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I'd like to hope they don't! Interviewees, however, tend to get flustered if they can't remember the method names. It's another rock on a pile that eventually

I'd like to hope they don't! Interviewees, however, tend to get flustered if they can't remember the method names. It's another rock on a pile that eventually leads to nervousness collapse, something that happens far too often, so after a few dozen interviews I've started stressing up-front that no, it doesn't matter, I'm not scoring you on that. That, on its own, produced a measurable increase in average score.

jetsnoc 9y ago
What do you score on?
- Filligree 9y ago
  It all amounts to "Would I like to work with this person?", but a couple of things. Persistence, memory, ability to learn -- not trying the same thing over again if it doesn't work -- intelligence when possible, knowledge if I expect them to have it. That's pretty vague. I use the same strategy as the sibling post, ratcheting up difficulty until the candidate fails, so I usually have a lot to go on, but the exact criteria end up changing from one interview to the next depending on what the candidate did. Occasionally I end up with not enough data. I try to give my feedback in the form of a confidence interval, but if it's mediocre candidate combined with not-stellar signal quality... figuring out how to score them can take a while.
wutbrodo 9y ago
Yea, I know how stressful it is to read the tea leaves of what an interviewer is actually looking for, so I'm always extremely up-front about the fact that I don't care at all about certain things. Hell, I've even told people that an incorrect final answer isn't a big deal: one of my favorite strategies is incrementally racheting up the difficulty of a problem until the candidate gets stuck. The richness of the information you can gain from this process is fantastic, though again, you have to couch it in a lot of communication to the interviewee that they shouldn't get stressed about not perfectly crushing the problem.

jetsnoc 9y ago

What do you score on?

Filligree 9y ago
It all amounts to "Would I like to work with this person?", but a couple of things. Persistence, memory, ability to learn -- not trying the same thing over again if it doesn't work -- intelligence when possible, knowledge if I expect them to have it. That's pretty vague. I use the same strategy as the sibling post, ratcheting up difficulty until the candidate fails, so I usually have a lot to go on, but the exact criteria end up changing from one interview to the next depending on what the candidate did. Occasionally I end up with not enough data. I try to give my feedback in the form of a confidence interval, but if it's mediocre candidate combined with not-stellar signal quality... figuring out how to score them can take a while.

wutbrodo 9y ago

Yea, I know how stressful it is to read the tea leaves of what an interviewer is actually looking for, so I'm always extremely up-front about the fact that I don't care at all about certain things. Hell, I've even told people that an incorrect final answer isn't a big deal: one of my favorite strategies is incrementally racheting up the difficulty of a problem until the candidate gets stuck. The richness of the information you can gain from this process is fantastic, though again, you have to couch it in a lot of communication to the interviewee that they shouldn't get stressed about not perfectly crushing the problem.