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> You’re never going to check, are you? I'm definitely going to ask probing questions about the tech. And the more familiar I am with it (and the more relevan

> You’re never going to check, are you? I'm definitely going to ask probing questions about the tech. And the more familiar I am with it (and the more relevant it is to the job), the more detailed and discerning I will be. It works too. The outcome is usually either, the interviewee is rattled and straight up admits that they don't know as much as their resume claims; or, we get to have a pretty in depth conversation about what the interviewee has actually done The former is fine with me. I think most developers understand it's better to come clean early. When interviewing with me, that's the right call, because if I think you don't know you're stuff, you'll fail, but if you admit that you aren't so familiar with $technology, then I'll shift my questions to something else. The latter is ideal though, since it segues well into the actual job requirements, and the interviewee gets real insight into what they are walking into. The person who wrote this article is a-typical. I've interviewed people with github accounts, but most of the time they are full of college course work or cloned open source repos, so they aren't really worth investigating too deeply. But someone with an active open source project on github and a popular blog seems like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with anyone like that.

alephxyz 4y ago
This is why I wish cover letters were more popular. Having a candidate tell you they don't have much experience using X to do Y but that they'd love to learn to / have been working on it on their spare time is better than having them lie on their resume (or miss out on candidates that are too honest for their own good).
- actually_a_dog 4y ago
  Contra this, cover letters aren't popular (at least for SWE hiring) in my experience, because nobody reads them.
  - nly 4y ago
    Honestly you're lucky if anyone reads your CV. Standard practice for the technical interviews, i.e. where someone on a team somewhere is taking time away from real work to interview you, is for them to maybe spend 90 seconds, just 5 minutes before the start of the interview, to give it a skim
physicsguy 4y ago
We had this recently with a candidate I interviewed. List full of technologies but < 5 years of experience. Started probing a bit - “can you explain about the project you did with X” and for pretty much every one we got back “oh, I haven’t done much with that”. It was almost laughable because it was literally every skill listed we asked about, we never got to a point to bounce off of.
autarch 4y ago
> But someone with an active open source project on github and a popular blog seems like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with anyone like that. I have many thousands (tens, definitely; hundreds, maybe) of lines of code I've written on GitHub. I also have a blog (not sure I'd call it popular though). In my recent interviews (which I blogged about at length) I don't think _anyone_ had looked at my repos on GitHub. Certainly no one asked questions about those projects. A few had read my blog, however. A couple times I did show them some of my work on GitHub, primarily a project I was working on at the time that had a UI I could screen share.
- yata69420 4y ago
  I just read a few of your blog posts and I'm sure you'll be hired quickly. Easy to see that you're an old perl hacker that's now into rust and you're active in community stuff that matters (LWN, CPAN). I feel like you might over-share on your blog in a way that could turn off potential employers, but those are companies you wouldn't want to work for anyway. I get the vibe you might be opinionated and risky, but are clearly technically competent. I'd probably put you in a team with other rust-enthusiasts for maximum success. You're likely to inspire newer developers. You might want to take HTML/CSS/JS off your resume because JS pretty much means React/Vue/Angular these days and you don't seem too interested in that stuff. That's the sort of stuff I'd check about you before the interview. Good luck!
  - autarch 4y ago
    Thanks for the kind words. I ended up at MongoDB and I've been there about 7 weeks now. I don't think my blog posts had too much of an impact on my offers, although of course I guess some places could've just said no and not told me why.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>if I think you don't know you're stuff, you'll fail Have you ever experienced the opposite and been the one that's failed the candidate? Maybe either via a bad job description or answering questions inaccurately or dishonestly? Any times you've had to come clean as the interviewer?

alephxyz 4y ago

This is why I wish cover letters were more popular. Having a candidate tell you they don't have much experience using X to do Y but that they'd love to learn to / have been working on it on their spare time is better than having them lie on their resume (or miss out on candidates that are too honest for their own good).

actually_a_dog 4y ago
Contra this, cover letters aren't popular (at least for SWE hiring) in my experience, because nobody reads them.
- nly 4y ago
  Honestly you're lucky if anyone reads your CV. Standard practice for the technical interviews, i.e. where someone on a team somewhere is taking time away from real work to interview you, is for them to maybe spend 90 seconds, just 5 minutes before the start of the interview, to give it a skim

physicsguy 4y ago

We had this recently with a candidate I interviewed. List full of technologies but < 5 years of experience. Started probing a bit - “can you explain about the project you did with X” and for pretty much every one we got back “oh, I haven’t done much with that”. It was almost laughable because it was literally every skill listed we asked about, we never got to a point to bounce off of.

autarch 4y ago

> But someone with an active open source project on github and a popular blog seems like an easy interview, but I've never had the opportunity to speak with anyone like that. I have many thousands (tens, definitely; hundreds, maybe) of lines of code I've written on GitHub. I also have a blog (not sure I'd call it popular though). In my recent interviews (which I blogged about at length) I don't think _anyone_ had looked at my repos on GitHub. Certainly no one asked questions about those projects. A few had read my blog, however. A couple times I did show them some of my work on GitHub, primarily a project I was working on at the time that had a UI I could screen share.

yata69420 4y ago
I just read a few of your blog posts and I'm sure you'll be hired quickly. Easy to see that you're an old perl hacker that's now into rust and you're active in community stuff that matters (LWN, CPAN). I feel like you might over-share on your blog in a way that could turn off potential employers, but those are companies you wouldn't want to work for anyway. I get the vibe you might be opinionated and risky, but are clearly technically competent. I'd probably put you in a team with other rust-enthusiasts for maximum success. You're likely to inspire newer developers. You might want to take HTML/CSS/JS off your resume because JS pretty much means React/Vue/Angular these days and you don't seem too interested in that stuff. That's the sort of stuff I'd check about you before the interview. Good luck!
- autarch 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. I ended up at MongoDB and I've been there about 7 weeks now. I don't think my blog posts had too much of an impact on my offers, although of course I guess some places could've just said no and not told me why.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>if I think you don't know you're stuff, you'll fail Have you ever experienced the opposite and been the one that's failed the candidate? Maybe either via a bad job description or answering questions inaccurately or dishonestly? Any times you've had to come clean as the interviewer?