| here's the uncomfortable truth. most software engineers are good enough to hire. i've seen a few interview types in my time: 1. technical interviews run by nontechnical or junior engineers who can't judge technical talent. this typically produces sub-par hires. imagine you are made the director of UX design and you have to hire someone but know little about the industry. what type of hires are you going to get? 2. technical interviews that focus on CS skills. can you write a red-black tree in Java? can you write a bubble sort in haskell? The problems here is that this has bias towards new CS grads that dont have much industry experience but just took tests on stuff like this in their degree. google pioneered this style of interview and it's taken off as leetcode. the problem is that experienced devs dont typically write bubblesort algorithms. this type of interview is biased toward younger out of college hires and codecamp hires that have little experience but gring on leetcode sites. 3. technical interviews that have too many opinions for a hire recommendation. this seems to be a new trend where you need 3 or 5 or 7 thumbs up to get hired and any negatives sink the candidate. this does raise the bar, but typically what i see is someone on this panel has a high opinion of his/her abilities and gives everyone they seem a thumbs down. What i've found is that soft skills and team dynamics are > the technical accumen. I can teach you how to write go(lang) but its much harder to teach you how to influence your peers or to communicate effectively. Experienced devs probably dont know how to ace your leetcode interview, but they do know how to influence and communicate and when to stay away from bad ideas. You dont get tested on these things. It's analogous to a being combat veteran. You've been there, you've done that you know how to survive. You might not know the new tech, but that can be taught. I have never seen an dev not be able to pickup a new platform/language/skill within 6 months of hire - anywhere. Here's hoping this will get better one day but i'm not holding by breath. |