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> I need to know whether you can code On the flip-side, how much time do you spend explaining to an interviewee what hurdles they must overcome in order to cod

> I need to know whether you can code On the flip-side, how much time do you spend explaining to an interviewee what hurdles they must overcome in order to code in the first place? Cultural blocks? Inefficiencies that don't have an owner or visibility to the greater org? If your infra is well architected and any random engineer can start contributing within a week to a month, kudos. In my experience, way too much energy is put into "can they do the job?" when the energy should be in "is this an environment where engineers can do their job?"

saxonww 4y ago
This is a good question. At least where I'm working, we have multiple conversations with a candidate throughout the interview process. When I have the opportunity, I do talk about technical or process challenges we have and try to be up front about aspects of a job that we know from experience can be a problem for some people. For example, I'm on an internal tooling team, and so there's a support component where we have to be accessible and accountable to devs who encounter problems using tools we've created. We have a support rotation where one person a sprint is primarily tasked with being the first contact for people with questions, problems, etc. We've had people on the team before who didn't like this and it showed because they put little effort into it. So now we're very up front during the interviews that this is part of the job; we don't want to hire someone who will be unhappy in the role. It's what we think is the best we can do. It's hard to answer about cultural blocks, because I haven't experienced those myself. I'm not sure how to even approach that; "hey, I see you're $different, here's some potential challenges you may need to deal with" ? That seems like it is as likely to offend as aid. That said, we do try to get a candidate in front of a variety of people, both to get a sense of how they deal with different people, and to give the candidate an opportunity to get feedback from people in different parts of the organization.

saxonww 4y ago

This is a good question. At least where I'm working, we have multiple conversations with a candidate throughout the interview process. When I have the opportunity, I do talk about technical or process challenges we have and try to be up front about aspects of a job that we know from experience can be a problem for some people. For example, I'm on an internal tooling team, and so there's a support component where we have to be accessible and accountable to devs who encounter problems using tools we've created. We have a support rotation where one person a sprint is primarily tasked with being the first contact for people with questions, problems, etc. We've had people on the team before who didn't like this and it showed because they put little effort into it. So now we're very up front during the interviews that this is part of the job; we don't want to hire someone who will be unhappy in the role. It's what we think is the best we can do. It's hard to answer about cultural blocks, because I haven't experienced those myself. I'm not sure how to even approach that; "hey, I see you're $different, here's some potential challenges you may need to deal with" ? That seems like it is as likely to offend as aid. That said, we do try to get a candidate in front of a variety of people, both to get a sense of how they deal with different people, and to give the candidate an opportunity to get feedback from people in different parts of the organization.