[donatj]

In 2006 when I got my first dev job, I sat down with the lead developer for about half an hour and we largely just had a very friendly and informal conversation talking about how I would hypothetically build things, what software I enjoy using, etc. I very vividly remember talking about how great I thought it was you could do basic math in the Firefox search bar at the time.

He left to talk to the owner, came back with a (in hindsight very small) number on piece of paper, and I started that week.

When I started at my current gig over a decade ago I had a three-day ordeal of interviews. In person, telephone, full day of in person again. Spoke with at least six different sets of people. Jobs I've applied for in the interim have been even worse.

As someone who has been in a hiring position myself, I think that first informal interview tells you way more than any checklist. If you need the checklist items answered, put them on the application. Interviews should be for getting to know the person.

I don't do hiring these days, but from what I've heard, DEI doesn't want us going off pre-approved script at all. I understand where that's coming from but it seems like it would do more harm than good.

[newswasboring]

> When I started at my current gig over a decade ago I had a three-day ordeal of interviews. In person, telephone, full day of in person again. Spoke with at least six different sets of people.

These kinds of processes just feel designed to dilute the blame.

[donatj]

I kind of feel like it's no department wanting to feel left out of the process.

[mcv]

My interviews still tend to be one or two friendly conversations. Of course I'm freelancing (for big projects) rather than employed, so maybe that changes things. And the actual hiring process can still be long because I do a lot of work for banks and other organisations with a serious screening process, but at its core is still the basic interview that's basically a friendly chat.

When I was responsible for hiring at my previous project, that's also what I did: I want to get to know the person. Is this someone I can work with? I was much more interested in what their most interesting project was, than in which checkboxes they checked. If there was one checkbox I had, it was: "can they admit they don't know something?" because some people just started spewing nonsense if they didn't know the answer to a question.