The ANNOYING Truth About Technical Interviews in 2024
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- Опубликовано: 9 окт 2024
- Are technical interviews for software engineers broken? Trisha Gee gives her opinions on the state of technical developer interviews and suggests ways they can improve.
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Technical Interviewing Is A Skill Worth Developing ➡️ / technical-interviewing...
#softwareengineer #developer #jobinterview
the last company that I interviewed rejected me because they think I’m not technical enough whereas I have delivered many successful softwares in the last 15 years both as a developer and a lead/manager. So they must be building some state-of-the-art solution over there.
When I interview people we just talk about what motivates them, how they like to work with others, and get them to draw a system that they have worked on and talk about it - what problems did they have to overcome, what would they have done differently if they were to do it again etc.
If they say the problems were all caused by other people then we don't hire them.
I have 8 years of experience and i released 10th of successfull projects but i cant pass the test questions they are asking us to do in short time so i made a rule any company asks me to do test i reject them im not wasting my time, tell me whats my job going to be ill tell you if i can do the job or not and stop your technical BS nonsense
The best companies I worked asked me about my values and ideas during the interview. The worst companies I worked asked me some very specific technical questions and demanded precise answers. Those people built terrible systems and constantly struggled to maintain them. Probably fragility of their systems is the reason behind that approach to the interview. They want to hire a person who will outsmart their terrible architecture and make it work. Their real problem though is always about communication and culture of such organisations. They put a lot of effort to protect their bad design from changes.
Protecting bad Design from changes. That nails it. The reason is often, that they spent years to into that "design" that they inherited by an old coder, who knew what he did, but with the patterns of the past. And if you come and refactor it to something maintaineable, they get very uncomfortable. Let the keep blaming the long gone creator and move on to the company with the heads you can learn from.
I agree with the broken side of technical interview. I was once part of a panel of interviewers. I kind of get ticked by questions from my colleagues for technologies that are remotely not used by the application we're supporting. My only concern in a job interview is the candidate should know the basics of programming. At least how an object (class) works and and idea how to connect to the databases. Because everything revolves around it. Now depending on the level of the candidate needed, I probably need to just know how the candidate solves specific problems (no correct answer on this one as I want to probe how the person solves things) then it's up to the hiring manager who the hiring manager has a feel in having as a new hire.
Interviews are just never enough time to get to know someone and how they work. It's hard to get a sense of what someone's going to be like on months or years long projects when you've only spent 1-2 exhausting high tension hours in a room with them not working on a real project.
I agree, interviews are a terrible way to judge someone's skills. Just like exams in school. One of my favourite "tests" for an interview is to give someone some buggy code, and see how they debug it to figure out what's wrong. You can learn a lot about the interviewee from this, as you' testing their knowledge of the language and logic and many other aspects all at the same time. Let's be honest, a lot of time as a developer is spent debugging.
When I interview people for a developer job, I usually get them to talk about stuff they built earlier, and how easy or difficult it is for them to explain it to me. I'll try to get them to draw a few diagrams to summarize the system.
Because I believe the most important skill for a developer is to take a step back from the details and create some overview / abstraction. And this test also gives me insight into how they will function in a team, and the level of complexity the person can handle.
Much of the motivation behind skill interviews seem to be as an automated way to cull candidates down to a shortlist worth the time and effort to sit with a human interview panel. The criteria for culling them are almost irrelevant, as long as it gets you down to a short list of candidates that you can talk with.
Just pick half at random, because you don't want unlucky candidates!
(I do not take credit for this joke)
"Tell us about a technical challenge you faced and how you overcame it" - One can prepare/lie to answer it, not sure it's a good way to rate technical skills.
They can ask in detail about your knowledge of the subject. Especially if it is in their expertise, it is very hard to fool them. If you take time to prepare such elaborate lie, might as well do it for real.
>you're more likely too succeed if you attend interviews
Well the problem is - on many markets (not only the US) - it isn't easy to even get an interview these days. Getting consistent zero response after applying and no contacts on Linkedin (ah the fantasy of developers getting actual/fitted offers on Linkedin en masse - lovely lie). You can't even tell if you're good or bad if your workplace has zero mentoring options.
I wouldn't want to work for a company that lets me be interviewed for a programming job by a non-programmer. Or for a management job by a non-manager.
this video nailed it... totally! Good work and kudos to author.
The interviewers should know well in advance to which project they are hiring and what skill are required in there. This hardly happens and so the broken process and nobody till date knowing how to fix this core problem.
I think, in a face to face interview coding task can help to save more time.
I had a candidate with a good speech, he knows few languages, so gave him simple task: reverse string.
Code logic looked almost good. But he failed on basic principle. He used immutable string as mutable char array.
I'll take a portfolio on $forge over a technical interview any day, on either side of the desk. An interviewer once asked me "what is your desert island technology or design pattern, and why?" and I feel once you get someone with experience talking about their favourite tools you can tell how deep they go on their assigned tasks. Obviously that doesn't tell you about whether they are good to work _with_.
My desert island technology is a machete
Great subject! and timing 😊! since I've been having a lot of interviews in the last couple of months 😊 Thank you and greetings from Argentina.
Technical interviews should just be a senior dev having a beer with you and talking about patterns and architecture and the bullshit you've had to deal with professionally. That's it.
Source: me. I have a small software company, and this is how I do them. It hasn't failed me yet (well maybe the guy was ultimately an asshat, but he always knew his stuff).
I believe that the technical interview should be skipped if the candidate has a code portfolio or certifications that already prove their abilities. Many companies practice cargo cult interviewing.
both can be faked, I've interviewed people who's portfolio and cert should mean they can answer basic questions. When asked, they totally drop the ball.
I love point 3. I didn't know I could do that.
love the T-shirt 😄
This arguments about synchronized in Java is feel-good bollocks. There’s no way you can write threadsafe code if you don’t know the basics. There are better and higher level abstractions, but I don’t believe you know what even a race condition is, if you don’t know synchronized.
Some interviewers seem to show of how good they know stuff.
So so burnt out. wish I could really get the willpower to study.
Technical interviews are an example of the Drunk and the Lamp-Post parable. They reveal the incompetance of the hiring team and reveal very little about the interviewee. If technical skills are so important to you then ask for a certification. Be more respectful of people's time.
And therein lies the problem: there is no universal 'certification' method in the IT industry. In the accounting profession you have to undertake your training and qualifications to obtain your certified professional accountant qualification and be a member of the professional institution in your country. Until you get that, you are a junior and you can never hold a position of leadership or authority. Most other professions are the same: engineering, architecture, medical etc. Even the trades have this. The IT industry is way behind. The UK, Australia and Singapore for example, all have their respective Computer Societies. These are the recognised professional bodies in those countries but they are not mandated like in the accounting and other professions. They absolutely should be. Once we have that, then a large amount of the nonsense we see in IT interviews will disappear because proper professional qualifications will ensure that candidates meet given standards and can be measured as such. At the moment, they can't.
Technical interviews are a joke. I will give you an example gathered from my own experience
You interview for company X, they accept you, give you an offer and you decline it for the moment OR they close the position, even though you passed it.
You interview for company X 2-3 years later and have to go through the same process again, yet for some reason, this time you do poorly on their shitty 1 hour Codility or Hackerrank test. So they reject you.
So the company saw you as great, whereas now it sees you as not great. In this time you have gained expereince, however.
So it doesn't make any sense
The last time I was looking for a job, I had 7 interviews in one week. After such a marathon, everything became incredibly easy.
lying well is absolutely an important skillset. the company is never honest why should you be?
Are you guys getting interviews? 🤔
Use Guerrilla Tactics...
This is a good video. It would be a great one if it touched upon how capitalism makes the interview process worse off. Engineers have always been at the frontier of exploitation - from laying down the railroads by expropriating land to the internet-scale data expropriation to feed AI. This crucial role cannot be entrusted to people who haven't been ideologically browbeaten. Imagine if the engineers revolt or even do the bare basic by unionizing 😅 Therefore, organizations create a gauntlet of an interview process that drives people to be individualistic, narrow-minded, and constantly focused on the unnecessary and irrelevant.