Skip to main content

On Interviews from the other side

Image
By
On the last months I had a couple of the most aggressive interviews on my current job hunt. 

It started with one of the interviewers stating that I was being recorded and that all answers should be provided from the top of my head, that if I looked elsewhere it would be considered as cheating and against my candidacy. 

Wait what? Are you serious?  This is a senior or staff level position.  If you do not trust me to even do an interview why start this process at all? 

Then while talking about technology we were discussing concepts and this same individual starts to talk about specifics and "educates" the candidate and tells me to validate this afterwards.  Come on, of course I will not contradict you, but if this is the kind of culture you are allowing count me out.

Then on to systems design on whiteboard. Here I'm asking lots of questions regarding the domain and all they answer is to make an assumption. Then they start asking how to develop the solution but there is a catch, the problem statement talks about an MVP which means this will not be the final solution nor will it handle all functional and quality characteristics by definition. This will probably be a discarded project that needs to reach production as fast as possible hence the important part is to understand the domain, the participants and the interactions, not the technology used.

I felt like I was being interviewed by my past self from 12 o 15 years ago I was a real pain for candidates. This and title inflation on many organizations makes really hard to be on both sides.

From this experience I can reflect back to my own path and how I handled interviews from the other side. I for sure was a real pain for the candidates. I apologize and commit to do differently from now on. Also being on the hunt for long months has also shown me a different perspective which probably I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise as this is something you can't learn unless you have to walk the path.

Whenever I find myself as an interviewer I'll do my best to keep all this in mind and be more understanding of both sides.
Labels:

Popular Posts

Logffillingitis

By
I'm not against of leaving a trace log of everything that happens on a project what I'm completely against is filling documents for the sake of filling documents. Some software houses that are on the CMMI trail insist that in order to keep or to re validate their current level they need all their artifacts in order but what is missing from that picture is that sometimes it becomes quite a time waster just filling a 5 page word document or an spreadsheet which is just not adequate for the task needed. Perhaps those artifacts cover required aspects at a high degree but they stop being usable after a while either by being hard to fill on a quick and easy manner by someone with required skills and knowledge or they completely miss the target audience of the artifact. Other possibility is that each artifact needs to be reworked every few days apart to get some kind of report or to get current project status and those tasks are currently done by a human instead of being automated. ...
Read more

Are we truly engineers? or just a bunch of hacks...

By
I've found some things that I simply refuse to work without. Public, Centralized requirements visible to all parties involved. I is ridiculous that we still don't have such repository of information available,  there is not a sane way to assign an identifier to the requirements. Then we go with the 'it is all on Microsoft Office documents' hell which are not kept up to date and which prompts my next entry. Version control. When we arrived here quite a lot of groups were working on windows shared folders... now it is a combination of tools but heck at least there is now version control. Controlled environments and infrastructure. Boy... did I tell you that we are using APIs and tools that are out of support? Continuous deployment. First time here, to assemble a deliverable artifact took 1-2 human days... when it should have been 20 minutes of machine time. And it took 1 week to install said artifact on a previously working environment. And some other things that ...
Read more

Qualifications on IT projects. Random thoughts

By
Projects exceed their estimates both in cost and time. Why? Bad estimation would be an initial thought. If you know your estimates will be off by a wide margin is it possible to minimize the range? Common practice dictates to get better estimates which means get the problem broken down to smaller measurable units, estimate each of them, aggregate results and add a magic number to the total estimate. What if instead of trying to get more accurate estimates we focused on getting more predictable work outcomes? What are the common causes of estimation failure: Difficult problem to solve / Too big problem to solve Problems in comunication Late detection of inconsistencies Underqualified staff Unknown. I'd wager that having underqualified staff is perhaps the most underestimated cause of projects going the way of the dodo. If a problem is too complicated why tackle it with 30 interns and just one senior developer? If it is not complicated but big enough why try to dumb it down a...
Read more

Job interviews

By
So after my sabatic period I started to go to different job interviews (most of them thanks to my fellow colleages whom I can't thank enough) and after most of them I feel a little weird. Everyone tries to get the best people by every means possible but then somethin is quite not right. Maybe they ask wrong questions, ask for too much and are willing to give to little in return or just plain don't know what they want or what they need. Our field is filled with lots of buzzwords and it is obvious that some people manage to get jobs only by putting them on their résumé. Then there are some places where there is a bigger filter and filters out some of the boasters. But still it is a question of what do they really need and what questions are needed to weed out those that do not cover minimal aspects required by the job. Don't get me wrong, it is really hard to identify good developers on an interview. It seems that almost no one knows what to ask in order to get insights abo...
Read more