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"Standard" is the key - I've seen more candidates who overrate themselves than underrate... "Years of experience" isn't a great indicator either. The language

"Standard" is the key - I've seen more candidates who overrate themselves than underrate... "Years of experience" isn't a great indicator either. The language I'm most proficient in today is the one I learned most recently.

bartonfink 16y ago
Fair point, and I agree that years of experience is thinly veiled bullshit. It only gets perpetuated because people don't know exactly what they need employees to do. Life would be much easier if job listings said things like "you need to be able to work with Python with access to other engineers for help" or "you need to have encyclopedic knowledge of JVM options, internals and optimizations" instead of crap like "Python - 2-3 years", "Java - 10+ years" which don't really say anything but filter out candidates needlessly. To your under/overrating problem, I think that's where ?'s have to come into play. Someone who ranks themselves very highly needs to be able to back it up, and it's your responsibility as an interviewer to get appropriate people to do that vetting if you can't. Someone who rates themselves as a 10 with Solaris, for example, needs to be vetted by the best damned sysadmin you can get. Someone who rates themselves as a 3-4 can probably be comfortably vetted by an experienced engineer. I try to knock myself down roughly a point off where I think I ought to be, and I've found that works well in interviews. For instance, at my second job interview (after only a six month internship), I was asked "on a scale of 1-10, how do you rate yourself as a software engineer?" I replied that I rated myself a 2-3, but I considered 10 to be an engineer with a world-class reputation like Steve McConnell or Steve Yegge. Compared to the people with my experience, I rated myself an 8, but I recognized that I had a long way to go. Humility works well if you make it sound rational and not just like kow-towing.

bartonfink 16y ago

Fair point, and I agree that years of experience is thinly veiled bullshit. It only gets perpetuated because people don't know exactly what they need employees to do. Life would be much easier if job listings said things like "you need to be able to work with Python with access to other engineers for help" or "you need to have encyclopedic knowledge of JVM options, internals and optimizations" instead of crap like "Python - 2-3 years", "Java - 10+ years" which don't really say anything but filter out candidates needlessly. To your under/overrating problem, I think that's where ?'s have to come into play. Someone who ranks themselves very highly needs to be able to back it up, and it's your responsibility as an interviewer to get appropriate people to do that vetting if you can't. Someone who rates themselves as a 10 with Solaris, for example, needs to be vetted by the best damned sysadmin you can get. Someone who rates themselves as a 3-4 can probably be comfortably vetted by an experienced engineer. I try to knock myself down roughly a point off where I think I ought to be, and I've found that works well in interviews. For instance, at my second job interview (after only a six month internship), I was asked "on a scale of 1-10, how do you rate yourself as a software engineer?" I replied that I rated myself a 2-3, but I considered 10 to be an engineer with a world-class reputation like Steve McConnell or Steve Yegge. Compared to the people with my experience, I rated myself an 8, but I recognized that I had a long way to go. Humility works well if you make it sound rational and not just like kow-towing.