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If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

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Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#91

Post by ryanmarsh »

PeterisP wrote: post #71
mrfusion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all deserved to be treated with that kind of dignity. I'm not sure where our industry went wrong. You'd never ask a doctor medical school trivia during an interview.

I believe that it started during the dotcom boom, when a lot of unqualified people tried to join the industry despite having no skills - once you get bit by hiring people who claim (and have) job experience but turns out can't code at all, not even on a basic junior level; you need some process to filter them out.

I'd say it mattered less then. This was all new. Nobody knew what they were doing so it was easy for imposters to come in and fake it till they made it. Things are more transparent and aggressive now. The industry I entered in the late 90's is very different than it is today. It grew up.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#92

Post by ryanmarsh »

xenihn wrote: post #76
ryanmarsh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors take a test and go through a verifiable apprenticeship period. If Dr. Nidal got his MD from Johns Hopkins and did his residency in pediatric oncology at Sloan Kettering where he is a fellow and has published 2 papers on Nueroblastoma you can safely assume he knows a thing or two about high risk pediatric solid tumor cancers. What do we have for programmers?

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I'd never get hired

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#93

Post by beobab »

oega98 wrote: post #86
PeterisP wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that it started during the dotcom boom, when a lot of unqualified people tried to join the industry despite having no skills - once you get bit by hiring people who claim (and have) job experience but turns out can't code at all, not even on a basic junior level; you need some process to filter them out.

No, it started way before that. I interviewed with Microsoft in 1993 and had to answer questions like "Why are manhole covers round," and "Reverse this linked list." This has been going on for decades.

My favourite answer to that is: because the hole they are covering is round.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#95

Post by cema »

beager wrote: post #75
nulagrithom wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming that people who haven't maintained a vanilla JS app don't actually know JS?

Not at all. I'm getting at the fact that many frontend devs don't know JavaScript, they just know cut-and-paste jQuery or how to fiddle with/maintain React/Angular components in a large app.

I doubt you can really just cut-n-paste jQuery in any nontrivial web app...

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#96

Post by cema »

poikniok wrote: post #87
aidenn0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's at least partly because how averse many shops are to hiring people; even people who clearly lied on their interview/resume. At one point in the past I worked with someone who was incapable of understanding pass-by-reference; something like: int getFoo(foo *out); A colleague spent multiple hours per day for a week trying to explain this to them. After a week they still were unable to successfully make use…

Isn't this passing by pointer and not passing by reference?

I guess technically in C everything is passed by value but you can pass a pointer to something and call it, naturally, a pass-by-pointer. Since in C you can typically get the pointer value by providing the reference (I don't remember if it is called the reference in pure C, but we are clearly talking about the same thing here) it can also be called a pass-by-reference, consistent with some other programming languages.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#97

Post by eli_gottlieb »

poikniok wrote: post #85
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once interviewing for a fairly generic Java CRUD job, and the interviewer asked me to figure out how to balance a binary search tree. He then interrupted me every minute or so as I was trying to figure out a way to ask me if that was my completed algorithm.

Can you explain what it means to balance a binary search tree? Are you referring to writing your own implementation of AVL or RB trees?

>Can you explain what it means to balance a binary search tree?

Yes, to minimize the depth by "filling" every branch possible/equalizing the number of nodes in every subtree at a given depth.

>Are you referring to writing your own implementation of AVL or RB trees?

Yes, though the interviewer didn't say "AVL" or "RB". I'm not sure I ever even got a class with those in it, and frankly, I don't care enough to memorize how to implement them just for an interview question.

Again, this wasn't Google. This wasn't a firm that did complicated data-structures stuff all the time. They fully admitted how simple their work is. But they asked about how to balance a binary search tree anyway.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#98

Post by WorldMaker »

dagw wrote: post #33
mrfusion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all deserved to be treated with that kind of dignity. I'm not sure where our industry went wrong. You'd never ask a doctor medical school trivia during an interview.

I don't know. If I was to get a new co-worker tomorrow I would hope that someone had checked that he had relevant skills beyond knowing that 'python' was a programming language and knowing how to sound overconfident in interviews. And in the case of the doctor he'll have to have a verifiable degree from a verifiable university as well a verifiable several year long 'internship' from a reputable 'company' before you w…

The software industry has a lot of equivalents: we just mostly ignore them. You can have a verifiable degree from a verifiable university with several years of experience in reputable companies and still have to sit down and answer trivia questions and try to program a basic algorithm on whiteboard, none of which you'd need in the day-to-day job.

I think "dignity" is a spot on word for it: professionals like doctors and civil engineers are generally assumed to have the qualifying skills that their resume says they have; software developers are assumed to have no skills unless proven otherwise and your resume barely gets your foot in the door.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#99

Post by WorldMaker »

metaphorm wrote: post #63
mrfusion wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all deserved to be treated with that kind of dignity. I'm not sure where our industry went wrong. You'd never ask a doctor medical school trivia during an interview.

on the other hand doctors are credentialed and software developers aren't. you don't get invited to interview for a position as a doctor unless you have your medical school degree, and all of the associated training that goes with that (residencies, etc.). there is nothing equivalent to that for software development, and in fact a computer science degree is sufficiently abstract/mathy that it's possibly to graduate w…

There are things that are equivalent. The issue isn't that there aren't credentials that could be trusted for software developers, so much as no one interviewing for software developers cares.

My degree was an ABET accredited engineering degree that required practical software development skills (including soft skills). Outside of interviewing in my hometown, no one knows that or cares.

The software industry tomorrow could easily adopt the internships and test/certification requirements of a profession like medicine or engineering. The industry doesn't seem inclined to do so, however, for a weird variety of reasons and excuses, and seems for the most part overly satisfied with trivia questions and whiteboard problems.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#100

Post by metaphorm »

WorldMaker wrote: post #99
metaphorm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the other hand doctors are credentialed and software developers aren't. you don't get invited to interview for a position as a doctor unless you have your medical school degree, and all of the associated training that goes with that (residencies, etc.). there is nothing equivalent to that for software development, and in fact a computer science degree is sufficiently abstract/mathy that it's possibly to graduate w…

There are things that are equivalent. The issue isn't that there aren't credentials that could be trusted for software developers, so much as no one interviewing for software developers cares. My degree was an ABET accredited engineering degree that required practical software development skills (including soft skills). Outside of interviewing in my hometown, no one knows that or cares. The software industry tomorrow…

> seems for the most part overly satisfied with trivia questions and whiteboard problems.

I agree and it is puzzling to me as well. My own CompSci degree as ABET accredited and I did two years worth of internships before working full time. It doesn't translate into a strong credential though. I still get asked to do whiteboard shit, just like everyone else.

I think it's a complicated issue and is in some sense due to the immaturity of the industry (only a couple of decades old, whereas some other professional disciplines are centuries old). In any case I'm glad it's a topic of frequent discussion in the community. It's important and the discussions are usually good ones.

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