Hiring, what do you do?
We are in hiring mode - again! - adding, hopefully, two people who can both do nice design work and write decent frontend code. I have limited expectations for interviews - my understanding is that the literature shows they are poor predictors of on-the-job performance. Here's what we are doing - what should we be doing?
- Absolutely no "why do you want to work here?"-type questions, if I wanted flattery I would buy it from the artisanal flattery in the village.
- Code walkthroughs of the candidate's own projects
- Coding test on CoderPad (definitely not mad algorithm stuff, more "built a tiny feature")
Over to you - what do you do?
I like to ask candidates about the project they are most proud of.
I would probably fail most coding tests, even though I have shipped a lot of code.
So asking candidates about their own code would give you a good idea about their ability and enthusiasm.
"I like to ask candidates about the project they are most proud of"
Great question, this is going on our interview question set!
Re "own code": this is why I love code walkthroughs - they are taking me through their own project, and much more comfortable on "home ground", I feel it gives a much better chance to let them show themselves as their best.
OMG, this is my dream question!
Short answer:
I have built an algorithm that assess fit, which no bs interview questions can compete with. It takes 5 min, is accurate and totally easy to validate. I see you posted your message a few months back, but if you are still hiring and are open to try it, I would love so much to help you. Let me know if you would like to setup a 15 min call.
Code walkthroughs don't yield meaningful data points. Changing someone else's code is easy. Writing new code is hard. It requires creativity. Case in point, I just interviewed an engineer currently working at a FAANG company with dozens of links to PRs where he was the primary contributor, but he couldn't code a simple 5 line React app. If I had given him a pass by looking at his PRs, I'd miss a very important data point: he doesn't know HTML!
Oh, the walkthrough is of a personal project they've built themselves. So, I can see they like coding so much they don't do it just for school or for work, and I get a better sense of the scale and scope of their skills than I could in a coding test.
'Absolutely no "why do you want to work here?"-type questions, if I wanted flattery I would buy it from the artisanal flattery in the village.'
That's not entirely the case I believe - that question gets at how much effort has the person put to research the company / industry. Is the person simply applying because they need to get software eng experience and anything will do? Or does the person actually have an interest in the industry the company operates in and the company itself. All else being equal, of course I would rather hire the person that shows at least initiative to talk intelligently about the industry the company operates in when explaining why "they want to work here"
I just ask them how much they know about the company.
Why dance around it?
The answer to "Why do you want to work here?" is always "I need money."
That is a really, really good point. I think they would have to be a tiny bit stalkerish to give a solid answer right now - our web presence is not so much discreet as downright cryptic - "we do stuff with AI, securely" is about as much as our sight will tell them.
Will definitely revisit this as we open up our public presence, thank you!
My other thought is that, whatever motivations New Hire starts with, I fully intend to install new ones of my own devising - "such a nice team, such cool problems, I'm learning so much, I think I found my happily-ever-after".
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