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Everybody is afraid of interviewing. This is a generalization that doesn't always ring true. As I've gained experience, I've come to enjoy interviewing at tim

by kohanz 13y ago

Everybody is afraid of interviewing. This is a generalization that doesn't always ring true. As I've gained experience, I've come to enjoy interviewing at times. Especially when I'm going into an interview where I feel quite comfortable discussing that particular domain. If you're someone who doesn't mind social interaction and who doesn't lack confidence (for better or for worse), interviewing can be an enjoyable experience. I doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way.

tptacek 13y ago
Maybe not. It hasn't worked that way for me. Also: no correlation between how strong I feel in the problem domain and how well I'll interview for it. And I'm just fine getting up in front of a room full of clients and selling consulting services, or getting in the face of a lead developer and telling them what they're doing wrong. It's something about the "set and setting" of a job interview. I'm unsurprised if there's a lucky cohort of people who just don't have this problem. Enjoy! For my part, I'm looking forward to spending more and more of my career beating the tech job interview to death with my bare hands, because I loathe it --- from both sides, as a candidate and now a hiring manager. Death to interviews!
- read 13y ago
  there is zero correlation between how people comport themselves in job interviews and their ability to do a job. Agreed. What is your approach to finding good people given this phenomenon?
  - CocaKoala 13y ago
    tptacek's approach to finding good people is fairly well documented, as it happens. I'm sure he can jump in and summarize it better than I can, but in brief: his company has several pipelines which generate quality candidates for the type of work his company performs (he is a co-founder of an application security consulting firm; the pipelines are a series of crypto challenges that are designed to teach you how to implement and how to break common crypto algorithms, and www.microcorruption.com, a ctf that teaches you to reverse-engineer assembly code and craft malicious payloads to take advantage of legitimate exploitable code, while defeating legitimate exploit defenses). These pipelines are, according to tptacek[1], very good at producing candidates who are interested in security work and are capable of doing same, regardless of prior experience. He has also refined his interview process in an effort to generate quantifiable and comparable information about each candidate, as opposed to e.g. asking candidates to solve brain teasers because it makes the interviewer feel smart. [1]: I'm phrasing it in this way not because I don't agree with him, but because it's new enough that I don't think it's been established as objective truth. I'm of the opinion that the pipelines are very cool and fairly effective as recruiting tools.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      w/r/t/ interviews, I would say that the outreach programs are less important than standardized interviews and work-sample tests.
kasey_junk 13y ago
I actually quite like tech interviews as well, but having been on the other side of the table many times I've come to realize that I am in a huge minority and you should start from the point of view that the interviewee is most likely uncomfortable.

by kohanz 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

Maybe not. It hasn't worked that way for me. Also: no correlation between how strong I feel in the problem domain and how well I'll interview for it. And I'm just fine getting up in front of a room full of clients and selling consulting services, or getting in the face of a lead developer and telling them what they're doing wrong. It's something about the "set and setting" of a job interview. I'm unsurprised if there's a lucky cohort of people who just don't have this problem. Enjoy! For my part, I'm looking forward to spending more and more of my career beating the tech job interview to death with my bare hands, because I loathe it --- from both sides, as a candidate and now a hiring manager. Death to interviews!

read 13y ago
there is zero correlation between how people comport themselves in job interviews and their ability to do a job. Agreed. What is your approach to finding good people given this phenomenon?
- CocaKoala 13y ago
  tptacek's approach to finding good people is fairly well documented, as it happens. I'm sure he can jump in and summarize it better than I can, but in brief: his company has several pipelines which generate quality candidates for the type of work his company performs (he is a co-founder of an application security consulting firm; the pipelines are a series of crypto challenges that are designed to teach you how to implement and how to break common crypto algorithms, and www.microcorruption.com, a ctf that teaches you to reverse-engineer assembly code and craft malicious payloads to take advantage of legitimate exploitable code, while defeating legitimate exploit defenses). These pipelines are, according to tptacek[1], very good at producing candidates who are interested in security work and are capable of doing same, regardless of prior experience. He has also refined his interview process in an effort to generate quantifiable and comparable information about each candidate, as opposed to e.g. asking candidates to solve brain teasers because it makes the interviewer feel smart. [1]: I'm phrasing it in this way not because I don't agree with him, but because it's new enough that I don't think it's been established as objective truth. I'm of the opinion that the pipelines are very cool and fairly effective as recruiting tools.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    w/r/t/ interviews, I would say that the outreach programs are less important than standardized interviews and work-sample tests.

kasey_junk 13y ago

I actually quite like tech interviews as well, but having been on the other side of the table many times I've come to realize that I am in a huge minority and you should start from the point of view that the interviewee is most likely uncomfortable.