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"competent software engineers are not the median candidate applying for most roles" Most developers with a few years of experience are pretty competent. Most
by ipaddr 3y ago
"competent software engineers are not the median candidate applying for most roles"
Most developers with a few years of experience are pretty competent. Most employers are not toxic waste dumps.
Give the worst interview candidates a try and they will do well. Give the best interview candidates a try and they will fail or leave early. Interviewing is a skill, anyone who is extremely good at it most likely practiced more often and that could mean they needed to. The more experienced and poor interview they give the more of an unearthed gem you've discovered
- zdragnar 3y agoI just interviewed someone who I am certain lied on their resume; they could barely write valid code during their interview, despite supposedly being a senior engineer with nearly 10 years of experience. Randomly hiring the first people to apply (or "giving them a shot") is a terrible strategy unless you have tons of money to burn and no deadlines to meet. We have internship positions for people willing to learn, but when we are trying to fill a senior position, we expect people to be at a certain level.
- bodge5000 3y agoI'd like to think I'm a competent enough engineer, but I usually don't perform well in those live coding interviews, whereas I tend to do well enough in the "take home" tests. I wouldn't even necessarily say its a problem with live-coding, I've done things like pair programming before and its always gone fine, but an interview is an entirely different setting.
- zdragnar 3y agoThere's nothing I hate more than coding exercises in technical interviews, but the team wanted it, so there's a pretty simple one. I try to make as clear as possible in the preamble before we get to that part of the interview that I consider it to be a casual exercise, and have will offer to pair program with candidates who freeze up. I honestly don't care if they know the answer to some leetcode problem (also something I state in the preamble), I want to see how they break down a problem, and if they get stumped, how they work with other people on it. In the example I gave before, I had to explain to the candidate what the code they copy / pasted from the internet did. That might be fine for a junior candidate, but for someone with "10 years" of experience with the language, it's a non-starter for a senior programmer.
- ipaddr 3y agoI would hire that person based on the reasons I gave before. Not being able to perform to your standards in the space you allowed doesn't mean that person is a fraud or that the person couldn't do the job. You were biased by your own test. You thought you were measuring how good a programmer someone was when in reality you were testing how good your test was.
- wiseowise 3y agoThat’s a lot of words to say nothing.
- lisasays 3y agoIt's amazing how fast coding skills can turn to shit (or in more polite terms, atrophy) if they haven't been accessed for, say, a year or so (and you were not super burned in with that language). Take that, add a bit of performance anxiety - that is to say: basic humanness - and there you go. Doesn't mean you have to hire them. Still, sometimes we just don't have enough data to tell whether someone is lying or not.
- sublinear 3y agoIf the "coding skills" were shallow idioms in a few languages, I agree. This only proves why it's important to get an education and stay curious beyond mere trends.
- wiseowise 3y ago> Most developers with a few years of experience are pretty competent. I’ve reviewed hundreds of assignments in last two years. No, that’s not true, chief.