| Just a technical conversation. I have hired dozens of engineers and have never failed do find great hires. What I mostly do is just a conversation, which I call “geek conversation”, just like when you meet people at meet-ups or tech conventions. With a simple talk I can first make the person relax, this allows me to have a great impression about her/his personality, passions, interests, personal roadmap, attitude towards problem solving and etc. Whenever we ponder on a more technical subject I throw some questions that might help me measure their technical level a bit, but what I care to measure is mostly awareness on things, nowadays software engineers need to be, above all, great at researching, for most roles they must have a broader overall knowledge and be able to creatively join the dots with a ton of pragmatism. I don’t care if they are able to implementing Dijkstra's or to modify a Trie in front of me, although having awareness of what problem these things solve is a good indication of some seniority. These interviews take a lot more from me, I have to properly learn about the candidate and the role before I enter the interview and that requires people skills and real interest in the product, and of course I am not able to interview 40 candidates to find just “the best one” (which is ridiculous and something I actually don’t believe actually exists). Yes there are roles which require the extreme algorithm coding skill, but those are a minority and it is unfortunate if your company is treating every candidate as if they were going to do that. |