Ask HN: What matters for getting back-end positions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What matters for getting back-end positions?

2 pointseanthy6 comments

I've had many interviews throughout the years with many fails/passes. What I noticed is that the only thing that matters is how you do on the tech part, which is usually a Hackerank style question. It seems that how you approach/solve that question is about 90% of the interview and everything such as experiene/hr part/personal projects barely matter. The question is does having a good git portfolio of projects or personal website or overall experience matter/helps you get interviews/jobs or is it only like 1% improvement?

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What I noticed is that the only thing that matters is how you do on the tech part...

Tech skills are obviously important, but whenever I've interviewed people the "candidate is not a psycho" checks are equally, if not more, important. You can be the most technically skilled person in the world but you're probably in a list of candidates who can all do the job, so that's rarely a major differentiator once you're actually at the interview stage. Conversely, if you don't seem to be a nice person who I'd be happy to have in my team you're not getting hired.

Consequently a personal website or a portfolio that shows off the fact you're actually a decent person is really useful. Mentioning things like hobbies or volunteering gives the interviewer a great starting point to find out more about your personality - that's what makes a lot of people shine in my opinion.

Experience and personal projects get you past the screening process, interviews get you past the hiring process.

Most companies aren't looking for personalized interview processes in order to assess a candidate's fit. They're looking for standard, comparable interview processes where they can justify their decision and hold interviewers accountable. It's easy to compare two Hackerrank scores, harder to (objectively) compare personal projects.

Hackerrank-style interviews suck and they aren't representative (not even remotely) of real working conditions. But they are good at something: evaluating the tenacity and the drive of a candidate. You need to work hard to ace these interviews, and companies are looking for candidates who are persistent and able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on.

Do you think there is even point wasting time on personal projects for passing the screening process when in most cases it's a phone call and based on that I pass or fail the initial screening?

Realistically? No. But with the right personal projects you can impress the right people from your network and get a fast pass to onsite interviews.

Afaik (not a personaler, I'm a consultant mostly working backend-jobs): experience is important, personal website/git portfolio is not, at all. Recruiters are not techies, they can't be arsed going through your github, and if they did, they wouldn't understand a thing.

Once you get invited, you need to perform vis a vis; if you don't get invited, you didn't meet the criteria.

The criteria vary by employer and position, but are mostly:

* is your code good enough?

* are you someone the team can work with?

When you get declined, ask for specific feedback. What went wrong? What can you improve on? Etc.

This sounds fair, but in most cases recruiters treat you as just another potential resource. Even when I ask they never send a feedback and if I don't pass the interview they never even call/email. So usually it's me analysing or trying to guess what went wrong after I haven't heard from them in a while and realise I hadn't got it.

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