How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by kazinator on Thursday January 08, 2015 @08:10PM (#8860139)

That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper. Some blatantly incompetent people write themselves up to look good on paper. They have relevant education, skills, plausible-looking experience and so on.

Following up on some references before calling people in for an interview isn't a bad idea.

Man, I have seen some blatantly incompetent ones. You'd give them a white board and ask them to show a linked list with boxes and arrows. They just couldn't do it.

One case I remember couldn't demonstrate pseudo code for a circular buffer operation based on an array with a head and tail index.

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Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by fencepost on Thursday January 08, 2015 @08:47PM (#8860279)

While linked lists are fundamental, depending on the language(s) people have used and how people were taught they may actually not be something people have used. Anyone using mostly high-level interpreted languages (e.g. Python) or something like PHP may not have ever used them, and if they're somewhat self-taught then they may not have encountered them in their reading.

Hash tables might be a better filter, because IMHO you're a lot more likely to find those in real use these days than linked lists.

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Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by kazinator on Thursday January 08, 2015 @09:12PM (#8860367)

Your comment is on the mark. But in that particular question they were asked something like, show a singly linked insertion on a white board using some box-and-arrow notation. They were not asked to write it in C or whatever. They couldn't visually whiteboard the concept at all.

(The job area was embedded development, involving C and C++, so asking for C code related to linked lists would have been fair game!)

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Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by kyllo on Thursday January 08, 2015 @08:29PM (#8860211)

That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper.

And (hopefully) how well they did in the phone screen...?

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Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by UrMomReadsHN on Thursday January 08, 2015 @09:03PM (#8860335)

If you phone screen people and don't call them in for an interview, you are still rejecting them.

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Re:How my life was changed when I began caring about the peo... by kyllo on Thursday January 08, 2015 @09:55PM (#8860481)

But not solely based on how they look on paper.

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