As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume – about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you’ll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count – a lot.
Let’s not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won’t compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme’s concerns, as it should be.
Except I’m not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.
Ah, right, the proxy evaluation that’s so famously effective. Lol
So true. At the same time, this happens because a lot of hiring managers don’t know intimately what the job actually does, so they resort to cookie-cutter interview techniques.
I stopped sitting in on interviews at my old job. Everyone that I thought was a great interview ended up being a shitty employee.
If only you could use ChatGPT during an interview the same way as when you’re employed. Then everyone would finally recognize how outstanding you are
Most people can do most jobs.
Companies shouldn’t legally be allowed to be this selective.
Interview: “reverse this binary tree with an algorithmic efficiency of O(1)”
Job: “The marketing team would like you to indent this button by 10 pixels”
production code: “hehe this is running at polynomial scaling”
put a triple the height column right there - luck to get an interview in the first place. You’re lucky if an actual human reads your CV nowadays, instead of an AI fishing for keywords
I’m interviewing people right now and I feel like it’s actually the opposite. I know for a lot of folks this is true, and I’ve been through those interviews, but fuck, I would love if I could find somebody who is just on par with the interview questions and could just answer them all satisfactorily, because that’s what we actually need.
The more HR takes over the interview process, the more important getting past HR becomes than doing the job.
Add another column labelled “knowing the right people” with the bar so large the other two are blips.
Also just being liked by the interviewer. For my current job I had an interview of about 90min, and basically just had a rather one-sided chat with the two guys. They seemed to like me, just let me talk and the next day I had the contract draft in my email.
I certainly did not excel at anything during the interview.
So true! Out of the five jobs I got over my career, three were from referrals.
I came here to say that. Who you know makes the other two criteria become irrelevant.
At my work they openly mention that 80% of their hires are from referrals. And I’m not talking about a little unknown company. They have more than 10,000 employees. I’m one of the 20%.
However, I only got my first job because I knew a VP at that company.
Same
sobs in social anxiety
A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don’t make them a bad coworker. I don’t think I agree with that. Your job isn’t just the stuff you like. Organization, prioritization, collaborating and interacting with your coworkers, attending meetings and making useful contributions, just generally not being a dick…all of those are your job. Interviews often take place after they’re already convinced that you have the required background, so they’re largely interested in discovering whether you’re a good chemistry match for the team.
Can’t really speak to grueling tech interviews though. That’s a whole different category of thing.
I get this, and being good at customer service helps a lot in interviews.
But on the other hand it’s really fucked up how we are all expected to go to work and always be pleasant when most of us don’t want to be there and are only there so they don’t become homeless. So I don’t care if my coworkers are pissy, it’s healthy to act how you feel.
At 18 years old US society puts a gun to our heads and says “work or die”, with no guarentee of being able to find work that pays for a life.
On the one hand the way corporations expect loyalty and devotion all the time in return for a very small percentage of their profits being paid out to us as salary sucks. On the other, having to work if you want to eat is just kind of…life? Not saying we couldn’t work on something better as a society, but there’s been very few people at any point in human history who didn’t have to work hard to survive. I’m glad that I get to at least do soulless work in an office which is mostly just boring instead of hard labor or something actively dangerous.
Nobody is saying work isn’t required, but if we only forced people to pay off the debt their existence incurred most people would probably retire before 40
I think for many people it has to do with nervousness. Also power dynamics. When you already have the job, and especially after being there for a couple months, getting on with your coworkers is easy and discussions aren’t awkward usually. A random stranger doing an interview that decides whether or not you become homeless puts pressure on people, and they dont know anything about their personality. Should I joke, what do they find funny, do they find that unprofessional, am I being to quiet, do I need to ask more questions, should I bother asking any.
A few weeks after working with Becky I know the exact number of questions to ask her and how we mesh/joke intertwine etc.
Power dynamics is definitely part of it, and I’ve found that I have much better luck in interviews when I treat them as a conversation rather than just being grilled. It’s easier to do in your 40s than in your 20s though.
Yeah, I’m 35 now and I find myself doing better if I just treat them as a casual gathering but I struggle sometimes with not acting extremely mature at all times. I’m not saying unprofessional things, but I will joke, or laugh to often for some people. Had one that someone called me out for having to stand up a bottle that had liquid in it with a screw on lid. Can’t remember what the product was but I had a bit of an ADHD moment or something where I just figured, that might leak at some point, and stood it up and one of the interviews asked “did you have to do that?”. I laughed it off but it seems a strange thing to ask me when looking back at it.
The problem with that analysis is that the simple skill checklists used by HR workers who don’t even understand what the terms mean are woefully bad at assessing people’s job fitness. If you have ABC but not XYZ it doesn’t matter if you invented ABC, those glorified hall monitors won’t let you interview. But they will if you just lie on the form, knowing you can convince the actual manager that you know ABC inside out and can learn XYZ in five minutes.
This couldn’t be more true for my job. My last job had so many moving parts that we never weren’t under water. My current employer has things so segmented that I’m encouraging friends at the old place to jump ship by telling them how easy things can be when you have proper leadership.
I’d rather present it as a non-overlapping Venn diagram. It’s not the level, those are different skills completely
At some point you’ll need to know the basic syntax of some programing language.
deleted by creator
Hardest interview I ever had was a job where I worked the least. Second-most lucrative.
