The technical interview practice gap

Re:The technical interview practice gap by jerf on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @02:58PM (#26403334)

While I won't accuse any one person of this exact opinion, I do enjoy that the gestalt of HN appears to believe that for this upper-middle class job from which you'll have the power to easily destroy millions of dollars' worth of value if you screw up hard enough, you should not have to 1. solve problems in front of someone in an interview 2. bring your laptop to your interview 3. have to provide any evidence of your programming ability via open source samples or past work 4. have a take-home work problem 5. be hired to do the job on a trial basis for a period of time 6. put up with the fact that the interviewer has power if for no other reason than you are one of multiple candidates 7. essentially prove your ability to do the job in any manner whatsoever.

I can understand the arguments for many of those, but... uh... somehow you're going to need to prove yourself. We can't just throw everyone who shows up into the position to see how they'd do... and the HN gestalt would presumably complain about how awful that is, too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by hackinthebochs on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @05:31PM (#26405304)

>somehow you're going to need to prove yourself

You could just, like, ask me! Talk to me like a human being. You'll quickly see I'm all the things I claim to be on my resume. /s

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by grillvogel on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @07:07PM (#26406179)

once you start drilling down into the details of things they claimed that they worked on its usually pretty clear if they are BSing or not

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by maerF0x0 on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @08:13PM (#26406621)

Used to play this game where we'd ask the interviewer to "go deeper" on how something worked to see where there limits of their technical understanding was. Depending on the level expected (eg junior vs senior) you could expect certain depth.

Eg: "Tell me what happens when you type an address into your browser bar"

Someone junior might say "You type in the address, it fetches HTML from their server, and your browser shows it" -- "go deeper" -- "Their server uses HTTP or something.." etc..

Someone senior might get to something like "Well when you press the first 'w' key it triggers a hardware interrupt ..." or more likely something about TCP/IP and the rest of the network stack...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by jerf on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @12:59PM (#26414061)

I don't expect to ever have either the chance or the true desire to do this, but I've often wondered if I could, with literally zero additional preparation, spend a full 8 hour day presenting an answer to that question extemporaneously. If I couldn't, I'm not off by much at this point.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by grillvogel on Thursday March 11, 2021 @07:39PM (#26430928)

yea this must be a pretty standard networking question, when i am probing network skills i ask "what happens when you type ping google.com"

you get a very interesting range of answers

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by jjav on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @08:46PM (#26419140)

> somehow you're going to need to prove yourself

A doctor can do a whole lot more damage than the vast majority of software engineers, and yet doctors don't have to start this proving process from the ground up every job change.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The technical interview practice gap by jerf on Thursday March 11, 2021 @12:39PM (#26426721)

A fair point. I would suggest that doctor's decade-long post-high-school educations are much, much more directly connected to what they are doing than a 4-year bachelor's in computer science is to a programming job. A doctor comes out of an internship in which they were actually doing the job for an extended period of time under heavy supervision. If software engineering adopted the same procedures, we could probably also get away without these interview procedures.

[ Parent | on HN ]