Reply to: Rules for a better interview process

[tranceporter]

Also, if you hire a team of people who live their lives on the latest and greatest cutting edge technologies, spend every waking hour on this blog and that forum, you end up with a team that don't deliver what the business requires, they just do what they want to do in the way they want to do it.

The only interest I have is just keeping up enough to keep working. Beyond that's it's an excrutiatingly dull profession to be in.

Wow. I seem to be in agreeable mood today, but the above sums it up for me. Every word has a grain of truth.

[Bunk]

Asked to see interviewer's resume to see if the personnel executive was qualified to judge the candidate

That's a good one! I sometimes wonder about that myself. There's a guy a clientco who was hired by a couple of completely non-technical staff. I looked over 3 candidates technical tests and told them I wouldn't hire any of them. They did anyway

[tranceporter]

Surely forums, blog posts and podcasts would be a better bet question nowadays

In the .net world by the time the book is out (technical books have a lead time of 3-6 months) the technology is already half way to being replaced. In node and big data it would probably already be out of date.

^^ This. I would rather watch videos on pluralsight subscription than read wrox books.

[OwlHoot]

I ask what technical books they have read recently. If they can't even name one, that's a bad sign IMO.

What an extraordinary idea - I haven't read a computing book for 20 years

I guess I'm in the DimPrawn camp - There's so many more interesting things to be doing (or reading for that matter) than reading than some geek computer manual.

[DimPrawn]

That's you off the shortlist then

Good.

[BigRed]

The only interest I have is just keeping up enough to keep working. Beyond that's it's an excrutiatingly dull profession to be in.

That's you off the shortlist then

[BigRed]

Couldn't agree more.

Dreadful Grocer's's's' apostrophe.

I must admit I spotted it before pressing submit as well but couldn't be bothered to change it

[MyUserName]

The best interview question I have had was from a manager of an investment bank development team in London who was known for being very picky with his hires. I got through a programming test and associated concept discussion to finally meet him.

He told me he wanted to hear about a large complicated project that I had done a lot of work on. We chatted for 10 minutes about Viking history and then he said "Okay, you have had long enough to choose a project now tell me about it".

I told him about when I had lead a team to convert a legacy trade capture system into Chinese which meant porting it to Unicode first. Huge project, took over a year and I was lead programmer and technical manager of a team of 17 based in China.

He asked what the biggest problem was and then probed my solution and asking why I did not use other ideas (mainly ones he thought of as he pointed out if he could think of them in 5 minutes I should have thought of them at the time). There was no technical questions like "what do you think when you see 'delete this' in a function?" but he was absolutely ruthless and it got to the point where I could not answer some of the questions I could not remember the details. He asked me to talk about another project and we discussed a telecoms project I had worked on - we played again and after about 45 minutes I was exhausted and had a headache.

Got offered the gig and then lost it at the last second when someone better qualified jumped in. Ended up in the same bank in a different team which was odd but it worked.

[VectraMan]

younger guys who've studied to get into the industry cos it pays well but have no real passion for it as opposed to the older generation who are often largely self taught and got into it cos they love computers. Identifying the ones who do is quite a challenge.

To put a reverse spin on that, I turned down a (permie) job recently in part because I had the feeling the people I was interviewed by had no real interest in technology or programming and were only in it as a means to an end. Whereas the people at the job I accepted were obviously much more passionate about what they did and there's (hopefully) a genuine desire to push forward and develop new and better products by using new technologies. And that's important to the likes of me.

The former was in the financial services world, and although that might have been a meal ticket for the future, I think I would have been bored out of my mind.

[d000hg]

The PhD Java programmer would probably have needed a week or two to get into it but I very much suspect he would producing very well structure code and very well tested code, because PhD´s on the whole are very thorough indeed at what they do.

If you're a scientist who needs to use programming as a means to an end, but you never had any education in programming, there is a big chance your code is terrible and a bigger chance you have no idea how to structure a project, use version control, etc. Being super smart doesn't imply you're a good programmer - probably they could be trained so that's a long-term hiring decision.

[DimPrawn]

I have no interest in what I do for work outside work. It's dull and tedious the vast majority of the time, and I have enough to do during the day.

Also, if you hire a team of people who live their lives on the latest and greatest cutting edge technologies, spend every waking hour on this blog and that forum, you end up with a team that don't deliver what the business requires, they just do what they want to do in the way they want to do it.

The only interest I have is just keeping up enough to keep working. Beyond that's it's an excrutiatingly dull profession to be in.

[TheFaQQer]

Asking about forums, blogs etc is just to check the person is likely to be interested in what they are doing.

I have no interest in what I do for work outside work. It's dull and tedious the vast majority of the time, and I have enough to do during the day.

[BrilloPad]

It was better 25 years ago. 5 minute chat - no HR. If you are no good then sad after 2 weeks.

[doodab]

But you´ve no idea whether he wouldn´t be a good programmer

So why take the risk? Hiring the wrong person can have a negative effect on the whole project. Much better to wait for someone who can convince you they are right than hire someone who isn't.

A technical test is just a piece of the puzzle, not the sole decision making criteria. The trouble is that most people don't have the flexibility you describe, especially younger guys who've studied to get into the industry cos it pays well but have no real passion for it as opposed to the older generation who are often largely self taught and got into it cos they love computers. Identifying the ones who do is quite a challenge.

[doodab]

So the best bit of advice I will ever give you is this:

Some people aim to hire guys that read books...
What they should be doing is hiring the people that can write them instead...

There is a big difference in having the ability to follow instruction as opposed to improvise the application of freely learned knowledge.

Agreed. I have the same attitude to frameworks and tools. Lots of people know how to use them to do the stuff they already do, some people get into the internals of them and develop a deep understanding, extend them and so on.