9 ms·

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that i

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" If I ran into a problem and went to them for help, would they just stare at me, waiting for me to figure it out on my own? They didn't extend an offer to me and, based on my performance in that interview, I can't say I blame them. I'm not sure I would have accepted if they had, however. That experience really left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a low impression of that company. We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews.

nine_zeros 5y ago
"Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" Unfortunately, yes. Young engineers are terrible at communication and working with others. Partly due to workplace incentives and partly because you must realize that entire generations have grown up with computers and not people.
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  I don't think this deserves the downvotes it is getting simply because there is some truth to the comment. A good friend of mine worked with a young developer recently who was excited about what he was able to generate with a single npm command. When my friend, who has been writing software longer than this guy has been alive, calmly pointed out that the npm command had just generated 400 files and thousands of lines of code that didn't actually solve their problem, this guy got mad and went to complain to their manager.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    I'd be mildly ticked-off, too. The senior guy was being an ass.
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      I can easily imagine how it went down. "Wow! I can do so much with so little!" "Everything you just generated is wasteful and meaningless." The right way is to encourage that enthusiasm and guide them toward doing more useful work with the same power they just discovered.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    We only have your telling of your friend's telling of the story. This is rhetorically similar to saving a 50% quality jpeg as a 20% quality jpeg.
- teclordphrack2 5y ago
  In all honesty it's not just younger developers. I have worked in plenty of companies where the idea of "communication" needed to be stressed and would of fixed many problems and saved a lot of money.
raincom 5y ago
In a cut-throat environment, where 10% of people are PIP'ed, it is expected: your senior colleagues are not going to help you, will lead you down a wrong path, etc. That way, the tribal knowledge will be with them, and they can outshine any new employee. In your interview case, they should have given you hints, even if they want to not hire you later.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  That’s not how 10% attrition works at any notable company.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - polotics 5y ago
    Pray tell, can you clarify what's incorrect in the above description?
  - teclordphrack2 5y ago
    I know some MIT labs work that way. Backstabbing people b/c there are only so many upper positions instead of titling and paying people their skill level you would have to wait for someone to retire.
sparker72678 5y ago
I had an extremely similar experience recently and it really shook me up for a few days. Same amount of time in the industry as you. Looking back there's no way I would have fit in there, but damn did that interview screw me up for a while.
vmception 5y ago
Nothing about tech interviews is a signal for what happens inside the company, aside from you having the dual role of giving tech interviews while you forgot to factor that into your sprint planning You’re making the same mistake at vetting them that they’re making at vetting you
- edoceo 5y ago
  The interview is signal from the actual company - it's definitely got some information about what's inside.
  - vmception 5y ago
    You are simply determining that you are okay with false negatives Which is exactly why they do irrelevant interview brainteasers as well This problem is a two way street in the tech sector, in case anyone wanted to fix it. The candidates alone are making the same mistake and bringing it to the company
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Is a "false negative" a positive?
      - vmception 5y ago
        Its a quadrant. Positive, Negative, False Positive, False Negative
      - randomswede 5y ago
        It is a determination that something should be rejected, when it really should have been accepted. Similarly, a false positive is something that was accepted, when it should have been rejected. If you have a sufficiently high candidate pool. you can (for a while, at least) live with an interview process with a relatively high false negative rate (that is, x% of the time you don't hire people you should have). If it is typically quick to go from "in through the door" to "is a productive member of the team", it may be that you can live with a high false positive rate (that is, y% of the time you hire people you shouldn't have).
vidanay 5y ago
Honestly, these are the reasons I don't look for a new position.I make "good" money, but by no means great. I have the benefit of 20 years tenure and apparent stability in my current role. Trading that for more stress in hiring and gambling more stress in daily work doesn't balance the potential salary increase.
mikepurvis 5y ago
I've never understood the heavy emphasis on in-interview coding or brain teasers. To the extent that I've participated in the hiring process (both as an IC and a manager), 80% of the interview is assessing culture/personality/ethic fit; that is, the basic "do I want to work with this person" question. The technical competence check is all retrospective, hearing them talk about prior projects and what the design and implementation process was like, how decisions were made, what the challenges were and how they were handled, any regrets/learnings. And most of that is just digging in far enough to confirm that the person was actually a first-class participant in it with a deep understanding, and not a bystander. Any whiteboard stuff would be "show us how the system worked" as a last-ditch check on basic communication skills.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  You know, I was nodding my head in agreement as I read this when something occurred to me. This all requires that the interviewer be willing to interact deeply with the candidate. Our profession has a (well deserved, I think) reputation for having a high percentage of people who really don't like interacting with others on a peer level. Is it likely that a large part of the problem is that we have people doing interviews who really shouldn't be? I mean, if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them, then you're going to be a really shitty interviewer. And that's exactly the personality type I see being described over and over in these anecdotes.
  - kodisha 5y ago
    Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head" I can tell you, with quite substantial sample size from me directly and from people I deeply trust that every time we encountered an interview like this, we later found out that the company culture was really bad. Those are not the kind of people you want to work with.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      For clarity, is the "like this" in your comment referring to brain teaser technical one-upmanship interviews, or the less structured style that is focused on getting to know the person and having them describe in their own words the projects in their past?
serf 5y ago
i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script. Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost. I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related. It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards. That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.
- mateo411 5y ago
  > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.
lowercased 5y ago
> trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. that describes 2/3rds of the 'codility' tests I've been given in a few scenarios (toptal used it to weed me out). The couple of jobs I've been in where I was explicitly barred from ever asking any clarifying questions, or talking to business/SME folks about the problem at hand... I left those pretty quickly. I guess it serves to weed out people who have some hard-wired dependency on talking to people to clarify requirements.
herbturbo 5y ago
Never understood this way of interviewing. I get shit now and then for helping people too much in coding exercises, but if someone has reached the point where they are obviously not going to progress why not nudge them along and see how they respond? I've found that the ability to receive and act on guidance with a certain degree of humility is a much better signal of someone's potential than how many algorithms they've memorised.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Interviewing is hard. It takes a lot of practice to know what level of assistance to provide at what time. A coworker once showed me a technique of keeping a google doc with the problems, as well as a step-by-step of the solution and the times at which they should be at that step. It always seemed to work out well for the candidates, as even a poor candidate would finish the problem at like 55 minutes into a 60 min interview. Even with that, getting a person to see what they should be doing next, without telling them explicitly, is definitely a skill you develop with practice. I think you're right in erring on the side of too much assistance. You get to see much more of how the candidate works if you can skip over the part where they are getting stuck on something.
  - herbturbo 5y ago
    Yes some people just need a nudge in the right direction to carry the task through to completion. And some need to be pushed along the entire way. In either case they don't leave the interview feeling humiliated having floundered in the face of smug silence.
  - marbletimes 5y ago
    It is one of those common tropes, "interviewing is hard", that seems to justify the inevitability of poor attitude, wasting time of interviewees (remember the interviewers are paid for those hours) and a painful process for basically anyone. I often interview for my company/group and yes, it is challenging in one hour to find out "life, death, and miracles" of some guy who is being interviewed, but it is especially challenging when the interviewer is in a bad mood, does not want to be there, or sees interviewing as a nuisance, and he is looking for a reason to make someone fail. I worked at a FAANG and I got offers from FAANGs-adjacent companies, so I am not one of those you-cannot-win-at-this-game-so-you-complain people. I saw: someone stopping the interview for unexplained reasons after the first 45 minutes, an interviewer at a blue company looking at my private parts for a good part of 45 minutes, multiple people interviewing while doing something else in person or virtually, recruiters (those were the fronts, the hiring managers were responsible) dragging the process forever and then say no with zero explanation. Is it really "hard" doing better than that?
xtracto 5y ago
Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides a test where they evaluate a person for proficiency on different sets of English skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, general comprehension. At the end of the test they give you a score for each of those and then a general score. Now, the nice thing about the TOEFL score is its reputation: When you are going to study into a University (from Oxford to Liverpool, from Harvard to Queensland), if you are not a native English speaker, the university asks you to take a TOEFL (or equivalent) and get a score higher than X. As long as you provide that score, the university won't ask any questions. They don't doubt your English proficiency skills. I want to do something like that but for development: Sure, University thought you CS101, CS201, etc. But what companies are looking for are specific skills (similar to say, https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix/ https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix... or https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC... ). These very concrete skills that can be concretely measured. I want this becase I've been dealing with recruiting, interviewing and also being interviewed for most of my career. And in my experience setting up a "recruiting wheel" in a company or startup is very painful. Most developers don't know how to perform interviews. Or don't care (who has time for that?). As an Engineer manager, having to comb through 400 resumes a week is time consuming and unproductive. So I imagine a scenario where, there is this proverbial "Full Stack Developer" certification authority which is independent, very reputable and unbiased: They won't tell me if X or Y developer will make it into my team. They will tell me how does the person score in "Algorithms/Data Structures" or "Micro Services development" or "Frontend development" and then I will choose whether I want to hire them or not (according to my current requirements). That way, I only have to do a culture-fit interview and that's it. In the past I have dealt with "Sourcing Agencies" that try to do something like that: They do the 1st technical interview, and they say that there will be alignment to what I want. But that was not the case: They send me 2 candidates and get very surprised when I reject one and not the other. And I feel our objectives are not aligned, so everybody is frustrated. Moreover, I don't want to have to deal with hiring agencies. And paying 1 to 3 salary months is too fucking expensive. Now, as a candidate/developer: I would love to have a "TOEFL" like certificate that I can show, with my proficiency. That way, I can "look for a job" passively. I don't have to be making countless of code interviews showing one time after another what I know. I only do it ONCE for an authoritative company, and everybody else can check my qualifications there. Companies like Microsoft or TripleByte have tried to do something like that, but the problem is again that they do other things: Their interests clash. Why would I trust LinkedIn? That's why TOEFL monetization make sense: The candidate has to pay for it. I am aware there are some certifications: Oracle whatever, Microsoft whatever, AWS whatever. But those are either too specific/niche (WebLogic Server 12c administration exam) or they are only a "badge" (AWS Cloud Engineer) that doesn't tell you that much. There is opportunity here for disruption. And I know that the problems that I've faced are faced by countless of other CTOs/Technology Heads.
ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago
My honest opinion, at this stage in my career I don't have any patience at all for explaining technical concepts. Its almost never a one off, once you have to hold someones hand, you always do. And if you don't, they are creating technical debt.
andrekandre 5y ago
> We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. maybe i'm naive but, how about just ask the candidate to make a mini version of what they would actually do irl? if your an app dev: make me an app that does x, you have 60 min if your a rails dev: make me a site that does y, you have 2hrs if your a pdm: make me a spec and tickets for a system that does z maybe i'm missing something but it shouldn't be too hard should it?
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  It's all the potential criteria around the request that makes just that one piece more complex than it seems. For example; "Make me a site that does x, you have 2 hours" Do I need to build the app in front of you? Problematic because how often does one build an entire web site in a couple of hours, while someone is standing over their shoulders scrutinizing every keystroke? Do I take it home and do it? If so, how do I prove to you that I did the work? Do you care what framework I use? Do you care if I use Open Source code? What design should I use? Where do I get the site assets from? If I'm building this site for you, are you paying me for that time? Then there's the non-technical parts missing from an interview like that: How does such an exercise tell you that I'm the kind of person you want to work with? How does such an interview provide me an opportunity to ask you question? It tells me nothing about you or your company which is every bit as important as you finding out about me.
rambojazz 5y ago
I could absolutely never ever make anything with people staring at me. I need to be alone with my PC.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. Won't happen, because most don't want to figure out a better way. We just have to come to terms with it.

nine_zeros 5y ago

"Is this how working with these guys is going to be?" Unfortunately, yes. Young engineers are terrible at communication and working with others. Partly due to workplace incentives and partly because you must realize that entire generations have grown up with computers and not people.

Zelphyr 5y ago
I don't think this deserves the downvotes it is getting simply because there is some truth to the comment. A good friend of mine worked with a young developer recently who was excited about what he was able to generate with a single npm command. When my friend, who has been writing software longer than this guy has been alive, calmly pointed out that the npm command had just generated 400 files and thousands of lines of code that didn't actually solve their problem, this guy got mad and went to complain to their manager.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  I'd be mildly ticked-off, too. The senior guy was being an ass.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    I can easily imagine how it went down. "Wow! I can do so much with so little!" "Everything you just generated is wasteful and meaningless." The right way is to encourage that enthusiasm and guide them toward doing more useful work with the same power they just discovered.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  We only have your telling of your friend's telling of the story. This is rhetorically similar to saving a 50% quality jpeg as a 20% quality jpeg.
teclordphrack2 5y ago
In all honesty it's not just younger developers. I have worked in plenty of companies where the idea of "communication" needed to be stressed and would of fixed many problems and saved a lot of money.

raincom 5y ago

In a cut-throat environment, where 10% of people are PIP'ed, it is expected: your senior colleagues are not going to help you, will lead you down a wrong path, etc. That way, the tribal knowledge will be with them, and they can outshine any new employee. In your interview case, they should have given you hints, even if they want to not hire you later.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
That’s not how 10% attrition works at any notable company.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- polotics 5y ago
  Pray tell, can you clarify what's incorrect in the above description?
- teclordphrack2 5y ago
  I know some MIT labs work that way. Backstabbing people b/c there are only so many upper positions instead of titling and paying people their skill level you would have to wait for someone to retire.

sparker72678 5y ago

I had an extremely similar experience recently and it really shook me up for a few days. Same amount of time in the industry as you. Looking back there's no way I would have fit in there, but damn did that interview screw me up for a while.

vmception 5y ago

Nothing about tech interviews is a signal for what happens inside the company, aside from you having the dual role of giving tech interviews while you forgot to factor that into your sprint planning You’re making the same mistake at vetting them that they’re making at vetting you

edoceo 5y ago
The interview is signal from the actual company - it's definitely got some information about what's inside.
- vmception 5y ago
  You are simply determining that you are okay with false negatives Which is exactly why they do irrelevant interview brainteasers as well This problem is a two way street in the tech sector, in case anyone wanted to fix it. The candidates alone are making the same mistake and bringing it to the company
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Is a "false negative" a positive?
    - vmception 5y ago
      Its a quadrant. Positive, Negative, False Positive, False Negative
    - randomswede 5y ago
      It is a determination that something should be rejected, when it really should have been accepted. Similarly, a false positive is something that was accepted, when it should have been rejected. If you have a sufficiently high candidate pool. you can (for a while, at least) live with an interview process with a relatively high false negative rate (that is, x% of the time you don't hire people you should have). If it is typically quick to go from "in through the door" to "is a productive member of the team", it may be that you can live with a high false positive rate (that is, y% of the time you hire people you shouldn't have).

vidanay 5y ago

Honestly, these are the reasons I don't look for a new position.I make "good" money, but by no means great. I have the benefit of 20 years tenure and apparent stability in my current role. Trading that for more stress in hiring and gambling more stress in daily work doesn't balance the potential salary increase.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I've never understood the heavy emphasis on in-interview coding or brain teasers. To the extent that I've participated in the hiring process (both as an IC and a manager), 80% of the interview is assessing culture/personality/ethic fit; that is, the basic "do I want to work with this person" question. The technical competence check is all retrospective, hearing them talk about prior projects and what the design and implementation process was like, how decisions were made, what the challenges were and how they were handled, any regrets/learnings. And most of that is just digging in far enough to confirm that the person was actually a first-class participant in it with a deep understanding, and not a bystander. Any whiteboard stuff would be "show us how the system worked" as a last-ditch check on basic communication skills.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
You know, I was nodding my head in agreement as I read this when something occurred to me. This all requires that the interviewer be willing to interact deeply with the candidate. Our profession has a (well deserved, I think) reputation for having a high percentage of people who really don't like interacting with others on a peer level. Is it likely that a large part of the problem is that we have people doing interviews who really shouldn't be? I mean, if your typical response to talking to another technical person is immediately to try to one-up them, then you're going to be a really shitty interviewer. And that's exactly the personality type I see being described over and over in these anecdotes.
- kodisha 5y ago
  Not sure about English, but in my language we have a saying "The fish stinks from the head" I can tell you, with quite substantial sample size from me directly and from people I deeply trust that every time we encountered an interview like this, we later found out that the company culture was really bad. Those are not the kind of people you want to work with.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    For clarity, is the "like this" in your comment referring to brain teaser technical one-upmanship interviews, or the less structured style that is focused on getting to know the person and having them describe in their own words the projects in their past?

serf 5y ago

i've had similar experiences over the phone. "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?" Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you." I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script. Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost. I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related. It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards. That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.

mateo411 5y ago
> "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?" The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back. Is this a good question? If you want somebody with a lot of Python expertise, then knowing about generators is a good thing. If I was interviewing a candidate, and they didn't know this, then I would just find a pleasant way to move on after a minute or two. If this is the only interviewing question, then that makes me happy, because this company has a flawed process, and is leaving some great talent for me to hire. It's not a big deal if you didn't know this at the time. You might not have known what a generator was, and the person interviewing probably wasn't very good at interviewing people.

lowercased 5y ago

> trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. that describes 2/3rds of the 'codility' tests I've been given in a few scenarios (toptal used it to weed me out). The couple of jobs I've been in where I was explicitly barred from ever asking any clarifying questions, or talking to business/SME folks about the problem at hand... I left those pretty quickly. I guess it serves to weed out people who have some hard-wired dependency on talking to people to clarify requirements.

herbturbo 5y ago

Never understood this way of interviewing. I get shit now and then for helping people too much in coding exercises, but if someone has reached the point where they are obviously not going to progress why not nudge them along and see how they respond? I've found that the ability to receive and act on guidance with a certain degree of humility is a much better signal of someone's potential than how many algorithms they've memorised.

mywittyname 5y ago
Interviewing is hard. It takes a lot of practice to know what level of assistance to provide at what time. A coworker once showed me a technique of keeping a google doc with the problems, as well as a step-by-step of the solution and the times at which they should be at that step. It always seemed to work out well for the candidates, as even a poor candidate would finish the problem at like 55 minutes into a 60 min interview. Even with that, getting a person to see what they should be doing next, without telling them explicitly, is definitely a skill you develop with practice. I think you're right in erring on the side of too much assistance. You get to see much more of how the candidate works if you can skip over the part where they are getting stuck on something.
- herbturbo 5y ago
  Yes some people just need a nudge in the right direction to carry the task through to completion. And some need to be pushed along the entire way. In either case they don't leave the interview feeling humiliated having floundered in the face of smug silence.
- marbletimes 5y ago
  It is one of those common tropes, "interviewing is hard", that seems to justify the inevitability of poor attitude, wasting time of interviewees (remember the interviewers are paid for those hours) and a painful process for basically anyone. I often interview for my company/group and yes, it is challenging in one hour to find out "life, death, and miracles" of some guy who is being interviewed, but it is especially challenging when the interviewer is in a bad mood, does not want to be there, or sees interviewing as a nuisance, and he is looking for a reason to make someone fail. I worked at a FAANG and I got offers from FAANGs-adjacent companies, so I am not one of those you-cannot-win-at-this-game-so-you-complain people. I saw: someone stopping the interview for unexplained reasons after the first 45 minutes, an interviewer at a blue company looking at my private parts for a good part of 45 minutes, multiple people interviewing while doing something else in person or virtually, recruiters (those were the fronts, the hiring managers were responsible) dragging the process forever and then say no with zero explanation. Is it really "hard" doing better than that?

xtracto 5y ago

Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides a test where they evaluate a person for proficiency on different sets of English skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, general comprehension. At the end of the test they give you a score for each of those and then a general score. Now, the nice thing about the TOEFL score is its reputation: When you are going to study into a University (from Oxford to Liverpool, from Harvard to Queensland), if you are not a native English speaker, the university asks you to take a TOEFL (or equivalent) and get a score higher than X. As long as you provide that score, the university won't ask any questions. They don't doubt your English proficiency skills. I want to do something like that but for development: Sure, University thought you CS101, CS201, etc. But what companies are looking for are specific skills (similar to say, https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix/ https://sijinjoseph.netlify.app/programmer-competency-matrix... or https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhC... ). These very concrete skills that can be concretely measured. I want this becase I've been dealing with recruiting, interviewing and also being interviewed for most of my career. And in my experience setting up a "recruiting wheel" in a company or startup is very painful. Most developers don't know how to perform interviews. Or don't care (who has time for that?). As an Engineer manager, having to comb through 400 resumes a week is time consuming and unproductive. So I imagine a scenario where, there is this proverbial "Full Stack Developer" certification authority which is independent, very reputable and unbiased: They won't tell me if X or Y developer will make it into my team. They will tell me how does the person score in "Algorithms/Data Structures" or "Micro Services development" or "Frontend development" and then I will choose whether I want to hire them or not (according to my current requirements). That way, I only have to do a culture-fit interview and that's it. In the past I have dealt with "Sourcing Agencies" that try to do something like that: They do the 1st technical interview, and they say that there will be alignment to what I want. But that was not the case: They send me 2 candidates and get very surprised when I reject one and not the other. And I feel our objectives are not aligned, so everybody is frustrated. Moreover, I don't want to have to deal with hiring agencies. And paying 1 to 3 salary months is too fucking expensive. Now, as a candidate/developer: I would love to have a "TOEFL" like certificate that I can show, with my proficiency. That way, I can "look for a job" passively. I don't have to be making countless of code interviews showing one time after another what I know. I only do it ONCE for an authoritative company, and everybody else can check my qualifications there. Companies like Microsoft or TripleByte have tried to do something like that, but the problem is again that they do other things: Their interests clash. Why would I trust LinkedIn? That's why TOEFL monetization make sense: The candidate has to pay for it. I am aware there are some certifications: Oracle whatever, Microsoft whatever, AWS whatever. But those are either too specific/niche (WebLogic Server 12c administration exam) or they are only a "badge" (AWS Cloud Engineer) that doesn't tell you that much. There is opportunity here for disruption. And I know that the problems that I've faced are faced by countless of other CTOs/Technology Heads.

ldjkfkdsjnv 5y ago

My honest opinion, at this stage in my career I don't have any patience at all for explaining technical concepts. Its almost never a one off, once you have to hold someones hand, you always do. And if you don't, they are creating technical debt.

andrekandre 5y ago

> We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. maybe i'm naive but, how about just ask the candidate to make a mini version of what they would actually do irl? if your an app dev: make me an app that does x, you have 60 min if your a rails dev: make me a site that does y, you have 2hrs if your a pdm: make me a spec and tickets for a system that does z maybe i'm missing something but it shouldn't be too hard should it?

Zelphyr 5y ago
It's all the potential criteria around the request that makes just that one piece more complex than it seems. For example; "Make me a site that does x, you have 2 hours" Do I need to build the app in front of you? Problematic because how often does one build an entire web site in a couple of hours, while someone is standing over their shoulders scrutinizing every keystroke? Do I take it home and do it? If so, how do I prove to you that I did the work? Do you care what framework I use? Do you care if I use Open Source code? What design should I use? Where do I get the site assets from? If I'm building this site for you, are you paying me for that time? Then there's the non-technical parts missing from an interview like that: How does such an exercise tell you that I'm the kind of person you want to work with? How does such an interview provide me an opportunity to ask you question? It tells me nothing about you or your company which is every bit as important as you finding out about me.

rambojazz 5y ago

I could absolutely never ever make anything with people staring at me. I need to be alone with my PC.

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

>We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. Won't happen, because most don't want to figure out a better way. We just have to come to terms with it.