have a few decently impressive projects on my Github profile. I also contribute to a pretty well-known open source project. As a result, it's not hard for me to get an interview. Nonetheless, I've discovered that despite being very good at interviewing in my prior (well, still current) career, I completely freeze when I interview for programming jobs. Programming interviews seem incredibly confrontational compared to my current profession. Interviewers seem to be out to trick you at something, or else to prove how much smarter they are than you. So I predictably freeze in these types of situations, to the point where I blank on things that I can usually do, even under pressure. It's been a big shock for me, since I did very well in school and went over a decade without "failing" an interview (i.e., taking an interview and not getting an offer) before attempting to transition into programming.

But I love programming languages and software development, so I do contracts from time to time, which always go well. Unfortunately, I've not yet done a contract that was actually for a company that was actively hiring employees (most were for small businesses with no full-time developers). But this post has given me some hope. If there are companies willing to let a candidate work on short-term contracts to prove their worth, that means there's hope for me yet to be able to move into software development full-time.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#49

Post by bcoates »

taopao wrote: post #20
mscottmcbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the fascination with asking an applicant about minutia of data structures and algorithms. Isn't that the domain of reference material? I gain much more insight into a person by asking them to describe a large system they've designed, what choices they made, the effects those choices had, ect. How did their initial assumptions hold up through the course of the project? How did they adapt to changing…

Put yourselves in the shoes of an employer. There are a hundred candidates applying to your position. Would the answer of "just trust me" convince you to hire one person above the 99 other applicants? If only one of those 100 applicants showed they had the skills you wanted, right out of the box, wouldn't you feel better about hiring him? I think the attitude of "they should hire me, since I can learn anything" is se…

The problem is that most companies make terrible decisions about which skills they want right out of the box. They can't get people that are 100% on everything they actually need (as such people are unhireable for the job/pay they're offering), so they settle for people who know a lot about B+ trees (or more likely, how to reverse a linked list and do a bad version of quicksort on a whiteboard) because that's what the folks who have been studying their "how to get hired at a tech company" webpage know.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#50

Post by chaostheory »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
chaostheory wrote: post #5

well you better have something to show then such as a public github repo.

Pass. I spend enough time at the office writing code that I can't show to the world because my employer owns it. I don't need to justify my six figure salary to my next employer by writing even more code on my off time just to prove I can write said code.

Well then how am I going to figure out whether or not you can code? The only thing I can think of is an expensive two week trial period which doesn't make sense since I feel that most programmers will either submit work or submit to a pop quiz.
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