The software industry's greatest blog post sin: "Hiring in tech is broken"
This topic is trite. Furthermore no one seems to be able to offer up actual tangible suggestions as to how to fix this, or some objective 'better way'.
Disclaimer I work at a FAANG etc company:
Also this has been distinctly "not" my experience at many FAANG type companies. Usually these interviews, even the one's I haven't done well in, have been highly conversational, and all contain a fairly in depth 'soft skills' interview as well.
Yes, your technical knowledge has to be good, but a good interview will keep pressing at the edge of your knowledge (not to make you 'fail'), but to see how you handle the unknown.
In fact for one of the companies I ended up working at I was called in for a second soft skills interview just to dig even deeper on the dimension the author claims is 'never tested for'.
Much like these authors I don't have a perfect solution to this, however I will say one of the most rewarding interviews I've ever done (at a well funded startup where I did NOT get the offer was comprised of):
- 1 Algo question (standard fare)
- 1 Architecture question (standard fare)
- 1 'find a bug in this mock part of the codebase / pair program with me' question. Implementation didn't necessarily have to be perfect, mostly was interested in diagnosing the actual problem and talking about 'how' we might solve it (very fun)
- 1 Product Sense (!) question with actual PMs (very fun)
>Furthermore no one seems to be able to offer up actual tangible suggestions as to how to fix this, or some objective 'better way'.
There are other professions with models of credentials that could be adopted to software given some time and adjustment and faith. Then we could shed our current technical interviews in favor of shorter interviews overall. You naturally need more people to handle interview bandwidth as your company grows.
People want to show some credential and not have to deal with technical interviews at every potential opportunity. We've learned enough about technical interviews that we should be able to make this kind of widely-recognized credential. We just don't want to do it. We'd rather keep recruiters employed and force developers to budget large blocks of interviewing time.
This topic is trite. Furthermore no one seems to be able to offer up actual tangible suggestions as to how to fix this, or some objective 'better way'.
Disclaimer I work at a FAANG etc company: Also this has been distinctly "not" my experience at many FAANG type companies. Usually these interviews, even the one's I haven't done well in, have been highly conversational, and all contain a fairly in depth 'soft skills' interview as well.
Yes, your technical knowledge has to be good, but a good interview will keep pressing at the edge of your knowledge (not to make you 'fail'), but to see how you handle the unknown.
In fact for one of the companies I ended up working at I was called in for a second soft skills interview just to dig even deeper on the dimension the author claims is 'never tested for'.
Much like these authors I don't have a perfect solution to this, however I will say one of the most rewarding interviews I've ever done (at a well funded startup where I did NOT get the offer was comprised of):
- 1 Algo question (standard fare)
- 1 Architecture question (standard fare)
- 1 'find a bug in this mock part of the codebase / pair program with me' question. Implementation didn't necessarily have to be perfect, mostly was interested in diagnosing the actual problem and talking about 'how' we might solve it (very fun)
- 1 Product Sense (!) question with actual PMs (very fun)
- 1 General culture fit / experience interview