| Again, the op stated these things are put there to "show how people react to stress" -- my post was a response to that, there is no re-creation of a stressful environment in the situations I stated. "I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well." Yes, it is a failure of how you have set up your hiring pipeline which you are now band-aiding. The majority of those folks can be screened by one look at a resume or in the first 30 seconds of the phone interview. Other hiring managers in our company repeatedly had this problem until we got them to focus of the right candidate qualities and ask the appropriate questions. Take for example your local symphony orchestra; they have the same problem where people with visions of "making it" show up not being able to play at all. Want to audition? Send us an audition tape and a check. When you show up for the audition, you'll play a selection from these pieces and be asked to sight read this music. It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete. To make an analogy, the software world is akin to: Interviewer: "I see you are interviewing for the 1rst chair violin. The 3rd chair tuba player is really into experimental music, he would like to transpose Vivaldi's Four Seasons into a new scale with 12.5 notes per octave with a slight progressive jazz leaning. Oh, and since we all know there is pressure in performing in front of an audience, you have 30 seconds to think before the 2nd chair begins to throw rotten food at you. Reaction to stress and all you know...here is your tuba." "But I don't play tuba...Are you asking me to play tuba? Am I going to be playing this nutcase's new music as part of our program?" "Sigh...you don't know music do you?" |
"Here's a couple of pages of unfamiliar sheet music that a second-year student should be able to play. You have an hour to figure out how to muddle through it on an instrument of your choice."
People hiring musicians don't do that, because they instead prefer to give candidates 16 bars of complex sheet music, and expect them to play it perfectly during the audition.
The programming equivalent would be to give someone a hard take-home problem, let them stew on it, bring them into the interview, and ask them to type in their solution, from memory, into a text file, on a keyboard with a broken Backspace key. That they will then compile, run, and compare the result of to that of the other 60 candidates auditioning for the role.
Are you sure you want to do auditions, instead of interviews?
> It is ironic that for an industry that is in a sense so subjective that the gates in the hiring process are more concrete.
That's because there's fifty thousand correct ways to solve a trivial programming problem, but only 'one' way to correctly play second violin in Vivaldi Four Seasons.
Music is a subjective art. Playing music is a mechanical process. My iPod can play music. My iPod can't implement a sorting algorithm.