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It goes without saying that solving algorithm questions are only a part of the interview process. Candidates are also judged on culture fit and design skills.
by jarjoura 13y ago
It goes without saying that solving algorithm questions are only a part of the interview process. Candidates are also judged on culture fit and design skills.
- derwiki 13y ago'Culture fit' -- the wild card that lets you reject any candidate.
- JackMorgan 13y agoThe idea that culture fit is just a catch-all for personal bias and -ism's recently occurred to me, and kind of freaks me out. Right now I think there are three things I'm most looking for in a quality Sr candidate: restless learning, pair programs well with my team (we do it on all production code), and focuses on solutions not problems. I'm afraid though that "culture fit", especially around pair programming is just a way for me to cop out on someone I don't like, but I can't prove it.
- derwiki 13y agoIt's a slippery slope if you ask me. If you don't like them, you might not be able to work well with them. What's more unfair -- adding someone to the team who will cause problems because they're qualified -or- rejecting someone who is qualified because your 45 minute evaluation is, "they're not a good fit"? I don't know the answer. But I do know that it's a lot harder to fire a bad fit than to never hire them to begin with. I expect this to bite me as ageism in ten years, when a 23 y/o Stanford grad will be aghast that I don't spend my evenings playing with MeteorRails.js.
- mbillie1 13y agoA nebulous description of a vitally important quality - someone who your existing team won't hate. It's one-sided to claim that people only use it to unfairly reject candidates. Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment.
- frostmatthew 13y ago> Being an ahole is something I'd like to see candidates rejected for, but it won't show up in a technical assessment. I'm not sure that shows up in hours of interviews either...especially when most (all?) of that time is spent on "technical assessment"
- 02 13y agoIt filters out the people whose ego won't let them take the test.
- krainboltgreene 13y agoAnd people who don't think tests are a good start to a relationship between an employee and a company. And people who are getting better offers at better companies. You'll never know.
- normloman 13y agoYou mean it filters out people with too much self respect to jump through hoops to get a shitty start up job.
- analog31 13y ago'Culture fit' could be a vicious circle: The more mono-cultural your team becomes, the harder it gets to hire the most talented people. And if everybody just happens to be looking for the same 'culture,' companies that have fallen into that trap end up with higher recruiting and wage costs.
- throwwit 13y agoI've learned to be wary of the "Talk about some recent topics in the news" type questions, politics & issues can be surprisingly divisive.