Whats annoying and disappointing is if the questions are at such a low level that there is little room to shine. You leave after your day not feeling as if the employer gained any understanding about you, and you certainly weren't able to get a read on your prospective peers.
The purely conversational interviews almost invariably lead to disappointment for me. The company is so desperate to fill a slot that they ask you probing questions about your work style. They spin grand portraits of exciting collaborations, novel development techniques, fundamental problems of concurrency and consistency. In the end they just want someone to respond to minor bug reports in their massive taped together codebase and make sure the servers stay up.
I'm very good at my job but would bomb the technical part of many of the traditional interviews.
and some people will be disgusted, and they probably aren't that great to work with. it would be sad if you couldn't find a job, but i doubt thats the case :)
I think it comes from the "Get that job at Google" blog post[1] by Steve Yegge. It is not clear what Steve means here, but he wrote:
You should be familiar with at least one flavor of balanced
binary tree, whether it's a red/black tree, a splay tree or
an AVL tree. You should actually know how it's implemented.
I understand the gist of a R-B tree, I can probably write the immutable one on a whiteboard, but I don't think I will ever be able to implement the mutable insert/delete methods on a whiteboard. I have never been asked it in an interview yet, though.[1]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
sounds wrong to hire the best conversationalist. I know many people who are all talk and no substance.
>an you imagine interviewing medical doctors the same way we interview in the tech industry
they are already certified by the boards. Computer science degree is not equivalent to medical board certificate.
Talk only goes so far. It isn't hard to make a poseur look like an idiot if you know what you are doing. A "Five Whys"-style line of questions, for example, will blow up most fakers in a few minutes. After all, how do you know these people are all talk? Is their talk really convincing to a technologist or does it just dazzle non-technical people?
> they are already certified by the boards. Computer science degree is not equivalent to medical board certificate.
People like to overstate the power and effectiveness of medical licensing boards. Very few doctors have to prove anything after their residency. All they need to do is complete continuing education requirements (which, in many cases, are pretty fluffy). That's for the most regulated of the regulated professions, too. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, and others have basically one major hurdle to jump, after which it's easy to remain current by the letter of the law.
Just saying in case you and your candidates have a different idea of the role you are hiring for.
But that is what you get with great buzzwords like DevOps.
Most good candidates know this, and will actively avoid "DevOps" roles.
Now someone claiming 10 - 16 years experience as a DevOp, is : A: Lying. The term is 6-7 years old B: If they have even been using / administering computers for that long should know what a default route is.
Could they have misinterpreted the question? I know the even at a senior level, interviewees can get flustered and confuse themselves.
What job title would you suggest to find people with a working knowledge of programming, config management, and infrastructure/systems internals? If all you can do is copy-paste jenkins tutorials off of the internet, you're not a "senior" anything.
You've been doing a job for x years. There's been some personal development and it's been challenging (maybe you're now managing 10 developers and are having to write proposals, for example) but ultimately you've not had to prove yourself in the way you do in an interview in over a decade. What's to say you haven't allowed other aspects of your skillset that you've acquired over the years? If you're reviewing 20 peoples' code per week, when would you have had time to code out your algorithms? Using your own example, it's not at all unusual for senior doctors to lose their skills at suturing or putting in IVs. That's not to say that they've not acquired other valuable skills but there's also something to be said about keeping your fundamentals sharp.
Now maybe I've been drinking the kool-aid, but my understanding is that at your Googs and FBs they have open remits and expect their staff to be dynamic and quick to learn. One of the most valuable skills in that case is sharp fundamentals.
Losing that familiarity with the nitty gritty is a perfectly human thing, I saw it happen with professors being "outsmarted" by undergrads while at uni and early into my professional dev career I am already feeling certain aspects of my skill base deteriorating, I can only imagine what it'll be like in a couple of decades.
With all that, it's not hard to imagine why your big 5 do have such rigorous hiring loops, especially when they're already oversubscribed...
You work on system design, databases, high availability and making sure large clusters don't fall and are able to talk to each other. None of the above require "algorithms". Also, it's hilarious how every company are asking the Google and FB questions now. And, you rarely get a SQL or database questions. I've had to work with colleagues who think they know everything just because they answer the algorithm question and can't do a simple "group by".
[0] http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/ian-pater...
So far that's pretty much been a deal breaker because I have other things I'd like to put my energy in, but eventually I'll just implement a generic rest api that handles common interview cases in languages I want to interview in, and use that, and adapt it as needed.