My last gig was great in that aspect. My client found my LinkedIn, we had a quick 15 minute call to discuss the project and I was working for them the next day.
Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to sniff out a pretender vs someone who can write software, would not having a heavily technical conversation about details, challenges and other things not make it clearly evident after 15-30-45 minutes if this person is who you need? Rest of the time can be spent napkin designing something or peer programming to check off those to be sure.
I had a interview in 2021 where I had to do a 1.5 hour timed exercise, that apparently isn't sufficient, so their interview pipeline has 3x1hour additional live coding sessions with engineers. Over 4 hours of coding just to prove I can write code up to their standards. Then another 3+ hours of behavioral interviews, meeting the team. Multiply that by the ~5 candidates you interview per position multiplied by each position you hire for in a given year.
When I was interviewing for both junior and senior positions, my typical tack was to look through their resume and look for something interesting that I have some kind of background knowledge of. Or, alternatively, just ask them "what's the coolest project you've worked on?" From there I'd just let it be a pretty organic conversation where I'd just keep asking for more details until we've either gotten to the bottom of the tech implementation or have gotten to the point where they can say "I don't know, someone else worked on that".
So far I haven't been disappointed with any of the outcomes from that process; there was one where my conclusion was "no hire" and then down the road they were hired anyway... and it turned out pretty much how I figured it would. Good surface technical knowledge with a super scattered implementation.
This is the first question I ask followed by, "What's the worst project you've worked on?" The answers are pretty insightful.
"They made developers write unit tests!!!" vs "There were some personality clashes which unfortunately impacted on the team's ability to collaborate effectively".
I'll happily trade for your rock.
But before that company I had a manager at a very small company who absolutely had no ability to do the work — and would have failed a personality test on top of that.
In the intervening time, a candidate not quite ticking all the boxes but with motivation and energy could have learned what they needed to and moved whatever the project is forward.
And for me it's clearly a people one.
It can be that the manager don't want to actually hire someone because they have personal interest of using consultants to do the job. Or the manager lack confidence and is looking for a unicorn to avoid making any mistake (probably the most common). Or the manager expectations are disconnected with the job proposal (they want a senior but the salary is for a junior or like said in another comment, they want someone with skills exactly aligned with the tech stack).
Here we have a trial period of at least three months so it's quite easy to get rid of someone if they don't fit but it's rarely used in IT and I don't understand why. And once the trial is over, it's quite hard to get rid of someone. But basically it seems that once your in, if the trial period is used as a quick exit it's mainly by the new employee and not by the company.
I agree. In Switzerland employment law is governed by the code des obligations, or for the parent poster who asked in the first place, Obligationenrecht. There are various notice periods, 1 week in the first 3 months, 1 month for the first year and so on. An employer isn't required to give a reason for dismissing someone either.
I think it is entirely a people issue.
Not all hiring managers and not even all engineers understand that every requirement winnows down the available candidates. Eventually you're left with only the people who are desperate enough to apply despite not meeting half your list of requirements. Those candidates are on average not as strong as the ones you'd get if you just asked for software engineers with any experience in consensus algorithms and listed your tech stack as an FYI.
Went on to join the highest performing team I've ever worked on. I miss the first few years of that job... before the acquisition!
So I'm inclined to think your 15 minute intuition is nearly enough - the worst people reveal themselves very quickly. And so does the best people. Where a little bit more time might be needed is sometimes in the middle, but it's rare for more conversation to change the initial judgement.
Over nearly 30 years, there have been borderline cases where we might have overpaid someone, and a couple I'd have preferred not to have hired, but who still could deliver, but I don't think we've ended up with anyone who were bad enough to justify these kinds of extensive hiring processes.
I tend to see these complex hiring processes more as tests to determine which candidates are willing to jump through hoops and prove their eagerness and loyalty. E.g. when a FAANG sent me a reading list.... I declined, pointing out that if I needed to study for their interviews they weren't testing my skills, but how desperate I was to work for the. Their recruiters called me back a couple of times to try to convince me again.
I can understand them doing so, because they can, and getting people to who will see it as an achievement to get past these barriers might be worth it to them, but to me it just felt like I didn't want to work in an environment where people were so eager work there that they'd put up with that.
Just gouging their enthusiasm and knowledge of topics they may not necessarily need to be aware of for the job.
At least it seems to bear out so far, and if not, then it means all candidates are just decent and it doesn’t matter whom we hire.
... and then, after wasting thousands of dollars per candidate, many companies opt for RTO policies to "trim fat". Yeah, makes sense if you're an accountant / stock market analyst only focusing on capex vs opex and long-term liabilities (which employment contracts are everywhere but in the US with at-will), but from a holistic viewpoint it's all an utter waste.
Assume 30k of hiring costs related to filling any new position (and that's on the lower end), it makes zero sense to not grant existing employees even 2 grands a year in wage increase... but here we are. Financial games have ruined everything.
That is MUCH too low. Most recruiters are paid 20-30% of first year annual salary as a placement fee.
Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring the interview back on track, with subtle grace?
At the end of a series of "bad interview loop" tests, you learn that they secretly weren't interviewing you to be a coder, and now you are the next chosen-one CEO of Lego.
Said no company ever....
And any company being so openly dishonest as to set up fake arguments for candidates react to . . . if discovered, that's the mother of all red flags.
This is not the case with new interviewers shadowing a single interviewer. That's actually a positive sign, that they know some of their people have skills and are actively trying to train their staff.
One time, for an unspecified job at a think-tank-ish place, after passing the first phone screen, the recruiter lightly prepped me for a call with the hiring manager. So I get on the call that's supposed to be with the hiring manager she described... and the format is like a thesis defense in front of a room of people I can't see, taking turns asking me incisive questions, on topics of their choosing, over a speakerphone. At one point, one of the random people talking at me admonished, a bit sternly, "That's not what I asked you." I at least half-bombed it. (I did get invited to do a job-talk after, like for an academic job, so apparently someone decided I'd passed well enough or to give me another chance. But I was really peeved with the recruiter giving me worse-than-zero intel on what I walked into, and there were other demands on my time, with no job talk ready to go, so I declined.) Much later, I wondered whether that interviewer barrage was intentionally a surprise, to try to filter for people who wouldn't wilt if they were a think-tank expert suddenly put on speakerphone to room of clients on some matter.
The best tag-team interviews I recall were for an R&D unit role at a traditional financial institution, where I'd be interfacing with teams throughout the org. Some of them videoconfs (during Covid) were 2 or 3 higher-up people, representing different parts of the org. That actually worked in that case, and gave both of us parties an impression of what the other might be like in some of the kinds of interfacing between teams we'd be doing. I came away with a positive impression of smart, humble, and amiable people, who'd done big things, and would be good to work with. (I was fortunate to get that offer, and in hindsight should've taken it, at the time.)
The most recent tag-team interview was for an early startup (where the plan was I'd be a key IC, and later lead engineering/technology, as the multi-talented founder moved to focus only on CEO duties). One of the interviews was a videoconf with all three non-CEO engineers at once, and I got a favorable initial impression of them, but I had a lot more questions and felt like maybe I was being dumped on them without them having enough info about me. Later, as the founder put together an offer and bounced it off me, one of the diligence things I asked for was to meet one-on-one with at least one of the engineers from the tag-team, when we might speak more candidly than in a group, develop a little rapport, etc. Founder declined, and said something like, that wouldn't be useful. (Then other things came up on my calendar, and I'm embarrassed to say I accidentally ghosted them, so I never asked him what he meant, nor clarified why I still thought it'd be very useful to talk with any one of them one-on-one before signing on.)
It sounds like an extremely effective question;)
Why would a teacher have "bedside manner"? Sounds pretty sus...
I think a possible alternative is they’re not a native/regular speaker?
WTF is up with your personal attack there? That's uncalled for. :(
And note, unlike your behaviour, I didn't call you names. I just pointed out your wording was weird. That's not a personal attack.
I've seen the phrase used with medical professionals before.
Never with teachers or other situations though. The results and definition from the duckduckgo search (above) also only show it in use by medical professionals, not with others, and doesn't support your stated meaning.
Sounds like the phrase is used more widely in your part of the world. Good for you I guess. :)
You're making personal attacks as well?
A common theme among many English idioms is that a phrase is found in one discipline (ie. the medical discipline), in this case "bedside manner." Some deeper meaning is extrapolated, in this case it is "showing kind, friendly, and understanding behavior for people in your care." And then the phrase is re-used in other disciplines and contexts where the deeper meaning is what is intended to get across to the recipient hearing that phrase, rather than the literal interpretation (ie. the bed isn't necessarily involved at all.)
As another example: "curiosity killed the cat." There's no cat, and it's not necessary that people will die when this phrase is used. It just means "sometimes following your curiosity leads to bad consequences." Hopefully this lesson has helped you the next time you come across an idiom and wonder why they used that choice of words.
I recently read a book that would count as literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction) for the first time in over a decade and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Explain that to all of those suffering through the reading just to make a grade because it is part of the required list. If I read Scarlet Letter today, I would not enjoy it any more than I did then. I'm just not entertained by some love triangle in a religious uptight society. I get enough of that in my every day life, minus the love triangle. It's the same reason I don't want to watch Rosanne or King of the Hill--it's just too close to home
Almost like the unnecessarily complex hiring processes are built that way on purpose.
The ones at a fraction of the cost aren't very good. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
I've worked with great offshore teams and terrible ones, I think the great ones were more expensive but still less than a local salary.
But the theoretical hiring manager here doesn't care anyways. All they want is to come under budget so they can max their bonus for being so cleverly frugal.
Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always have more competent people than countries that have 50 Million in population.
And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
No, it's an experienced one.
>Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always have more competent people than countries that have 50 Million in population.
That is only a fraction of what it takes to produce good software developers. You have to include quality of the educational systems, living conditions and all that. Any offshore developer worth their salt gets paid market rates or near market rates.
>And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
It's not their nationality, it's the price they are charging for. I bet you can't find a quality US worker for $30K a year either.
I don't really see the value in going through hiring gauntlets and opt out of any process that looks like it might waste time like that.
That's the whole point of resumes and LinkedIn...especially in technical fields. You self-select for the hiring criteria you're looking for. You then speak to the candidate to understand a bit more about their experience as it relates to the job you're seeking a candidate for. That's why it often makes sense for such roles, for technical people to interview other technical people.
"Oh, you have experience with XYZ technology stack, and you worked with it for a few years, awesome. That's what we use here, but could you please talk about some of the projects you worked on with said technology?"
But no, tell me how that's not possible to do quickly.
I'm not saying you need a gauntlet of tests. I liked the approach mentioned elsewhere of a technical discussion about what they did. But it takes, like, an hour or two to make sure they're not BSing and that they're actually as much of an expert as they claim to be.
I mean, of course it would be better to find the most qualified candidates every time with perfect accuracy. Does having a longer interview process help with that goal, or does it deter the exact candidates you want? Is it okay to end up with the guy who wrote the FrobNizzle compactor instead of the woman who wrote the FrobNizzle extractor?
I mean your low ball easy to answer question gives you exactly zero information other then yes they in fact worked on a team that did stuff. They just talk about what their peers did you've got such a short interview your not going to figure out they didn't actually do that shit.
There’s something lacking with your interviewing skills if you can’t detect them in a conversation.
If on the off chance you do get some sociopath that somehow escapes all efforts of detection, well, it’s easy to fire people, in the US anyway.
They can make a thing that would take a day of work sound like some sort of fantastical world changing undertaking.
The candidate may embellish and fuzz thing (both on the CV and verbally), mixing what they did with what the team did, color things to make themselves look better, etc. In certain parts of the world, that's just the normal behaviour in interview loops, and the loop takes it into account. Sometimes you remove the extra "marketing layer" and still have a good candidate --- sometimes not.
If you're Google or similar, you can afford to throw such candidates out even at the recruiter screening stage. But in other companies, probably even in the 3rd quartile, you may need to fish in these waters.
Example: does "shipped" mean it went into production and users were using it, or, does it mean you gave the source code to the client and then you have no clue what happened to it? Does "Airflow" on the CV mean you once played with it for a blog post, or you used it in production for 5 years? Does "Manager" mean you were managing the people and accountable for delivery, or you were in a lot of meetings?
You can weed out _some_ of the poor candidates in 15 minutes, but not _all_ of them, not even close. But the point of the interview loop is to weed out _most_ of poor candidates.
The fact that a somebody once got a job after a 15 minute interview is completely irrelevant.
What you can't do is weed them all out, and you usually can't tell if someone is a good fit yet.
You do realize you’re replying to a comment showing it _is_ possible right?
Great tech guys are able to explain to you complex systems quite easily; not by making them overly complex, but quite the opposite, to keep them simple, and regarding the bug you can understand the depth of troubleshooting the person went through.
I'm sure for a small and even medium sized company looking for a technical role it's fine to look at resumes, have a quick chat, and get them in. Not as safe to use when sorting through thousands of candidates at a FAANG.
That said I’m getting the feeling you’re more interested in confirming your world view than anything else here. Continue hiring however you wish. Continue believing it’s the only effective way of you wish.
Last year I interviewed for MongoDB. They proudly boasted that their hiring process consisted of a 7 interview marathon. I asked if that wasn't too many interviews, and the interviewer boasted that they already managed to streamline their process down from 12 interviews.
They also proceeded to point out that all FANGs follow the same process, except they really don't.
I respectfully dropped from the hiring process there and then. The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality is out of this world.
Nah, just "webscale" like everything else Mongo.
Not a take-home writing assignment, which would be pretty standard, but a live writing interview via Zoom screen share. Very unusual, but I don't have too many other things on the horizon right now, so I'll see where it goes...
b) Not necessarily, some companies would care if their contract writer stole/copied/repurposed/reused content from a competitor/regurgitated copyrighted material. Think also GenAI hallucinations, fabricated citations, etc. But sure, most cost-conscious companies won't give a hoot, so they could probably get by with cutting corners.
I asked for feedback on the blurb or ways to improve it and got told, basically, "well you took so long" (~30 minutes?) "to implement this that we don't really have time for that", or something to that rough effect.
I got a relatively generic rejection email shortly thereafter, and frankly, only minded because I was unemployed at the time. I have no idea what whoever designed their hiring process thinks they're getting out of being overcomplex and generally cold, but I can't imagine it's anything good.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16833100/why-does-the-mo...
From what I understand, Canonical culture isn't great, either. The whole process sounds a lot like what you are talking about -- just hoops to winnow out people for the sake of winnowing.
It was one of the more laughably ridiculous interviewing processes I've seen, and thankfully the only one I've seen recently that was so egregious.
Please elaborate...
It meets the "disparate impact" criterion, which is the legal bar for racism.
Do rich golf-playing Harvard graduates really apply for a remote 100k per-year positions at Canonical? Or what is the idea of such interview?
You have identified a very specific type of economic class, which has nothing to do with "race" and/or ethnicity. I also doubt Canonical is only seeking people who "summer" in Martha's Vineyard, regardless of their skin color.
The op asserted classist == racist in the US. Something I requested elaboration on, and has yet to be offered.
In the U.S. class, income, and race are correlated for various historical reasons. Obviously "correlated" means "on average", not a rigid relationship. But discriminating based on class is very likely based on correlation to produce a disparate impact based on race.
How disparate, and how bad that is and even I suppose whether it's bad, are hotly contested ideological questions.
Please elaborate...
I miss interviews like this. We need to compile a list of companies that still do this. In fact, getting on that list could really help a company's recruiting efforts - which in turn could influence other companies to adopt this interview style.
When I first started interviewing, this was the method I used. It turns out that most people have fanfic for resumes. "Designed a system" or "worked with a system" actually means "played an insignificant part in the design of a system" or "minimally modified some existing code". Getting to a point where this is obvious can take a significant portion of a 45 minute interview, and almost always comes from digging into the nitty gritty of the details, very close to code. Then, worried, you have them try to write some basic code as time runs out, and they completely flop, with that, and whatever small thing triggered your suspicion, being the only useful evidence you can point to for why you're saying no, even though others are saying yes.
So, I flipped it. I go for real evidence first, which gives me objective, repeatable, results, then any remaining time is left to talk and go into depth. I give them an easy work related problem, requiring realistic syntax. I've had people that were fantastic with communicating their ideas, and even pseudocode, but didn't know the syntax of a function or simple for loop, in the language of their choice. Take home code/screens can't be trusted, without basically goin through it line by line. Heck, video interviews can barely be trusted these days. I've many had people obviously, and not so obviously, copy paste the top google search result. I've even had people double team an interview, with the second person listening and typing the results on a second screen.
That said, I completely agree. My dream interview, either side, is just getting nerdy for an hour and a half with someone. But, especially for less senior roles, I can see why it's not popular, especially if you're stuck with short interviews, or are not the hiring manager, where you don't have to objectively justify things. Interviews are, unfortunately, a fairly adversarial interaction.
I mean, without the project being some huge OS thing it's hard to prove contribution it in any amount of time. I don't mind some simple system design questions to sus that out (and maybe relate it to a work experience to test some validity), but instead it turns into 4 rounds of Leetcode. A waste of time and STILL not making it obvious.
If you have four people on the panel, and they're all trying to piece together something perceived as objective, then you could definitely end up with 4 rounds of leetcode. In our group, we have different people focus on different things, so this doesn't happen.
But, I think we're in agreement. I don't think a "conversation only" approach is good, because at the end of the day you have to make sure someone can actually code. A code only approach isn't good, because it severely limits the context that the person can show competence.
I would love to hear opinions on how I could interview better. I've never heard anyone claim that interviewing is easy, or solved, and I'm definitely not doing that here.
I chose the startup, and it has been the best job decision I've ever made.
Personality tests can disclose a lot of personal information. It's unclear where this data might end up or who might have access to it. I detest this practice and consider it a major red flag.
(edit: typos)
I always remember the words of my Professor: "Don't you know that everything where you have to invest a lot (I assume effort, time, money, energy) nothing ever comes out?
So if your IT job requires a letter of recommendation from the pope and even if you are able to get the letter, you are unlikely to get the job. :-)
You don't make a profit on the sell price. You make a profit on the buy price.
That's something I lot of people seem to not understand about investment, it's not about how high something can go. That's random chance. It's about how deep a discount you can find on something valuable. If you can't estimate what something might be worth, you're not investing, you're making a bet on things you don't understand.
In my experience the only thing personality tests disclose is how good the testee is at guessing which answers will be viewed most favorably
i remember doing these like 20 years ago when i got out out of the military and just needed a bartending job.
corp chain, had you take a bunch like "if I see an employee slacking off I'm 1) very offended, 2) slightly offended, 3) indifferent, 4) okay with it, or 5) very okay with it
it was obvious what answer they wanted, and empathy had nothing to do with it
Folks on a spectrum are usually that way because they’re bad at already knowing that - or unwilling/unable to say it naturally. For various reasons.
Which is why the spectrum covers ‘disorders’ (aka things that make life suck sometimes/most of the time) instead of ‘awesomenesses’.
That said, there are advantages and utility where one can find niches and ways to adapt most of the time.
Being the same/reacting the same as everyone else, tends to get you the same results as everyone else. For better or worse.
Mixing in with the herd offers a lot of protection, as long as the whole herd isn’t being stampeded off a cliff by a smarter adversary.
You’re unlikely to starve either, but you’d better be good at eating grass other people have already crapped on/next to.
It’s a pain in the ass to lead disagreeable people.
Agreeable people are often terrible leaders, as they’ll as often lead a team off a cliff as say no. Or be unable to actually drive action among a group of disagreeing people.
leading often requires coming up with your own answer based on the circumstances you’re seeing - someone can’t ‘agree’ their way out of that.
That said, someone too disagreeable will just cause friction and internal issues all the time for no value add. Disagreeing with the right/proper thing to do is just being a pain in ass for the sake of being a pain in the ass.
Usually, the organization has settled on a middle ground somewhere for each level of it’s hierarchy.
Very top down organizations usually need very agreeable ‘bottom’ layers to do the grunt work. It has predictable consequences - good and bad.
There is a reason why militaries pride themselves on ‘breaking down’/‘rebuilding’ people in basic. And why officers almost always go through a separate process.
Only if you want it to. Answer in a way that suits your purpose.
Then it becomes a question not of whether you're 'worthy' of a job with these people, but whether you really want to walk into a place that is telegraphing this much paranoia.
I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview and I wish I did. What I do know is how to sandbag an interview, and I'm sure there are a few people out there who have poor opinions of me that are the direct result of my poor opinion of them.
Places with calm confidence during the interview process may be their own kind of delusional, but they may also be really great places to work, with a good sense of teamwork.
"Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk to me, guys, but I don't think this is a good fit. Let's cut our losses and give each other some time back. Bye."
Get up and walk out.
Trust is earned, not given.
part of the reason you feel as if you can trust them is because you don't have to trust them _fully_. You're protected by the system, life circumstances, etc. Put another way, it's easy for me to trust that someone I don't know will pay back the $20 they just borrowed because if they don't the damage to me is minimal, it's a hell of a lot harder for me to trust that someone will pay back $20k that they borrowed.
If someone isn't showing the level of trust you would expect it's generally two things.
1. That person is themselves untrustworthy and they view the world as if everyone is like them, or
2. That person doesn't feel as safe and protected by the systems in place as you do. Sometimes due to general anxiety, sometimes due to life experiences, etc.
Even someone in category 2 may show themselves to be untrustworthy because they're going to cross you due to a perceived slight or as a means of protecting themselves so 1 & 2 can often blend together.
But make no mistake, you don't trust them either, you just know they can't truly hurt you so it's safe to assume they're trustworthy. Trust is earned over time, not given.
For a personal anecdote, there's a developer here who had major problems with me, it got heated a few times to the point we both had to walk away from the conversation. He just took everything I said in such a negative light. We would talk it out and then it would happen again. And then it came out that he had medication for anxiety, my gf of 12 years has anxiety too so I understand it better than most I suspect.
Once I had that understanding I approached him differently and we have a great relationship now. Some if it was serious heart-to-heart conversations, some of it was my behavior changes. That combination and time has earned me his trust and earned him my trust. He'll very publicly challenge me and I never take it personally, I'll publicly challenge him and he doesn't take it personally either. Sometimes he'll contact me directly and tell me something I said looked bad to others and he helps me keep a lifeline into the team as a whole (I'm an architect).
I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses but it's definitely a good working relationship now. I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright. Sometimes you have to but make sure you have to before you do.
> I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright.
I'll give them the minimum amount of respect, but if I have to walk on eggshells just to do every day work communication, I'm going to trust them very little. I'm glad you worked it out, but most of the time you will never know their story (and you'd be cast as the bad guy if you pried to find it).
What I do is say something along the lines of "I believe that I would be a poor fit for this position and am withdrawing my application. Thank you for your time and consideration."
Just random questions to test my personality.
— LeonI had a similar experience with Cisco. The recruiter, who seemed pretty inexperienced, said she wouldn't reveal the compensation range until after the 5-hour interview. I declined the 5-hour interview day and that was the last time I even considered a job that didn't post the compensation range up front.
I never made a technical error, but I think that I did hire a couple of folks, over the years, that didn't integrate into the team that well. Not sure the personality test would have made a difference.
Sometimes, the only way that you can tell how someone will do, is start working with them.
After complete astonishment at the focus on "performance coding" also known as obey my commands now.. by tech-bros from MSFT, the immediate thought was "this is a new style of engineering management that emphasizes the authority of the interviewer over talent and skill fitting"
Not anymore.
I've been shipping (as opposed to "writing") software, for my entire adult life. That means start-to-finish, and continuing support, afterwards. In the last dozen years, I've had over 20 apps in the Apple App Store (but I deprecate them, so it's probably only five or six, now), done alone.
I can do the stuff, and I can prove it. I have a gigantic library of code, out there, along with a great deal of blog posts, teaching courses, and whatnot.
If someone wants to find out about me, they could get a really good idea, in about fifteen minutes of searching. I make it a point, to be public about my work (if possible -the app I just released is not open-source).
But it surprises me, that they are more interested in 50-line academic exercises. I've actually been told that "I probably faked" my portfolio.
I've interviewed way too many people who can't write a for loop. Fizzbuzz is supposed to be a joke not something people legitimately fail but it happens all the time.
Like, how is this sub-fizzbuzz programmer getting interviews but someone with 10+ years experience gets trapped in the HR filter?
So probably a different pool than the 10+ year people.
It has gotten to the point where people straight up lie about tech experience on resumes, so the HR filter may be worse than random (it filters for liars, not legit related experience).
Something unique goes a long way with me, even if it is something I could not care less about.
I've never understood why large companies do such long gruelling interviews. I always assumed it's because big companies get lots of low quality applicants at high volume but thats just a huge investment for both sides.
From my limited experience hiring you can spot the talented ones pretty quickly and the real test comes a few months down the road when you're working together and you see their output and ability to learn and adapt quickly to the team.
Work background and experience is usually plenty of information. Not sure what some toy tests in a remote call is going to tell you other than their ability to manage nerves and operate under public pressure.
The thing I dislike, but not surprised about, is how so many dev teams will engage in this circus. The dev management guy is definitely okaying the 5th toy test thing. Which can probably be summarized by the stereotype of which devs seek management, if they are devs at all.
Anyway, I doubt FedEx is doing interesting programming work anyway. They'll get the quality and output they deserve.
First, the website gets a ton of traffic. Granted, it’s not google scale but it’s still significant enough to be interesting.
The more interesting bits are behind the scenes. The operations research challenges are enormous, routing millions of packages across thousands of trucks and airplanes. The sorting hubs are highly automated and frankly terrifying in their scale and speed.
I worked in fraud detection and infosec, and I can’t say much detailed about that. Suffice it to say that stealing packages is a sufficiently good motivation for criminals to develop some interesting strategies.
All that to say that it’s deeply disappointing that fedex is using dumb shit like this to screen talent.
I have created a bug fix for the issue they had. I saw the developer has committed my code into their repo.
Then there was a white board session when I had to present my take on the problem they have described and outline possible ways of resolving it.
I saw few team members had lightbulb moments.
In the end the whole exercise took whole day. I didn't get the job.
I've been thinking if I should have sent them an invoice for that day...
Do they really want to be asking this? People's reading habits are highly personal. There are lots of questions you can't legally / shouldn't ask during an interview, and this is pretty borderline.
"How To Become the CEO of the Company You Work For"
I once walked into an interview and they presented me with a wunderlich test (the test they give NFL quarterbacks). It's not technically an IQ test but you can back into IQ ranges using the results.
For the math part I made sure I got the wrong answer on everything then in the in-person interview that happened immediately after I made sure to tell them I was very bad at math (my degree is in CS & Math).
I don't want to work in a place where they think these sorts of tests tell them anything useful.
Did he happen to have pointy hair?
The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted to 'try this out'. I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview.
I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview or personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the tech lead about my previous experience and if I had the experience to work on their current system.
It was the best job I ever had and they are still my client almost 5 years later.