I will not do a tech interview (opens in new tab)

Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed.

I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/specificity works. Give them an example webapp idea, and ask how they might architect it.

None of these are gotchas. All of them are directly applicable to the work they'll be doing. If you can't explain how closures work, then either you don't understand them (so you shouldn't be hired except for a very junior position), or you're bad at communicating/explaining (which, on teams, can be equally bad).

The author says "Other times I just froze on topics that I know very well." Maybe somebody can explain this better to me -- but if you freeze up in interviews, are you also going to freeze up in developer meetings? During code reviews? When you're in the room with clients?

If you freeze up in interviews, then it doesn't seem like the problem is with interviews -- the problem is with you freezing up, isn't it? I mean, if you can't answer basic questions about your knowledge in a one-on-one conversation, then that's a real problem, and not just in interviewing. (Obviously, some overly aggressive or unfriendly interviewers can be off-putting, but I'm just talking about "normal" friendly interviewers.)

I like the twist of doing the contract off site on the developers own time.

Every time I see someone on hacker news saying, "we've solved the interview problem. We just require every new hire to give up their old job and contract with us for a week to see if they are a good fit", I often wonder about the quality of the people they hire as I have yet to run into a talented dev who would quit their current job to do this one week contract for hire option.

Doing contract work via take home seems like a nice balance here as even people with kids have 2-3 hours free after kids go to bed. Done over a few nights in a week makes much more sense.

So for me, I really want to interview somebody before he can work with me.

Also, I believe there was an article posted here a few weeks back that indicated Google's brainteasers did not lead to quality candidates - I know I am cherry picking something that supports my beliefs but it was here nonetheless.

Also, I have interviewed a lot of people with 4.0 BS/MS in 5 years that turned out to be horrible employees. They were awesome with the brain teaser questions but sucked when they actually had to build something.

I guess I do not see how you can lose if you take the contract-to-hire approach ..

Off-site contract work is NOT a solution. Hint: the candidate may not be doing the work himself; he may be farming it out to oDesk or Elance at a fraction of the price and playing WoW all day.

The interview process is broken and many of the interviewing techniques either do not correctly judge a candidate, or place too much burden on them. I guess the reasoning is that a false negative is better than a false positive.

There was a huge emphasis on avoiding false positives in the interview process - largely because a single bad hire can do great damage to a software development team. But people seem to be learning that these grueling processes may not do as much to avoid the false positives as we thought, and are creating a vast number of false negatives.

I am no longer interested in participating in this sort of multi-day technical exam taking. I've studied stochastic processes, mathematical optimization, data structures and algorithms. I've taken exams on them. I've hit the books for a couple of weeks prior to interviews where I've been grilled on these subjects in greater depth than I experienced during my exams in grad school. It's important knowledge, I get that, but I don't want to have to mentally reload the material in "exam ready" memory simply to pass yet another interview. I will rely on my general knowledge and my ability to look things up on the job. My interviewers should feel free to evaluate my knowledge, but does this really have to be more grueling and take four times as long my final exams in college/grad school?

It's not that a technical screening isn't valuable, it's that the grueling nature of these interviews means that if you can't recursively print out all permutations of a string on the spot, right now, don't get confused up there at the whiteboard, you're a no-hire. It can be very clear that the interviewee is aware of what mergesort is, how recursion works, the importance of run time in algorithms, and that the candidate almost certainly at one point implemented it. They want to see it, now, in code, on the whiteboard. Or, these days, typed into a screen that an interviewer is looking at.

A couple of years back, last time I was looking for jobs, I spent one and a half days in interviews. I was asked to code a singleton, add a branch to a binary tree, traverse a binary tree, now without recursion please!, find the long term probabilities in a markov chain, formulate a linear program and prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, now with matrix notation please!, write a bunch of outer joins, convert a curve into a piecewise linear function (don't lose convexity, please), on and on. Each interviewer was fresh, I was shuttled from room to room. Then I came back for three hours of interviews with management. No hire.

Another special one was where I only got to talk to a recruiter, passed a few java tests (about an hour), and then took a homework assignment (spend no more than 5-7 hours, please!). Didn't hear back, didn't hear back, didn't hear back. About a month, and the recruiter calls, oh, they've decided not to pursue this any further.

This is a rant, and perhaps an angry one. I feel bad about that, and it doesn't feel great to admit that I've failed in these interviews, either. But I'm glad that some pushback against this practice seems to be building.

If I don't know the answer to a question or if it is ambiguious, I tell them. For example, I was once asked to describe how a TCP sessions ends. Well, that's implementation defined. What OS? Are we talking FIN ACKs or do TCP resets count as ending a session too? The RFC may say this, but in the real-world, software sometimes does it like that. Etc, etc.

And, many times the questions aren't made to be answered, but to draw things out of you (like the one above). And in these cases, you can turn the questions back on them. Put them on the answering end ;) and that's OK, those exchanges tell both sides a lot about the other.

I do like a few black and white questions. Like, "How many bits are in an IPv4 address" or "What data structure is a C++ set typically implemented in" and if candidates have no idea on an answer, then I do have concern over that. However, if they do not know the answer, but understand types and their sizes and data structures and their pros/cons, then that's good enough in some cases as well.

I may be one of the most contrary programmers here on HN when it comes to this subject. I have never shared code or given references before a job offer and I never will. I believe that reviewing code that's already been written has far too much risk for any benefit; permissions may be required, explanations are often needed (but never given the opportunity), and most of all, taken out of context. I want a prospective employer to do their own work to evaluate me, one on one, without depending on other code or others' opinions. I will do whatever it takes to help them do this, including interviews, meetings, and yes, coding for them.

As an interviewer, I have used many tools to get to know the interviewee, but the coding exercise has alway been, by far, the most important. If you can code, great. If you can't, I'll find out. If you struggle, no problem, we'll work through it. But I have to know, otherwise we can't move on.

The trial project is a great idea, but for many reasons, it's not an option for many employers.

Do whatever it takes to get past the roadblock of not being able to do a tech interview. There are plenty of resources to do that. If you struggle and your interviewer is a jerk, then no problem: you didn't want to work there anyway. If you struggle and your interviewer helps both of you to solve the problem, then you've both learned a lot about each other.

(Also, please try to avoid language like "I will not...". Except for murder and ethical issues, this will probably hurt more than it will help.)

Disclaimer: My parents are non-native English speakers and I can't understand a thing they say over the phone, but in person I have no trouble.

After going through an initial resume screening and phone call, you show up on-site in the morning.

You then give a presentation about some recent work you've done. For those fresh out of school, it's generally about their grad work.

Then you have a series of 1/2 to 1 hour interviews through the day, mostly with people who were at your talk that morning.

The individual interviews tend not to be the Google-style "please implement a data structure for XYZ on the board" sort of thing. Rather, we'll ask about things from your talk or your resume that interest us. We might describe some work we've done here, to hear what you think about the problem, how you might have solved it.

A lot of what we're looking for is how well you're able to communicate your responses. We also want to get a feel for personality, how well you work with others and how well your personality will interact with the people here. I believe this place is actually pretty diverse, and I like to think we don't fall into the "culture fit = 20-something white male" trap; however, some of the restrictions and circumstances of the work we do may make some people unhappy and we'd like to avoid that.

We also pick two people to take the candidate to lunch. This is supposed to be a chance to talk more about life in the area and what it's like to work here, although honestly a lot of that comes up during the regular interviews.

After all the interviews are done and the candidate leaves, the interviewers get together, share their impressions, and say whether or not they recommend hiring. The hiring manager then makes the final call.

It's not really suitable to everywhere, I'm sure, but I'm pretty happy with it.

The other irritating thing is that people seem to prefer selecting people who are technically more intelligent than they are, but who are less socially apt that they are. It's so bad that I think entrepreneurs need to think about protecting their employees from themselves, because this cannot possibly be good for companies in the long run.

Lets just face it. Engineers often times have low self-esteem (especially compared with "business types")(edit: myself including), and interviews frequently become the one place where they can be on top. It's always re-posed as some "meritocratic" test of skill (isn't it always?), and it's anything but, because an interview setting is not effective at measuring whether someone has the initiative and creativity to get a job done.

Every issue the author mentioned can and should be mitigated by a decent internal recruiter or manager. Essentially whoever initiates the contact with the developer maintains a responsibility to ensure that their 'candidate' is as comfortable as possible throughout the process, regardless of who they are meeting.

I've dealt with plenty of people who suffered from the exact issues the author describes. It's a lot more common than you'd realise. I've also dealt with rare occasions where I've helped candidates with autism, aspergers and even down syndrome through the interview process.

If you form a decent rapport with your candidate and truly comprehend what they really want from a job with your company as well as 'grok' their personality type and limitations then there really is no excuse for dumping them into a situation where they feel so stressed and under pressure that they shut down.

Your responsibility doesn't end with the candidate though. It's equally important to ensure that the people who will be interviewing this person after you have a decent understanding of the type of person they are about to meet and to ensure they are equipped to deal with a situation where the person being interviewed begins to crumble.

As for references to previous submissions and comments where people claim to have "solved the interview problem", I call bullshit. Every company, every hiring manager, every team, every job and every candidate is different. The silver bullet to 'solve' the problem simply doesn't exist and never will. Sure there are companies with fantastic processes but for every 'perfect process' you show me, I can show ten companies where that process simply wouldn't work.

The best thing about these discussions is that it encourages people and companies to simply try harder and that's never a bad thing.

Let's do the opposite of all these things!

I've recently started writing down an attempt at providing a better replacement I hope to begin following and enforcing 100% without exception going forward. My own system has similarities to what the OA advocated. I call mine RYR, which stands for "Realistic, Yes-Finding and Reciprocal."

"Hey, as I'm sure you may understand, these sorts of on-the-spot interviews are a significant departure from the day-to-day environment under which I normally perform these sorts of tasks. I know this stuff well, but still might fumble a bit because of this atmosphere. Do you mind if I talk through this problem with you as I would if we were working on the job together?"

Short contracts can be great when you can afford them (ie, have time/are not currently otherwise engaged), but sometimes you have to work within the framework provided. Being your own salesperson is not all that complicated: manage expectations, build rapport, and under sell/over deliver.

A good recruiter can help fill in these gaps for you -- pre-setting the hiring managers expectations, coaching you up on interview strategy and tactics, and helping you understand a given company's interview process in full so you can mentally prepare. Unfortunately, most recruiters are not good and dealing with them tends to be a pain. We're building a better recruiter, online, at Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com). You control the whole process through a web interface, and simply request contact when desired. We're geared towards engineers and are currently in private beta. Will expedite invites to HN signups -- feel free to email me (address in profile).

The UK civil service used interview boards consisting of a manager of the role, a subject matter expert and an independent person from outside the organisation. It is an inherently high-stress situation for the candidate due to the numbers involved and and usually due to the room layout.

I was trained to account for the stress reactions and see past a freeze due to the situation and focus on clear demonstrations of skill and experience. If anything we were trained to try to make the candidates perform at their best in the board rather than probe to see their worst sides.

It was complicated by the fact I was employed in a highly technical specialist team (It was a military research agency) and few people we interviewed had any experience of what we were planning to employ them for.

We also consciously went beyond a general knowledge test and focused on how the candidate thought about answering questions rather than if they knew every technical detail. In that role technical detail was only a man page or a conversation with a colleague away if you know what you didn't know and were prepared to ask for help.

Any interview that stresses the candidate, quizzes the candidates memory of detailed technical facts and doesn't work from the premise that it is a high stress artificial situation is not going to provide a valuable outcome for anyone involved.

Edit: My best question to identify general technical competence starts with "Can you describe the TCP handshake?" and if they know is quickly followed up with "Why is it like that?". Unless there is role specific reasons to know TCP then it doesn't really matter if they don't know, if they do know I am really interested in their answer to why it is the way it is. Many even quite senior candidates have never considered it before and watching their process of thinking about it is very instructive about their ability to think about technical details in the abstract.

i've had multiple interviews where i did well on the phone and the tech-out, only to receive a "take home exercise".. with guidelines such as "it will be graded by style and architecture in addition to correctness of function".

This would mean half of my saturday in a coffee shop coding an elaborate solution using latest technology and good patterns.. with some resentment because i just wasted hours of precious (and scarce) free time.

Not only has this never lead to an offer, but in some cases i'd not hear back for weeks, with eventual vague comment like "it was good, but not great" or "it was great, but we decided to go with someone who happened to have more experience in X domain".. that's nice..

This is a recipe for only finding unemployed people, and in my opinion, the best people already have jobs.

I have been offered to interview with YC startups that wanted me to fly out, spend a week writing code with them, and _then_ they'd offer me a job. I'm already employed, by an employer that legally owns all my code. I can't take a week off, write your code, and then _possibly_ get an offer. I don't have time for that.

Technical interviews can go afoul, yes. But, IMHO, they are the best we've got. They show respect for the interviewees time, and decisions should be made quickly. Will you occasionally miss a good candidate, yes. Will a bad one get through, less likely. That's about the best one can hope for.

This article reeks of privilege, namely that of location.

The suggested is horrendously unfair to people that would need to relocate (possibly even internationally) to get a job.

I am currently interviewing for a large tech. company in Silicon Valley. I am living in England. It would take a substantial amount of resources for me to even meet the team in person, so of course they want to vet me via Skype or whatever before they commit to this. On the flip-side, if I'm going to be uprooting my entire life and moving to SF, I want some sort of guarantee I have a solid, full-time position.

I also wouldn't be able to afford a £1,000+ flight (and countless days of missed work) in order to do an on-site interview. Utterly preposterous.

Thankfully, the person doing the technical interviews has been a person who basically has the same job as me, so they understand the position and can see if I'm a good fit. The interviews were of the format that they pasted into some questions to a collaborative editor, I get to choose a language, and solve them. We are Skyping so I explain the reasoning behind what I'm doing etc. Code doesn't have to compile, I don't have to know the exact syntax for function calls (because who can't find that in seconds anyway), but it's about figuring out my though processes, confidence, ability to deal with new things, etc.

It'll be interesting to see what they think of me, but it seems like a reasonable process, and does not exclude people based internationally.

They did a pivot after acquiring Kyle's TinyProj [2] customer base, which included us. Wondering if anyone has any good experience with GroupTalent?

[1] https://grouptalent.com/welcome/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/16/tinyproj-shuts-down-users-s...

Nice idea. Though I hope you don't expect to be given high priority stuff or be paid a full senior dev's wage during this short contract before which I don't know your abilities as I've not had some other chance to assess them.

Of course an active public portfolio helps here, as potential employers can get some idea of your output from that, but we can't truly rely on it as it can be faked (or be misleading for far more equitable reasons).

Do I want to hire a person who is great when things are going well but who goes to pieces under pressure?

Learning how to be interviewed is as useful a skill as learning how to code.

I've been a dev for 10 years and worked in Sydney, London, New York & San Francisco. What I noticed is that San Francisco has a very different "technical" interview approach that is very CS focused. I studied a CS degree (7 years ago) and think it's stupid that I have to dig into knowledge that I have not needed professionally over my whole career.

I've built successful startups, coded mamoth apps used by millions of people, but failed interviews at companies like Yammer.

I wrote a post about how I conduct technical interviews for my company airpair.

http://hackerpreneurialism.com/post/43661666180/how-i-conduc...

Pair Programming is KEY.

Also, side plug we've been getting lots of business both around preparing for interviews and helping to interview candidates when you don't have in-house knowledge to vet skills you don't have.

Here are some examples:

http://airpa.ir/1d5sqR6 (Need help reviewing candidates code)

http://airpa.ir/1dteU8H (Need help interviewing an iOS candiate)

http://airpa.ir/173ily2 (Needed help preparing for JavaScript interview)

I feel this is different than in almost all social interactions, such as working with clients or participating in meetings. There is more equality and control in those kind of negotiations.

I blanked. They just handed me the laptop and didn't even tell me it was a test. There were some comments at the top of a few javascript files and like an idiot I answered the questions verbally. The two devs just sat their smirking at each other like they'd won at something.

I'm not averse to tech interviews, but I do not enjoy the "look at how smart we are that we caught you out" attitude that comes with them. I'm shit at crosswords, that doesn't make me illiterate.

I've since been keeping an eye on their work and now I get to feel smug because it's been universally panned.

I also had to sit a test for what I call "the worst agency in the world" (AKQA and after 7 hellish months there I'm happy to stand by and put my name to that assessment, they're simply awful). I forgot to specify the radix in a call to parseInt. It was the only flaw and while they didn't make a big deal out of it, the interviewer was clearly pleased with himself for finding it. They then proceeded to ask ZERO questions about why I'd coded the test the way I had. Which is a shame, they might have learned something.

In my experience, there's nothing wrong with tech interviews, but there's a lot wrong with the people administering them. If I want to know wether a dev knows what they're talking about, I ask them to explain something they've already coded. If they can explain it, they understand it, and I usually learn something to boot. Everybody wins.

All managers dream of robots that can read minds and work for titles but lazy managers prefer to hire those who do what they are told, even if its pointless, even when done poorly or without imagination.

A good manager is worth his weight in gold. "I will not do your tech interview" while offering a short contract is an excellent way to screen out the lazy managers.

I had an interview with a small startup I adore and had to code a simple python scrapper with the startup's CEO. I was so freaked out I totally bungled it up. Needless to say, my confidence went down the toilet.

I think I should accept that I don't do the traditional tech interview well. Next time, I find myself in such a situation, I'll suggest the short contract or coding exercise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

I've posted here on HN from time to time, which I expect to add to my personal website in a while. A job candidate who doesn't want to do a work-sample test is a job candidate who doesn't want to work for a smart employer.

It sounds like contracting might be what the OP wants to do more than employment if he's so good at selling that and not interviewing, but also not keeping those jobs long enough.

Or maybe I misread it? Sounded like he was hired a number of times for jobs, but went back to interviewing not long after anyways.

I've had similar experiences to the guy who wrote the article. Something about interviews seems to make my heart race and I can stumble on very simple code. This is in strong contrast to how I am in normal social situations where I am highly confident and my personality is often infectious and passionate. I think it's a case of high anxiety in authoritarian/test conditions. Those that imply their working conditions are similar to interview conditions make a good point, however if that is the case I would prefer somewhere less confrontational and more forgiving.

Generally I prefer proper timed tests [0] without anybody watching. This is how I normally work.

I'm also one of those people that has to constantly look things up; actually I have a broad range of experience but I often find myself delving deeply into things I have only cursory knowledge in - imagine a librarian that remembers the locations of the books in a library and the analogy to knowing high-level concepts that allow thinking on your feet when used together with the correct reference materials.

Of course I believe that it's better to be good at making do with limited information. Understanding things from scratch is what I have been doing all my life. Like a chameleon when I look at some code that I did not write, it becomes my syntax and I quickly understand the contents. However different organisations and cultures sometimes prefer different kinds of engineers: there is either a preference towards robustness or flexibility [1].

[0] http://codility.com

[1] A test I would excel on would be being passed code in an unfamiliar language, domain, library or ecosystem and being told to quickly get to grips with it and add features/fixes (aka. flexible knowledge: unfamiliar territory which requires me to pull together a broad range of skills.) This is opposed to being passed a piece of code in a familiar language, domain, library and ecosystem and being told to quickly and robustly add a feature or fix to it (aka. robust knowledge: familiar territory which requires only a very specific set of skills.)

My free time is very limited and valuable. Google sounds interesting, but here are my options:

a) Spend my free time exploring and building small projects with new technologies and techniques. Maybe work on a mobile app that could make some money.

b) Find my old CS textbook and notes and do algorithm studying and exercises just to prepare for an interview.

Doing a) directly improves my skills and has lots of benefits. I've been able to improve projects and gain a lot of good reputation at work because of things I discovered doing a). a) could also lead to making a revenue-generating mobile app. And perhaps most important of all, a) is FUN.

Doing b) just feels like a giant waste of time. Doing b) is a direct opportunity cost of not doing a). The potential return for b) is what? Going through a day long interview with judgmental engineers trying to look smart? And it's boring. It was fun learning in college when it was the first time and I had that aha moment of understanding. Now its just boring to go over it again and again just to rote memorize things. I would rather be building or learning something new.

A week or two goes by, and they hired him without doing an interview.

On a separate note, I've always had the test anxiety problem so I could understand how an interview is more of an acquired skill and less of an indication of your coding ability. I can code, and I have no problem with understanding the material, but when it comes to taking a timed test and using a pencil and paper for something that I usually use a completely different input for (a keyboard and a monitor), I struggle with it. Some people dismiss it and say "well you obviously didn't know the material if you couldn't get it on a test," but I never agreed with that.

Most people I know, myself included, have suffered from anxiety or panic attacks at some point in their lives. It's usually possible to overcome this, though. When you realize that you don't interview well, are afraid to speak in public, freeze up on dates, are afraid to speak to clients, panic when your boss disagrees with you, etc., you can either work on it or try to avoid those situations forever. Frankly, I'd rather not hire somebody who convinced themselves that they have to avoid certain situations because they can't handle them.

I do love the contractor idea, though. Perhaps it would be best to hire somebody as a contractor for a small project and then have them present in front of the entire team and ask specific questions or ask for live modifications?

I like this approach. In fact, something similar has happened to me in several of my job acquisitions. Networking trumps pretty much anything else.

Now, a good interview isn't one where you ask question about the technical details of a language or a framework or how HTTP works or anything like that. Sure, good technical knowledge is necessary for most positions, especially senior ones, but information is really easy to pick up as you go, whereas real talent is not. Good interviews ask more broad, open-ended questions. "If you wanted to build X, how would you build it?" "If your app was really slow, where would you look to fix it?" "What do you think about framework/language/tool X in relation to tool Y?" Etc, etc. These kinds of questions let you really get into the candidate's head and figure out if he's a good fit, while still allowing him room to go in a different direction and play to his own strengths.

Practice can work against you. In one case I was worried about the algorithm and data structures side of things based on glassdoor posts. Spent a week of evenings coding algorithmic whizbangery. In the interview I obsessed on getting every line of from-scratch code right (obsessively focused is often how I code real software) and stopped "listening" to what was being asked. Double whammy was the interviewer was actually not very familiar with the solution to the problem (canned and complex do not mix well) and when I confidently but politely corrected him as we were coding, boy the color of the interview changed fast and game over. My bad, In the real world I'd politely correct a coworker too.

Or maybe what you should practice is writing out JavaScript with pen and paper like another interview. I hadn't written code out by hand for 15 years .. like since the invention of the keyboard. I did a terrible job despite having just completed a non-trivial very modern mobile front end project. Ri-donk-u-lous.

Be yourself, stay balanced, do your best, HR science is evolving too.

One of their main features is contract to hire. I find many great candidates through them where I work.

TL;DR: Everything you need to know about if I'm a good fit is available online in my OSS (et al) track-records. If that's not good enough for you, that's not the kind of job I want anyway. I want to work for companies that value the full lifecycle of OSS work, which you can only see in such a way, and CANNOT judge via tech interviews.

By the time I walk in the door for an in-person interview, I expect you to already know that I am fully qualified (tech and otherwise), and you're looking now to judge my cultural fit by sitting me down in a real team meeting and seeing how it works, etc.

If I show up and you try to quiz my tech skills, you didn't do your homework on me, and I have no more time for you, so I'll just chuckle and walk out. Politely of course.

That was 2004 or 2005. He's still here. Great hire.

Sometimes you can just tell right away.

All that rambling aside, I'm with the people who dislike the techy interviews. I was #4 at Google and I don't think there is a chance in hell that I could pass their interview questions today. But I've done good work, created good stuff, they ping me from time to time to come back. So perhaps I should be hired but I wouldn't pass the interview process so far as I can tell.

What's wrong with the contract idea in the original article? As a manager, I love the idea of someone who is willing to demonstrate their skills in a contract. If I were out looking for a job I'd offer that up, it's try before you buy, what's the downside?

Can other managers tell me what is wrong with that approach?

Plus, in a large company, internal transfers are common. The social dynamic of asking for an employee who works elsewhere in the same company to do work for a different part of the company seems awkward.

Does anyone have any success (or failure) stories about trying to make this sort of approach work in a large company?

So what's the answer? no, not contract to hire. Although good in theory, in practice many companies won't support or approve contract to hire for full time position. Call it HR inertia, a.k.a 1 of the 4 horsemen of death in bigger more established tech businesses.

So where am i going with all this? Well, that's why networking is important. Get the people you worked with to bring you in places. You don't have to impress anyone on a white board (who codes on whiteboards anyway) but put the emphasis on culture fit since you already pretty much have been tech screened by your old pals.

In conclusion, be nice to your peers. Especially the smart ones you work well with.

My point? Don't just ignore the problem of anxiety when it cripples your life. Address it head on and try to work through it. It will help your life greatly if you can.

Meeting potential employers outside the office like this (over lunch or coffee) has been so much more effective for me as well. It takes the pressure off on both sides and lets everyone really get to know each other. If you can't sit down with someone over coffee or lunch, how are you going to work with them?

We're gathering companies who are interested in this approach to hiring (and trying to make it a trend). Employees at the companies offer coffee meetings (their treat) that anyone interested in the company can request. If there's mutual interest, they meet for coffee to chat about the company.

www.treatin.gs

The issue is that where I work we can't subcontract as a way to 'test' for candidates. The code is so proprietary, and have so much red tape (Options Trading platform) that we don't trust anyone unless you are full-time. Also, the code is fairly complex and embedded in it's industry-speak that unless you come from the same industry subset, you will not be productive (like knowing what Black-scholes, instrument, or delta means). So the investment to getting any good developer to be able to produce is immense. We considered subcontracting for assessing a candidate, but it is fairly hard.

Also we have seen people that do extremely well on every other aspect of the interview but can't deliver when asked to write a piece of code. Good or bad it does show your ability to work under pressure (I am not sure if it's extreme in the financial industry, but stress levels here run fairly high... for a fun read http://codesnipers.com/?q=interview-the-wall-street-programm...). So when you're getting your coffee, someone comes and says 'we need to fix this' it will probably be as intimidating (or more) as having a code interview.

Lastly, maybe because we've seen it often enough, there are a ton of programmers that can't write code (yes, the fizzbuzz crew). Having the codility test filter in front of all eliminates a lot of that chaff we see, so we don't even bother with the candidates unless they get a good-enough result in codility (we do look at the code, not just if it passes/fails the unit tests, but we don't bring the candidate for an actual interview until we have a reasonable expectation that they can program). We understand we will miss Ike Ellis, and we accept that as part of the tradeoffs between time and opportunities.

I ask people for a list of projects that they designed and coded (live projects, so I can see how they function), to get a sense for how good they are overall, then will look at the underlying code. I value readability and documentation over fancy tricks meant to show off the author's MENSA status.

When it comes to the interview, that's all about assessing their personality, work habits, and broader interests. Friendly personality, good work ethic and broader interests = someone who is flexible, which is vital in a small company where everyone has to do a bit of everything.

There are many reasons why people would come to you to ask for help or why you are more successful then colleagues. E.g. in my company we have a guy who thinks of himself as a web developer but thinks that CGI is the protocol the browser talks to the web server. It is not hard to be the best in such an environment. Don't compare yourself inside your company! Compare yourself to the rest of the world! Look on GitHub, read blogs, talk with people on software development mailing lists. If you still feel stronger than most people around you, you probably are.

I also insist on doing some work there, to prove myself of course and see how things work. how they are organized, tools and frameworks they use etc. And most important to get a feeling about the people there. I know it's hard in just one day but you get an impression. I left my last job because I wasn't feeling good there. No team spirit and a "cold" atmosphere. Why should I spend 8-9 hours a day at a place like that?

It definitely doesn't help with my confidence going into an interview and not knowing if I admit I am not an encyclopedia is going to get me disqualified right then and there.

I am sure that it has to do with the jobs and the locations and the companies but definitely freaks me out about my future.

2nd to references is looking at real work products. You're in advertising? Show me your ads. You build websites, show me your websites.

Your method of short term contracts is a good way to get to both at the same point.

Any thoughts on recruiting college hires? They don't have work products, and in many cases don't know enough to be useful on a project with low guidance.

For instance, a gamer who enjoys TF2 or better yet, Left4Dead...that's a partial sign that they enjoy teamwork, despite the downsides of dealing with weak-links and griefers. Someone who enjoys only Halo deathmatch...well, hopefully their skills match their bravado ;)

I interviewed at a company that gave a software engineer's interview for a data scientist position. Because I'd actually worked as a data scientist, my software engineering was a little crusty. I failed the puzzles, and its really frustrating that way.

I've done the 'start as a contractor' thing twice and it works.

Heres a choice quote that I'm still happy with:

"Programming isn’t theatre or performance, “on demand” isn’t how your job works"

But I support this because a lot of technical interviews are ripoffs of people's time. I've put a lot of effort into technical presentation, done well, and then been disqualified based on other criteria. That sucks and the companies have done it that way because it's easy for them.

Anyways, the article is good, but mostly for very experienced developers who can demand certain accommodations.

And I am certainly not going to introduce a TON of overhead into our process bringing you up to speed just to assess this. You go from asking for 3-5 hours of my time to asking for over a week like that is reasonable. Like that is somehow a superior outcome for everyone? Here's a hint: it is not.

You live the life you wanna lead buddy, but I am not going to "trust" that you are a good developer without getting at least some indication that you are not a very convincing impostor. I have trouble with high-stress googletard interviews too (and I don't give them), but to ask for tech jobs without any real evidence of tech capability?

That's unreasonable.

Does anyone know how interviews at Apple and Facebook are like? There are often praises of Microsoft's interview procedures and bash on Google's on HN. Wondering what these two other companies are like.

  - How long have you been doing this career for?
  - How many jobs have you had?
  - How long you had those jobs?
  - How many technical interviews did you do?
  - Since when have you started practicing your new 'technique'?
  - Over which period have you effectively applied it?

In a non ad-hominem manner, I guess what I mean is: what useful data is this? Should people base their future behavior on your anecdotical reliable experiment/measurement?

I was working on a project myself, that I kept getting stuck at a particular point. It could just have been that I was looking at it, by myself, too long and was too close to the problem that I couldn't solve it.

I was looking for Rails devs because 5KMVP started getting more requests for work.

I got a few recommendations and people reached out to me about that freelance Rails position. I whittled down the list to a few I was interested in and I decided to do exactly this.

I created a mini-spec of the problem I was trying to solve, pushed the codebase to a private bitbucket repo and added the guy I was evaluating.

Told him what I wanted completed, and told him I would pay him to complete that micro-job. If it works out, then we will move on to other projects.

Once he finished the project (in a few days) we both walked through his solution. That was such an insightful process for me, because I got an inside look into the way another developer thinks. I even learned from his approach, from his code style and was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the output.

Going through the 'post-code analysis' also allowed me to see how he communicates in the way that I will really communicate (which is via Email and Skype).

I have since hired him and I love working with him. We do have things to work out - specifically on the communication side, but I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome of the little experiment.

For a relatively small amount of money, I was able to a) Learn an interesting approach to solving that particular problem, b) learn new coding approaches, c) figure out how he communicates, d) see how we would work together - he didn't understand something, so he asked questions while he worked through it, e) he was able to do all of that at his leisure - not necessarily through a timed examination.

It's a wonderful screening tool - and while I am not sure how that will scale - that has been my experience with this approach too.

I will definitely continue hiring freelancers like this....by the way, I only did this after I looked through his Github account and checked out any projects and web properties he had online. That's the first line of screening from my perspective.

Edit 1: I thought I should add that I think that this worked so well for me, because this was a problem that I had been tackling for weeks and couldn't solve. So I was intimately familiar with the inner workings of the problem and so could fully appreciate the solution.

I'm not alone.

the brainteaser-whiteboard-fizz-buzz-5-member-panel interview is, and has always been, highly unreliable, if only for the sole reason that PEOPLE GET NERVOUS. gee whiz, what a concept. back here on earth us mere mortals have to deal with things like nervousness, forgetfulness, and intimidation on a regular basis.

let's not forget sociopaths or assholes in a bad mood who deliberately try to make people feel nervous. they exist. that's a thing. i've seen it with my own eyes.

it is an unreasonably strict high-pass filter that gives false negatives people who are otherwise perfectly valid for developer jobs. that's great if you've got millions or billions in the bank and have carnegie mellon grads lined up out the door. that's awful if you've got $50k in the bank and you need someone competent working on things yesterday.

SO much value can be won by hiring people who can't or won't deal with this kind of scenario. on both sides of the table.

We forget this at our peril.

The real reason we indulge hoop-jumping is that it gives a veneer of equality to a process that (really) has more to do with natural gifts than certifications.