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A good interview is an absolutely rare thing. I can't name the chances, but throughout one's career it's going to be close to amount of jobs one's going to land

by rckt 2y ago

A good interview is an absolutely rare thing. I can't name the chances, but throughout one's career it's going to be close to amount of jobs one's going to land. More likely less than that number. From my experience you can say it's going to be good or bad right from the start. 5 minutes into an interview and you can already see where's it's going to end. I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to senior devs. Even if your GitHub or whatever profile is not rich with projects you can evaluate person's professional level during the conversation. And I also hate stupid riddles during the interviews. But there was an interesting case. I got a couple of verbal puzzles that I should have solved right at that time and I failed. But I got the job anyway. So I guess if people in the company are common sense driven it helps to choose hiring strategies that work for both sides.

alentred 2y ago
Agreed on first two points. You often can get a feel of a company based on the interview. > I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to senior developers. I think this is perfectly valid, though. When I interview candidates, I start with the conversation and I can tell you that more often than not it goes very well: talking about software design, architecture, what they think about various frameworks, etc. But you would be surprised how many people can talk their way through the interview, and then get totally blocked on a simple syntax error in the code. (Stress being accounted for). I agree, though, that the questions should be fairly designed before the interview and be consistent with the level of the expertise expected for the position. I would never ask a senior developer to implement a FizzBuzz. We'd rather sketch an architecture for some piece of software with some specific constraints, discuss the choices of the language and libraries and argument them, etc. And yes, eventually code something: just sketch some core domain logic. I would never hire a software developer, whatever the level, without seeing them coding first.

by rckt 2y ago

alentred 2y ago

Agreed on first two points. You often can get a feel of a company based on the interview. > I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to senior developers. I think this is perfectly valid, though. When I interview candidates, I start with the conversation and I can tell you that more often than not it goes very well: talking about software design, architecture, what they think about various frameworks, etc. But you would be surprised how many people can talk their way through the interview, and then get totally blocked on a simple syntax error in the code. (Stress being accounted for). I agree, though, that the questions should be fairly designed before the interview and be consistent with the level of the expertise expected for the position. I would never ask a senior developer to implement a FizzBuzz. We'd rather sketch an architecture for some piece of software with some specific constraints, discuss the choices of the language and libraries and argument them, etc. And yes, eventually code something: just sketch some core domain logic. I would never hire a software developer, whatever the level, without seeing them coding first.