The Tech Interview is Dead.
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Hear Hear! (or is that "Here Here"?? :confused:) http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/22/the-technical-interview-is-dead/[^] I think his breakdown of the interview process is pretty spot on. -EM
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I've got years of real experience and in the last year I decided to look around for a new position. I've been at my current position for over 12 years. I ended up having some technical interviews and I have discerned a pattern of them. When you interview for a C++ position you will always get judged on how you understand elements of the language you will never use in real work. I have a special sarcastic fondness for the questions regarding dynamic casting of polymorphic nested classes with a common function. Second comes the sarcastic fondness for the design pattern questions. I've decided that in the future I will just cut to the finish line and tell them "Listen, I've got the experience to research my work and do it the best way possible. I haven't memorized the API of the STL and I suck at templates. If you have me write live code I will probably make a mistake and anyway no one works that way on the job so why do you wish it?" Having said all that I will show them my online catalog of open source work on fairly large projects and tell them they need to gauge me based on my portfolio.
Maybe once I'm a grumpy old man with no desire to learn anything new I will let them quiz me but until then my memory is no measure of what I can do. But I guess at that point I will have given in and accepted a managerial position. Right now I am happy I have a manager that takes all the crap for us.
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I had one interview in London for a job back in Joburg. It lasted no more than ten minutes. The bloke who interviewed me was one of Anglo American's ex Zambian Mafia contingent as they were known. He came to London to "interview" but it was a "jolly" as he used the business travel/hotel in order to watch a test match at Lords. He shook hands, we talked about rugby. I told him I'd worked for a couple of years on Prime Computer machines (anyone else remember those?)and I was familiar with Fortran. That's good enough he said, he shook hands, told me to start in six weeks, mentioned the salary and said he'd arrange flights for me and Mrs. Wife. Not all interviews need to be technical.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
First computer I ever got to "type into" as opposed to punch cards for was a Prime 400. Then a GEC4070 a week or so later, and IBM 360/195 the week after that and a FR80 graphics processor just after that. They wouldn't let me near the Cray II. :sigh: Industrial training on Uni courses was fun in those days!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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First computer I ever got to "type into" as opposed to punch cards for was a Prime 400. Then a GEC4070 a week or so later, and IBM 360/195 the week after that and a FR80 graphics processor just after that. They wouldn't let me near the Cray II. :sigh: Industrial training on Uni courses was fun in those days!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
OriginalGriff wrote:
was a Prime 400
We had Prime 750s at Anglo-Am. That was followed by some sweet little 2250s running Primos 21.0. I can still remember some of the subroutine names: PRWF$$, ATCH$$, SGDR$$ and the token-ring network where only one packet at a time could flow around the cable. The highlight game we played was Yahtzee.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
was a Prime 400
We had Prime 750s at Anglo-Am. That was followed by some sweet little 2250s running Primos 21.0. I can still remember some of the subroutine names: PRWF$$, ATCH$$, SGDR$$ and the token-ring network where only one packet at a time could flow around the cable. The highlight game we played was Yahtzee.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
It was Colossal Cavern for us!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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pkfox wrote:
a three month contract which ran for 21 years.
It took you 21 years to do a 3 month job? :omg:
It was broke, so I fixed it.
If they are willing to keep paying you at contract rates, you stretch the work out as long as you can... :laugh:
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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If they are willing to keep paying you at contract rates, you stretch the work out as long as you can... :laugh:
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
I was kind of thinking what a sweet gig that would be. Just keep blaming Microsoft, oops another MS update I need to work around. :)
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert. (here[^]) Which - to quote a a Scott Adams corollary - suggests it's virtually impossible to hire someone smarter than you, except by accident.
His list of "Interview steps" can be somewhat bend to fit my experiences: - request simple "live coding" to weed out the inept - get them to discuss technology with you - discuss what they did before - do they fit the club? - You really can tell only after a "real" project However, there are some obvious problems with that. "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you" candidates might not be able to discuss their previous work (might actually be common in certain industries). Cultural fit is tricky, it requires great social skills and tolerance from the inverviewer. A company like google might get away with expecting an "audit" project, most smaller companies will lose good candidates that way. But hey, noone said interviewing would be any easy from the other side!
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I've got years of real experience and in the last year I decided to look around for a new position. I've been at my current position for over 12 years. I ended up having some technical interviews and I have discerned a pattern of them. When you interview for a C++ position you will always get judged on how you understand elements of the language you will never use in real work. I have a special sarcastic fondness for the questions regarding dynamic casting of polymorphic nested classes with a common function. Second comes the sarcastic fondness for the design pattern questions. I've decided that in the future I will just cut to the finish line and tell them "Listen, I've got the experience to research my work and do it the best way possible. I haven't memorized the API of the STL and I suck at templates. If you have me write live code I will probably make a mistake and anyway no one works that way on the job so why do you wish it?" Having said all that I will show them my online catalog of open source work on fairly large projects and tell them they need to gauge me based on my portfolio.
Andy Bantly wrote:
When you interview for a C++ position you will always get judged on how you understand elements of the language you will never use in real work.
Yep. Another example of where developers are not smart enough to recognize what they actually do and where the real problems are.
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Hear Hear! (or is that "Here Here"?? :confused:) http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/22/the-technical-interview-is-dead/[^] I think his breakdown of the interview process is pretty spot on. -EM
GPA’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless … Your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different … Academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment
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It's good that people at last have started realizing that education and training are completely different things.
Education and training are the same. What is the differnce. Bad eduation is bad training, good training is good education. The issue is that the school system basically sucks. If it was working right it would give you the right background. Amoung other things, the eduction system is not designed to make you think. It wants you to regurgitate facts.
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I have never had a "proper" interview. No tests, no whiteboard code, no brain teasers. Well, I'm lying, there was this one place but I ended up refusing them. I didn't do that well with the code I had to write on paper. And I could see they weren't happy with my weird answers, or my 0 knowledge in a field I'd been working for 3 years at that point. When asked what does function "x" do, I said I don't know, I never bother remembering, I just check the API when I need to use it. When asked what API function I'd use for something I said "I don't know, I search API, I google and I select the best option in my opinion". They really weren't happy. They did offer me a job, not that well paid. I called them on the signing day and told them I don't want the job. Real reason was I'd found another job where I went in with 0 experience (web dev previously to mfc c++). That other job the interviewer (my future boss) asked me a couple of tech questions which I barely answered (what is malloc, new etc), I mostly guessed what they should do. I never saw that condescending look on his face. Then it was "What do you want in this job?". And I answered "To learn as much as I can". Hired. 2 weeks later I was working on real projects. First job was on a file sharing site and the interview scheduling happened at 3 AM. The boss saw some of my PHP learning code and told me he was impressed that I was actually organized in a learning project (separate files by functionality, display functions separate from logic - I still have no idea what MVC MVVC and that other crap means). That learning project was a discussion forum written from scratch. Current job I was recommended and the interview was a discussion on what I like and how I'd do certain things and arguments in why one way may be better than another for a certain given design and requirements. For some reason I was hired as a senior, with close to 0 C experience even though all I do is C and various flavours of ASM. I also pretty much never had issues with people in the teams I worked in. There's just nobody I actually dislike. As for the ones that are slightly slower, or know less, you help them even if that means a couple hours unpaid overtime to finish your work. In the end the team benefits, the project(s) benefits. As for when I'm slow or know less, I ask my team and if they can they help. In the end I'm pretty sure I would fail most "proper" interviews. I just can't get myself to care about preparing for an interview, it's such a complete waste of time to le
I so wish some interviewer can understand people like you and me, it’s as if you were talking about me, I am one person who can’t prepare for interviews. I passed all assessments (design systems, writing code, in short doing all they want) but always not good when we had a face-to-face interview. I blame myself lots of the time for my inability to express myself until I met my ex-boss (currently my friend). I told him at the begin of an interview (that boring “Tell me about yourself” question) that I somehow can’t express myself technically – I had already done well on the assessment test. Then, he told me about issues facing the company and what’s I could be do the resolve them. I was put 3 months probation as a junior, after 3 months I moved to Senior level, when he left he suggested that I start my own company and will bring me projects to work on, I now ran my own little company but still work for the same company. I know he took a chance with me, at times it’s not easy to pick the right person, but interviewers should have the skills to see through a person. Give him/her a little read and write project, check his/her coding style, understanding, analysis etc then make a decision from there – by the way a project doesn’t have to work to hire a person.
I remain joe!
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Hear Hear! (or is that "Here Here"?? :confused:) http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/22/the-technical-interview-is-dead/[^] I think his breakdown of the interview process is pretty spot on. -EM
emartinho wrote:
interview process
Personally, I never thought very highly of the google interview process. I know of one person that claimed to be a "software tester" with years of experience that was absolutely convinced that something like, "The button has the wrong text" was a valid bug report. No mention of which button or what was wrong with the text or anything else that could possibly be a clue as to what he was babbling about. But he was a "test guru" he was.... and google hired someone like that.
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It was Colossal Cavern for us!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
Never heard of that one but unless we were given them on magnetic tapes, they weren't games we'd ever hear about. I used to like the Prime error messages, all of which were prefixed E$. Our favourite was the one for a bad unit number, E$BUNT. Some people we dealt with in support were called bunts.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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pkfox wrote:
a three month contract which ran for 21 years.
It took you 21 years to do a 3 month job? :omg:
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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First computer I ever got to "type into" as opposed to punch cards for was a Prime 400. Then a GEC4070 a week or so later, and IBM 360/195 the week after that and a FR80 graphics processor just after that. They wouldn't let me near the Cray II. :sigh: Industrial training on Uni courses was fun in those days!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
I'm old too. My first 'terminal' was on a ICL 2900 back in 82. From there I just had fun with one of the earliest PC's, a Commodore Pet(I mean 'Personal Computer', not IBM clone). This was the main Wind-Tunnel workhorse, and the guys had it singing all sorts of tunes through custom hardware interfaces. Imagine real-time pressure distributions from a DOS system? They used it for typing their theses too. I used the good old secretary. She made nicer tea. I got the job in competition with Aeroscrape up in Manchester; Cranfield bribed me away with more money and free flying lessons. Serious perk. As for software, I had a lovely time in Basic; I integrated aircraft performance equations with aircraft component mass equations, then wrote an algorithm that allowed the user to request a basic outline and performance; the programme chased it's tail. If it converged, bingo, you had a design.
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I'm old too. My first 'terminal' was on a ICL 2900 back in 82. From there I just had fun with one of the earliest PC's, a Commodore Pet(I mean 'Personal Computer', not IBM clone). This was the main Wind-Tunnel workhorse, and the guys had it singing all sorts of tunes through custom hardware interfaces. Imagine real-time pressure distributions from a DOS system? They used it for typing their theses too. I used the good old secretary. She made nicer tea. I got the job in competition with Aeroscrape up in Manchester; Cranfield bribed me away with more money and free flying lessons. Serious perk. As for software, I had a lovely time in Basic; I integrated aircraft performance equations with aircraft component mass equations, then wrote an algorithm that allowed the user to request a basic outline and performance; the programme chased it's tail. If it converged, bingo, you had a design.
Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
I'm old too.
No, no, no - we are as old as the woman we feel. Reminds me: must trade Herself in on two 25 year olds...
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
I'm old too.
No, no, no - we are as old as the woman we feel. Reminds me: must trade Herself in on two 25 year olds...
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
Right now that makes me ageless.
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Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert. (here[^]) Which - to quote a a Scott Adams corollary - suggests it's virtually impossible to hire someone smarter than you, except by accident.
His list of "Interview steps" can be somewhat bend to fit my experiences: - request simple "live coding" to weed out the inept - get them to discuss technology with you - discuss what they did before - do they fit the club? - You really can tell only after a "real" project However, there are some obvious problems with that. "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you" candidates might not be able to discuss their previous work (might actually be common in certain industries). Cultural fit is tricky, it requires great social skills and tolerance from the inverviewer. A company like google might get away with expecting an "audit" project, most smaller companies will lose good candidates that way. But hey, noone said interviewing would be any easy from the other side!
Yeah, at my interviews I like to see some real code. Particularly if it looks like it didn't come from a book. If I get a sense about the person I'm formally interviewing may have the right stuff, I drag them back to my office and we have an informal chitchat on what they like to do and I show them some of my code and we talk about it. This lets me separate the BSers and @sskissers you normally get in the formal interview from the real deal. I think I've been very successful in this style. One person, who's previous work experience was driving a barcode reader, caught my interest and he turned out to be excellent. Maybe it was that he reminded me of me at that age. I don't believe in quizzing for syntax, that always changes, I want people who understand the concepts behind the syntax. I don't like tests, I'd rather see them use their own methods to solve problems, and you won't see that in an interview. I know I never perform well when people try to dictate my methods, so why should I expect others to be different? Certainly I look for people I think I can work with, but my overriding criteria is, "Does it work?" and can I trust people that say their code works? In a programming team I look to see what each person does best and then leave them to it. I don't expect everyone to be interchangeable. I'll challenge them to move outside their comfort levels, but never on a critical piece of code.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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Yeah, at my interviews I like to see some real code. Particularly if it looks like it didn't come from a book. If I get a sense about the person I'm formally interviewing may have the right stuff, I drag them back to my office and we have an informal chitchat on what they like to do and I show them some of my code and we talk about it. This lets me separate the BSers and @sskissers you normally get in the formal interview from the real deal. I think I've been very successful in this style. One person, who's previous work experience was driving a barcode reader, caught my interest and he turned out to be excellent. Maybe it was that he reminded me of me at that age. I don't believe in quizzing for syntax, that always changes, I want people who understand the concepts behind the syntax. I don't like tests, I'd rather see them use their own methods to solve problems, and you won't see that in an interview. I know I never perform well when people try to dictate my methods, so why should I expect others to be different? Certainly I look for people I think I can work with, but my overriding criteria is, "Does it work?" and can I trust people that say their code works? In a programming team I look to see what each person does best and then leave them to it. I don't expect everyone to be interchangeable. I'll challenge them to move outside their comfort levels, but never on a critical piece of code.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
BrainiacV wrote:
This lets me separate the BSers and @sskissers
I found it amazing and sobering with what coding skilles people can make it through a formal technical interview. A trivial problem (i.e. with a complexity of roughly FizzBuzz) is usually sufficient. The latest modification (only tried once, successfully) was instead of "write a function that does X" *handing them a function (printout in that case, though google in reach seems ok) and asking "tell me what it does, and what's wrong with it".
BrainiacV wrote:
I don't expect everyone to be interchangeable.
I think everyone should be allowed and able to change every line of code - that's your insurance against wolf attacks. However, this still allows for personal responsibility for particular modules, and placing people where their expertise is can improve throughput a lot. Conway noted that the structure of software follows the structure of the organization writing it. I'd go even further: Often, software structure follows individual skills.
