3 ms·

You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here goes: I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of people. It starts with reviewi

by rcurry 4y ago

You folks are probably going to skewer me for this, but here goes: I’ve been a hiring manager for many years and hired a lot of people. It starts with reviewing resumes just to see if someone has a few years of experience in similar technologies as what we are working with. If it looks good, I just pick up the phone and spend half an hour or so shooting the shit - an intelligent person will realize this is an opportunity to talk about their experience and they’ll do that. If that goes well, they come in for a face to face chat with me and maybe one or two of our developers, totally free form and absolutely no coding challenges or nothing. If they seem like they have their shit together, we hire them. I’d say I have about a 90% success rate with this model. Yea, sometimes you get a good bullshitter and it doesn’t work out, but that’s easily remedied… I have a lot of faith in casual conversational interviews and don’t worry about grilling people on whiteboards. I just go with my gut and that’s it.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Anyone who can bullshit so well they can survive this really ought to be in sales or something. They'd make way more money with their evidently incredibly good social skills, working in a field where it's directly applicable. I'm convinced most of the "bullshitters" people "catch" with programming puzzles, who "can't even write a for loop" are just choking under interview pressure, or are for-real bullshitters but never would have made it through the process you describe anyway, because they're not that good at bullshitting.
- RandallBrown 4y ago
  We were interviewing someone that used to work with my manager... as his boss. My manager basically said "This guy is awesome, we'd be crazy not to hire him" but obviously my manager wasn't allowed to be a part of the interview. He BOMBED the interview, which was a pretty simple coding challenge. I could tell he was incredibly nervous (despite being a very experienced developer) and it felt obvious to me that he was only bombing because he was just so nervous. I could tell from talking to him that he probably knew what he was doing. We hired him and he was great. Some people are bad at interviewing (myself included.)

by rcurry 4y ago

yamtaddle 4y ago

Anyone who can bullshit so well they can survive this really ought to be in sales or something. They'd make way more money with their evidently incredibly good social skills, working in a field where it's directly applicable. I'm convinced most of the "bullshitters" people "catch" with programming puzzles, who "can't even write a for loop" are just choking under interview pressure, or are for-real bullshitters but never would have made it through the process you describe anyway, because they're not that good at bullshitting.

RandallBrown 4y ago
We were interviewing someone that used to work with my manager... as his boss. My manager basically said "This guy is awesome, we'd be crazy not to hire him" but obviously my manager wasn't allowed to be a part of the interview. He BOMBED the interview, which was a pretty simple coding challenge. I could tell he was incredibly nervous (despite being a very experienced developer) and it felt obvious to me that he was only bombing because he was just so nervous. I could tell from talking to him that he probably knew what he was doing. We hired him and he was great. Some people are bad at interviewing (myself included.)