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A comment on Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role. Parent comment

Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by Balgair on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @04:58PM (#16916502)
Wow, alright, this is exactly what I was thinking. The 'novel coding' test was just one test, that it was forewarned to be laughably hard, and that you all were friendly about it. I really do want to know more about how this all went as I thought this would be a really good way to interview coders, but unfortunately I am totally wrong. I want to know why my thoughts are totally off-base.

Really, please, tell us more!

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by kybernetikos on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @07:50PM (#16917683)
> I thought this would be a really good way to interview coders, but unfortunately I am totally wrong.

It's not that you're wrong, it absolutely is a really good way of finding out how someone reacts to being asked to learn something new in a stressful situation. And that is a valuable thing to know - I love working with people who get excited about an opportunity to learn something.

It's just that you have to be prepared to give so much help and the question has to be so easy because it's all completely new that you can't test competence in any meaningful way. Which means that at the end of the 90 minutes or whatever, you know exactly one thing more - their attitude to learning under pressure, but you have relatively little time with them, and you probably need to learn multiple things per session.

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by Balgair on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @08:20PM (#16917811)
Maybe this cockamamie way of doing interviews is the correct one then? Each company tries their own thing, and if you get flustered and bomb it, we'll both parties know it not a good fit. Some companies value the ability to learn and be cool under fire, some like GPAs, some like HW tests. The sorting occurs and is not 'fun' but works in it's own way.
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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by cpeterso on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @05:28PM (#16916794)
I like to pose technical problems that can scale to the candidate's level of experience. If I sense I'm hitting the candidate's comfort level, I can back off. Otherwise, I can take the problem even deeper with more technical questions. Either way the candidate still has a positive experience.
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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by humanrebar on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @07:29PM (#16917564)
This is my approach as well. Ask really easy questions and get more complicated as they do well. I also try to increase difficulty in line with the strengths espoused on their resumes. If they are fantastic with databases, I might make sure the problem can be solved well with a database oriented solution.
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