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Nope. At my last company I did all the technical interviews. Now, I have no idea how HR selected them, but I got their CVs on my desk and was asked to schedule

by lawl 12y ago

Nope. At my last company I did all the technical interviews. Now, I have no idea how HR selected them, but I got their CVs on my desk and was asked to schedule a meeting with them. And so I did. And oh boy, there were a LOT of previous Fortune 500 Senior devs that could not write anything that even resembles a correct fizzbuzz solution in any language they like without time restriction (I had to kick a few people out after I left them alone for 30 minutes and they told me they need more time). All their CV's looked fine though. If I interview you, I'll ask you to write code, on any level. Usually I asked interviewees for ~3 code samples on paper starting with fizzbuzz moving up in difficulty to still beeing a relatively easy ~5 minute task. I've had one interviewee that started to laugh when I asked him for a fizzbuzz sample and he said, "well that's like asking a baker to bake a bun". he proceded to write a fizzbuzz solution down and is apparently one of the top developers at that company now. I don't care how senior you are. If you're offended by quickly writing down a fizzbuzz solution you're not senior enough to realize how much some people suck at programming. Obviously the actual only interview only started after they wrote fizzbuzz, fizzbuzz helped me stop wasting my time and I convinced HR to stop sending me CVs of people that played bullshit bingo in their CVs. Sure you could blame HR on this for not filtering good enough but HR aren't developers. Although I'm not saying HR couldn't have given me better CVs...

herghost 12y ago
I've had very similar experience hiring for information security roles. The volume of "good" CVs that landed on my desk was consistently high, but when we spoke to the candidates on their first telephone interview it became immediately apparent that they were not nearly as skilled at security as they were at writing CVs. In the end, we inserted a 10 minute quick-fire Q&A at the beginning of the telephone interview which was as basic as "Define: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability" and other such trivial security knowledge. It was terrifying the number of people applying for mid/senior level jobs, or contracts with high day-rates who couldn't get past this. What was most galling was when people were obviously googling the anwswers whilst we spoke - we countered this with simple "which is better, and why" type questions so that there was too many variables to google and you also needed to defend your answer. There were only a very small number of candidates who, when confronted with the Q&A responded in a "are you serious?" kind of way and just rattled off the basic knowledge in a couple of minutes. With these we could get down to the detail of the real interview pretty quickly.
cookiecaper 12y ago
Why would you trust HR to forward you the CVs anyway? I had to beg and plead to get HR to send me the unfiltered resume submissions but finally got them to do so. They're completely unqualified to determine which experience is necessary or relevant (which is fine, since they're not programmers; they just shouldn't be filtering resumes).
- lawl 12y ago
  To be completely honest, I just really didn't care enough and had other things to do. I did that when we were ~7 people, then the company grew, we got a HR department and I kinda lost interest in the company and was just doing my job. Efficient shouting-trough-the-room to get shit done was replaced by by slow corporate processes, office politics started to happen, somebody decided that our SMB shared folders must have a number in front so they are shown in the order admin though they needed to be shown... So when they decided to optimize folder structures for mouse-heavy non-technical users, taking my ability to quickly nagivate trough the directory structure, I decided it was time to leave :) Edit: One funny thing I forgot, they built a file-name generator in excel we had to use :)
nogridbag 12y ago
Fizzbuzz has not been very useful for me while conducting interviews. Nearly all candidates had no problems solving it fairly quickly. But many of these candidates couldn't solve much simpler problems such as "Initialize a list or array of numbers".

by lawl 12y ago

herghost 12y ago

I've had very similar experience hiring for information security roles. The volume of "good" CVs that landed on my desk was consistently high, but when we spoke to the candidates on their first telephone interview it became immediately apparent that they were not nearly as skilled at security as they were at writing CVs. In the end, we inserted a 10 minute quick-fire Q&A at the beginning of the telephone interview which was as basic as "Define: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability" and other such trivial security knowledge. It was terrifying the number of people applying for mid/senior level jobs, or contracts with high day-rates who couldn't get past this. What was most galling was when people were obviously googling the anwswers whilst we spoke - we countered this with simple "which is better, and why" type questions so that there was too many variables to google and you also needed to defend your answer. There were only a very small number of candidates who, when confronted with the Q&A responded in a "are you serious?" kind of way and just rattled off the basic knowledge in a couple of minutes. With these we could get down to the detail of the real interview pretty quickly.

cookiecaper 12y ago

Why would you trust HR to forward you the CVs anyway? I had to beg and plead to get HR to send me the unfiltered resume submissions but finally got them to do so. They're completely unqualified to determine which experience is necessary or relevant (which is fine, since they're not programmers; they just shouldn't be filtering resumes).

lawl 12y ago
To be completely honest, I just really didn't care enough and had other things to do. I did that when we were ~7 people, then the company grew, we got a HR department and I kinda lost interest in the company and was just doing my job. Efficient shouting-trough-the-room to get shit done was replaced by by slow corporate processes, office politics started to happen, somebody decided that our SMB shared folders must have a number in front so they are shown in the order admin though they needed to be shown... So when they decided to optimize folder structures for mouse-heavy non-technical users, taking my ability to quickly nagivate trough the directory structure, I decided it was time to leave :) Edit: One funny thing I forgot, they built a file-name generator in excel we had to use :)

nogridbag 12y ago

Fizzbuzz has not been very useful for me while conducting interviews. Nearly all candidates had no problems solving it fairly quickly. But many of these candidates couldn't solve much simpler problems such as "Initialize a list or array of numbers".