I agree with you, Nick. If you wanna check how an applicant thinks, you are on the right track. Testing an applicant's ability to solve problems or their ability to design a complex architecture that corresponds to your business demands is 100% justified.
What I am talking about is to standardize the interview process for software developers, so developers know what is expected from them to know.
Today, we have chaos. Each company has its own standard: in one company, they ask memory base questions which you need to answer in few seconds, in another company, they give you a 4 hour task before you say hello to them, in another company, they ask you about simple things and if you fail to answer one of them questions, they end up considering you "below the demanded level" although you have 10+ experience in many other companies.
(I can always ask you a SIMPLE question to which the answer you might have forgot..)
One more thing about your last point (paragraph), I learned all what I know on the job. I was accepted as an intern, then I got promoted all the way to senior in about 4-5 years. You would agree as well that a GOOD developer is one that "learns on demand". We are humans after all, we are not memory machines. I bet you forgot lots of things that you have learned just 1 year ago. We forget the code that we write, don't we? We forget code because we write lots of code, and we forget knowledge because we already know too much of it.
Someone, someday, will figure it out. They will figure out how to shape up a fair job interview for both the company and the applicant. All I want is to contribute to that.
I'm with you on that. I forget stuff all the time. Sometimes I feel like I am developing Alzheimer's with the amount of stuff I can't recall. However, one thing I've noticed is that my fundamentals are still very strong. I don't do well on interviews if I go in cold without brushing up on stuff. And, it sucks to have to learn everything all over starting from my first CS course - (I've been coding professionally for 20 years now!).
I have preferred project based interviews as they are more realistic. However, those are a bit tricky as you may not be able to gauge everything. On few of my recent startups, I paid candidates to work on a problem that was relevant to the business. I liked that approach as both sides were gaining something and nobody was taken advantage of. Also, if it turned out relatively well, I was able to use their code.
I don't think Software Engineering can be compared to other professions. What we do is pretty unique and things change daily in our field which is important to be on top of if you want to stay competitive. The scope of work for most of the other professions is fairly limited, so I think the interviews can be standardized there. In the 90's and 00's, certification was a big thing, but I think that has sort of phased out.
You are right that we should be learning-on-demand, but one can do that only if they have strong fundamentals. Traditionally, this was evaluated through your transcripts and GPA, but that is not a good metric. So, how else can we evaluate a candidate in 30-60 minutes?
Anyway, I like the discussion on this thread. Thanks for starting it.
I also prefer home based tasks/projects, but they don't usually pay around here..
Fundamentals are a must know, I agree totally, the rest should be "need to know".
I've been doing this for 5 years and I already feel like I got a bad case of the Alzheimer's , I cannot imagine what would happen after 20 years!!!
I hope you'll keep on posting on Youtube, I just started following you there. Very interesting stuff, especially that I just started focusing on React.
Thanks! Let me know if there's a particular topic you'd like to learn about.
Once a company had me work on a distributed cloud storage (like dropbox) that encrypted files into 96 chunks which were stored across the web on 96 different machines with redundancies. The idea was that you give some space on your machine to get some space on the cloud (aka other people's machines). They said to do my best work and take as long as I want - it took me 3 weeks to deliver something that was production ready. They loved the project and called me in only to say that oh we don't have that role anymore, instead they made an offer for an SDET role. I'm glad that place went out of business recently!
I've worked with people who've been in the industry for over 40-50 years and they're definitely a huge inspiration, so I think there's hope for us. :D
Well, I am fairly new at React, so just about anything is interesting to me.
One little thing I would ask for is that in your React video, we could hear you type kind of loudly. If you can push away your microphone from your keyboard, I think the viewers would really appreciate it :)
Thanks for the feedback. I will need to figure this out. I had increased the gain on my mic since last time I got feedback that my voice was a bit low. The keyboard on my macbook is also a bit loud with the force feedback. I might need to consider typing in chunks and turning off the sound and introduce background music (but that'll work only in large chunks, not every 10 seconds :D).
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I agree with you, Nick. If you wanna check how an applicant thinks, you are on the right track. Testing an applicant's ability to solve problems or their ability to design a complex architecture that corresponds to your business demands is 100% justified.
What I am talking about is to standardize the interview process for software developers, so developers know what is expected from them to know.
Today, we have chaos. Each company has its own standard: in one company, they ask memory base questions which you need to answer in few seconds, in another company, they give you a 4 hour task before you say hello to them, in another company, they ask you about simple things and if you fail to answer one of them questions, they end up considering you "below the demanded level" although you have 10+ experience in many other companies.
(I can always ask you a SIMPLE question to which the answer you might have forgot..)
One more thing about your last point (paragraph), I learned all what I know on the job. I was accepted as an intern, then I got promoted all the way to senior in about 4-5 years. You would agree as well that a GOOD developer is one that "learns on demand". We are humans after all, we are not memory machines. I bet you forgot lots of things that you have learned just 1 year ago. We forget the code that we write, don't we? We forget code because we write lots of code, and we forget knowledge because we already know too much of it.
Someone, someday, will figure it out. They will figure out how to shape up a fair job interview for both the company and the applicant. All I want is to contribute to that.
I'm with you on that. I forget stuff all the time. Sometimes I feel like I am developing Alzheimer's with the amount of stuff I can't recall. However, one thing I've noticed is that my fundamentals are still very strong. I don't do well on interviews if I go in cold without brushing up on stuff. And, it sucks to have to learn everything all over starting from my first CS course - (I've been coding professionally for 20 years now!).
I have preferred project based interviews as they are more realistic. However, those are a bit tricky as you may not be able to gauge everything. On few of my recent startups, I paid candidates to work on a problem that was relevant to the business. I liked that approach as both sides were gaining something and nobody was taken advantage of. Also, if it turned out relatively well, I was able to use their code.
I don't think Software Engineering can be compared to other professions. What we do is pretty unique and things change daily in our field which is important to be on top of if you want to stay competitive. The scope of work for most of the other professions is fairly limited, so I think the interviews can be standardized there. In the 90's and 00's, certification was a big thing, but I think that has sort of phased out.
You are right that we should be learning-on-demand, but one can do that only if they have strong fundamentals. Traditionally, this was evaluated through your transcripts and GPA, but that is not a good metric. So, how else can we evaluate a candidate in 30-60 minutes?
Anyway, I like the discussion on this thread. Thanks for starting it.
I also prefer home based tasks/projects, but they don't usually pay around here..
Fundamentals are a must know, I agree totally, the rest should be "need to know".
I've been doing this for 5 years and I already feel like I got a bad case of the Alzheimer's , I cannot imagine what would happen after 20 years!!!
I hope you'll keep on posting on Youtube, I just started following you there. Very interesting stuff, especially that I just started focusing on React.
Thanks! Let me know if there's a particular topic you'd like to learn about.
Once a company had me work on a distributed cloud storage (like dropbox) that encrypted files into 96 chunks which were stored across the web on 96 different machines with redundancies. The idea was that you give some space on your machine to get some space on the cloud (aka other people's machines). They said to do my best work and take as long as I want - it took me 3 weeks to deliver something that was production ready. They loved the project and called me in only to say that oh we don't have that role anymore, instead they made an offer for an SDET role. I'm glad that place went out of business recently!
I've worked with people who've been in the industry for over 40-50 years and they're definitely a huge inspiration, so I think there's hope for us. :D
Well, I am fairly new at React, so just about anything is interesting to me.
One little thing I would ask for is that in your React video, we could hear you type kind of loudly. If you can push away your microphone from your keyboard, I think the viewers would really appreciate it :)
Thanks for the feedback. I will need to figure this out. I had increased the gain on my mic since last time I got feedback that my voice was a bit low. The keyboard on my macbook is also a bit loud with the force feedback. I might need to consider typing in chunks and turning off the sound and introduce background music (but that'll work only in large chunks, not every 10 seconds :D).