What do interviews look like now

What do interviews look like now

Times are changing, the IT industry is changing. The big IT players left, and with them went the standards, top specialists and workplaces. The ratio of vacancies to resumes is depressing, everything looks like a competition for budget places in top universities.

At the moment, I am a .Net team leader with the need to recruit good specialists to my team for a new project. For several long months, I never managed to assemble a team for a new project, and this prompted me to think about whether we are doing everything right. We are also responsible for the technical interview of a new project technician with senior level experience. The votes FOR and AGAINST after the interview are split in half, and a problem arises from this. All those candidates that I liked, tech leaders did not like, and vice versa. I will describe several cases of interviews with the following refusal.

The first case

Our HR talks about the company, but doesn’t talk about the technology stack and practices in the development team. Next, he asks general questions, sends the candidate’s resume and description to us, and invites him to an interview. The candidate has good experience in something that is not applicable in the new project. We did not know this until now. interview. The result is as follows. I am in favor of a candidate who knows and understands what he is doing, knows how to implement the assigned tasks. But with a slightly truncated fork of zp due to lack of experience in the technologies we use; with the hope that he will quickly grasp everything and get involved in the work process. Techlid is against because there is no experience in technology. At the same time, he is not interested in the general level of the candidate. Refusal, lost another good specialist.

The second case

Based on previous experience, HR talks about the company and the technology stack and practices, asks questions about their knowledge, provides a resume and description, and invites to an interview. The candidate has good experience in microservices, knows what and how to implement, can imagine a description of the implementation of something new for him, understands the nuances that should be taken into account. Result. I am for the candidate, I liked everything, he will quickly get a job. Tehlid against with wordsDoes not know the base well“. Indeed, the candidate blocked a couple of questions. But he blocked them banally due to the fact that he rarely used them in practice and had already forgotten what they were for. To understand what kind of questions were asked by the technician.” You know about multithreading and synchronization, then describe in depth the work of the Thread class”, “Describe the principle of operation of DLR and the generation of objects in GC”. Honestly, even I would not be able to answer these questions right away and most likely I would be confused anyway, because no longer understood why we needed them.We use TPL like many to implement multitasking, and native threads are rarely used for new projects now, but the “know-it-all” techlid thought it was the base and should be known by all .

The third case

One more candidate, first HR round, then transfer to us. Unfortunately, I was on vacation at the time and did not participate in those. interview. I was replaced by the team leader of the old project, who told me about the interview. Rejection of the technical lead due to the lack of pet projects and the impossibility of evaluating the practical part. The candidate said he doesn’t have time for pet projects due to workload at his current job. I suggested that the technician sketch a couple of simple tasks for live coding, if he had a desire to evaluate the practical part. We do not consider test tasks, because I try to respect the personal time of the candidates, and at the moment the test tone. We have taken into account, the technician has prepared tasks for live coding, let’s move on.

The fourth case

Again, we have a candidate for those. interview. Inundation of the tech leader with questions about “BaziThe candidate was a bit nervous and I can understand. Writing code is a bit, let’s say, an intimate thing. Any programmer writes code alone in a state of concentration. And here are unnatural conditions for him, as if you are writing homework under the watchful eye of a strict father, who gives a slap on the back of the head for any mistake. And here for the first time I saw the tasks prepared by the tech leader. This is a set of tasks for algorithms with leetcode of an intermediate level. How does it apply of our web microservices, where algorithms of this level are not used, only a technician knows. Conquered his excitement, the candidate wrote a working algorithm and it was quite good. But the technician rejected him again. This time for two reasons.The base is limping“, yes, on top of that”The algorithm works slowlyAnother rejection. At this point, I doubted the adequacy of techlid. Honestly, among the cool developers, even in our company, I know one or two people who periodically write algorithms to support brains. But again, these are units. the prerogative of large companies a la Yandex, where a separate stage of the technical interview has been set up for this, and there it can be justified by real use in their practice.

As a result, we now have:

  1. There is a huge shortage of workers in the team.

  2. We constantly do not invest in regular deadlines.

  3. Questions from the superiors about a large load and results that are slowly being achieved.

  4. An “all-knowing” techie who is being pressured by his superiors, who is putting pressure on me.

After that, it’s funny to hear from the recruiting community that there is a shortage of specialists on the market, they can’t find a good middle-senior for months, and at the same time, under their threshold, there is a horde of shy and not-so-good guys who want to work in the galleys. This is a kind of Schrödinger’s cat in the world of recruiting. Cries about the lack of specialists, and for one vacancy there are 10 or more resumes.

Further, for the sake of interest, I decided to understand what is currently happening on the market, and what we are doing wrong in hiring, since I have been in my current position for 2 years, and quite a lot has changed during this period. I updated my resume and went on a wonderful job search. I was interested in n companies and offered me those. interview. I will bring out several interesting cases from these interviews.

The first case

The HR of the company talks about the company, talks about the technology stack, asks questions from experience and invites to a technical interview. I connect to the interview and do not see anyone. I sit alone for 10 minutes and some employee flies into the conference. Without any idea, he starts throwing technical questions at me. I answered in a state of mild surprise. Then there was an interesting dialogue with this employee, let’s call him Vasya.

Vasya: “Can you show your code, pet projects there?”
Me: “I don’t have time for pet projects right now, and the ones I have are no longer relevant for my current level.”
Vasya: “Then show your code at your current place of work.”
Me: “Um, do you know what an NDA is?”
Vasya: “Yes, and what’s the problem?”
Me: “Should I explain why I can’t show this code? Maybe livecoding is better?”
Vasya: “Everything is clear, I cannot appreciate your knowledge without your working code, all the best.”

Something reminded me of it, but I don’t remember what… After this small incident, I received a rejection from HR with a question, maybe I didn’t like something in the interview. Every employee should know the NDA.

Case two (typical)

The initial interview from those. specialists. “In general, we use fresh technologies, but sometimes we have to dig into old frameworks. And we don’t have devops, we do everything ourselves. And we don’t have testers, we test everything ourselves. And we don’t have analysts, we analyze everything ourselves. And we are looking for a specialist who will bring something new to our project.” At this stage, I understood what kind of project and company were waiting for me.

Case three (still typical)

Scheduled a technical interview without any prelude and company story, without even asking if there is an opportunity at the scheduled time. A wild surprise of HR, why I don’t know what projects their company implements, it dropped a link to a business card site, which has nothing but a business domain and a name. Technical interview, a very colorful technician greets me with a phrase like “Hello, Noname, what kind of fortunes did you come to us with, what are you looking for, what kind of person are you?” At this point, I thought that instead of mentioning the .Net base, I should have read a couple of articles on how to log in. Then began the typical senseless and cruel one and a half hour encyclopedic violence, attempts to catch at least the slightest ignorance. It was especially amusing after the phrase “I’ll ask you a couple of questions, you don’t need any encyclopedic knowledge, answer as you know.” After such a bunch of questions, the answers to which are not used in practice in 90% of cases, for the sake of interest, I asked a senior developer in another team a couple of such tricky questions and was sent with the phrase “I’m Google to you, I forgot it a long time ago. Unhook, I have an integration unrealized.”

After several dozen more such interviews, I realized that the market has not changed once, but at the same time it is not at all similar to what it was literally 2-3 years ago. As before, there are companies in which the applicant is interviewed as a state employee. exams, checking his memory and jagged answers from the nth interview. As before, there are companies that first drop you a test task without even trying to talk about the company and get to know the applicant. As before, there are attempts to crush the applicant with his authority and knowledge with an unclear purpose. As before, please solve abstract tasks that do not belong to real work. But now there are very few companies that know how to attract. There are very few companies that will tell you right away what you are signing up for. There are very few adequate interviewers and the right interview culture. There are very few interviewing specialists of the company, who check the skills of solving specific tasks and understanding of implementation, and not perfect knowledge of theory.

In the dry residue we have:

  1. Companies that have adequate interview standards and are looking for specialists to solve tasks have either left or already have such specialists, and they, in turn, know what is currently on the market, so they do not leave their positions.

  2. Due to the departure of companies that set a high standard, the local “Horns and Hooves” have a kind of monopoly on the labor market, so it makes no sense to somehow improve recruiting methods.

  3. Through the remaining companies, in which interviews are conducted according to the type of exam, a beautiful picture emerges, already described in the comment to another post about “idiots looking for idiots” interviews. Such interviews always reminded me of either university exams, or the long-passed EDI, where a cram of the same material is needed just to pass the exam, and then the typical “Forget everything you learned…” takes place.

  4. An insurmountable threshold of entry for inexperienced, but smart and really smart guys who are starting their career in it.

  5. The culture of recruiting, which was not in all companies anyway, but now in very isolated cases, is lost. Disrespect for the applicant, for his time and work, personal dislike for the applicant, the idea of ​​himself as “Second after Google”, when in reality it turns out to be completely different, and everything in this spirit.

  6. Mythical “BASE“, the idea of ​​which is different for everyone, depending on the interlocutor specialist. As a result, there is a search for a specialist who knows the same one”Base“, which the interviewer knows, rather than searching for a developer, knows how to skillfully solve the tasks assigned to him.

I have seen many excellent practitioners who know how to implement projects well, but do not engage in constant sharpening of theory. They pull up the theory at the moments of implementation of new tasks that they were still performing. I myself am one of those, since the knowledge of any specialist comes in proportion to the new challenge for him. At the same time, the hiring itself, depending on the language and technology, does not differ much, whether it is Java, C#, any other language. The lack of specialists is due to the incorrect search for specialists themselves. For an interview, a specialist, even with experience, needs to allocate time for preparation in weeks. Mention “Base“, terminology, mechanisms that he has not used in practice for years. At the same time, after receiving an offer and starting a new job, the specialist will understand that this”BASE“, terminologies and mechanisms have nothing to do with work in a new place and will simply perform tasks using my experience. I almost never met questions based on real tasks and practice at interviews. Only once did I hear a question about how I would implemented some real mechanism, but as a result, no matter how the specialist answered, no matter how he showed his practical experience, this was not a criterion for selection.

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