Interviewing Sucks Continued
there are definitely two camps of interviews, the side where they want to know if you think your shit don’t stink. at least, that’s what i call it when they want to just quiz and drill you over computer science fundamentals. to a small extent, i think it’s a good idea, but otherwise, it’s horseshit.
hah, i realized i never really finished that thought about “two camps”.
anyway, the second camp is basically everyone else trying to find a better way to interview, because it’s hard. it’s hard to both get a good insight into a person’s experience and history while also trying to minimize the amount of time, interviews, and resources to evaluate them.
seems most companies do some sort of small project that can be done at hte applicants leisure. the idea being that you are not pressured into performing immediately on the spot, which by itself, is not a very inclusive practice.
one of my favorite interivew processes was with Webflow. from the start, after you apply with your resume and standard affair like that. but then i got an email from their CTO Bryant directly (not a recruiter). we did a small screener project. but then afterwards, we did a paid project. it wasn’t huge, but it was enough to cover some of the major topics i’d be working with, with the same people on the team i would be joining. and it was not a huge amount of time involved either. i think in total is was a few hours? but i also had the availability of a guest slack account that i could talk to teammates, collaborating with them as necessary—as you would in any ohter day-to-day work.
following that, then there was just a round of interviews with people talking about normal things, how you work, deal with adversity, etc etc.
should everyone do that? probably not. especially if you are getting thousands of applicants and many of them pass through the resume screening. i would be curious if Webflow still does that to this day.
by and large, when i do interview, most companies seem to use some sort of initial tech screener project, mostly only requiring an hour or two of your time to complete.
some are pretty extreme, like build and host your own search engine for a number of websites. i kind of wonder if that was a serious code screener or like one of those “fuck off” prices people put on things they advertise as selling but never mean to actually sell.