Re-thinking developer experience • Product @Gitpod 🍊 Helping folks get their start in cloud • @openupthecloud ☁️ AWS Community Builder 🛠 Replies in GIFS 😃
"interviewers pick a handful of esoteric concepts and decide to use them as a litmus test for the candidates' abilities. And that's fine"
This is sadly, very true. Developers learn a concept, feel superior, then use that as their test for others, but if turned around the other way I'm sure the developer on the other side of the table knows some equally puzzling or tricky and esoteric questions. A very irritating aspect of tech hiring for sure.
This is exactly why we focus our dev interview around a creative coding challenge that forces the candidate to learn a new concept and apply it with a ton of wiggle room around how they want to approach the task. We just give some general goals to accomplish in the project, then we discuss how they solved the problem without nitpicking the tools outside what we asked them to demonstrate.
We also give them an appropriate window of time on their own to research the new concepts so that it's not an on-the-spot stressful thing.
"interviewers pick a handful of esoteric concepts and decide to use them as a litmus test for the candidates' abilities. And that's fine"
This is sadly, very true. Developers learn a concept, feel superior, then use that as their test for others, but if turned around the other way I'm sure the developer on the other side of the table knows some equally puzzling or tricky and esoteric questions. A very irritating aspect of tech hiring for sure.
Well said.
This is exactly why we focus our dev interview around a creative coding challenge that forces the candidate to learn a new concept and apply it with a ton of wiggle room around how they want to approach the task. We just give some general goals to accomplish in the project, then we discuss how they solved the problem without nitpicking the tools outside what we asked them to demonstrate.
We also give them an appropriate window of time on their own to research the new concepts so that it's not an on-the-spot stressful thing.
BINGO!
Pretty soon, I'm going to do an article on how I want to do interviews - and it's basically what you're describing here.