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Would you work for a company that spent 0 time vetting you? There has to be a "right" amount of time for evaluating candidates and the amount of time the candid

by spuz 7y ago

Would you work for a company that spent 0 time vetting you? There has to be a "right" amount of time for evaluating candidates and the amount of time the candidate is required to give up when looking for a new job is only one side of the equation. Unless you want to work somewhere that has no hiring standards, you should not dismiss the time taken for take-home tests as wasted without evaluating their effectiveness vs other methods.

scarface74 7y ago
I had two offers before I took my previous job. At Job 1: the interview was a white board interview where he wanted me to write a merge sort. He asked a few questions about my background and had to model a database schema and write a few queries to answer done questions. The 2nd offer was after an interview where I had no language questions, he asked me about how I would design a development process “if I ruled the world”, methodology about dealing with legacy code and integrating it with a mobile app via APIs, my feelings about testing, what trade offs I had to make based on “business realities”, etc. The first offer was full time, a shorter commute and paid more. The second offer was contract to perm, if I translated it to an FTE salary it paid less (I ended up making more since I got paid by the hour), and it was a longer commute. They were both supposedly “senior software engineer” jobs. I took the second offer. I didn’t realize at the time that they were actually looking for a dev lead. When they bought me on perm they matched the offer of the first job. Are you really not able to tell someone’s experience if they have been in the industry for awhile just by talking to them? The truth is that most developers are “dark matter developers” doing yet another software as a service CRUD app or a bespoke internal app that will never see the outside of the company.
derivagral 7y ago
I effectively did this. No whiteboarding, no code stuff, just a phone call and an onsite with coworkers and boss. Small team, range of technical talent, but a much better fit for me compared to the larger (or smaller) standard advertising companies in the area that run 4-6 hour take home tests followed by a day of whiteboarding. You do not need to haze candidates, but you do need to test for basic ability. As for vetting the company from my side: there's a bunch of mentoring and refactors that needed to happen with prior code, sure, but nothing game-breakingly broken. I've viewed this as a great mentorship setup, not as a "time to post another N+1 select to dailywtf".

by spuz 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

I had two offers before I took my previous job. At Job 1: the interview was a white board interview where he wanted me to write a merge sort. He asked a few questions about my background and had to model a database schema and write a few queries to answer done questions. The 2nd offer was after an interview where I had no language questions, he asked me about how I would design a development process “if I ruled the world”, methodology about dealing with legacy code and integrating it with a mobile app via APIs, my feelings about testing, what trade offs I had to make based on “business realities”, etc. The first offer was full time, a shorter commute and paid more. The second offer was contract to perm, if I translated it to an FTE salary it paid less (I ended up making more since I got paid by the hour), and it was a longer commute. They were both supposedly “senior software engineer” jobs. I took the second offer. I didn’t realize at the time that they were actually looking for a dev lead. When they bought me on perm they matched the offer of the first job. Are you really not able to tell someone’s experience if they have been in the industry for awhile just by talking to them? The truth is that most developers are “dark matter developers” doing yet another software as a service CRUD app or a bespoke internal app that will never see the outside of the company.

derivagral 7y ago

I effectively did this. No whiteboarding, no code stuff, just a phone call and an onsite with coworkers and boss. Small team, range of technical talent, but a much better fit for me compared to the larger (or smaller) standard advertising companies in the area that run 4-6 hour take home tests followed by a day of whiteboarding. You do not need to haze candidates, but you do need to test for basic ability. As for vetting the company from my side: there's a bunch of mentoring and refactors that needed to happen with prior code, sure, but nothing game-breakingly broken. I've viewed this as a great mentorship setup, not as a "time to post another N+1 select to dailywtf".