Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

As a 40-year old who has been in the industry long enough to have a very healthy set of references to back me up, I conversely find it annoying that my time is wasted by people who want to subject me to half a dozen levels of interviews where I'm mostly doing silly shit like reversing a string in place or doing their stupid variation of a Fermi question.

Yes, interview me for fit (on both sides), but subjecting me to an endless barrage of technical interviews where you ask me questions I've heard dozens of times before is much more likely to get me to drop out of the process than subjecting me to not enough is. The article says they skipped "one of the final interviews" suggesting there were multiple already... And within one interview I can assess the skill level of the people interviewing me without having to attempt to intuit it based on how many of the "Microsoft questions" from the 80s they found on Google to ask potential candidates.

Are you sure the candidate was "spooked" because you didn't interview him or her that one final time? The article doesn't do a good job of explaining if that is speculation or verified feedback from the candidate. There are a billion and one reasons why someone might give you a pass.

This can definitely go to far, especially if the company’s process itself involves too many steps. I don’t think that’s the case with us, which has been an advantage when competing against companies that take weeks to decide. For an engineer, assuming they’re available for interviews, we can make an offer in just a few days after they apply.

Sorry for not clarifying about verification versus speculation. I talked to the candidate on the phone at the end of the process. The candidate felt like we had moved too quickly and had remaining questions. The last interview would have answered those questions, but no doubt, that’s partially speculative.

I got hacked off with a company recently. They send an email to the local Python meetup group with what they were looking for. I replied, highlighting experience in 13 of their 15 criteria.

"Great now, we would really like to see an example of your code".

"Well all my stuff at work is in house, and contains some sensitive information. I have started a small side project recently, but you will have to understand that it is not finished. Have you got a bitbucket account?"

"Great, now we would like you do dedicate a bit of time to set up a simple flask API...."

"I have sent you an example for real work I have done, I don't think it is really necessary for me to set up a project using two technologies I am not familar with..."

The guy kept of framing it as if I was causing a problem. I said I would do it for the local freelance rate, but that seemed to go unnoticed as I was asked for a solution to my reluctance to do the test.

As a response, I've started a project where I code out the answers to all of these silly "can you code" questions that pop up. I've been able to use it in several interviews, and it's thrown the interviewer for a loop (they still insist I write it out as if I'd go to all the trouble to fake a GitHub repo to avoid writing five lines).

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/SomeKittens/Interview

Asking too interesting questions can go the wrong way too... I interviewed for very successful startup. They decided to throw some "real world" problems at me-- problems they'd been struggling with for a year. The interviewer spoke very poor English and could not describe the topology of their systems but still managed to shoot down every idea I had.

Not sure how I was supposed to solve a problem in 45 mins that had been haunting them for a year.

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