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0 pointsbartread5y ago0 comments

It hasn't happened for a long time but I remember, many years ago, being repeatedly frustrated by attending job interviews where I was questioned about languages/skills that clearly weren't listed on my CV and/or where I'd been clear with the recruiter up front that I had no knowledge or experience in these areas.

E.g., even now I have next to no knowledge of Python because I've never used it in detail. Nor do I claim to have done on my CV. An interview where I get asked "Lots of Python" questions (see the second round section on OP) isn't going to go well, and even as a veteran engineer with a fairly thick skin I'm not going to be terribly happy about enduring it.

This kind of problem is exacerbated if your interviewers haven't done sufficient prep so, instead of realising that you don't know anything about a particular technology, they take your poor performance in that area as an indication that you overall suck.

I understand why companies ask these standardised batches of questions: we all know that IT is full of jokers who claim proficiency in technologies where in reality they have very limited exposure and skill. But if somebody's actually told you they don't know something then you're simply wasting your time and theirs, and creating an unnecessarily negative experience, by going through the motions.

The thing with Google is that, because so many people want to work there, there will likely be somebody in that mass of candidates that has reasonable knowledge in all those areas, and they can afford to be that picky. Most companies can't which, overall, I think is a good thing.

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dd825y ago· 2 in thread

I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing, even if it wasn't in line with their lingua franca. The one that said yes turned out to be a pretty enjoyable interview, because we chatted a bit about how implementation details differ between languages and how X could be done in Y, and vice versa. The one that said no... I think I got a better signal of job suitability from that one question than anything else.

>This kind of problem is exacerbated if your interviewers haven't done sufficient prep so, instead of realising that you don't know anything about a particular technology, they take your poor performance in that area as an indication that you overall suck.

Absolutely, I've been on the interviewee side of this a couple times, so absolutely try to ensure I have a list of questions for the candidate, including a number of references to their CV and github (or other public code repo). I'm there to get a signal on their suitability for working here, not to stroke my ego.

bartreadOP5y ago

> I've been in this spot a couple times, and one thing I found helpful was to ask if I could do the question in a language of my choosing

This is a great strategy and, as you say, if they say no you've learned something useful.

When we interview we always make it clear to the candidate that they can pick a language with which they're familiar. We tend to ask for "C-like" at the application stage but have some flexibility around imperative/OO languages. E.g., Python or Ruby might be OK, as might JavaScript.

dd825y ago

Same here, but the downside with this is the interviewer might not be too familiar with the candidate's language selection and therefore miss out on nuances about implementation details. It hasn't happened yet to me, but we do have golang here and I'm not familiar with it at all and am picking it up on my spare time.

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