|
It's frustrating, isn't it? I've said a few times here on HN that it's a career goal of mine to get to the point where I don't have to do technical interviews. I'm not particularly offended by tech tests[1], I just wanted to get to the point in my career where I didn't have to take them anymore. Unfortunately, I'm not sure this is realistic anymore, at least not without severely limiting my opportunities. Overall, I'd say that if you really don't want to take another tech interview test, your options are: 1) Consult to hire. This is unappealing for a number of reasons, and many companies will still ask you to take a technical test to work as tech consultant anyway. But they may be more willing to take a chance on you as a consultant without the tech test[1], so you might be able to prove your technical ability on the job and get an offer that way. I'd say this is an option if you are unemployed, failing at the tech test part of the interview, and would like to try something new. 2) Work on open source projects that span multiple institutions, and get hired by one of those institutions. This is different from having a generally impressive github profile or history of open source contributions - it is more about having worked directly on an open source project with developers or other staff specifically at the company or institution where you are interviewing. Why ask you to find a cycle in a linked list if you've already developed and tested features directly with the devs at the institution where are interviewing? This is similar to the "consult to hire" - there are people who have worked directly with you already and know you can do the job. 3) Become a luminary. This isn't an option for me, but the people who created Python, Ruby, Rails, that sort of thing, they can don't have to find the longest path of non-negative integers in a binary tree at the whiteboard to get a job. Of course these folks don't exactly need advice from me, and I doubt they "get a job" in any sense that resembles the way I "get a job". I'd say that for your good but not famous dev, the second option can be effective, though you do need to make an effort to keep branching out and looking for the right kind of project (they aren't necessarily easy to come by). Personally, I've reached the conclusion that I'm limiting my options too much by avoiding technical interview exams. Studying those data structures and algorithms books, getting razor sharp with solving medium to difficult problems at a whiteboard in 45 minutes, it's probably just part of the profession, at least for now. You really do lose a lot by refusing to participate. [1] by "tech test", I mean the sort of questions you'd find in "cracking the coding interview" or questions you'd typical find in an algorithms and data structures exam (variants on trees, hashes, graphs, sorting, run time), along with some OS stuff involving threads, deadlock, and so forth). |