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I'm not sure if this is an "American thing", but in (Western) Europe usually a candidate that holds a degree in engineering or has a couple of years of experien

I'm not sure if this is an "American thing", but in (Western) Europe usually a candidate that holds a degree in engineering or has a couple of years of experience is enough to be considered a competent developer. Sure, there are tech interviews and the like, but in all my years of experience and companies I have worked for, most if not all of the colleagues I have worked with were normal developers (which for 99% of the tech companies out there means 'good developers'). I'm not talking about rock stars.

spawnthink 6y ago
That's possible, but then doesn't that limit your candidates pool to people with engineering degrees? I'm not sure about the couple of years experience, that's sometimes a miss depending on what they built during those years.
toast0 6y ago
I've worked with people who have a degree and a couple years of holding a developer job without actually being able to do software development. It's not pleasant. When I do a technical interview, I'm mostly looking for basic skills: from a brief description of the problem with example input, ask any questions and describe the output and show what the output would be. Then write code that does what you described; any language is fine as long as it's consistent on the board. My problem is reversable, so if we have time, I ask them to write the code to go the other way. The problem itself isn't hard, the biggest issue people have is being consistent; even after we spent a good portion of time coming up with an example output, some people do something totally different. Very ocassionally, I get someone who has real trouble with a basic for loop. Sometimes, people are having a bad day and you can tell, which is unfortunate. If they're local, you can try to get them rescheduled, but if they were flown in, that's kind of their one shot for a while.

spawnthink 6y ago

That's possible, but then doesn't that limit your candidates pool to people with engineering degrees? I'm not sure about the couple of years experience, that's sometimes a miss depending on what they built during those years.

toast0 6y ago

I've worked with people who have a degree and a couple years of holding a developer job without actually being able to do software development. It's not pleasant. When I do a technical interview, I'm mostly looking for basic skills: from a brief description of the problem with example input, ask any questions and describe the output and show what the output would be. Then write code that does what you described; any language is fine as long as it's consistent on the board. My problem is reversable, so if we have time, I ask them to write the code to go the other way. The problem itself isn't hard, the biggest issue people have is being consistent; even after we spent a good portion of time coming up with an example output, some people do something totally different. Very ocassionally, I get someone who has real trouble with a basic for loop. Sometimes, people are having a bad day and you can tell, which is unfortunate. If they're local, you can try to get them rescheduled, but if they were flown in, that's kind of their one shot for a while.