[euos]

> A question to everyone: What would a good application process look like?

I work in a top company with infamously difficult interview. I made major contributions to several opensource projects that modern tech runs on. I can easily show a clean standalone pull request attributed to me that introduces complex multithreaded code. That code runs daily on millions instances.

Why the hell do I need to spend hours answering “what a mutex is”? Also, understand that a lot of stuff is much less obvious and clear cut (e.g. how HTTP protocol works) for me than for your engineer. They only saw the basic case. For me the answer will be “it depends”.

Please, respect the candidate time and experience.

[lmm]

> I work in a top company with infamously difficult interview. I made major contributions to several opensource projects that modern tech runs on. I can easily show a clean standalone pull request attributed to me that introduces complex multithreaded code. That code runs daily on millions instances.

A lot of applicants will lie or bullshit something similar. How would you suggest an employer distinguish someone like you from someone pretending to be someone like you?

[blincoln]

This. Once you've spent enough time on the other side of the hiring process and/or in a leadership role, the reasons behind aspects that seem annoying and trivial as a job candidate become clear.

Any interesting technical position posted by a company with a good reputation gets so many unqualified applicants that I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it over and over myself at different organizations. Every HR department I've worked with has done a good job of filtering out the ones that didn't even look good on paper. Out of the ones that get past that stage, I'd estimate maybe 1-5% actually have the technical qualifications for the job. Of course, even if they have the technical qualifications, they may be lacking in other areas, like professionalism.

The last three companies I've worked for have all used a custom CTF as one of the interview phases, and it's been invaluable at screening out people who were good at talking about the work, but not good at actually doing the work. So, superficially, I'd love to be able to use something like Starfighter instead of having to maintain one in-house. But how likely is it that a company like that would build truly unique challenges for every customer? IMO it would cause cheating to be easier, because people doing the CTF in bad faith could just work from lists of known elements used in previous CTFs from the same company.

[euos]

References. My GitHub profile. LinkedIn.

[lmm]

All extremely easy to fake.