3 ms·

I've also gotten positive feedback for clearly stating what I know and what I don't know. I'm using a „skill meter” to distinguish between „I'm an expert in thi

by lytefm 4y ago

I've also gotten positive feedback for clearly stating what I know and what I don't know. I'm using a „skill meter” to distinguish between „I'm an expert in this language“ and „I've used this a couple of years ago“. I got a job offer from a company whose main language is Go and I didn't even know the basics. A good software engineer can pick up any reasonable language in a reasonable amount of time [1]. I usually ignore recruiters who don't contact me via InMail. If they convey that they actually took a look at my profile, I'll reply. I've had a very good experience with the three EU companies that I've been interviewing with this year. One had a take-home assignment that was reasonably scoped for 2-4h and well thought. The others asked some basics and some architechture / design / business understanding related questions. No leetcode or whiteboard coding. Open communication + quick feedback. Was I just lucky in that regard or are there a lot of companies with a sane interview process out there, but some HN readers prefer to apply at those who don't? [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

Lazare 4y ago
Most of us probably don't interview at a statistically significant sample of companies, so I guess it's hard to say. For the record, I recently did three tech interviews for tech lead level roles. * Company A: Small startup in a non-profit space. Technical part was an informal chat with a current tech lead, which led to them sending me a list of high level general questions around architecture and design to be discussed on a follow up call, then it moved on to a third non-technical round. Good approach overall, I appreciated being able to prepare in advance instead of being given a pop quiz, and I think it unpacked my skills pretty well. Total time maybe 3 hours? It led to an offer. * Company B: Medium sized ecommerce company. Technical part was a live coding challenge via screen share, with a tech lead and an engineering manager watching. Think "given this list of categories and items, how would you loop over it to find the item with the highest cost? How about all the items in a specific category? How about all green items in any category?"; a very simple problem, used purely as a jumping off place to discuss thought processes, trade offs, approaches, tools, algorithms, etc. I dislike live coding challenges, but this was about as good as could be expected, and led to two more follow up round of high level architecture and design questions. Three total rounds, each 1 hour. Again led to an offer. * Company C: Medium sized developer tooling company. Started with an take-home assignment that was very poorly defined. I was verbally told it should take "an evening" and "don't take it too seriously", but as I later found out they were expecting more like 18+ hours, finished to the standard you'd expect in production, ie, thorough unit tests, good code coverage, carefully chosen variable and method names, completely documented, all edge cases handled, etc. I didn't make it to round two, which would apparently have been a rigorous code review exercise on the code from the first step, which at the point I'm counting as a win. I honestly disliked the coding challenge from company B, and semi-enjoyed the one from company C (or what I thought they were asking for). But I'd have been reluctant to spend the incredible amount of time they expected on an unpaid coding challenge even if they'd managed to convey they wanted that, which they didn't. So based on my experience, about 1/3 of companies out there have terrible interview processes.
- lytefm 4y ago
  Still sounds like a good ratio, I'd say. Live coding isn't very, but I found live code review + occasional adjustments quite effective when interviewing candidates.

by lytefm 4y ago

Lazare 4y ago

Most of us probably don't interview at a statistically significant sample of companies, so I guess it's hard to say. For the record, I recently did three tech interviews for tech lead level roles. * Company A: Small startup in a non-profit space. Technical part was an informal chat with a current tech lead, which led to them sending me a list of high level general questions around architecture and design to be discussed on a follow up call, then it moved on to a third non-technical round. Good approach overall, I appreciated being able to prepare in advance instead of being given a pop quiz, and I think it unpacked my skills pretty well. Total time maybe 3 hours? It led to an offer. * Company B: Medium sized ecommerce company. Technical part was a live coding challenge via screen share, with a tech lead and an engineering manager watching. Think "given this list of categories and items, how would you loop over it to find the item with the highest cost? How about all the items in a specific category? How about all green items in any category?"; a very simple problem, used purely as a jumping off place to discuss thought processes, trade offs, approaches, tools, algorithms, etc. I dislike live coding challenges, but this was about as good as could be expected, and led to two more follow up round of high level architecture and design questions. Three total rounds, each 1 hour. Again led to an offer. * Company C: Medium sized developer tooling company. Started with an take-home assignment that was very poorly defined. I was verbally told it should take "an evening" and "don't take it too seriously", but as I later found out they were expecting more like 18+ hours, finished to the standard you'd expect in production, ie, thorough unit tests, good code coverage, carefully chosen variable and method names, completely documented, all edge cases handled, etc. I didn't make it to round two, which would apparently have been a rigorous code review exercise on the code from the first step, which at the point I'm counting as a win. I honestly disliked the coding challenge from company B, and semi-enjoyed the one from company C (or what I thought they were asking for). But I'd have been reluctant to spend the incredible amount of time they expected on an unpaid coding challenge even if they'd managed to convey they wanted that, which they didn't. So based on my experience, about 1/3 of companies out there have terrible interview processes.

lytefm 4y ago
Still sounds like a good ratio, I'd say. Live coding isn't very, but I found live code review + occasional adjustments quite effective when interviewing candidates.