The Case for “Normal” Interviews
I hate technical interviews. As part of a job hunt, I hate doing them. As part of my job, I hate conducting them. We can do better, in the technical community, at discovering who is well-suited for roles in our organizations.
A technical interview is an oral exam you can’t really study for. You don’t know what they’re going to ask or what you’re going to remember, but you have to put the answers in full display on the white board. Write out binary search, implement a heap, swap the characters in a string, and don’t forget the semi-colons. Maybe you screw up a solution, maybe you nail it, but either way you move on to the next interviewer and another problem to solve. Five or six such repetitions with different engineers, maybe a hiring manager, and you’re left feeling exhausted and, sometimes, defeated.
Our jobs are nothing like our interviews. What do we learn by subjecting candidates to this process? I’ve never, in my years as an engineer, been compelled to implement a heap in any language—though I’ve had to do it at least twice in interviews. I once interviewed a promising candidate who was dismissed solely because he couldn’t remember how to read a file in C. I’ve also seen candidates hired who were professionally competent but personally, well, unpleasant.
When problems have cropped up with colleagues who ultimately left a company, the issue has never been a lack of technical expertise; it’s always a question of fit or attitude. In my experience, no one minds a co-worker who struggles with a design or piece of code, as long as he or she is willing to ask questions and take suggestions. The ones who fare poorly are the ones who design arrogantly or receive advice belligerently.
We can get a reasonable sense of someone’s technical prowess by asking high-level design questions, asking about previous projects, and even typical-interview questions like how did you overcome a problem. That way, you get some insight into attitude and personality as well as competence. Maybe even ask to see a code sample, which would give you an idea of how an engineer performs with time and consideration, rather than on the fly.
Changing our perspective about interviewing might change our working lives for the better. What do you think of technical interviews?
Related posts:
Did you enjoy this post? subscribe now to get all of the posts Comments (2)
I know right! What is the point of technical interviews and are they as good or better at predicting the interviewee’s success at the job?
In the company I worked in, my VP boss never gave anyone a technical interview because he expect you to be able to learn on the job and not be dumb. So far in his 30 years in the same company, there was only 1 or 2 hires out of 40 or so that he hired, didn’t work out after 1 year.. that’s a 95% success rate. He did it by looking at their degree and experience, summing up the person behaviorially AND see if they are a fit. That’s it!
A 95% success rate without technical interviews and these are programmers who are either majored in Comp Sci, MechE, CivilE, Aerospace Engineers who coded non-trivial software which other professional Engineers use to design the car which you and I use, the airplanes which transport you AND also F1 formula Racecar engineers used it to redesign the chassis to make the air flow efficient.. (not to mention pace maker blood flow and other stuff).
So why other industries which doesn’t have this mission critical software requires stupid technical interviews. Take Microsoft for example. Their software is not mission critical and their software CONTINTUES TO CRASH AND HOG MEMORY! Yet they still have intense technical interviews. What’s the point then! Since they had intensely interviewed these candidates, shouldn’t the software be flawless and not crash nor hog memory?! This just shows that technical interviews are not a good predictor of success.
Or maybe it’s majority of the people in my company has AT LEAST a MS degree?.
@bwc, great point about microsoft! The whole write-code-on-the-board interview pretty much started with them, I think, many moons ago.