| I’m torn on this topic, I always tell my teams I hire for Attitude and Aptitude. If you have a good attitude and can learn we can teach you everything you need to learn. If you have a crappy attitude about life we can’t help you. I have been in tech for 30 years and have had to learn so many things that I find it a bit insulting to have a technical interview when clearly we’re all learning every day. If you’re not learning you’re dying. If you get into one of these types of interviews you might want to think twice about the employer. It’s important to remember that interviews go both ways, I’m interviewing you as much as you are interviewing me. To be clear when I’m an employer I’m worried if the candidate isn’t interviewing me. I worry they’re sold on the coolaide and not looking for a good fit that will reward them. People like this never make it in my teams because we can’t have someone who shows up for the wrong reasons. They will just fail and if we hire them it’s not fair to them or our team. That said I interviewed at Valve and they had teams of two go after me and ask me to code on a whiteboard and at one point the team interviewed me on Perl. I’ve been coding in Perl since it was released on UUNET in 1987. The people interviewing me gave me a problem and asked me to code it on a whiteboard. I did and then they kept saying “You have a syntax error” and I kept saying “No I don’t” after a couple minutes of this banter one of them got upset and typed it into his laptop to prove to me I was wrong. Boy was he embarrassed, I’ve been writing in Perl for so long I was certain I was right and this gentleman was certain he knew Perl until he met me. To me this event is proof that the “technical interview” is bogus. It’s a nice to have and certainly will help weed out some people who won’t make it but it also can cause this strange disconnect between skills and raw coding styles and/or understanding of the underlying tech. To me the “technical” interview needs to be real life problems, potentially something your team is struggling with or perhaps has solved recently. You provide the details and see how the person approaches the problem. Do they ask smart questions, are they thinking about how they’d collaborate, how they’ll look at what others have done to approach similar problems in the past. Again, this is about Attitude and Aptitude not about syntax errors and semicolon style. One of the best systems guys I ever hired was a pool man, literally cleaning pools when I met him. And one of the best sales people I’ve ever hired was an English teacher. I don’t care about your background, I’m not hiring you for that, I’m hiring you for your future on my team and how you’ll grow to be a major contributor as we solve crazy hard problems. Past performance does not guarantee future results… To me the only things that make a different are Attitude and Aptitude, the rest we learn together… |