[vmception]

Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.

Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?

[JohnBooty]

    they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and 
    evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome 
    by each employee

I've been in the industry for 20+ years and have done my fair share of live coding interviews.

Some of them were horrible. There was one where I had to code on a literal whiteboard while a pair of, uh, let's just call them "people with distinctly non-wonderful personalities" critiqued everything. I did horribly.

I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

It's perhaps also worth noting that I began a lot of these by saying, "These sorts of interviews make me nervous, but I'll give it my best!" or something similar. And you know what, a good interviewer knows and understands that. They know these kinds of interviews make 99% of the population nervous. So acknowledging that fact helped me to feel at ease.

So, done well, I think they can be great.

[vmception]

> I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

My best interview experiences were like this. I thought I did well and left those interviews feeling great, positive reinforcement, great performance of code, plenty of time left over! Just for a faceless and ambiguous rejection letter :) I started getting an aggregate view that people just didn't want to pay me that much, or that there's some external factor on a search engine or within the industry about me that I'll never be aware of, but I landed on my feet on the entrepreneurial side.

So guess I'll never know!

[JohnBooty]

Did all of your positive interviews result in rejections?

Some of mine did. That always hurt. But, I mean...

1. A lot of companies follow the "it's better to turn away 10 qualified hires than to make one bad hire" adage

2. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, that might be true for 10 other candidates as well so I expect a 90% rejection rate even when things go well.

3. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific domain knowledge (maybe it's fintech, and they've worked in fintech before and I haven't) and it might be a tiebreaker in their favor

4. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific tool/framework/language I don't. If I have experience with 50 tech buzzwords, and so does the other candidate, but 27 of mine overlap with the company's requirements and 29 of theirs do, then that might be a tiebreaker in their favor.

Anyway, being an entrepreneur is better anyway. I'm glad you found success. I miss running my own show. Every day.

[vmception]

Right I’m aware there were potentially other reasons like what the very first chapter in all the tech career handbooks say, as you wrote, and they all concluded that I was wasting my time on a broken process, while surrounded by people bragging about the multiple offers they are able to line up in the same time frame somehow. Well good for them.

I was getting the short straw so I unsubscribed, good for me that was an option at all.

[JohnBooty]

I feel like the process is broken in a looooooooooot of ways, but I can't feel that a low % of job offers relative to the # of interviews is necessarily a sign of brokenness?

For most software development jobs, I feel that collaboration is important and those sorts of interviews, when done well, are probably one of the least-terrible ways to get a feel for it.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases when this sort of interview is not ideal. Not all development jobs require collaboration. And there are brilliant developers who just don't interview well. Etc.

In the end, though, you won. Entrepreneurship is tough but ultimately I love it more than working for others. It's your life, why work for others if you can help it?