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I disagree. The answers to these situational questions say a lot about a candidate, and their importance is often underestimated by inexperienced interviewers,
by mjr00 4y ago
I disagree. The answers to these situational questions say a lot about a candidate, and their importance is often underestimated by inexperienced interviewers, IMO.
In this specific question, a few things I'd be looking for are:
* Was the candidate proactive in resolving the challenge? Many people just complain when they run into hard problems and expect someone else to pick up the slack.
* Did the candidate learn something, or step outside of their comfort zone? This could be as technical as "I had to learn how this legacy codebase's build scripts worked" or "I had to research postgres' MVCC implementation" to something as nontechnical as "I had to schedule a meeting across 10 different departments and get agreement on changing an internal process."
Coding challenges are just one piece of the puzzle. I've previously made hires who were great at the coding part but gave weak answers to situational questions and they ended up not working out; they were excellent coders but would never really push anything forward beyond whatever tickets were assigned to them. By that I don't mean "they didn't work 60 hours a week," I mean that they never wanted to take the time to think about the current state of how things were done and come up with ways to improve the situation. This type of developer would probably be fine in a larger organization, but when you're hiring a senior dev for your 20-person startup, a hire like this can be a disaster.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y agoAll that can easily be bullshitted a hundred times easier than any leetcode-style question. I am not saying "just use technical questions" but you are extremely naive as a interviewer if you dont think candidates will MASSIVELY overstate the importance and magnitude of their accomplishments. Hell, politicians do it all the time, we can notice that they are lying and they still do it. My experience indicates the better you are at this (there is a grayzone between outright lying and exaggerating) the better you will do, specially in big organizations when you can "hide" behind lawyers of bureaucracy and other employees.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoI think OP point is that everyone a bit skilled at interviewing knows what you are looking for in the answer and will craft you a solid retelling of something which didn’t actually happen. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good skill to have. You want people who understand what’s expected of them and can craft you a solid story. It’s just that there is better question to ask if you want to test for that. > "I had to schedule a meeting across 10 different departments and get agreement on changing an internal process." That’s a good exemple. I don’t interview developers but I have seen similar situations happen in plenty of interviews. You are telling me you have the pull to get a large cross-departments meeting organised and enough political savviness to get internal policy changed but are now interviewing to be a developer. I would find that strange and have a ton of follow-up questions.
- someweirdperson 4y ago> and will craft you a solid retelling of something which didn’t actually happen. A story about anything that did really happen would disclose information of/about the current/former employer. A story about anything made up would put the current/former employer in the wrong light. Is it possible to answer any questions that demand a story at all?
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoUnless you signed a far more comprehensive NDA that the one I have seen until know, you can disclose enough information about your current employer to tell this kind of story.