| I've just went through a round of interviews from various companies after being made redundant from work 4 months ago.
Admittedly the job market was really quiet but it was eye opening the differences in interview techniques and processes. I had one interview from a FinTech company which I actually thought went quite well, the next day I got a rejection stating "I need to improve my STAR technique". I just rolled my eyes thinking FFS Another company the CTO wasn't on the call but had asked to record the last 15 minutes of the interview with questions he'd prepared, I was close to terminating the interview. If he couldn't be assed sitting in on the interview why should I answer questions the interviewer himself didn't understand. One of the questions was "What is triple D". I'm an experienced dev, fully aware there are too many acronyms in the industry but had never heard of triple D before, when I googled it after I was thinking FFS, that's just what any competent dev does by default. I guesses data driven development but admitted I wasn't sure. Another interview the principal engineer yawned 3 times when I was talking before I even got to the half way stage, not one apology. I know it's just human nature but to not even acknowledge he was making me uncomfortable reminded me afterwards that it's probably a toxic work culture, which I've been told since is the case from people who worked there. Thankfully at the start of the new year I was offered 3 roles, 2 of them I thought I'd screwed up the interview. The one I accepted, apart from taking on a task to review some code and raise issues with it, I was asked to describe an architecture of some system I'd worked on and enjoyed. I spoke too long, going past the interview time but didn't feel I explained the whole system. I understand interviewing candidates is difficult, I've had to do it a few times in the past but the competency of interviewers and the process to score candidates varies wildly from organisation to organisation. A realisation for me although I was already aware of it, is the personality of the people interviewing you varies wildly, more often than not it's a good indication of the organisation itself. |