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A good senior developer should be able to go out to lunch and know if the candidate has the skills and the right cultural match by the end. There's no need for
by danjl 2y ago
A good senior developer should be able to go out to lunch and know if the candidate has the skills and the right cultural match by the end. There's no need for coding tests or whiteboarding problems. I've seen some of the best developers I've worked with in 40 years of coding get turned away by Google and Apple because of their terrible interview processes. The only thing better than going out to lunch is working with the person for a couple of weeks. Ideally this happens on a paid contract basis. Of course our culture makes it more challenging to switch jobs if you want to work together first, but really no other interview process has ever provided good data.
- novok 2y agoAt big companies HR and legal will say you need a reproducible, auditable, objective and defined interview process or you open yourself to a whole host of lawsuits, and you will get lawsuits because there is blood to squeeze from that lawsuit cow. Also at large scale you cannot trust the entire corpus of employees since your are well beyond dunbars number, so the process is there to prevent cheater and nepotism clusters forming where random employees hire their incompetent drinking buddies or cousins after a single "lunch". That process works for small companies, and it's an advantage they should leverage, it does not work for the large ones. IMO you need work sample tests as a minimum, which means a coding assignment. Some people are great bullshitters at lunch.
- alisey 2y agoIn my experience, the results from those who claim they can judge skills based on a lunch conversation have not been good. I think people who can do it are the exception, not the norm.