Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”
Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews?<p>Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I performed under pressure.<p>Having been on both sides of the hiring table now many times, there is only one approach that makes sense to me:<p>1. Speak to them over the phone to make sure they are decent human being, verify again in person.<p>2. Be upfront with general compensation ability and expectations so that neither of you waste the others time.<p>3. Do a pair-programming exercise where they build a small piece of software that mirrors something that would be working on as a day-to-day there. Make it clear that finishing is not important, you just want to see their thought process and how they communicate. Ask them to refactor parts of it at some point to see how coach-able they are and how they respond to criticism.<p>This strategy has worked exceedingly well for me, and when I was on the other end of the hiring table the companies whose process generally looked like this were great places to work with good people.<p>Algorithm questions are a hazing ritual, and so many junior devs get sucked into wasting hundreds of hours practicing them when they could be building real-world skills. This practice has got to stop, IMO.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;poteto&#x2F;hiring-without-whiteboards" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;poteto&#x2F;hiring-without-whiteboards</a>