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Years ago I was flown out to Amazon to interview for them. I had like five interviews that day, all from different teams who were all asking questions that had
by peterwwillis 10y ago
Years ago I was flown out to Amazon to interview for them. I had like five interviews that day, all from different teams who were all asking questions that had nothing to do with the job I was applying for, never asking about my relevant experience. They were asking me CS questions and I had never gone to college. They asked about computer design - like, draw a diagram of a computer (I had never made a diagram before) and explain how the northbridge on the motherboard works (this was a while ago). Granted, I could have taught myself a lot of that, and I had a general idea about most of it, but they also just could have said "We are looking for someone who has the same skills and knowledge of a Computer Science graduate", and I probably wouldn't have gotten on the plane.
So perhaps a big part of the problem is figuring out what candidates you want to interview first. A lot of these questions are designed just to rule out people who aren't very logical or won't take the time to do it properly, and I understand that.
A manager once told me about a hire they had to fire on the first day. They did a lot of interviews remotely as he was in India. When they finally flew the guy in and put him in the chair, he was a different person. Literally. He had someone else do all the interviews for him so he could get in the door. Pretty weird that he thought they wouldn't notice, but people are that weird sometimes.
If you have too many hires to do, it sounds like you either need to outsource hiring, or build an internal hiring team that can do the technical interviews. This could be a semi-global or traveling team if you're often looking at non-local talent. Or they could do a lot of interviewing via webcam, perhaps with a second webcam shipped by Amazon (it's not like you don't have cheap shipping already) the user could point at their own screen for extra security.
- mabbo 10y agoThe reason for the very generic interview is that you won't be on the same team in two years. People move around a lot. If they hire you because you know Angular but fuck all otherwise, they're screwing over the team you're going to be on in two years who need someone that can learn C socket programming ASAP. It's about finding someone who can see things more generally, but then implement solutions with the tools on hand. It's really hard to do, but it means I get to work with incredible people. (Also, I did a webcam interview this week. It's not a great format.)
- peterwwillis 10y agoI don't think it's as bad of a format if you just change the premise to a remote hire or something. You need to do a lot more communicating. But there is really no way to be totally sure about someone. I also find it mildly insulting that essentially i'm interviewing for a job I don't know i'm going to have, as if I had no choice in what I do, or my choice was irrelevant. If I get hired for a Perl job, don't put me on a Java team, because I hate Java. They could also just skip certain interviews by asking if I have any interest in X team in the future, or if I have any experience with it. I will say I did appreciate and enjoy my own experience with Amazon - two phone interviews, possibly some code sample, and an in-person. Really nice people. Just an unfortunate waste of time, especially for the interviewers.
- FireBeyond 10y agoOther than in house tech support, or some systems design work for AWS, I struggle to think of many situations in which "Explain the purpose and functionality of the Northbridge on a motherboard / in a CPU" would serve any practical purpose whatsoever. Hell, I've lost track of the number of custom PC builds I've made, BIOS tweaks and I still had to research this.
- flukus 10y ago> If they hire you because you know Angular but fuck all otherwise, they're screwing over the team you're going to be on in two years who need someone that can learn C socket programming ASAP. That's even more fucked up. It really shows that they view all developers as interchangeable cogs.
- mabbo 10y agoCogs implies lack of choice. I choose when I move teams. Or sometimes, a manager asks me if I'm willing to move, as there's a team that needs more help.
- flukus 10y agoThat sounds fine. The original comment made it sound like people were shuffled around by management with no regard for what their skills are, that angular devs would be move to c sockets.