3 ms·

If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints a

• ijk 3y ago
  I think the most common complaint is that the interviews don't test technical skills, they test things that look like they're adjacent to technical skills but aren't the kind of work that you'd actually be doing.
  • BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Coding a fizz-buzz may be super boring, but pre-ChatGPT, it was an efficient way to rule out incompetents. This way you could focus on a quality interview with people with actual programming experience. And for somebody who is a senior dev, it's a 2 minutes job anyway.
• danaris 3y ago
  The problems are (non-exhaustively): - Many interview coding problems are very unlike what we have had to do in our daily tasks, and very unlike what will be required if we get the job. - If the company is trying to avoid that problem by making the coding part of the interview working on actual problems they're having, then that means the interviewee is giving the company work for free. (Unless the company pays for it, but that's vanishingly rare.) - Even if they manage to thread the needle and have the coding part of the interview be relevant to the job, but not actually getting free work out of candidates, it's very hard to make it representative of the environment in which the candidates are used to or will be working. It's time-limited, very high pressure, with unfamiliar tools, often without the ability to consult online sources—or they make it a take-home assignment, and run the risk of having the candidates just get someone else to do it for them. - Most other types of jobs don't require you to prove your skills. They read your resume, they take it at face value, they check your references, and if it turns out you lied on your resume and got the job, you get fired. ...Or they don't do their due diligence, and end up with terrible employees.
  • dahart 3y ago
    The first two items there contradict each other. What’s an employer to do? This list of problems only reflects the point of view of a relatively inexperienced candidate who doesn’t like interviews, it’s not a list of problems that companies have, or that people with strong skills and experience have. It’s an assumption to expect interviews need to reflect the work on the job or match daily tasks. Interviews are the employer trying to select the best candidate for an uncertain future, not mimic the drudgery of a day in the life at work. If I’m interviewing, I don’t want to know if you can code a specific task today, I want to know how well you can adapt to changing roles, whether you’re more extroverted lead material, or introverted and wicked smart or prolific, whether you’re ambitious or happy laying low. I’m much more interested in broad potential more than ability to perform technical tasks. Isn’t the last item on your list a good reason to do some due diligence by checking whether people can code in practice before going through the expensive process of hiring them and having them fail and then having to try again with someone else? I haven’t seen a lot of outright lying on resumes, but I’ve seen a ton of overconfidence in one’s relative skill, I’ve seen people who are great on paper but duds in practice, but more than those I’ve see a lot of people who don’t communicate well, don’t get along well on a team, have bad attitudes, cover up mistakes instead of learning or admitting skill gaps, etc. I don’t know what it means to claim most jobs don’t require proving skills. Most jobs are entry-level minimum-wage jobs. Anyone in the arts is used to constantly proving their skills via auditions, critiques, performances, etc. Doctors have it way worse with low paid grueling residency. We’re talking about high paid programmers where hiring the wrong person is an expensive mistake and can damage team productivity.
    • danaris 3y ago
      You seem to be leaving out an awful lot of types of jobs there. Do accountants have to provide a portfolio? Do museum curators have to spend several hours curating a collection for their prospective employers, for free? Do any of the 31 flavors of middle management have to sit through a "leet-manage" test? Professions that require on-the-spot demonstration of your skills in order to be hired are very much the outlier, not the norm.
• duped 3y ago
  The answer to almost every technical question are "it depends" and "let me look that up for you." > Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right? For the "best" candidates they need a way of deciding which interviewers are worth their time to speak to, and overhead of the hiring process is a fantastic filter.