Re:Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software s...
by josephg on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @04:17PM
(#29180950)
> passing many good hires is preferable to letting one bad hire through.
This is certainly Google’s philosophy, but our industry doesn’t think with one mind on this.
And as for having so little material - to me this is a sign of a badly designed interview. Almost everyone is weak in one area or another. If your interview only assesses candidates in one way (eg via a coding challenge, or based on a single whiteboard problem) then you are making a decision with insufficient signal. Multifaceted interviews are good interviews.
Plenty of otherwise strong candidates are weak in at least one section of any assessment. And plenty of bad hires will still, for example, know trivia about data structures even though they don’t actually know how to program. Making a hiring decision based on a single metric leaves way too much to chance.
This is certainly Google’s philosophy, but our industry doesn’t think with one mind on this.
And as for having so little material - to me this is a sign of a badly designed interview. Almost everyone is weak in one area or another. If your interview only assesses candidates in one way (eg via a coding challenge, or based on a single whiteboard problem) then you are making a decision with insufficient signal. Multifaceted interviews are good interviews.
Plenty of otherwise strong candidates are weak in at least one section of any assessment. And plenty of bad hires will still, for example, know trivia about data structures even though they don’t actually know how to program. Making a hiring decision based on a single metric leaves way too much to chance.
(Source: I’ve done over 400 technical interviews)