Re:Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews
by giantg2 on Monday December 07, 2020 @04:41PM
(#25337968)
I don't mind simple fizz-bang coding interviews. But some of the ones I've been to, for internal positions no less, have been absurd ambushes.
I once had an interview for a front-end midlevel position. I had some prior front-end experience in another framework, but mostly worked on midteir and vendor products. I was notified the morning of my interview that it wasn't just a regular interview but a code screen and I could use any language/tools/etc that I wanted. I got there and found out that was not the case - he was not following HR's procedures. So he hands me a Mac (which I'm not familiar with), tells me to use Angular (which I've never used), in Webstorm (I played around with it once), and tells me to build a page to upload a CSV file and display the contents in a table on the page. I have 30 minutes to do it, and then I'll get 30 minutes to dress it up in CSS. Needless to say, I bombed it. I was sort of impressed with myself that I had it almost functional, but yet ashamed at my abysmal evaluation. He said I didn't do well and that he was looking for an expert. Shouldn't you open a senior posting if you want an expert? I asked him why he gave me an interview if my resume listed none of the technologies, with my cover letter stating that I was looking for a change and wanted to learn new technologies. His answer was that maybe I knew the tech from personal projects. I had Android personal projects listed on my resume, so why would I have left off other ones more pertainate to the position? My guess is he was too lazy to read and understand the resume and cover letter, not to mention ignoring HR's instructions. What a waste of both our time (moreso mine since he was on his laptop most of the time).
I once had an interview for a front-end midlevel position. I had some prior front-end experience in another framework, but mostly worked on midteir and vendor products. I was notified the morning of my interview that it wasn't just a regular interview but a code screen and I could use any language/tools/etc that I wanted. I got there and found out that was not the case - he was not following HR's procedures. So he hands me a Mac (which I'm not familiar with), tells me to use Angular (which I've never used), in Webstorm (I played around with it once), and tells me to build a page to upload a CSV file and display the contents in a table on the page. I have 30 minutes to do it, and then I'll get 30 minutes to dress it up in CSS. Needless to say, I bombed it. I was sort of impressed with myself that I had it almost functional, but yet ashamed at my abysmal evaluation. He said I didn't do well and that he was looking for an expert. Shouldn't you open a senior posting if you want an expert? I asked him why he gave me an interview if my resume listed none of the technologies, with my cover letter stating that I was looking for a change and wanted to learn new technologies. His answer was that maybe I knew the tech from personal projects. I had Android personal projects listed on my resume, so why would I have left off other ones more pertainate to the position? My guess is he was too lazy to read and understand the resume and cover letter, not to mention ignoring HR's instructions. What a waste of both our time (moreso mine since he was on his laptop most of the time).