4 ms·
The beginning of wisdom is to understand that nobody knows everything. I regularly interview candidates for my team and other teams. I can pretty much determine
by temporallobe 4y ago
The beginning of wisdom is to understand that nobody knows everything. I regularly interview candidates for my team and other teams. I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not. But one thing I have noticed lately is that some of them try to cheat (only possible with remote interviews of course). Basically they google answers as we are talking, or they have someone else do it in the background. It’s pretty obvious because there are long pauses, attempts to delay, indications that they’re reading something, and then they suddenly know the answers. They never say “I don’t know.” My “gotcha” technique is to ask a really esoteric question that I am certain the candidate would not know, and somehow, miracle of miracles, they suddenly know the answer after “thinking” about it for a minute. I actually don’t really care how much you know, rather, I care that you are honest, confident, resourceful, passionate, and that you communicate clearly. Obviously intelligence matters as well, and I’d take an intelligent person with the above-mentioned qualities who lacks knowledge in a particular technology than a “qualified” candidate who pretends to know everything and is a liar.
And hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I live on stack overflow.
- htrp 4y agoso basically the kobayashi maru? i like the approach, do you just outright ding someone due to the googling of answers offscreen?
- Ologn 4y ago> I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not I have interviewed a lot of people. Most of the time I can determine three questions in if someone is not a good fit. This is on a technical interview. I have never done an interview where someone blew, or gave middling answers to the first three questions, and then recovered. Also, I never gave an interview where the person hit the first three questions out of the park and then started flagging, in terms of technical answers any how. In terms of people who did well on the first three questions but who did not get an offer, it was always due to "cultural" issues, and it was someone else (often the manager) who raised those cultural issues, with me sometimes disagreeing (for instance, my old manager thought someone was too arrogant, whereas I didn't mind).
- whatever_dude 4y agoWhat are the three questions? Are they always the same or do you adapt on context?
- Ologn 4y agoFor the first three questions - They're ones I've asked before. They are questions that have gotten some coherent response from about five out of six people, but generally only get a good, clear, robust response from one out of six people. Usually they touch on different areas - I don't ask three questions about function parameters, I ask about very different topics, as theoretically they may be weak on one area and strong on another (although usually people have the same level of strength over all areas in my experience). I don't really worry about asking the same questions to each candidate, since if they hit the ones I always ask out of the park but then struggle on ones I only sometimes, or rarely, or never ask, I would find that odd. I might adopt questions to what they have on their resume, but generally it takes a while to adapt to a newer question. If we start using a new language more and an old language less, I probably will adapt questions to the new language and so on.
- whatever_dude 4y agoThanks.