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> Can a candidate lacking the technical skills go deep into details the way the parent commenter describes? More often than you'd think, alas. I'm going by abo

> Can a candidate lacking the technical skills go deep into details the way the parent commenter describes? More often than you'd think, alas. I'm going by about fifteen years of personal hiring experience, for whatever that's worth.

intern4tional 11y ago
I've seen this same thing frequently when evaluating security engineers. They often can talk the talk, but when given a simple task to perform more often than not will fail. Coding exercises might not be a great measure, but as far as I have experienced, they are better than other items out there.
jccc 11y ago
Do you mean that over your 15 years you've hired people more often than we'd think who later turned out to have been fooling you during the interview with their sales skills? That sounds terrible and I'm sorry to hear that. On the other hand if you mean that you've discovered during your interviews that candidates more often that we'd think had been trying to fool you -- and that's why you didn't hire them -- well then that doesn't sound much different from the above person's eight years of experience. I don't think anyone here would argue that there isn't a significant number of candidates for technical positions who BS about their technical skills.
- angelbob 11y ago
  I've hired, at several places, more than a few people who were fooling me with their sales skills. More often I work at a place where we do multiple interviews -- some "technical" in the sense that it's talking about tech, and some "technical" in the specific sense of asking a programming question with a verifiable answer (i.e. run the program, see if it works.) Frequently people do well on the technical-not-actually-coding portions and very badly on the please-write-code portions. That is, if we didn't ask the specific coding questions, we'd be hiring people they disqualify. At those places we less frequently hire people that just can't code -- though I've been around for that too, usually when we look at a resume and say, "oh, we don't need a coding test for him, he's been writing important code for years in a way where he couldn't hide lack of ability." It would appear that a resume is a poor way to verify that.

intern4tional 11y ago

I've seen this same thing frequently when evaluating security engineers. They often can talk the talk, but when given a simple task to perform more often than not will fail. Coding exercises might not be a great measure, but as far as I have experienced, they are better than other items out there.

jccc 11y ago

Do you mean that over your 15 years you've hired people more often than we'd think who later turned out to have been fooling you during the interview with their sales skills? That sounds terrible and I'm sorry to hear that. On the other hand if you mean that you've discovered during your interviews that candidates more often that we'd think had been trying to fool you -- and that's why you didn't hire them -- well then that doesn't sound much different from the above person's eight years of experience. I don't think anyone here would argue that there isn't a significant number of candidates for technical positions who BS about their technical skills.

angelbob 11y ago
I've hired, at several places, more than a few people who were fooling me with their sales skills. More often I work at a place where we do multiple interviews -- some "technical" in the sense that it's talking about tech, and some "technical" in the specific sense of asking a programming question with a verifiable answer (i.e. run the program, see if it works.) Frequently people do well on the technical-not-actually-coding portions and very badly on the please-write-code portions. That is, if we didn't ask the specific coding questions, we'd be hiring people they disqualify. At those places we less frequently hire people that just can't code -- though I've been around for that too, usually when we look at a resume and say, "oh, we don't need a coding test for him, he's been writing important code for years in a way where he couldn't hide lack of ability." It would appear that a resume is a poor way to verify that.