| >"Representative take-home work samples and conversational problem solving are in." Exactly. How many times have you reached out to your network and said "HEY! I am trying to solve problemX and I am stuck on Y -- anyone done this before?" You cant expect everyone to know everything - ESPECIALLY in an interview, and even more-so in a panel interview. Measure their problem solving skills, not their intimate knowledge of tech/lang X.... and then on-top of that, judge their fit for working well in the team! only ask that when they come back from a takehome issue, that they say exactly how they solved it: "I had to call my buddy over at BigCorp and say, hey dont tell me the answer - but lead me to where I might figure out how to solve this problem" OR "Hey joe, I did this - but i am not sure how efficient it is - did you do something similar?" Tell them to get a slack channel of their peers to help them succeed. I am tired of everyone trying to be the hero - all my contacts try to support one-another, the interview process should be no different. |
Amazing, until you put it into writing I never realized that I do this too.
At least once a day I'll get a random question from my peers in areas where I have more experience than them, which also helped me gain real world work experience years before I even had my first job.
And I do the same when I wander in areas where I haven't had so much experience, discussing approaches and common pitfalls, which makes so much sense.
Yet in interviews it's like you're going to be working alone forever and have to be the best in these exact technologies/languages/stack or you'll never be able to do your job.
I guess this is what you end up with after calling everyone a ninja-rockstar-guru.