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Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

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Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#71

Post by anonzzzies »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #65
slekker wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)

And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things. Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!

I don’t want to be treated like a scammer; if you assume I am lying then I don’t want to work for you anyway.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#72

Post by ResearchCode »

panxyh wrote: post #43
willcipriano wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always some nonsense like: "He used his left foot to enter the room. A good candidate will use his right as they will put their best foot forward."

The salt thing isn’t in the same league of nonsense as the foot thing. It does tell something about the person.

Tells you something about their salt tolerance. It makes all the difference in plumbing together CRUD applications effectively.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#73

Post by mewpmewp2 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #53
albert_e wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not from the states but my IT career involved working on teams with US clients and also working in the US for a few years. I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish. In typical work projects even the best of ideas always need to be bought by rest of the team and also executed collaboratively by the team. I would be dishonest if I were to…

> I find it very hard to say "I did X" for anything except for personal projects that I did myself from start to finish. I come from a culture that has a similar approach, where taking sole credit for team efforts is typically viewed negatively. Took me a few years to get the hang of lying on interviews and taking sole credit for team efforts. And ironically, it only dawned on me when I became an interviewer myself.…

You don't have to lie to talk in "I" form. You don't have to take the sole credit.

Just be clear about what your influence was on the project.

Not everyone lies on the interviews. I have absolutely never lied, and I can still use the "I" form.

I usually make proportions of my involvements clear.

For example if I start and architect/design the project, I will say so and then I will say I successfully onboarded others to the project and guided them successfully to achieve X results.

If I didn't start it, I will describe it like "I worked on the project X, with 3 other people. My responsibilities were A, B and C. etc".

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#74

Post by jarsin »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #8

I’ve had this experience. I passed all of the interviews only to be failed by a senior manager that had some kind of expectation I couldn’t figure out. About 6 seconds into a phone call, I’d failed for not matching whatever expectation he had for how a phone call should go. As far as I can tell, he expected me to do everything his way without being asked. That was truly bizarre. I think I dodged a bullet there.

This is why I keep saying that hiring has become like dating.

Everyone has become Seinfeld trying to find a perfect match and inventing all kinds of idiotic tests.

It's not like getting a job is getting married. Average tenure is like 2 to 3 years now. Most of these companies won't be around in 5 years.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#75

Post by dinvlad »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #29
williamcotton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nothing like dating. Employees need a paycheck. It’s an asymmetric relationship. This becomes very apparent during economic downturns! There’s really no use searching for the perfect job when the market is flooded with candidates and you have young children and mortgage payments due, yet you have to act like every job you’re applying to is some gift you’ve been searching for your entire life!

> Employees need a paycheck. It’s an asymmetric relationship. This becomes very apparent during economic downturns! While this is certainly true, there still are usually enough jobs that fit the broad parameters of "pays enough to eat and take care of my rent". If you have a choice of a good boss at lower pay, or an a-hole boss at higher pay, you should take the good boss every time. We spend 1/3, or more, of our liv…

This is also important if one wants to grow in their career. It’s hard to grow in a position that is only asked to do what they’re told. As a result, they won’t progress to a higher-level position and will lose money in the long-term. In other words, short-term thinking loses out, even economically.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#77

Post by Redoubts »

logicalmonster wrote: post #40
rr808 wrote: post #22

For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. Lucky I'd done a few before so knew the tricks. Now I work there the job is basic crud style work, nothing fancy required. Employer also hires grads almost exclusively from Ivy League universities and they mostly suck. Makes me look good. :)

> For my current job I got grilled with leetcode style questions. I don't mind being asked a leetcode style question or two in an interview. Even if somebody struggles with solving an unfamiliar problem off the cuff, you can see if they they take some logical problem solving approaches. But it's frustrating that no practical web-development questions are ever asked for those kinds of jobs. For instance, security is r…

> Even if somebody struggles with solving an unfamiliar problem off the cuff, you can see if they they take some logical problem solving approaches.

I hear this a lot, from the likes of Google on down, but does any interviewer ever take away anything positive from "almost" solving an interview question? In my experience, most interviews are pass/fail and getting close isn't a pass.

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#78

Post by dahart »

slekker wrote: post #54
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #47

I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process. In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert. Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a div…

And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)

If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview.

CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right? How else would you do that aside from testing?

Re: Stop eliminating good candidates by asking them the wrong questions

#80

Post by ProjectArcturis »

panxyh wrote: post #43
willcipriano wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always some nonsense like: "He used his left foot to enter the room. A good candidate will use his right as they will put their best foot forward."

The salt thing isn’t in the same league of nonsense as the foot thing. It does tell something about the person.

What does it tell you?
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