When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling

Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by Alex3917 on Sunday January 20, 2019 @09:15PM (#18957079)

Was there a specific attack vector you commonly saw from candidates in interviews? It would seem pretty difficult to fake having built a real product or made significant open source contributions. In fact would probably be as difficult or more difficult than faking having written a book, and as far as I know book publishers aren't constantly trying to weed out would-be authors who have faked their previous publications.

I'm not saying you're wrong, especially since we hear about this kind of thing all the time, but I just don't see anything about coding that would seem to make it uniquely conducive to this sort of deception.

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Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s... by kronin on Sunday January 20, 2019 @09:24PM (#18957117)

Interesting examples.

I have interviewed candidates who: * Have impressive products that they "designed and implemented. * Co-authored a book. * Founded and ran a {programming-language} user group.

In all 3 cases, the candidates came across very well when talking at the surface level. Digging deeper, they (in the first example) overqualified their contribution, and none of the 3 could write the simplest of code.

There is a reason why coding tests exist.

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