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kitten smoothie posted:What drove me insane at an old job (and one of the many reasons why I bailed) were the times the majority of the team said "no hire" and yet they'd get offers anyway. Wow, that sucks! I'm happy to have never been in that position. I've certainly been part of a majority "hire" decision where it turned out we were very wrong, but I've never seen a time where even one developer said "we should not hire this person" and was overruled. Partially, this is a matter of building the interview panel that you want. I've worked with people who are bad interviewers and do poo poo like "do not hire: couldn't give the correct syntax for `git merge`". You have to make sure that the interviewers are looking for the right stuff. But after that if the panel doesn't like someone and they still get hired...? I think I would be urgently looking for a new job the first time that happened. Like, that's a clear message that your management does not want to hear what you think.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:10
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In order for management to care about what you think, you have to become the management. Makes u think...
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Jan 24, 2021 23:46
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Mniot posted:But after that if the panel doesn't like someone and they still get hired...? I think I would be urgently looking for a new job the first time that happened. Like, that's a clear message that your management does not want to hear what you think. Impostor syndrome’s a harsh mistress. I wanted to bail, but I convinced myself I wasn’t going to land any better job, so I put up with it for too long. Spend enough time in a dysfunctional org with a lovely tech stack, and it gives you the brain worms that make you think you’re not qualified to do better (I’m now a staff eng at a website you probably visited recently so I was full of crap though).
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Jan 24, 2021 23:55
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asur posted:This is the one of the few exceptions. If someone is obviously racists, sexist, etc I would have no issue immediately ending the interview and they'd probably be escorted out shortly after. There's no place for that in the workplace. That's why for our 'culture fit' we make sure there's a woman engineer and a non-technical man in the discussion. kitten smoothie posted:What drove me insane at an old job (and one of the many reasons why I bailed) were the times the majority of the team said "no hire" and yet they'd get offers anyway. Had a case where helping out another team hiring for an engineering Lead position. Myself and two others were the Leadership panel. Candidate failed by all 3 of us. They made an offer. I objected. The candidate declined it to stay at their current company at the start of Covid. Candidate was laid off, came back to us. Had another short panel, I still objected. They made an offer. Candidate rejected it for going consulting instead. Finally they just got frustrated with being jerked around and blacklisted the candidate who should never have gotten that far.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:59
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Good Will Hrunting posted:In all seriousness it's insanely rude to not ask your candidate about their lunch preferences in my opinion. oh, for sure. just cause i poke fun doesn't mean you're wrong! when my buddy interviewed at oldjob, they hosed up and didn't get him a vegetarian sandwich (normally they were good about that stuff). it's a religious thing for him so he ended up eating some chips and a banana and tea or something and it was very embarrassing. but he wasn't my friend at the time, he was just a dude i was interviewing. somehow he still took the job!
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Jan 25, 2021 04:56
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I’ve literally never done a lunch interview, it’s always been done facing off across a conference room table like western gunfighters Except recently, where it’s zoom instead of a conference table
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Jan 25, 2021 05:07
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A team I was on was interviewing intern candidates one time and one guy got asked something like “what do you like to do in your spare time?” (because there’s not much you can ask interns). The answer that came back was “Netflix and chill” and to this day none of us have any idea what to make of that.
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Jan 25, 2021 05:08
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The Fool posted:I’ve literally never done a lunch interview, it’s always been done facing off across a conference room table like western gunfighters If you do the Google-style gauntlet then you need a meal break in there. It's not realistic to do five hours of interviews without getting food. For something that's just an hour or two or maybe three, sure, lunch break is probably not happening.
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Jan 25, 2021 05:13
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If you do the Google-style gauntlet then you need a meal break in there. It's not realistic to do five hours of interviews without getting food. I interviewed at a Google-owned company for I think 4 hours in a row and they didn't offer me anything 
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Jan 25, 2021 05:14
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Lunch interviews are the best part of in-person work. Whether you're the one conducting it or the one being interviewed, you get some food on the company dime and someone has to pretend to be interested in what you're saying for 30-60 minutes.
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Jan 25, 2021 07:06
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I interviewed at Microsoft last year and they didn’t give any of us food. Good times.
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Jan 25, 2021 08:39
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I turned down an offer once in large part because an interviewer was such a prick during lunch so I guess it cuts both ways
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Jan 25, 2021 08:50
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At one point I was working somewhere with a shared office space that had a super long conference table, and I witnessed a 12 on 1 panel interview with every single person from their team on the other side of the table from this fresh college grad who looked like he craved death
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Jan 25, 2021 17:38
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Reminds me of the time I showed up for an interview, and the receptionist takes me to a room where there were five or six other candidates for the same opening. We all stared awkwardly at one another until someone came in to escort each of us to a panel, and then every hour we’d go back to that waiting room and swap. If it weren’t for the fact that I got referred in by a friend (who was absolutely horrified to hear how this went down) I would’ve just walked out, but I didn’t want it to reflect badly on them.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:27
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kitten smoothie posted:Impostor syndrome’s a harsh mistress. I wanted to bail, but I convinced myself I wasn’t going to land any better job, so I put up with it for too long.   This was me for years. In the back of my head I knew I needed to get out, but didn’t apply anywhere because I thought I sucked too much. I was introduced to my now-boss by a mutual friend who thought she’d be a good mentor to help me deal with sexist bullshit at my previous job. She decided to poach me instead and it took me way too long to figure out what she was doing because why would anyone want to hire me. Hughlander posted:That's why for our 'culture fit' we make sure there's a woman engineer and a non-technical man in the discussion. We do this too. I’m the female engineer on the calls and so far we’ve not run into any assholes. Our HR lady does the initial phone screens, but I’ve noted that this isn’t always sufficient because she’s nontechnical and sometimes these pricks will be perfectly polite to women “beneath” them but then be awful to female peers/superiors. One time my boss and a colleague (both 30-something married women) had a lunch interview with a 20-something dudebro candidate and they said it was hilariously awkward because it was painfully clear this guy had no clue how to talk to a woman who was not either his mother or a chick he was hitting on. My old company did nothing of the sort and had an incredibly opaque hiring process, which meant the new guy’s first day was the day the rest of the team met him for the first time. At best it made for a dissonant team with poor rapport, and at worst, they bring in someone who makes everything toxic. The team was like five people, too. Aardvark! posted:At one point I was working somewhere with a shared office space that had a super long conference table, and I witnessed a 12 on 1 panel interview with every single person from their team on the other side of the table from this fresh college grad who looked like he craved death That’s just mean. We did a 6-on-1 presentation panel with a candidate (over Zoom so hopefully it was less intimidating), but the idea was for the candidate to demonstrate presentation and communication skills because it was a position that involved a fair amount of client interaction. We don’t do it for dev positions that don’t involve client interaction.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:49
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Moving a discussion from the newbie thread over here:ultrafilter posted:If a hiring manager gets 200 resumes for a job and they only have time to interview 20 people, how should they filter? There are using issues with using projects as has been discussed, but everything else I can think of is worse. hendersa posted:This is the million dollar question, and probably a good one to discuss in the Oldie thread. You'll get a lot of very passionate debate on this one, depending on who you talk to. I'm not looking to defend most hiring practices here, but I genuinely don't see a better way to filter resumes for entry-level candidates.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:39
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ultrafilter posted:Moving a discussion from the newbie thread over here: For entry-level, it's a dice roll. Pick 20 names out of a hat and that'll be a representative sample. Entry level folks are entry level for a reason. They don't know enough to complete a project that can give you any meaningful insights. If you want to know the "high performers" look into their githubs for accepted OS contributions. For entry level, you want to look at communication, willingness to learn, and how they get along with the team. Can't really tell any of that until you get them face to face with folks. Although, I feel like in this field you need to give preference to ensure overrepresentation of women and POC, otherwise those 20 will be 10 young white dudes, 1 older white dude, 8 men of Asian descent, and 1 woman.
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Jan 25, 2021 22:01
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Interviewing is an unsolved problem, especially at the entry-level. It's a crappy chicken-or-egg situation about proving ability/aptitude without a track record. It sucks that applicants likely need to spend non-work time preparing for interviews and possibly a small project portfolio, but the alternative is requiring a specific degree and some sort of professional accreditation like "real" engineers. It's the trade-off for it being an "accessible" industry without a lot of red tape, for better or worse. If your resume is competing against a hundred other resumes for an SDE1 position it's unfortunately a numbers game and trying to make yourself standout in whatever way you can. If you don't have a CS degree and don't have any professional development experience you don't have a heck of a lot to point to except self-directed learning and projects. If you want to show aptitude, motivation, and drive what better way than some little side projects you can talk through? Nobody is expecting the next Facebook, but some dumb little game or tool that you can speak intelligently about how you made it and what problems you solved for about for 10 minutes. The bar here is actually quite low, you just need something mildly interesting to talk about. Guinness fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 22:18
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kayakyakr posted:For entry-level, it's a dice roll. Pick 20 names out of a hat and that'll be a representative sample. Entry level folks are entry level for a reason. They don't know enough to complete a project that can give you any meaningful insights. Yeah, I think random is the way to go for entry level if you want to reduce bias. It'll never happen though because everyone is convinced their system works
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Jan 25, 2021 22:34
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ultrafilter posted:Moving a discussion from the newbie thread over here: I honestly let recruiting do the first pass of entry-level. Mostly because they have the time to handle representation, and read 200+ resumes. They will also do the initial screen before I even see them. Mid-level or higher is vastly different, but entry and interns require it's own process.
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Jan 25, 2021 22:35
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Guinness posted:If your resume is competing against a hundred other resumes for an SDE1 position it's unfortunately a numbers game and trying to make yourself standout in whatever way you can. If you don't have a CS degree and don't have any professional development experience you don't have a heck of a lot to point to except self-directed learning and projects. I think having something to show for it if you are self taught is reasonable, but the post in the other thread that kicked this off was about eliminating everyone from the pool that doesn't have some kind of public project or internship regardless of their education.
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Jan 25, 2021 22:44
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Jose Valasquez posted:I think having something to show for it if you are self taught is reasonable, but the post in the other thread that kicked this off was about eliminating everyone from the pool that doesn't have some kind of public project or internship regardless of their education. Yeah, I mean that's another way to filter. I don't think it's a great way to filter, but it is a way. I don't even think it's really an unfair way to filter, but it's likely to get you a list of candidates that either love to code, the fortunate ones who went through the internship process, or come from a code school that knows that employers filtering through candidate pools just look for folks that have a public project in their github.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:02
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Jose Valasquez posted:I think having something to show for it if you are self taught is reasonable, but the post in the other thread that kicked this off was about eliminating everyone from the pool that doesn't have some kind of public project or internship regardless of their education. Not quite, the line was: quote:2. Roughly 40% of the remaining applicants (~40) have listed no internships, no previous jobs, no extracurriculars, and no projects (class projects or otherwise) on their resumes. I ignore these, as all these resumes tell me is "I went to school". The majority of Resumes I see for internships at least talk about their class projects a lot.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:23
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Jose Valasquez posted:I think having something to show for it if you are self taught is reasonable, but the post in the other thread that kicked this off was about eliminating everyone from the pool that doesn't have some kind of public project or internship regardless of their education. No, the thing that kicked it off is that he ended up weeding out everyone and then brought his story into the newbie thread as a cautionary tale. If you want to be extremely particular in hiring that's your business but it does newbies a huge disservice for that story to be broadcasted as an indication of poor candidates rather than a poor hiring process.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:27
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kayakyakr posted:Yeah, I mean that's another way to filter. I don't think it's a great way to filter, but it is a way. I don't even think it's really an unfair way to filter, but it's likely to get you a list of candidates that either love to code, the fortunate ones who went through the internship process, or come from a code school that knows that employers filtering through candidate pools just look for folks that have a public project in their github. Yeah, I'm not saying that doing it doesn't work, just that it sucks for the industry and results in the economically advantaged having an additional step up on everyone else... 
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Jan 25, 2021 23:28
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Hughlander posted:Not quite, the line was: I was referring to step 3, where he eliminates everyone from the pool that doesn't have some kind of public project or internship regardless of their education. hendersa posted:3. Roughly 50% of the remaining applicants (~30) have no internships or previous jobs, but do list some trivial class projects without any links to a github account or website that provides source code for me to review. I'll give each of these applicants about 10-15 minutes of my time to Google around and look for his/her LinkedIn profile, github account, or website to see if I'm missing anything. Of these applicants, additional searching has uncovered information that was not on their resumes that has led to four of them being tagged for an initial screening interview.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:32
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Most programmers I know work too much to begin with; if they're doing anything on the side it's a secret project they wanna sell someday, not CV filler.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:37
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Hughlander posted:Not quite, the line was: Yeah, I see this for interns a lot. Some of them omit the fact that it's a class project, but it's kind of hard to hide when 15 other people from their class are describing that same project in their resume.
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Jan 26, 2021 00:12
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Hughlander posted:The majority of Resumes I see for internships at least talk about their class projects a lot. Is that after the recruiting filter has been applied?
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Jan 26, 2021 10:05
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Progressive JPEG posted:Is that after the recruiting filter has been applied? Yes, fair point.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:16
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Guinness posted:If you want to show aptitude, motivation, and drive what better way than some little side projects you can talk through? Nobody is expecting the next Facebook, but some dumb little game or tool that you can speak intelligently about how you made it and what problems you solved for about for 10 minutes. Yeah this exactly Ideally with the github/git repo you're selecting for somebody who at least has more than "I need a good paying job, what skill set will make me X dollars" level of interest in programming. People with a real interest in the field tend to have deeper knowledge of neighboring specialties, might actually grasp basics of database performance etc* Even if you don't have much interest in the topic outside of your work hours, going though something generic like twitter for zombies, then adding SSO, or U2F to the login flow, that's super interesting and now you have some project you struggled with and the interviewer can get a better idea of how you think/if you can problem solve * raise your hand if you ever fixed a critical database performance problem that ended up was originally written by an intern or first year guy
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Jan 26, 2021 22:26
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Hadlock posted:Yeah this exactly You're also selecting for those privileged enough to have the time and equipment to do these projects. That means you're effectively eliminating non-traditional candidates, candidates with obligations outside of work, and folks whose job prevents them from sharing the code they've written. This is how you create a "people like us" recruiting process. It's no wonder so much of SV is white, middle-class men.
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Jan 26, 2021 22:52
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Why are we one of the only fields that equates interest in/passion for your job with doing it for free as a hobby? I'm passionate enough about it to do it 40 hours a week, whatever I do outside of that 40 hours a week shouldn't matter. I've had a very successful career and my github is dog poo poo, but I've mostly worked in industries that don't have the "tech mindset", and the tech company I work for right now couldn't have cared less about my github when I was interviewing.
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Jan 26, 2021 22:57
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Jose Valasquez posted:Why are we one of the only fields that equates interest in/passion for your job with doing it for free as a hobby? Because: Blinkz0rz posted:This is how you create a "people like us" recruiting process. It's no wonder so much of SV is white, middle-class men.
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Jan 26, 2021 23:15
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Exactly. "Culture fit" boils down to racism/misogyny/classism, as smart companies have figured out a way around using that specific term while still maintaining the problematic environment. I've interviewed many over the years, and I think I have a pretty good hunch if somebody will turn out to be a diamond in the rough. Unfortunately, like many of us, I work in a tech bro environment, and I have to fight to get the good candidates in. Every single one I had to argue about until the others caved in turned out to be an excellent "investment" and quickly rose the ranks as one of the most valuable engineers we have. Also, every single person where I was in minority but had strong feelings against turned out to be a creep or at least getting let go for being just bad at their job. So, as a reward for my track record, I'm not being invited to interview people any more. Yay.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:10
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gbut posted:So, as a reward for my track record, I'm not being invited to interview people any more. Yay. If you're at odds with the rest of the interview team too often, you just end up with a reputation as a pain in the rear end and then stop getting invited to interview people.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:21
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:If you're at odds with the rest of the interview team too often, you just end up with a reputation as a pain in the rear end and then stop getting invited to interview people. I'm not at odds with the other engineers on the interview team, at least not often. I was pointing out the situations where I saw something that others didn't. I am more at odds with the management (or the "leadership", as they like to be referred to) because they do the "RAPID" part of it and have the final say. They definitely see me as the pain in the rear end, but that's by design.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:29
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gbut posted:I've interviewed many over the years, and I think I have a pretty good hunch if somebody will turn out to be a diamond in the rough. Unconscious bias is very real, so if you're relying on "hunch", you're probably still selecting for your own personal "culture fit".
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Jan 27, 2021 02:19
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Blinkz0rz posted:You're also selecting for those privileged enough to have the time and equipment to do these projects. That means you're effectively eliminating non-traditional candidates, candidates with obligations outside of work, and folks whose job prevents them from sharing the code they've written. Jose Valasquez posted:Why are we one of the only fields that equates interest in/passion for your job with doing it for free as a hobby? Yeah, there’s definitely room to talk about people who need to write better resumes when they don’t have much more than school to put on them, but if someone has other poo poo to deal with at night or on the weekends, or if they just simply like to do things other than code in their free time, they shouldn’t be disqualified for (particularly) an entry level post if they’re able to put in a solid 35 hour week and learn the tool chain, etc. And, of course, I understand the incentives of the employer to look for more proof. But yeah the hiring biases start flying in like whoa if you aren’t reeeeeally careful.
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Jan 27, 2021 02:20
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Jose Valasquez posted:Why are we one of the only fields that equates interest in/passion for your job with doing it for free as a hobby? It feels even worse in games. I feel like a pretty competent graphics programmer, but I've been doing generalist work at my current position mostly out of necessity. So I don't have the super fancy portfolio that the enthusiast rendering programmers I follow on Twitter seem to just build in their free time. But I've been turned down for a few senior level graphics positions now, and the latest one was kind enough to mention that they feel I don't have the depth or portfolio expected of a senior level graphics programmer. I'm glad they mentioned it because it kind of confirms the hunch I'd been having. If all goes well, I might still get a generalist position with them, but at this point it feels like a self-perpetuating problem where I'll never have the experience expected of a "senior" graphics programmer unless they let me specialize back into it over time, or if I just spend a crapton of personal time building homebrew rendering features.
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