All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.
Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.
Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?
Why should it? What problems would they solve? Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?
We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.
> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.
The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.
The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.
Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.
Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
* special demerits to Canonical
No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.
Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.
Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?
In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.
If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.
And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.
1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.
2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.
I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”
If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.
>expected to showcase your skills
Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.
EVERY job in EVERY industry???
Well apparently the penguins have to pay tariffs. Do you know what industry they are in and how they do interviews?
I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.
Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure
No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.
> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.
All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.
> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?
You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.
Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.