10 ms·

If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

216 points by NTDF9 9y ago

sleepychu 9y ago
Interviewer: It means we do Agile. Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. We have a Recruitment Master, that coordinates all the other recruiters in Sprints. Absolute gold.
- sarabande 9y ago
  To give credit where it is due, this especially funny quote is nearly verbatim copied from the original article (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte...) from which "inspiration" for this one was taken: It means we do Agile. Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. We have a Translator Master, that coordinates all the other Translators in Sprints."
  - jmmcd 9y ago
    "inspiration". And I don't think they even fully understood the original, because this joke makes no sense in the new version, but did in the original: > What filter will you use, if you want more than two conditions or if you want to analyze the list using database function? Candidate: I’m sorry. What? Is that a question?
  - cyphar 9y ago
    """inspiration""". It's a flat-out and less funny rip-off of the original. In fact, several of the responses don't make sense in this version that did make sense in the original. Candidate: Forget it. Just give me a second ok? I think I will organize rows as candidates and columns as dates/times and use NOW, TODAY, WEEKNUM and the rarely used called YEARFRAC Interviewer: Oh, no, that’s from the answer sheet in the “Cracking the Recruiting Interview: 150 Spreadsheet Questions and Solutions.” Candidate: No, I mean, that is something I have used in the past for simple fractions Interviewer: How would I know? I’m not a spreadsheet wizard like you.
    - sleepychu 9y ago
      Oh yeah, I read this as like "you fail for giving me a standard answer" but reading the original it's clear they missed the point here.
IceyEC 9y ago
Why are we suddenly inundated with "If companies interviewed * the way they interview programmers" posts?
- sleepychu 9y ago
  because the community is super frustrated with the state of interviewing.
  - throwthis12 9y ago
    > because a bunch of people who take free online javascript classes are frustrated they're being asked about algorithms and data structures they deem irrelevant fixed
  - kaybe 9y ago
    It's quite interesting how different submissions on the front page build on each other and there is a sort of meta-conversation happening with the flow of articles. I think AI or whatever you want to call it is not up to it yet, but it would be an interesting investigation for in a few years.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  Because people copy things that have been recently popular, as a way of boosting their own audiences. "Curated list of XXX" was popular a while back, after that it was "Machine learning applied to XXX", and this week it is recruitment. Next week it will be something else.
- partiallogic 9y ago
  This is the first one I’ve seen in response to the translator one and would love to see more.
  - lolptdr 9y ago
    https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte... I believe this is the first of its kind. Enjoy.
pulse7 9y ago
Recruiters usually aren't good at programming. If they were - in most cases - they wouldn't be recruiting, but writing code... So their "identification of good programmers" is somehow limited...
- shubb 9y ago
  There are places where good technical recruiters earn substantially more than programmers - if they get 10% year salary (which I understand is not the highest number you might see), they only need ~1 successful placement a month to make reach parity.
  - creepydata 9y ago
    Not only that but they may just enjoy recruiting more than they enjoy (or don't enjoy) programing.
    - dagw 9y ago
      The two recruiters I know basically did it has a mid life career switch.
TamDenholm 9y ago
I get at least 5 phone calls from recruiters a week, being a contractor. The amount of times i get someone that asks me something like: Recruiter: "We're looking for someone with React experience, do you have that?" Me: "Yes" Them: "Ok, how about Javascript?" I want to explain to them but i end up just saying yes to every acronym on their list since they've no idea what they're asking for.
- empath75 9y ago
  Actual recruiting call: "I have an opening for someone with mesosphere and machine learning experience." "Well, I don't have any of those, but I have used docker a little bit." "Great, I'd like you to interview."
- beager 9y ago
  It's funny because in a different context, that's exactly a sequence of questions that I as an engineer would ask: > Do you have experience with React? > Okay, do you have experience writing pure, vanilla JavaScript? Absent a framework like jQuery or Backbone or Angular? The second question can often screen out people who simply maintain framework apps rather than those who actually know JS.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    Are you assuming that people who haven't maintained a vanilla JS app don't actually know JS?
    - beager 9y ago
      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.
      - cema 9y ago
        I doubt you can really just cut-n-paste jQuery in any nontrivial web app...
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
Why-is-the-title-written-like-this?
- majewsky 9y ago
  To save space(s). :)
- philbarr 9y ago
  because-it-makes-you-read-it-faster?
dagw 9y ago
On the flip side I recently interviewed for a programming position at a civil engineering company and at no point in the process did anybody ask any questions that would in any way test if I actually knew any of the things I claimed to know. The entire "programming" part of the interview was essentially: "We use quite a bit of python. I see from your CV you've used python". "Oh absolutely, I consider python the language I know best. I've worked on a couple of larger python applications as well as used it extensively in a number of smaller projects" "Great!"
- empath75 9y ago
  Actual programming interview question: "How would you rate your skill with cloudformation on a scale of 1 to 10" "I guess a 9.5" "Great." No follow up question.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  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.
  - dagw 9y ago
    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 would even consider interviewing him.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      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.
chrisweekly 9y ago
Instant classic. Hilarious -- and spot-on.
fecak 9y ago
20 year recovering recruiter here (now more focused on providing services to help job seekers). I think at least some of the animosity job seekers have for recruiters is that they may feel recruiters are designing these types of esoteric interview questions and exercises. The overwhelming majority of recruiters are entirely incapable of designing them because they lack the technical skills (myself included). The recruiter is primarily responsible for identifying a (hopefully) qualified candidate and managing the hiring process along to ensure the "candidate experience" doesn't get in the way of a hire being made. The recruiter might be just as frustrated with that hiring process and the methods as the candidate, but probably has little control over it. If we want to end these types of interviews, the people to change them are engineering managers. If the engineering manager wanted to end whiteboard exercises and trivial questions on minute details, I assure you the recruiter wouldn't be against it.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Exactly. My interactions with tech recruiters are, by and large, pleasant and effective. There are some bad ones, but most just seem overworked at best, flaky at worst. I don't see recruiters as a major part of the tech interviewing problem. It's not until the point where the recruitment process gets tossed over into to the hiring manager's hands where things go feet-up and I start feeling like a piece of steak being graded.
jordanpg 9y ago
When I read articles like this, I tend to assume that they are exaggerations written by people who feel burned because they didn't get the job they want and that the reason was unfair interview questions. In other words, I simply don't believe that interviewers are, as a group, so stupid that they regularly ask obscure Excel questions when they are plainly not relevant. To continue with the recruiting example, I suspect what is more common is that interviewers are expecting candidates with some Excel experience, and ask questions to gauge some basic level of competency. And interviewees have conflated using it one time with any depth of experience. I can attest to seeing this many times during programming interviews. If I see something towards the top of someone's resume, I will ask a basic question to see if anything whatsoever is known about that thing. Yes, book knowledge. Stuff that you would know if you had actually read any docs. I don't want to work alongside someone who claims knowledge or experience of something and doesn't know the basics. Or doesn't know that they don't know the basics.
- justin_vanw 9y ago
  Yes I think you are right, buuuut... Lots of times the initial screen is done by someone totally non-technical, and they are asking questions from a sheet and judging whether you are saying what is in the answer field for their sheet. This is super stupid, but I have seen it, usually when some headhunting firm is deciding whether to add your resume to their database which they pull resume's from to send to clients. The moral: Don't use headhunting firms, because they will basically never send you a decent candidate. In the very rare cases where they by pure luck do send a good candidate, this is rarely worth the dozens of crap candidates they have sent you (not to mention that they will try to push candidates on you if they think they can get away with it).
  - minxomat 9y ago
    Yep on the first point. I was once asked to bend a comically large paper clip out of pipe cleaners. Next I was to solve some physics questions. This was for an analyst job at a bank.
  - whatever_dude 9y ago
nautilus12 9y ago
This is a picture perfect description of my interview with stitchfix.
- jonathanwallace 9y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. For which position were you interviewing?
  - nautilus12 9y ago
    Engineering. First job ive never gotten an offer for. I feel like they werent serious about hiring and maybe they were required to interview a number of non internal candidates and were just checking boxes. Huge waste of my time. Granted I acknowledge Im not perfect and desirable in every way, but the interview felt really silly
dsr_ 9y ago
I am, now and on occasion, a hiring manager. Naturally, every freelance recruiter wants to be my friend. They often start cold calls with a description of a person's technical abilities, and then ask if I would be interested in interviewing that person. When that happens, I ask them to define one of the buzzwords that they have just used. "Could you tell me what 'big data' means?" or "What's the difference between AWS and GCE?" I don't do business with technical recruiters who aren't familiar with the meanings of the terms that they throw around. They have never been more valuable than a regex.
- dsacco 9y ago
  Please, please share one of the funnier stories you have about grilling recruiters who didn't know the difference between AWS and GCE.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    Most recently I asked if the recruiter knew the difference between Java and JavaScript, since he had just mentioned both of them. "Uh, they're web technologies... in very high demand." "Yes, but is there a difference between them? What kind of web technologies are they?" Long pause. The background silence changes a little, as though a hand were placed over the telephone's mouthpiece. I can't hear the word in the conversation he's having, but it's clear that he is talking to someone. The hand goes away. "Java is a general purpose computer programming language with concurrent objects, and JavaScript is the script version." Pause. "Did I get that right?"
    - dsacco 9y ago
      Perfect. Next time you should respond, "Hmm...that's not what I have here. The answer is, 'JavaScript uses Electron and Java uses Spring.' I'm sorry, I don't think you're a great fit for us. Best of luck and have a good day." Then hang up, and kill two birds with one stone in the process: the tone-deaf recruiter finally understands how the buzzword bingo interview feels, and you have one less incompetent recruiter to deal with.
dudul 9y ago
Total rip off of the original post. What does it bring? The jokes are the same ( and sometimes lose their meaning in "translation")
- dracodoc 9y ago
  Yes, almost byte by byte translation, and a bad one. The original is much better. I guess this title is better aimed at audience though, since many people may not have interest on translation. Strongly suggest people not read yet to read the original post https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte...
robotnoises 9y ago
That really was funny, but man, it's hard to stomach "inspired by" when realistically it's a Mad Lib of the original post from Free Code Camp.
SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
Step 1: Copy post from Free Code Camp Step 2: s/translator/recruiter/g Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit
jancsika 9y ago
> You see, we are looking for the very best Recruiters, and it has been proven by major companies that the people that are able to do the job best have a very solid foundation in spreadsheets for quick applicant tracking. Doesn't the punchline hinge on the above quote from the interviewer being false? In other words, if the research really did show that testing on spreadsheet desiderata would get you the best recruiters, there would be no joke here. edit: clarification
ggggtez 9y ago
These pieces always tend to feel to me like complaining. It assumes the reader already agrees that tech interviewers are broken and does nothing to convince others. I for one don't see whiteboarding questions as a problem, so the scenario rings hollow.
- nope123 9y ago
  Would you allow me to interview you and ask you some questions on algorithms and data structures and have that recorded for everyone here to see. I bet you that I can ask relevant questions that you'll struggle and most likely fail to answer in the 20 minutes time allotted. And no they won't be from any standard 'cracking the code interview' questions. The point is, the relationship between interviewer and interviewee should be reciprocal. Both should ask questions and the winner gets the job (maybe even the interviewer's job) Now, I think companies would love that as it exposes weakness in their ranks, but interviewers would then join the rank of complainers. You haver to think more deeply about this stuff, not just state whatever you feel like as your righteous opinion.
throwaway8686 9y ago
Time is the most valuable resource which can be saved tremendously if really competent recruiters/interviewers are involved in the recruitment process. I was recently interviewing for a position with a company behind pushcrew/vwo, it took me roughly 55+ hours (cumulative) to work on their assignment, attend interviews, company/business analysis etc. I knew the the assignment which I had created was really good given the time constraint on it. Even recruiters acknowledged it (!), but at the end the decision was made on basis of team diversity!! They wanted to have a diverse set of team. I'm not against their decision, it's their company and their team. But to come to this conclusion, there's no need to make a candidate spend this much amount of time. Just by glancing over resume and previous history, they could have rejected me straightaway OR maybe on the very first call! Both of my interviewers were good, I think, but I doubt they weren't sure what exactly they were looking for? It is simply another set of people, who I believe are from tech background but lack experience in recruitment. The equation should be managed properly: Tech knowledge + People Skills/Management = Good Recruiter. A good recruiter should be skilled equally in tech + his/her people reading skills. It saves a lot of time, money and efforts for both of the parties involved in the process.
kevstev 9y ago
I get that the point of the article is to point out the flaws of technical interviews, but I see a lot of people griping and quite frankly circle jerking about how bad recruiters are. I am definitely "mid career" at this point and a manager and I consider my "recruiter bench" to be a huge asset, both for when I am hiring, and also looking. The thing is, yes absolutely 80% of them are garbage- they are mere regex's and will likely be out of the industry in a few years. The other 20%, that really know their shit, and have deep connections in the industry are gold though. What you need to do is find those guys and build relationships with them over time, so when you have an open head, or decide its time, you already have a half dozen people you can call that you have a long relationship that you trust to help get you a job. These guys can also just give you good intelligence- what is hot right now, what is not, who is paying well, which companies despite their darling status at the moment can't seem to keep an engineer in their seats more than a year. To get that kind of info though, you have to build a relationship. If I see someone that writes a well informed, grammatically correct email to me, I will look them up on LinkedIn. If they have been around awhile, have some shared connections with me, maybe shared some posts that are interesting, I will usually give them a call back and say "hey I am not interested, but lets keep in touch- here are some things that might interest me in a new role, you are welcome to bounce stuff that fits this off me any time." They will inevitably continue to call you over time- and that's when you can start asking them stuff- who is good/bad, etc. Even offer to get drinks (they will almost always pay)- that's when you can get the really good gossip. If you keep that bench warm, you will likely find that the quality of potential positions thrown your way improves dramatically, as well as the quality of potential candidates. At least that's been my experience.
jftuga 9y ago
I actually created an Excel question for interviewing help desk candidates: If you were to type in 5+2 into a cell, what would be the result? :-)

216 points by NTDF9 9y ago

Interviewer: It means we do Agile. Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. We have a Recruitment Master, that coordinates all the other recruiters in Sprints. Absolute gold.

sarabande 9y ago
To give credit where it is due, this especially funny quote is nearly verbatim copied from the original article (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte...) from which "inspiration" for this one was taken: It means we do Agile. Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. We have a Translator Master, that coordinates all the other Translators in Sprints."
- jmmcd 9y ago
  "inspiration". And I don't think they even fully understood the original, because this joke makes no sense in the new version, but did in the original: > What filter will you use, if you want more than two conditions or if you want to analyze the list using database function? Candidate: I’m sorry. What? Is that a question?
- cyphar 9y ago
  """inspiration""". It's a flat-out and less funny rip-off of the original. In fact, several of the responses don't make sense in this version that did make sense in the original. Candidate: Forget it. Just give me a second ok? I think I will organize rows as candidates and columns as dates/times and use NOW, TODAY, WEEKNUM and the rarely used called YEARFRAC Interviewer: Oh, no, that’s from the answer sheet in the “Cracking the Recruiting Interview: 150 Spreadsheet Questions and Solutions.” Candidate: No, I mean, that is something I have used in the past for simple fractions Interviewer: How would I know? I’m not a spreadsheet wizard like you.
  - sleepychu 9y ago
    Oh yeah, I read this as like "you fail for giving me a standard answer" but reading the original it's clear they missed the point here.

IceyEC 9y ago

Why are we suddenly inundated with "If companies interviewed * the way they interview programmers" posts?

sleepychu 9y ago
because the community is super frustrated with the state of interviewing.
- throwthis12 9y ago
  > because a bunch of people who take free online javascript classes are frustrated they're being asked about algorithms and data structures they deem irrelevant fixed
- kaybe 9y ago
  It's quite interesting how different submissions on the front page build on each other and there is a sort of meta-conversation happening with the flow of articles. I think AI or whatever you want to call it is not up to it yet, but it would be an interesting investigation for in a few years.
stevekemp 9y ago
Because people copy things that have been recently popular, as a way of boosting their own audiences. "Curated list of XXX" was popular a while back, after that it was "Machine learning applied to XXX", and this week it is recruitment. Next week it will be something else.
partiallogic 9y ago
This is the first one I’ve seen in response to the translator one and would love to see more.
- lolptdr 9y ago
  https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte... I believe this is the first of its kind. Enjoy.

pulse7 9y ago

Recruiters usually aren't good at programming. If they were - in most cases - they wouldn't be recruiting, but writing code... So their "identification of good programmers" is somehow limited...

shubb 9y ago
There are places where good technical recruiters earn substantially more than programmers - if they get 10% year salary (which I understand is not the highest number you might see), they only need ~1 successful placement a month to make reach parity.
- creepydata 9y ago
  Not only that but they may just enjoy recruiting more than they enjoy (or don't enjoy) programing.
  - dagw 9y ago
    The two recruiters I know basically did it has a mid life career switch.

TamDenholm 9y ago

I get at least 5 phone calls from recruiters a week, being a contractor. The amount of times i get someone that asks me something like: Recruiter: "We're looking for someone with React experience, do you have that?" Me: "Yes" Them: "Ok, how about Javascript?" I want to explain to them but i end up just saying yes to every acronym on their list since they've no idea what they're asking for.

empath75 9y ago
Actual recruiting call: "I have an opening for someone with mesosphere and machine learning experience." "Well, I don't have any of those, but I have used docker a little bit." "Great, I'd like you to interview."
beager 9y ago
It's funny because in a different context, that's exactly a sequence of questions that I as an engineer would ask: > Do you have experience with React? > Okay, do you have experience writing pure, vanilla JavaScript? Absent a framework like jQuery or Backbone or Angular? The second question can often screen out people who simply maintain framework apps rather than those who actually know JS.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  Are you assuming that people who haven't maintained a vanilla JS app don't actually know JS?
  - beager 9y ago
    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.
    - cema 9y ago
      I doubt you can really just cut-n-paste jQuery in any nontrivial web app...

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

Why-is-the-title-written-like-this?

majewsky 9y ago
To save space(s). :)
philbarr 9y ago
because-it-makes-you-read-it-faster?

dagw 9y ago

On the flip side I recently interviewed for a programming position at a civil engineering company and at no point in the process did anybody ask any questions that would in any way test if I actually knew any of the things I claimed to know. The entire "programming" part of the interview was essentially: "We use quite a bit of python. I see from your CV you've used python". "Oh absolutely, I consider python the language I know best. I've worked on a couple of larger python applications as well as used it extensively in a number of smaller projects" "Great!"

empath75 9y ago
Actual programming interview question: "How would you rate your skill with cloudformation on a scale of 1 to 10" "I guess a 9.5" "Great." No follow up question.
mrfusion 9y ago
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.
- dagw 9y ago
  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 would even consider interviewing him.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    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.

chrisweekly 9y ago

Instant classic. Hilarious -- and spot-on.

fecak 9y ago

20 year recovering recruiter here (now more focused on providing services to help job seekers). I think at least some of the animosity job seekers have for recruiters is that they may feel recruiters are designing these types of esoteric interview questions and exercises. The overwhelming majority of recruiters are entirely incapable of designing them because they lack the technical skills (myself included). The recruiter is primarily responsible for identifying a (hopefully) qualified candidate and managing the hiring process along to ensure the "candidate experience" doesn't get in the way of a hire being made. The recruiter might be just as frustrated with that hiring process and the methods as the candidate, but probably has little control over it. If we want to end these types of interviews, the people to change them are engineering managers. If the engineering manager wanted to end whiteboard exercises and trivial questions on minute details, I assure you the recruiter wouldn't be against it.

ryandrake 9y ago
Exactly. My interactions with tech recruiters are, by and large, pleasant and effective. There are some bad ones, but most just seem overworked at best, flaky at worst. I don't see recruiters as a major part of the tech interviewing problem. It's not until the point where the recruitment process gets tossed over into to the hiring manager's hands where things go feet-up and I start feeling like a piece of steak being graded.

jordanpg 9y ago

When I read articles like this, I tend to assume that they are exaggerations written by people who feel burned because they didn't get the job they want and that the reason was unfair interview questions. In other words, I simply don't believe that interviewers are, as a group, so stupid that they regularly ask obscure Excel questions when they are plainly not relevant. To continue with the recruiting example, I suspect what is more common is that interviewers are expecting candidates with some Excel experience, and ask questions to gauge some basic level of competency. And interviewees have conflated using it one time with any depth of experience. I can attest to seeing this many times during programming interviews. If I see something towards the top of someone's resume, I will ask a basic question to see if anything whatsoever is known about that thing. Yes, book knowledge. Stuff that you would know if you had actually read any docs. I don't want to work alongside someone who claims knowledge or experience of something and doesn't know the basics. Or doesn't know that they don't know the basics.

justin_vanw 9y ago
Yes I think you are right, buuuut... Lots of times the initial screen is done by someone totally non-technical, and they are asking questions from a sheet and judging whether you are saying what is in the answer field for their sheet. This is super stupid, but I have seen it, usually when some headhunting firm is deciding whether to add your resume to their database which they pull resume's from to send to clients. The moral: Don't use headhunting firms, because they will basically never send you a decent candidate. In the very rare cases where they by pure luck do send a good candidate, this is rarely worth the dozens of crap candidates they have sent you (not to mention that they will try to push candidates on you if they think they can get away with it).
- minxomat 9y ago
  Yep on the first point. I was once asked to bend a comically large paper clip out of pipe cleaners. Next I was to solve some physics questions. This was for an analyst job at a bank.
- whatever_dude 9y ago

nautilus12 9y ago

This is a picture perfect description of my interview with stitchfix.

jonathanwallace 9y ago
I'm sorry to hear that. For which position were you interviewing?
- nautilus12 9y ago
  Engineering. First job ive never gotten an offer for. I feel like they werent serious about hiring and maybe they were required to interview a number of non internal candidates and were just checking boxes. Huge waste of my time. Granted I acknowledge Im not perfect and desirable in every way, but the interview felt really silly

dsr_ 9y ago

I am, now and on occasion, a hiring manager. Naturally, every freelance recruiter wants to be my friend. They often start cold calls with a description of a person's technical abilities, and then ask if I would be interested in interviewing that person. When that happens, I ask them to define one of the buzzwords that they have just used. "Could you tell me what 'big data' means?" or "What's the difference between AWS and GCE?" I don't do business with technical recruiters who aren't familiar with the meanings of the terms that they throw around. They have never been more valuable than a regex.

dsacco 9y ago
Please, please share one of the funnier stories you have about grilling recruiters who didn't know the difference between AWS and GCE.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Most recently I asked if the recruiter knew the difference between Java and JavaScript, since he had just mentioned both of them. "Uh, they're web technologies... in very high demand." "Yes, but is there a difference between them? What kind of web technologies are they?" Long pause. The background silence changes a little, as though a hand were placed over the telephone's mouthpiece. I can't hear the word in the conversation he's having, but it's clear that he is talking to someone. The hand goes away. "Java is a general purpose computer programming language with concurrent objects, and JavaScript is the script version." Pause. "Did I get that right?"
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Perfect. Next time you should respond, "Hmm...that's not what I have here. The answer is, 'JavaScript uses Electron and Java uses Spring.' I'm sorry, I don't think you're a great fit for us. Best of luck and have a good day." Then hang up, and kill two birds with one stone in the process: the tone-deaf recruiter finally understands how the buzzword bingo interview feels, and you have one less incompetent recruiter to deal with.

dudul 9y ago

Total rip off of the original post. What does it bring? The jokes are the same ( and sometimes lose their meaning in "translation")

dracodoc 9y ago
Yes, almost byte by byte translation, and a bad one. The original is much better. I guess this title is better aimed at audience though, since many people may not have interest on translation. Strongly suggest people not read yet to read the original post https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6 https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte...

robotnoises 9y ago

That really was funny, but man, it's hard to stomach "inspired by" when realistically it's a Mad Lib of the original post from Free Code Camp.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago

Step 1: Copy post from Free Code Camp Step 2: s/translator/recruiter/g Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit

jancsika 9y ago

> You see, we are looking for the very best Recruiters, and it has been proven by major companies that the people that are able to do the job best have a very solid foundation in spreadsheets for quick applicant tracking. Doesn't the punchline hinge on the above quote from the interviewer being false? In other words, if the research really did show that testing on spreadsheet desiderata would get you the best recruiters, there would be no joke here. edit: clarification

ggggtez 9y ago

These pieces always tend to feel to me like complaining. It assumes the reader already agrees that tech interviewers are broken and does nothing to convince others. I for one don't see whiteboarding questions as a problem, so the scenario rings hollow.

nope123 9y ago
Would you allow me to interview you and ask you some questions on algorithms and data structures and have that recorded for everyone here to see. I bet you that I can ask relevant questions that you'll struggle and most likely fail to answer in the 20 minutes time allotted. And no they won't be from any standard 'cracking the code interview' questions. The point is, the relationship between interviewer and interviewee should be reciprocal. Both should ask questions and the winner gets the job (maybe even the interviewer's job) Now, I think companies would love that as it exposes weakness in their ranks, but interviewers would then join the rank of complainers. You haver to think more deeply about this stuff, not just state whatever you feel like as your righteous opinion.

throwaway8686 9y ago

Time is the most valuable resource which can be saved tremendously if really competent recruiters/interviewers are involved in the recruitment process. I was recently interviewing for a position with a company behind pushcrew/vwo, it took me roughly 55+ hours (cumulative) to work on their assignment, attend interviews, company/business analysis etc. I knew the the assignment which I had created was really good given the time constraint on it. Even recruiters acknowledged it (!), but at the end the decision was made on basis of team diversity!! They wanted to have a diverse set of team. I'm not against their decision, it's their company and their team. But to come to this conclusion, there's no need to make a candidate spend this much amount of time. Just by glancing over resume and previous history, they could have rejected me straightaway OR maybe on the very first call! Both of my interviewers were good, I think, but I doubt they weren't sure what exactly they were looking for? It is simply another set of people, who I believe are from tech background but lack experience in recruitment. The equation should be managed properly: Tech knowledge + People Skills/Management = Good Recruiter. A good recruiter should be skilled equally in tech + his/her people reading skills. It saves a lot of time, money and efforts for both of the parties involved in the process.

kevstev 9y ago

I get that the point of the article is to point out the flaws of technical interviews, but I see a lot of people griping and quite frankly circle jerking about how bad recruiters are. I am definitely "mid career" at this point and a manager and I consider my "recruiter bench" to be a huge asset, both for when I am hiring, and also looking. The thing is, yes absolutely 80% of them are garbage- they are mere regex's and will likely be out of the industry in a few years. The other 20%, that really know their shit, and have deep connections in the industry are gold though. What you need to do is find those guys and build relationships with them over time, so when you have an open head, or decide its time, you already have a half dozen people you can call that you have a long relationship that you trust to help get you a job. These guys can also just give you good intelligence- what is hot right now, what is not, who is paying well, which companies despite their darling status at the moment can't seem to keep an engineer in their seats more than a year. To get that kind of info though, you have to build a relationship. If I see someone that writes a well informed, grammatically correct email to me, I will look them up on LinkedIn. If they have been around awhile, have some shared connections with me, maybe shared some posts that are interesting, I will usually give them a call back and say "hey I am not interested, but lets keep in touch- here are some things that might interest me in a new role, you are welcome to bounce stuff that fits this off me any time." They will inevitably continue to call you over time- and that's when you can start asking them stuff- who is good/bad, etc. Even offer to get drinks (they will almost always pay)- that's when you can get the really good gossip. If you keep that bench warm, you will likely find that the quality of potential positions thrown your way improves dramatically, as well as the quality of potential candidates. At least that's been my experience.

jftuga 9y ago

I actually created an Excel question for interviewing help desk candidates: If you were to type in 5+2 into a cell, what would be the result? :-)