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- cross-posted to:
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Isn’t that like almost every job, not just being a programmer
So true. At the same time, this happens because a lot of hiring managers don’t know intimately what the job actually does, so they resort to cookie-cutter interview techniques.
“Do leetcode hard on screen share for 12 hours over three months, and then we’ll let you know if there’s any openings anyone here actually wants to hire you for…then the teams will interview you. Oh and if we don’t find a fit within a year of the phone screen you start all over lol”
Google, meta, etc. Fuck them all.
Bonus: If you score really high on the pointless quizzes, then you might get a chance at a remote job, which puts you first on the chopping block for layoffs every quarter!
Extra bonus: There’s an office near you, but we’re only hiring somewhere else right now that had a shitload of layoffs recently due to shitty management that didn’t get fired, so you’ll have to uproot your entire life and place your future in our hands for the privilege.
I stopped sitting in on interviews at my old job. Everyone that I thought was a great interview ended up being a shitty employee.
Interview: “reverse this binary tree with an algorithmic efficiency of O(1)”
Job: “The marketing team would like you to indent this button by 10 pixels”
production code: “hehe this is running at polynomial scaling”
All of this. When I tell people I meet that we don’t do coding tests, we instead do tiny assignments, they often get quite excited. It also seems to be way, way more effective
As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
100% this
And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that’s very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don’t care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our … simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It’s really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it’s proven highly effective so far
But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
Let’s not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won’t compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme’s concerns, as it should be.
Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.
Ah, right, the proxy evaluation that’s so famously effective. Lol
Most people can do most jobs.
Companies shouldn’t legally be allowed to be this selective.
Do you have any qualifiers for that? Like “with sufficient time to learn” or something? Is there some kind of personal development that you think could enable that?
In my understanding, asking a chef to be a doctor or a software engineer to be an artist often doesn’t work great.
How selective do you think is appropriate?
To be clear: I’m a hiring manager for some specialized stuff. I’m genuinely curious about your perspective because I hope it can help how I do that work. I’m not trying to argue with you or prove you wrong or anything.
Given enough time.
Obviously professions that take years to study have that barrier to entry.
But if your job isn’t life or death most likely they will already have to teach you everything you need to know on the job.
Add another column labelled “knowing the right people” with the bar so large the other two are blips.
Also just being liked by the interviewer. For my current job I had an interview of about 90min, and basically just had a rather one-sided chat with the two guys. They seemed to like me, just let me talk and the next day I had the contract draft in my email.
I certainly did not excel at anything during the interview.
So true! Out of the five jobs I got over my career, three were from referrals.
put a triple the height column right there - luck to get an interview in the first place. You’re lucky if an actual human reads your CV nowadays, instead of an AI fishing for keywords
I’d even say add another column of “Skills to get the interview”.
sobs in social anxiety
I’d rather present it as a non-overlapping Venn diagram. It’s not the level, those are different skills completely
At some point you’ll need to know the basic syntax of some programing language.
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The more HR takes over the interview process, the more important getting past HR becomes than doing the job.
Hardest interview I ever had was a job where I worked the least. Second-most lucrative.
I’m interviewing people right now and I feel like it’s actually the opposite. I know for a lot of folks this is true, and I’ve been through those interviews, but fuck, I would love if I could find somebody who is just on par with the interview questions and could just answer them all satisfactorily, because that’s what we actually need.
Can you share what kinds of questions you’re asking? Or at least generic versions of them?
I don’t know, if I have enough Daniel Abrahams for the job :-(
This couldn’t be more true for my job. My last job had so many moving parts that we never weren’t under water. My current employer has things so segmented that I’m encouraging friends at the old place to jump ship by telling them how easy things can be when you have proper leadership.
