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What some of us do now is at home exercises with no deadline and setup the interview to do a code review of it after it's given back. It gives so many advantag
by xwolfi 6y ago
What some of us do now is at home exercises with no deadline and setup the interview to do a code review of it after it's given back.
It gives so many advantages:
- people will have some fun trying to solve a real issue / build a little software
- they will show how good they are at stack overflow, general methodology, cleanliness, test coverage, deployment and even git (how many we see who can't even gitignore their project files, make a build script that works, or test for real)
- horrible candidates who can't even cheat will not be able to lie their way around a fake resume, cheaters will bomb the code review quite fast
- candidate will also discover their future team mates general work attitude during the review and if the reviewer is good, will lock the candidate faster than "how many billard balls can you put in a Boeing 747" type of interview.
- candidate will even LEARN during the code review => you get away with something out of the interview even if you fail
Since I've been interviewed that way, doing my little project on my wife's pregnancy bed smiling like an idiot at solving the challenge, then fell in love with my manager showing me new tricks during the review, I'll never do any other kind of interviews myself.
- tchaffee 6y agoI recently did one of these where I was paid at half the hourly rate of the job offer. There was an initial unpaid assignment that was difficult but totally related to most engineers' day to day work. That took less than 30 minutes. Anyone who passed that got the paid assignment which took a few hours.
- bananaface 6y agoIf I had options I wouldn't even do a 30-minute assignment. I'd just go with someone else. I'm reading about employers giving assignments a lot in this thread, but what do you do about the fact that the people you really want just don't have a reason to waste that time?
- tchaffee 6y agoThere was no interview. Not even a phone call. After I submitted the 3 hour paid assignment they hired me by giving me access to Slack and we just started working together. One of the smoothest and easiest "interviews" I've ever done and I got paid for everything except for a 30 minute challenge that helped solidify my understanding of git. > people you really want just don't have a reason to waste that time I'm "really wanted". In the past week I have had to say no to two clients calling me for follow up work. Where do you think I wasted my time?
- bananaface 6y agoThis seems like a very nice process.
- tchaffee 6y agoIt was great and I enjoyed working with them. That's why even though interviewing is broken at most companies I enter the process assuming the best and with an open mind. I'm disappointed 90% of the time, but you don't want to throw out a gem just because you usually dig up worthless stones.