I've built multiple SaaS, and some are used by multinationals. Yet, I fail miserably at tricky interview questions. In this article, I'm going to s...
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That just sounds like a bad interview. Lately I've been conducting a few interviews at my company and the primary focus isn't what you know but how you employ that knowledge. We have a somewhat tricky technical part but we're just looking for your process. We honestly don't care if you finish or not, rather were you able to communicate the issue, do you know how to debug your errors, can you think through a problem.
Trick question interviews are just lazy interviewers honestly. Being really good at finding any answer is more valuable than just knowing a handful of trick questions.
That sounds like much better interview experience. I only hope you'll make that expectation clear to the candidate. Otherwise, they will still feel obligated to finish and will be hesitant to ask questions. The candidate must know that you're testing communication skills and not the ability to finish.
It was a very bad interview indeed. Luckily, there are also good ones. I've blogged about that as well: dev.to/smeijer/how-i-got-a-job-off....
That flexbox question sent me down an interesting rabbit hole with
align-self: I could have sworn that that was the fix for that type of situation, but that only works for cross-axis items. The way to do this without an extra container is to setmargin-left: autoon the item you need to be pushed over. I ONLY know this because I came across it in Josh Comeau's CSS course. It's handy, but arguably trivia/epherma.This is the absolute worst interview experience I've read about. Tests like these cater to those willing to disregard requirements and take shortcuts. Because I don't see how anyone could score well without browsing for the answer in another tab.
A few days ago after having an interview with one recruiter, the CTO, and someone who was apparently a co-founder, I was asked to complete a 210 minutes (maximum time) test in codility. I am mentioning this here just because from my point of view (despite they are not multiple choice in general) codility tests are pretty similar to what is very well exposed as a concern in the post.
I didn't have time to dig into the test during the week because I was busy with my actual job tasks (I am looking for my next professional challenge). After that, the weekend came up, but I was doubting if dedicating 210 minutes of my relax/family time would be totally fair.
They pushed me on Monday. Kind of quoting: "Hey, we are kind of wrapping up the candidates for the position, did you had time to look at the codility test?"
So, after thinking deeply about the idea I created in my mind about the company based on the interview we had, and the pressure to work in a non-paid 3.5 hours depersonalized test, I decided to abandon the selection process.
I feel in general that we are obligated to show discomfort and struggle for fair recruiting processes for all of us. We should stand and get together to push companies to a more human and empathic process when they and we are looking for a win-win relationship in the future.
Every single one of these questions are HORRIBLE questions by which to evaluate devs.
Yeah, definitely. And these weren't even the worst. 😅
Great post.
I’ve run into similar types of questions and quizzes.
I hope those companies found who they were looking for.
If they were looking for people specialized in interviews, I'm sure they did. Universities like Stanford have classes dedicated to learning how to pass the technical interview.
web.stanford.edu/class/cs9/
I laughed out loud a couple of times! 😂 How do you honestly come up with stuff like this? 🤔 🤷♂️
It's crazy, right?