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Title: Editorial: And another thing...
Author: Bob Schmidt
Date: 12 May 2018 18:44:22 +01:00 or Sat, 12 May 2018 18:44:22 +01:00
Summary:
Body:
Those of you who attended ACCU’s 2018 conference in Bristol may have witnessed me giving a lightning talk about interview techniques. A 5 minute rant is obviously not sufficient to cover all the misgivings I have about how tech interviews are commonly conducted (and I’ve used this space previously, too!). One aspect I didn’t go into was the practice of having several rounds of interview in order to finally reduce the list of candidates down to the ‘best of the best of the best’.
Basic statistics suggests that, assuming there is one best of the best, as a hiring company you’re unlikely to even see their CV, never mind get to meet them face to face. In addition, expecting candidates to undergo multiple rounds of lengthy interviews, tournament (or boxing match) style runs two major, related risks. Firstly that your actual best candidate decides they aren’t prepared to keep returning, or they get another position with someone else. This leads to the second risk: that you end up filtering not for technical proficiency or team best-fit, but instead just end up with the people with the highest tolerance for interviews.
The interview contest itself seems also to have become a test of arcane knowledge often unrelated to the job being hired for. Low-level algorithm design can be fun, but very few working programmers use that knowledge routinely. I know a few that do, but not for their day job – they do it for no pay, in their spare time. In an analogy with the actual practice of programming, high-level languages and rich libraries allow us to think at a higher level of abstraction. I would like to see interviews that filter for people at a higher level too. In practical terms, I would much rather be working with people who understand and care about automated testing, continuous integration and delivery of robust, reliable software, than with people who know nothing of these things but have a deep understanding of red-black trees, and are able to implement them with pen and paper.
Notes:
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