My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers.
We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path.
Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.
You are my hero. If you ever end up having an HR department you can put in mediocre software developers to do the menial tasks. Most mediocre software developers will out do your average HR drone. For hiring and interviewing use the very best people that you have.
I went on a lot of interviews (maybe close to 100) before starting my own business, and I'd say at least 9/10 of them were very positive.
By positive: I felt we both left the interview a bit happier than we went in. We both had a legitimate good time, and enjoyed it. It wasn't a grind, both people got to know each other.
I'd say I had a 10% offer rate. The most common "why didn't you select me?" follow up answer I got was "we need someone who is an expert in XYZ language." Sometimes it was even that they need someone who is an expert in ABC library (when I was already pretty-much an expert in the language.)
The ones that did lead to job offers I didn't want after the interview.
The other 1/10 was because they had me take an IQ test, or do some really super long project, or meet with literally all 20 people in the company, or they made me sit in the lobby for 2 hours past the meeting time.
It wasn't that big a deal, but they didn't have a good reason to make it not a deal breaker.
Someone eventually called me to reschedule, and it took every last ounce of my willpower not to perform a verbal auxiliary anus installation over the phone.
To name names and shame the shameful, it was SAIC (before they split into SAIC and Leidos).
I would think this is something that should have been made clear from the get-go in the initial technical phone interview.
Anyone who goes to an in-person interview should expect, at minimum, that the interviewers have done their homework.
For example, if they just want Stanford or MIT grads, fine. But to bring someone into an interview - which may involve more than a day of travel, lost vacation time etc - just to tell them they went to the wrong college afterwards, that's plain infuriating and shows complete lack of courtesy.
There's nothing really wrong with that as long as they advertise such and make it clear before even starting the interview process that you won't be hired unless you're a library ABC or language XYZ expert. The problem comes when they don't advertise that, bring you in anyway, and waste everybody's time.
You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes.
I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it.
Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals.
If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are
I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
Vastly fewer responses and recruiters on major sites, but i've got about another 6 months to go on a really interesting couple of projects at my current job, so I'm not too upset about it.
Sometimes it is almost required (see MS certs) to be competitive.
So, they only care because it's a business thing (not a qualification thing) but they do care.
They are very keen on getting employees with existing certs or getting current employees to actively be getting more certs.
There are specific incentives from microsoft based on how many employees have certain levels of microsoft certification. it comes with discounts and marketing materials/privileges (Who doesnt want to say they are a Microsoft certified Gold support partner?)
As such, it is conveniently ignored that the guy with an MCSE isnt going to get fired because their gold level partnership lapses if they dont keep X number of MCSEs on staff
When my team would look at candidates, past accomplishments and projects counted for tons more than a cert. Still, a cert told us what someone was interested in and what they wanted to bone up on. They could expect questions relating to that cert field during the call. If they had trouble talking on the subject, then we knew that the cert was likely there to be a pad or just something to fulfill some billet requirement. In good cases we'd find that the cert was an indicator of something they were passionate about.
So I consider it a pointer of sorts. Never worthy of hiring someone on it's own, but I'd recommend them to people who are /ready/ to demonstrate knowledge and may not necessarily have the project experience otherwise. I'd just recommend to them that they be ready to talk to it in an interview.
The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself - it is just a way to pair down the choices of who you interview when you have many candidates. If you have knowledgeable people in the interview process (i.e. at least have a dev present for a dev interview, not just managers or HR people) then you should be able to catch those that don't really have the skills.
Heck, even people who genuinely have a certificate might be rubbish overall but revised well for the exam days - you'll hopefully weed those out in a good interview process too.
Have you had many IT interviews? I have, they are vastly non-technical interviews.
Unless you count "have you ever used #CommonSoftware? how about #SlightlylessCommonSoftware?" as a technical interview.
I'm an IT administrator, not a programmer, so i'm speaking to my experience in that field, I am not trying to make any claims about how programming interviews work.
I've never had a whiteboard in an interview, I have in two interviews ever been asked to walk through a diagnostic process for problems, or asked any infrastructure or network design/architecture questions.
Its worth noting I work and live in Detroit Michigan, so I'm not exactly interviewing with major technology companies regularly. But I have worked for MSPs which glossed over technical interviews in favor of culture fit as well. (MSPs are especially incentivised to have employees with certs, they get discounts and kickbacks)
I guess maybe i insulted some CCNA or MCSE-ers
The article starts with:
>This is a story about my interview experience in the tech industry.
I also work in the tech industry, I was sharing my experience of interviewing in the tech industry.
More specifically i was responding to a comment that said:
> Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
I've seen this directly happen - the interviewers were two Asian and one White male, who came to this job as their first outside college. Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. The one exception was a lone Asian female, who had a doctorate in CS.
Hiring "People Like Us" doesn't help a company.
IME, that's much more a consequence of the limited diversity of candidates, not a limited diversity of hires. In most places I've worked at, even if they hired all women and blacks (or other non-Asian minorities), there would still be at most approximately 5% women and 0% blacks (the latter would probably be higher in the US).
I have personally been rejected after a phone interview, not because my technical skills were lacking, but because the interviewer didn't like something he heard in our conversation. I could quite literally hear him checking out of the conversation and going back to surfing the internet.
That is the illusion many people have convinced themselves of but literally 0 of my coworkers could answer the questions I was asked simply because don't have similar responsibilities despite us applying for literally word-for-word identical job ads.
The reality is, unless you do X regularly, you simply aren't going to be able to impress people with your answer to X.
It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.
2. It likely gives you valuable experience to answer white board questions.
I don't think it's a perfect process but it weeds out fakers/resume padders. Also a lot of companies arent looking for specialists but want broad skills to handle a variety of problems cause the problems 5 years from now could be very different for the company.