Re:Today’s Top Tech Skills
by freedomben on Sunday November 24, 2019 @01:51PM
(#21622409)
Completely agree. Early in my career I had what I thought was "a suprisingly good filter" question I would ask candidates. For a couple years I did this. We hired one guy who had failed my question and then fired him a couple months later, which heavily reinforced my belief in the value of this question.
A couple years later I found the stack of resumes, some we hired, some we didn't. I realized that some of our best engineers had failed my question, and I had subsequently voted "no" (I was outvoted, fortunately, by my fellow panelists. Another reason I strongly advocate panel interviews but that's a separate discussion).
I soon realized that my question was good at filtering out people who didn't think like me, not at filtering out people who would make good engineers.
My takeaway was that everyone, especially me, could use a healthy dose of humility and self-skepticism. Not advocating swinging the pendulum into Impostor Syndrome (which I now struggle with sometimes), but somewhere in the middle is good and healthy IMHO.
A couple years later I found the stack of resumes, some we hired, some we didn't. I realized that some of our best engineers had failed my question, and I had subsequently voted "no" (I was outvoted, fortunately, by my fellow panelists. Another reason I strongly advocate panel interviews but that's a separate discussion).
I soon realized that my question was good at filtering out people who didn't think like me, not at filtering out people who would make good engineers.
My takeaway was that everyone, especially me, could use a healthy dose of humility and self-skepticism. Not advocating swinging the pendulum into Impostor Syndrome (which I now struggle with sometimes), but somewhere in the middle is good and healthy IMHO.