Seriously who is coming up with these software developer interviews?

[Hamster]

AI is here…

I'll start growing my own vegetables and live of the land!

 

[Priapus]

I'll start growing my own vegetables and live of the land!

Product owners need to accurately describe what they want. So we are safe until Ai replaces them.

Also.. don’t forget the boat. You always need a boat for off the land living.

 

[cguy]

I like these, very difficult to do remotely though.

My current method doesn't have any tests at all. I get on a phone call with the candidate and have a "chat". I like to think I get a pretty good gut feel of a candidates competence just through this. If that goes well, my partner and I have a joint chat with the candidate. If we're both feeling good, we make an offer with a 3 month probation period and take it from there.

Granted we're a small team of 15 so this probably wouldn't scale very well but it's worked good enough. Only let one guy go during the probation period so far.

That all said, I only ever reply back to super high quality CVs

Heh. These days the really top people I see won’t work without a 2-4 year guarantee, never mind a probation period.

 

[emperornemesis]

You misunderstand. It's not about fakers, but all about getting the best candidate. I have had to contend with HR hiring practices in the past that ended up giving me the "best" candidates who apparently had degrees and experience but could not find the desktop on a computer. It's also about seeing who the good workers are. Who will take the time to complete the task, and who will offer up a half baked excuse instead. In South Africa it is no longer about who has the qualifications and experience, but what those people can do with their qualifications and experience. What are their work ethics like? Will they require sick leave every week or two, or use lame excuses to stay home like "I had to go pay school fees" or "The sangoma booked me off for thinking too much". Companies are getting fed up with candidates who dazzle during the first interview, only for the company yo later realize that the candidate can barely read and write, yet is a certified programmer with 20 years experience from some backwater ANC run municipality. The truth is, that if you are as good as you think you are, and you are really in need of that job and not just another salary chaser, then you'll sit through and complete the tasks. My personal opinion is that you are undiciplined and shopping around for salaries, not for jobs.

 

[emperornemesis]

I used to work for DVT. Know the weather app challenge you speak of well. I also worked for discovery. Both in mobile development. You dodged a serious bullet with Discovery. It’s hell on earth.

You think that is hell on earth!? Go work for Amazon and then we'll speak again. Now that is probably the most toxic environment on earth, making a Uranium mine and Chernobyl look nice. They are constantly recruiting and have a huge staff turnover.

 

[kolaval]

I've seen a discovery iOS dev job advertised and was curious, do they have that many apps?
do they want everything in house vs outsourcing? And would iOS development encompass your whole job?

 

[newby_investor]

You think that is hell on earth!? Go work for Amazon and then we'll speak again. Now that is probably the most toxic environment on earth, making a Uranium mine and Chernobyl look nice. They are constantly recruiting and have a huge staff turnover.

I know a dev that works at Amazon here in Cape Town. He loves it. I suspect that in a company that big, the experience will vary widely from team to team.

 

[zimspy]

You misunderstand. It's not about fakers, but all about getting the best candidate. I have had to contend with HR hiring practices in the past that ended up giving me the "best" candidates who apparently had degrees and experience but could not find the desktop on a computer. It's also about seeing who the good workers are. Who will take the time to complete the task, and who will offer up a half baked excuse instead. In South Africa it is no longer about who has the qualifications and experience, but what those people can do with their qualifications and experience. What are their work ethics like? Will they require sick leave every week or two, or use lame excuses to stay home like "I had to go pay school fees" or "The sangoma booked me off for thinking too much". Companies are getting fed up with candidates who dazzle during the first interview, only for the company yo later realize that the candidate can barely read and write, yet is a certified programmer with 20 years experience from some backwater ANC run municipality. The truth is, that if you are as good as you think you are, and you are really in need of that job and not just another salary chaser, then you'll sit through and complete the tasks. My personal opinion is that you are undiciplined and shopping around for salaries, not for jobs.

You could dress it however you want but what remains is I will not put up with aptitude tests and unreasonable take home tasks. And no one ever should.

If a company can't figure out how to hire people properly, I doubt there's anything else great about their work culture.

Hiring is hard. I'm not denying that. But how you frame it is you're putting the entire burden of the process on the candidates. That communicates a company thinks they are so great and their job is so good, they would be doing me a favour by hiring me.

You also ignored what I wrote earlier. If I think a company is big enough and will pay me a lot of money, I can hire cheap developers on Firv to do the boring interview task for me. You haven't proven a thing with your unreasonable take home task. There's cases of people outsourcing their entire jobs to cheap Fivr devs.
If me taking a stand against long take home tasks given these circumstances still means nothing to you, then ayi I don't know.

 

[Barbarian Conan]

Unless you're being headhunted, expect a bit of a challenge. The main reason for a test like this is not just to get your capability with coding, but your attitude to a challenge and how you handle pressure. I've had people bail at the sight of a challenge which has made my job as a recruiter easier. The only thing I would say is to put a time frame to it, don't make candidates spend all day on an interview, that's doff. Just say like 1hr30 or something. I don't care if candidates finish, it's really just a hurdle that some dont get past. That helps me weed out the ones I dobt want to start with.

It's surprising the lengths scammers go to these days, especially in the online interviews...
Check it out

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I think 1:00 - 1:30 is OK before getting to the meat of an interview.
Any longer and you're only going to get the desperate people, and the desperate people usually aren't the best people.

 

[lkpat]

I think 1:00 - 1:30 is OK before getting to the meat of an interview.
Any longer and you're only going to get the desperate people, and the desperate people usually aren't the best people.

I do the practical last - after the interview, and only if I get the right vibes. IOW if I think this is the one.

 

[lkpat]

You could dress it however you want but what remains is I will not put up with aptitude tests and unreasonable take home tasks. And no one ever should.

If a company can't figure out how to hire people properly, I doubt there's anything else great about their work culture.

And you would probably capitulate at the first hurdle with a client.

 

[Harmonic]

Heh. These days the really top people I see won’t work without a 2-4 year guarantee, never mind a probation period.

Makes sense in the in-person US market. The rest of the world/remote isn't quite there yet, at least in my experience

 

[lkpat]

Heh. These days the really top people I see won’t work without a 2-4 year guarantee, never mind a probation period.

I always find that amusing. What is a 2-4 year guarantee with a notice period?

If a company is doing badly, there's no contract out there that will keep you employed if they can't afford to pay you.

 

[Priapus]

I've seen a discovery iOS dev job advertised and was curious, do they have that many apps?
do they want everything in house vs outsourcing? And would iOS development encompass your whole job?

They only have a single app. There are roughly 5 teams with 3-4 developers for that app. It’s huge. I used to be on the Insurance section for the app.

Yes, everything is in house. Though, they contract work out to dev houses - like DVT and Gluecode. But moving away from that I think.

Yes, the job would be 100% iOS development.

 

[Priapus]

You misunderstand. It's not about fakers, but all about getting the best candidate. I have had to contend with HR hiring practices in the past that ended up giving me the "best" candidates who apparently had degrees and experience but could not find the desktop on a computer. It's also about seeing who the good workers are. Who will take the time to complete the task, and who will offer up a half baked excuse instead. In South Africa it is no longer about who has the qualifications and experience, but what those people can do with their qualifications and experience. What are their work ethics like? Will they require sick leave every week or two, or use lame excuses to stay home like "I had to go pay school fees" or "The sangoma booked me off for thinking too much". Companies are getting fed up with candidates who dazzle during the first interview, only for the company yo later realize that the candidate can barely read and write, yet is a certified programmer with 20 years experience from some backwater ANC run municipality. The truth is, that if you are as good as you think you are, and you are really in need of that job and not just another salary chaser, then you'll sit through and complete the tasks. My personal opinion is that you are undiciplined and shopping around for salaries, not for jobs.

Doesn’t work like that for a lot of software developers. Myself included. I don’t need the job. I’m in a market where demand outstrips supply. My last three jobs - I did not apply for. All headhunted.

There needs to be a better way than the current system.

 

[SauRoNZA]

This is valuable feedback because to date my hiring process has always been initial interview after talent acquisition did their bit and then a more general technical interview with some team future team members and after a thumbs up there I send them a take home test that should take them a couple of hours but they have a full week to complete it.

Quite often they then magically disappear never to be heard from again and I considered flipping it all around and have talent acquisition send the test first and only interviewing those who actually delivered something.

In my case though if the candidate couldn’t do this test there is no way they could actually do the job, but on the flipside of that I’ve had some people in the past be up front about never having worked with the technology before but still wanting to try and they literally went and learnt it in that time and delivered something and showing aptitude and so I rolled the dice on them and it’s worked out well where I likely would not have given them a second look had I not interviewed them first.

So as much as it’s a catch 22 I think chatting to people first and seeing what they are all about informs your decisions a bit more than purely looking at results of a test, but I’m also looking at this from an infrastructure perspective rather than a pure development one.

 

[zimspy]

This is valuable feedback because to date my hiring process has always been initial interview after talent acquisition did their bit and then a more general technical interview with some team future team members and after a thumbs up there I send them a take home test that should take them a couple of hours but they have a full week to complete it.

Quite often they then magically disappear never to be heard from again and I considered flipping it all around and have talent acquisition send the test first and only interviewing those who actually delivered something.

In my case though if the candidate couldn’t do this test there is no way they could actually do the job, but on the flipside of that I’ve had some people in the past be up front about never having worked with the technology before but still wanting to try and they literally went and learnt it in that time and delivered something and showing aptitude and so I rolled the dice on them and it’s worked out well where I likely would not have given them a second look had I not interviewed them first.

So as much as it’s a catch 22 I think chatting to people first and seeing what they are all about informs your decisions a bit more than purely looking at results of a test, but I’m also looking at this from an infrastructure perspective rather than a pure development one.

My take away from this is you don't have a one size fits all approach and you are refining the process as you go.
You're also giving people a chance.

Where I am now, I have 2 juniors in my team and one of them would definitely not pass a straight up take home test. I didn't hire her, I found her here but she's a great developer.
She often picks the more challenging tasks, gets maybe 80% there and needs a bit of help polishing her code up.

If she'd been funneled through any of these traditional interviews, I wouldn't have her. You'd likely have looked at her take home and said nope.
That's my worry. It's not just about me getting a job with DVT or whoever. It's how we are losing very talented people because of our rigid interview processes.

 

[Priapus]

My take away from this is you don't have a one size fits all approach and you are refining the process as you go.
You're also giving people a chance.

Where I am now, I have 2 juniors in my team and one of them would definitely not pass a straight up take home test. I didn't hire her, I found her here but she's a great developer.
She often picks the more challenging tasks, gets maybe 80% there and needs a bit of help polishing her code up.

If she'd been funneled through any of these traditional interviews, I wouldn't have her. You'd likely have looked at her take home and said nope.
That's my worry. It's not just about me getting a job with DVT or whoever. It's how we are losing very talented people because of our rigid interview processes.

On the flip side; sometimes we hire a developer who did well in tech interview and never gave them a test. Only to find out just how bad they were at their job once hired. We had that at my last company.

 

[SauRoNZA]

My take away from this is you don't have a one size fits all approach and you are refining the process as you go.
You're also giving people a chance.

Where I am now, I have 2 juniors in my team and one of them would definitely not pass a straight up take home test. I didn't hire her, I found her here but she's a great developer.
She often picks the more challenging tasks, gets maybe 80% there and needs a bit of help polishing her code up.

If she'd been funneled through any of these traditional interviews, I wouldn't have her. You'd likely have looked at her take home and said nope.
That's my worry. It's not just about me getting a job with DVT or whoever. It's how we are losing very talented people because of our rigid interview processes.

Yeah my test is structured in a multi-tier fashion with kind of “must haves”, “nice to haves” and then bonus points of sorts.

To date I’ve not found any single place you could simply download or copy and paste the whole solution and maybe just minor parts of it and that in itself is a test because you’ll need an understanding or learning ability to make it fit.

I also implore people to work against a repo and submit it with all their commits and not just the final one and see how they think and where they got stuck.

It’s also open for them asking for help, but very few ever do but those questions often show their insight as well if they don’t strictly understood the brief or want to do it in a way I maybe didn’t think of etc.

Like you said I do want to give people a chance and it’s more about how they approach things than the outright delivery at the end.

 

[lkpat]

If she'd been funneled through any of these traditional interviews, I wouldn't have her. You'd likely have looked at her take home and said nope.

Then it sounds like you're the inflexible one.
Remember, soft skills are as important as technical skills and how you handle pressure is more important for the long haul than how quickly you can Google.

There are so many approaches to solving a problem with code that there's no one size fits all. I'm more interested in how you approach a problem and how you handle pressure - I.e. how confident in your own ability you are - than whether you can fix something in 1.5 hours.

The technical assessment weeds out the 10% of candidates who rev up their CV out of proportion.