Don’t do interviews, do discussions

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by jandrewrogers on Monday November 08, 2021 @01:07AM (#29146493)

The challenge with this approach as that many very competent people are not allowed to discuss their prior work in that level of detail. More practical variants of this approach use a straw man software design problem to talk to that will exercise diverse areas of experience.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by twic on Monday November 08, 2021 @05:03AM (#29147734)

I do experience-based interviewing, and i have never encountered this problem. The great majority of the time, people are able to talk about anything. Sometimes, there are sensitive parts of prior work, but a candidate can just talk around those bits and focus on the rest. Even if someone had been working somewhere super-secret, if they aren't a junior, they have other experience to talk about.

If all your career experience so far has been at the NSA, yeah, you might want to do a side project before looking for work.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by scottLobster on Monday November 08, 2021 @10:01AM (#29149945)

As someone who's done classified work, the general guidance we got is that we can speak in generalities.

So I can't say what the code specifically does or who it's for, but I can talk about how I worked on a c++ engine wrapped in a Java server that was responsible for coordinating a large group of non-homogeneous assets, as well as various architectural details (what libraries did we use, database, messaging setup, etc). So it's not like I have nothing to talk about in an interview, plus the fact that I can't get too specific adds mystique. It's kinda fun, because in my experience there's an assumption most engineers/engineering managers make about what I've worked on from that first statement, particularly if they know where I work, and it's actually not that. :)

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by nostrebored on Monday November 08, 2021 @06:56AM (#29148409)

I’ve worked at some large companies and would say this is wrong. I can’t talk about most of my best examples because they’re still roadmap items.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by ctvo on Monday November 08, 2021 @07:33AM (#29148641)

You can’t remove the identifying details and talk about the technical challenge and usage in a generic sense? Your system or software is that specific? Can you give a now public example?

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by nostrebored on Monday November 08, 2021 @07:41AM (#29148703)

I can, and that’s usually what I do, but there are identifying details about the very specific domain which AWS only has a single product in.

So I can talk about architecting a system, about customer feedback and redesigns, but I can’t talk about work I did that will span another three years.

I think at FAANG it’s usually fine — most people have good enough examples even without their full repertoire. But at mid enterprise or F500 companies I could see this being a bit impactful.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by ctvo on Tuesday November 09, 2021 @07:22AM (#29160729)

> I can, and that’s usually what I do, but there are identifying details about the very specific domain which AWS only has a single product in.

Sorry, to be clear, I mean can you give an example of something you couldn't use as an example, but is now public.

I've worked at GAMMA, and agree, it's very doable to turn my work generic and talk about it in-depth, compare it to alternatives, etc. so that was the main driver in asking for an example.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by b20000 on Monday November 08, 2021 @09:38AM (#29149694)

it is not less wrong than timed leetcode BS interviews

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by kirso on Saturday November 13, 2021 @10:02PM (#29215085)

Also, I would find it weird if a person never worked on any side projects or tinkering in the free time to discuss the things above.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by swiftcoder on Monday November 08, 2021 @04:03AM (#29147384)

Yep, 100% this. Particularly if you've worked for big firms in the past, those NDAs do not mess around.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by b20000 on Monday November 08, 2021 @09:42AM (#29149725)

yeah, and some very competent people have no time or interest in timed coding tests and know that great software is not built that way.

if you have been through a CS program you have worked on probably at least 10 projects. and then there are your personal projects. if you have any experience you can talk about at least some of these apart from the stuff under NDA.

so, this approach is much better than timed coding interviews and is a much more fair system as it rewards and takes into account experience.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by alistairSH on Monday November 08, 2021 @10:27AM (#29150219)

if you have been through a CS program you have worked on probably at least 10 projects

That's fine for a new graduate, but many of us are decades out of college. What we did then has almost zero relevance to jobs we might seek today.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by b20000 on Monday November 08, 2021 @11:12AM (#29150744)

the same goes for leetcode interviews. the key difference is that you don’t need to prepare to talk about your own projects. or at least much less. and you are probably working on stuff after hours anyway.

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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by FigurativeVoid on Monday November 08, 2021 @09:56AM (#29149894)

This follows what I think of as the best technical interview I ever had. It was for a more junior role, but it was pretty good.

Here's a basic straw man rails controller. There are a few things wrong with it. Apply suggestions. It was nice.

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