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It really depends on the interviewer not wasting both our times and making it worth for everybody. I had candidates that weren't good sellers of their past expe

by rescbr 6y ago

It really depends on the interviewer not wasting both our times and making it worth for everybody. I had candidates that weren't good sellers of their past experience, but I made sure to engage with them and they were in fact excellent professionals. When interviewing you can ask the candidate for details on their MySQL + cron job and investigate how do they think, architect and build a solution and how much bullshit they're talking. Were you given a very detailed task to perform and you just did it? Or did you reach the conclusion that a MySQL DB plus a cron job would achieve the results? Why? What if the cron job failed? Draw a rough flowchart of your script, etc. On the other hand, you can smell the bullshit of interesting fictions from a long distance when you ask those probing questions. Now, an interview on basic CS algorithms? The only thing I would know is that you have a good memory and can recall the Cracking the Code Interview book.

ertian 6y ago
The same thing actually applies to DS&A interviews: a person can memorize the solution to a given problem, but the interviewer can easily throw some curveballs that require deeper knowledge to handle. It might come down to who is doing the interview: if you're a founder, or a team leader, and have done a lot of project management, you're likely to ask better questions about constraints, considerations, teamwork, etc, and get a better read on a candidate from questions about past experience. OTOH, a programmer giving an interview may not really care that much about those aspects or have a realistic idea of what a reasonable answer sounds like, and will thus tend to just jump through the interview hoops--and be more susceptible to, well, nonsense. On the other hand, they may actually be interested and invested in low-level technical questions. I've had really good tech interviews that were challenging and even fun, and I don't think I could've faked my way through. I've never had a good experiential interview. But then, I've only ever interviewed for front-line programming jobs at large companies.

by rescbr 6y ago

ertian 6y ago

The same thing actually applies to DS&A interviews: a person can memorize the solution to a given problem, but the interviewer can easily throw some curveballs that require deeper knowledge to handle. It might come down to who is doing the interview: if you're a founder, or a team leader, and have done a lot of project management, you're likely to ask better questions about constraints, considerations, teamwork, etc, and get a better read on a candidate from questions about past experience. OTOH, a programmer giving an interview may not really care that much about those aspects or have a realistic idea of what a reasonable answer sounds like, and will thus tend to just jump through the interview hoops--and be more susceptible to, well, nonsense. On the other hand, they may actually be interested and invested in low-level technical questions. I've had really good tech interviews that were challenging and even fun, and I don't think I could've faked my way through. I've never had a good experiential interview. But then, I've only ever interviewed for front-line programming jobs at large companies.