Programming

Sorry an interview is stressful to candidates?

Not sure. One seemed either incredibly timid or just way in above his head on simple tasks. I assigned him a bug and had already narrowed it down to a particular return code, in a particular call tree. He could have set 20 breakpoints and found the bug in five minutes. Or put unique error codes and found the bug in ten minutes.

But weeks later he was still asking questions and eventually just moved on without solving the bug or even finding the cause.

Maaaybe he would have aced the live coding test, but I doubt it. He just never seemed to "get it" and I think the live test would have reflected it.

But by "senior" i mean decades of experience. No quibbling about job titles.

The article isn't saying don't check, it's saying that live coding interviews are a bad measure.

That sounds fair. I hate "tests" that involve things you'd never do on the job.

Yeah, that too! When you have some non technical manager breathing down your neck, you might have a hard time not fumbling around even if you normally could resolve the issue in no time.

Some bad interview questions are like that, sure. But they're supposed to be things you are very unlikely to have done before and can reasonably figure out. It's not too hard to come up with simple questions like that. (Though I will grant many people don't seem to bother.)

The problem with only hiring people you have met personally is that you miss out on a whole world of people who would be great to work with but had no chance of ever meeting you or your network. I agree that network recruiting is the safest route, but having diversity in your employees is great. If you only hire through your networks you'll see quickly quickly how you only get one kind of person.

I have seem this happen a lot in smaller companies. It's also the story of how I'm typically the sole woman in the department. I by happenstance happen to seed my professional network from college with a lot of men (because I accidentally picked a college that like 80% men). I'm a unicorn because many men's networks include so few women since in IT they tend to be non-traditional and/or generally excluded from younger men's social groups.

I get tapped via my network all the time. But if the company basically only does referral based hiring me and perhaps one other woman is there for the whole engineering department. It's way more balanced at 20%-30% of the department at companies that don't do this. There is some value in shotgun hiring even if it has a higher fail rate than referral hiring. Different kinds of people can bring fresh perspectives and considerations.

So in other words, focus on hiring extroverts who are great at forming social networks.

Story time?

for those who this affects, this lands badly