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It's really, really easy to tell what contributions were made to a project by the person whose profile you're looking at. There's literally a "contributors" se

It's really, really easy to tell what contributions were made to a project by the person whose profile you're looking at. There's literally a "contributors" section where you can click on them and see every commit they ever made to that project. Also, asking someone to code in front of you is a terrible way to figure out what it would be like to work with them. 1) It's an artificial non-cooperative environment. 2) It doesn't tell you anything at all about how they present and communicate their ideas. 3) The absolute best-case scenario is you figure out one degree of conscientiousness, which isn't enough to build a working profile model of them. I'd be curious to know if you know the personality profiles of the people you already work with, which profile framework you use, if you know what composite mix of profiles will lead to meeting your institutional success criteria, and then how you go about assessing a person's profile to fill the gaps that you have in that composite.

vkjv 11y ago
I over simplified to make a simple bullet list. This is not a "code in front of my while I sit in silence" kind of thing. It's collaborative, it's discussing requirements, strategies, etc. It's back and forth and suggestions. It's also open Internet and questions are encouraged. FWIW, we follow-up on what candidates thought of the interview process and it is overwhelmingly positive. I don't think it is overly stressful. Although, I'm not sure it's possible to make an interview not stressful at all! :) EDIT: It's simple if you think of it in terms of a single project. But, if you think of it in terms of many, most of which are no contribution or a small bug fix, it can represent a large time investment. That's why I recommend candidates point out a specific piece of code.
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  Well, I'm not sure how you're correcting for bias in the feedback. For the same reasons you don't think it's possible for an interview to be not-stressful at all; you also can't get feedback about that process without the bias that they're not going to want to tell you that your process might be bad. You'd more or less need to get feedback only from people who are already happily and gainfully employed who are also close to neutral on the 'agreeableness' spectrum. At any rate. You can remove the stress from an interview mostly the same way a therapist can remove stress from iterative therapy. By building an ad-hoc environment of trust, safety, cooperation, and goal alignment.
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  RE: Your Edit Hiring is probably the most important thing you can do in/for any company. It should be a time investment on your part. If you don't feel like you're given enough time to do hiring correctly, then I'd suggest setting different expectations with your leadership about how to use your time or what quality of candidate to expect given the time you have. Seeing a bunch of bug fixes across many projects tells you a lot about that person. So rather than going into the process looking for an extremely narrow thing (like some big project they are the sole maintainer of); go into it looking for anything that's there and see what kind of information is there to help you construct a useful narrative/model of that candidate. Lots of bug fixes across many projects may not indicate that they can own a singular vision from start to finish (though you can assess that from getting them to tell you a story about literally anything), but it does tell you that they can read other people's code, supply feedback in the way of working alternatives, will take the initiative to solve a problem themselves rather than wait for the maintainer or someone else to get around to it, and focuses on getting things working rather than design-paralysis.

vkjv 11y ago

I over simplified to make a simple bullet list. This is not a "code in front of my while I sit in silence" kind of thing. It's collaborative, it's discussing requirements, strategies, etc. It's back and forth and suggestions. It's also open Internet and questions are encouraged. FWIW, we follow-up on what candidates thought of the interview process and it is overwhelmingly positive. I don't think it is overly stressful. Although, I'm not sure it's possible to make an interview not stressful at all! :) EDIT: It's simple if you think of it in terms of a single project. But, if you think of it in terms of many, most of which are no contribution or a small bug fix, it can represent a large time investment. That's why I recommend candidates point out a specific piece of code.

im_down_w_otp 11y ago
Well, I'm not sure how you're correcting for bias in the feedback. For the same reasons you don't think it's possible for an interview to be not-stressful at all; you also can't get feedback about that process without the bias that they're not going to want to tell you that your process might be bad. You'd more or less need to get feedback only from people who are already happily and gainfully employed who are also close to neutral on the 'agreeableness' spectrum. At any rate. You can remove the stress from an interview mostly the same way a therapist can remove stress from iterative therapy. By building an ad-hoc environment of trust, safety, cooperation, and goal alignment.
im_down_w_otp 11y ago
RE: Your Edit Hiring is probably the most important thing you can do in/for any company. It should be a time investment on your part. If you don't feel like you're given enough time to do hiring correctly, then I'd suggest setting different expectations with your leadership about how to use your time or what quality of candidate to expect given the time you have. Seeing a bunch of bug fixes across many projects tells you a lot about that person. So rather than going into the process looking for an extremely narrow thing (like some big project they are the sole maintainer of); go into it looking for anything that's there and see what kind of information is there to help you construct a useful narrative/model of that candidate. Lots of bug fixes across many projects may not indicate that they can own a singular vision from start to finish (though you can assess that from getting them to tell you a story about literally anything), but it does tell you that they can read other people's code, supply feedback in the way of working alternatives, will take the initiative to solve a problem themselves rather than wait for the maintainer or someone else to get around to it, and focuses on getting things working rather than design-paralysis.