3 ms·

Everyone claims they want to hire the best, but their hiring process is all about filling the pipe with unwashed masses and then putting them thru a grueling fi

by MCRed 12y ago

Everyone claims they want to hire the best, but their hiring process is all about filling the pipe with unwashed masses and then putting them thru a grueling filtering process. All of these companies, including google, are following a silly, company-centric process. Putting junior engineers in there to make candidates jump thru hoops to get a job? Why are you even bringing in people you don't already know can do fizz buzz? Bring in people who couldn't have the resume they have without being decent programmers. Google is doing cattle calls? Seriously? That reflects badly on them. You should have senior people review the resumes. They should be able to tell from the resume whether the candidate is a good fit or not. Seriously. I can. Bring them in, spend the interview time talking to them. Ask them about a project they are proud of or liked or was challenging and get them to explain something technical to you. That's all it takes. Then spend a significant amount of time selling them on your company and why they should want to work there. They should be asking you as many questions as you're asking them! I do like to ask a little brain teaser, but it's relatively quick. IF you're making them write code, you've failed. I'm dead serious about this. I've hired a lot of people, never asked them to write code, then had them turn out to be great hires. Never hired someone who couldn't code. I've seen people lie on resumes (actually got a resume from someone who claimed to be on a team I'd lead, but that he hadn't been on!) Should take very little time to figure out if they're lying on their resume or not. Cultural fit is very important, but people apply that wrongly. They seem to think "I'm a nerdy white male who hates the new star wars trilogy, so they should too". Wrong. Cultural fit is about finding the guy who will show up to help you move without being asked simply because you mentioned you were moving and he's the kind of guy who jumps in and does shit like that. The kind of person who is brilliant but also able to communicate those brilliant ideas with others without it always being about drama. The kind of person who has enough backbone to improve the final product. The kind of woman who takes bugs and gets them cleared even though she could have reassigned them to someone more appropriate, simply because she knows that other person is overloaded. You don't find that on a white board.

jeff_marshall 12y ago
I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able to learn some things that aren't possible at the small companies I've worked at for the last decade). I had explained to the recruiter that I had spent the last several years programming almost exclusively in C on embedded systems. The call (~45 minutes) was spent doing a programming exercise involving string manipulation where the interviewer was essentially silent, while I dealt with the details of getting string manipulation on C correct (the actual problem was trivial from an algorithm standpoint, and could be banged out in python or a similar language in ~10 minutes with access to a REPL to check the details). I wasn't about to try to remember the proper syntax for another language on the fly (especially since the interviewer didn't want me to use anything other than a shared text buffer during the interview), and didn't have the prototypes for various string-related functions memorized, so I'd bet I came across as incompetent in the reviewers eyes. Never mind the fact that they could have asked interesting questions about how I wrote a rather complex piece of an IP stack from scratch recently, and successfully deployed it to various customers. I suppose if you have a big enough candidate pool and a reasonable compensation package, you'll find someone acceptable with this approach - but you'll spend a lot of interviewer-hours doing it. To be honest, I don't have anything against them, but I'm unlikely to accept another interview if their recruiters call again.

by MCRed 12y ago

jeff_marshall 12y ago

I would agree. I recently went through a phone interview with $BIG_COMPANY. I'm not actively looking for a job, but the opportunity was interesting (I'd be able to learn some things that aren't possible at the small companies I've worked at for the last decade). I had explained to the recruiter that I had spent the last several years programming almost exclusively in C on embedded systems. The call (~45 minutes) was spent doing a programming exercise involving string manipulation where the interviewer was essentially silent, while I dealt with the details of getting string manipulation on C correct (the actual problem was trivial from an algorithm standpoint, and could be banged out in python or a similar language in ~10 minutes with access to a REPL to check the details). I wasn't about to try to remember the proper syntax for another language on the fly (especially since the interviewer didn't want me to use anything other than a shared text buffer during the interview), and didn't have the prototypes for various string-related functions memorized, so I'd bet I came across as incompetent in the reviewers eyes. Never mind the fact that they could have asked interesting questions about how I wrote a rather complex piece of an IP stack from scratch recently, and successfully deployed it to various customers. I suppose if you have a big enough candidate pool and a reasonable compensation package, you'll find someone acceptable with this approach - but you'll spend a lot of interviewer-hours doing it. To be honest, I don't have anything against them, but I'm unlikely to accept another interview if their recruiters call again.