We do, but it isn’t efficient. There are two ways. One is to hire people you know or someone you trust knows and has worked with before…“Andy can do this, I worked with Andy at ACME and he architected a very similar solution. Bright guy, hard worker, gets along well with others, good cultural fit.” That’s probably the best way.
The other way is to send boatloads of contractors through (who you often interview, but don’t go through much of a process), hiring the ones after a few months who know their shit and are a good fit.
Hiring a disrespectful jerk is likely to backfire when other people don’t want to work with him and one of the female engineers goes to HR with a harassment complaint. Disrespectful jerks - unless they are brilliant - are more trouble than they are worth.
I once talked to a fellow who had a certain IT buzzword on his resume. I knew a bit about the subject and was tasked to find out if he also did.
After failing miserably, he explained that he had put that word on his resume because he had kinda read a book about it.
He also referred to the vendor by a name it had dropped 2 years earlier.
Then there are tech whizzes that can not be put in front of a non-IT nerd. You may be able to find a niche for such a person, but this was a consulting company - we send people out to client sites to work under client direction.
Yes, there are reasons for interviews.
The 24 yr old with a 3 page technical resume is almost always a giggle. Hi there, Arthur Andersen!
That’s not being a jerk. That’s being a programmer. Unless he says it to their faces. A jerk is someone who, when someone tries to give him a spec, rejects it and says he knows better. Or who berates team members. Or who secretly rewrites someones code because he can do it better.
I’ve done hiring for developers, QA testers, and project managers. We usually have a few people that conduct the interview and we discuss the candidate later to see if we all agree to hire them.
We completely ignore most of the pat interview questions like, “What’s your biggest weakness?” or “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” Everyone has memorized answers to those and they are worthless.
There is always some technical portion relevant to the position like writing code on a whiteboard, coming up with test cases or getting a basic framework of a project based on a vague description. This way we can weed out the people that inflated their resumes.
Then we ask about their past experiences to get an idea of what they really know. Then based on those answers, we hit them with the hypotheticals - “How would you handle this situtation?” “What would you do if this happened?” “What do you think is the best way to solve this problem?”
Except these hypotheticals are actual things that we’ve experienced and had to deal with in the past. This helps us figure out if they have common sense and a work ethic similar to our own. And to make sure they aren’t jerks.
I won’t hire someone I dislike no matter how good they are. There is nothing we do that is so critical that I will force myself to put up with an asshole to get it done. I don’t mind taking the second best person for a job if it means my day-to-day is that much less stressful. I have never seen anyone that was so far ahead of the pack that I would be upset if we had to settle on the next person.
It has only ever happened once to me and that was more a “design a class for this purpose, declare what should be static and what should be references and discuss why you made those choices”. “Being given a problem, take a few days to do it in your spare time, hand it in and if good enough get asked to come in to discuss your code” is by far the most common technique.
Everyone here seems to be concentrating on the employer. I see it as just as important for the applicant, to find out more about the company, philosophy and environment before deciding to go further.
So, it leaves me wondering. We all know that asshole at work - if they’re really a jerk, and the overarching plan of an interview is to weed out all jerks, how do these people get hired? And since we all know the answer to that - either they BSed it and bluffed their way in, the interviewer is like-minded, or the interviewer is simply incompetent:
If all interviews were perfect, where would the jerks work? Together at Jerks ‘R’ Us? Do we really believe all jerks would reform themselves? Is it good to use such a heavy method as employment to try and reform jerks when money is necessary to live in this world?
Yes, one part of the interview process is to weed out the jerks. It does weed out some jerks. Do you think closing your eyes and picking a resume out of the middle of the pile would be better?
Everybody who gets a face to face interview is someone the hiring manager believes could do the job based on their resume, if their resume isn’t complete bullshit. Another part of the interview process is to find out of the resume has any relationship to the facts. If you put on your resume that you work on flux capacitors, and the job is to work on flux capacitors, you better be prepared to talk about flux capacitors in the interview. Yes, you can bullshit them into thinking you know a lot more than you really do. But some people don’t just puff up and spin their skills, they outright make shit up.
I actually had that happen to me. I went in for an interview, and after a while they said, “Oh, I see you have experience using application X. That’s great, it’s not needed but a good bonus.” And I’m like, “Uh, no I don’t, I’ve never heard of application X, but I do have experience with Z, Q and Y.” Then they go, “Buuuuut, it says on your resume right here that you do.” Turns out the recruiter had edited my resume without telling me to add in that bullet point because it was in the job listing. Asshole.
The point of the interview is that you’re going to have to sit across from this person for the next year or more, so if you can’t stand them maybe the position isn’t a good fit. That goes for both sides. If you can’t at least fake being a decent human being for a couple of hours then what good are you?
It’s worth noting that this isn’t an either/or thing. It’s not like people only have a certain number of points to put into either technical expertise or social skills. There are plenty of people who offer both.
This happened to me. I wrote a class (software component, not educational class) for a new application. I checked it in and it passed QA. Perhaps it wasn’t the most elegant code, of the type you would expect an advanced doctoral student with unlimited time to produce, but it worked. Jerk comes along and thinks he can do better. He tried…and it broke a month later because he rewrote it wrong. Bug report comes straight to me because everyone “knows” that a wrote that component. I go into source control and verify that Jerk made a change without linking it with a change report or bug fix. I confront him. You could hear the shit hit the fan and splatter all over him.
This happened to me too. Recruiter tells me that the position that they are trying to get me onto is a bit above my experience, so may they falsify my resume? I say no. I go into the interview and start getting asked questions about things I haven’t done. Turns out that they were following my resume, which had about five years of fictional experience added on to it. I wrote a letter to the end company telling them why I couldn’t accept the position.
Do the hypotheticals usually have one “correct” answer, or are you more looking to confirm that the applicant has a reasonable grasp of the field? I know that in some environments, the answer to nearly every question is “Ask your supervisor”, while in others, you are expected to show more initiative in making your own decisions. The exact threshold where you need permission depends on the job, and most people can figure it out in the first few weeks. It’s not like most developers have a personality which places them at a specific location - they flex depending on the team.
On some teams, we were expected to fix stuff proactively before it became a problem. On others, changes were tightly controlled and even a spelling mistake on a menu header couldn’t be fixed without an official Change Request that had been approved by five different managers.
Elegant code? Doctoral student? A PhD student who spends time writing elegant code doesn’t understand what his job is - which is to graduate. My code was just good enough to the examples needed for my dissertation and no better. Two years after I graduated RCA called and wanted me to get involved in a grant proposal based on my stuff - and I said no flippin’ way.
Anyhow, you can’t always screen out jerks like your example, but a good interviewer might get a clue about him. (And I say him because of never run into women programmers who were jerks.)
Absolutely. Candidate who have bothered to look me up (I’m one of the few people here with a publication record) get brownie points from me. Plus you really don’t want to work at a place about to go out of business.
Sometimes - it depends on what position you are hiring for, whether the hiring manager is the guy who worked with “Andy” before.
If one of my old bosses called me up and said “you’d be a great fit for this job I have open” - I might interview because of an HR necessity, but chances are pretty good it would be a waste of time other than clicking off the box. My former boss knows me and my capabilities - she’d have to be really wow’d by an unknown.
First, it was Arthur Andersen
Then Andersen Consulting
It is now Accenture (don’t know if business practice is ongoing)
These people were infamous for hiring the top 10% of CS majors, sending them to school for 6 weeks and them sending them out as “Senior Consultants” - at $150/hr.
These were known as the “Arthur Andersen Children”, and I made a good deal of money coming in after them and cleaning up their messes.
Yes, 24 year olds with 3 page techie resumes. always a giggle.
