
Ask HN: How do you like to be interviewed as a developer? - samblr
For innumerable times it is discussed on HN that interviewing process is broken. Hence the question.
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arduinomancer
Test the actual skills of the damn job.

I feel like I need to maintain two skill sets nowdays. We drill down hard on
DS&A in the interview then once you’re hired it’s like “alright forget about
all that we actually need you to be good at something completely unrelated”

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protocontrol
Pick a random non-trivial line of code of HIS on-line software projects
repository and ask him to explain it. As simple as that.

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awareBrah
A few leetcode style whiteboarding interviews combined with some system design
ones combined with meeting the team and having a casual conversation after the
first part of thorough technical stuff.

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bsvalley
\- For someone fresh out of college: Don't change anything, the current
process is perfectly designed for college grads. So Leetcode it is and
whatever the google's, facebook's, etc, are currently using to hire "the best
of the bests".

\- For someone with 2 to 5 years of experience: A candidate should have a
choice between a full day onsite, working with the hiring team on a mini
feature or a bug fix. Or, a 1 week project assignment with a shared/public
repo between the hiring team and the candidate. In this case the candidate
could work remotely on the evenings/weekend. Code should be reviewed and
pushed into the repo at the end of the assignment period. Collaboration along
the way is highly recommended for the candidate. The hiring team should be at
least available to answer the candidate during the process. The onsite would
include a lunch with the team to get to know each other. If the candidate
chose the 1 week assignment, he or she would have to stop by for the last step
if everything went well, which would also be a lunch with the team to get to
know each other.

\- For someone with 5 to 10 years of experience: Same as 2 to 5 years of
experience, but would involve more technical choices from the candidate. This
could also be a feature or a product optimization task, etc. Requirements have
to be very high level and the candidate has to make design choices and define
a scope as well as delivering a working prototype. If the candidate is closer
to 10 years of experience, he or she should assign a coding task to at least
one member of the hiring team and make sure to help and review the work. This
process could also work for +10 years of experience as a Dev, or even a "Tech
Lead".

\- For an engineering manager: No Leetcode please! Stop now! :) The candidate
should take over the current sprint from the hiring team, or part of it. This
could also be a sprint exclusively designed for the interview process. Stories
could be made up or could be real stories from the team backlog. This could be
a 1 week project assignment. As a Hiring manager you should be able to keep
track of stories and to host standup meetings remotely with the team (5-10 min
conference calls all week for example). The team would simulate blocking
issues and conflicts between peers and the descriptions of these problems
would be sent to the candidate for review. You would have to show up onsite
and host 1-1's with the related folks in order to go over these problems to
try to fix them. This would also include a team meeting to share the status of
the project with everyone. During this day onsite, they might also simulate a
mini hiring process for a new Developer. Team members would be the actual
candidates and you would be the interviewer (a quick 15 min interview for each
candidate). Other hiring managers would be involved in this process as well
where you would discuss about the candidates and make a final decision.

That's it. As you can tell, this would require companies to do a lot the work
in order to set that up. Unfortunately, not enough energy is allocated to
hiring new people. Companies rely on the existing and broken process started
by Google in the late 90's... this was the only company asking academic and
weird puzzles to candidates. Also, I cut a lot of corners because my post is
already way too long, but you get the picture...

