“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
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“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
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Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#2We’re just simply at scale. There’s too many people at scale so the dumb tests show up.
Take a look at public school standardized tests. That’s basically where we are at with tech because we can’t handle scale.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#3We’re just simply at scale. There’s too many people at scale so the dumb tests show up. Take a look at public school standardized tests. That’s basically where we are at with tech because we can’t handle scale.
I will not say I don't know why you are downvoted, since such remarks get downvoted here.
But can't we look at an alternative model where some such standardized test is used to test basic competence, and then trainees get 2 week training on the job? Afterwards, we can select a subset based on specific tests designed for the job, rather than the usual interview questions. How many of us have actually used dynamic programming to solve a real-world problem?
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#4Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#5I do sympathize, but there is a flip side to this. I have worked in large orgs with many developer and engineer titled employees that can’t code at all. Zero coding skills. And their title would be things like “Senior Enterprise Application Engineer”. Unfortunately their resume doesn’t read that differently than a similarly experienced engineer that actually writes code.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#6I find the revisiting of fundamentals to be valuable practice when the job hunt begins. Refresh the algorithms, pick up new skills. Yes a bit of it is playing the game but its not totally wasted effort.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#7> It's also an opportunity to excuse ageism.
Yep!
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#8A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse:
Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good at whiteboarding
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#9> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems.
This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told.
Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy and code archaelogy.
Remember: They pay so much because otherwise people wouldn’t stay.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#10Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.
But do they still have to pass a bunch of HackerRank-style interview questions?
The best interview question in my life, a few years ago, was one where they gave me an open-ended question, a laptop, and the whole afternoon with occasional checkins to see how I handled it. The evaluation was completely subjective.
That's hard to standardize at an industrial scale, I understand why FAANG can't do that, but smaller shops really should and stop denying themselves acquirable talent.