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Discussion on: How I Evaluate You in a Code Interview

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Thomas Cayne

I wholly agree with you. I have 30+ years of software development experience. Throughout I would classify the best and highly skilled developers I've met to be non-chatty. Brilliant people! Some prefer to locked themselves in a darkened room with their headsets on with a soothing, bubbling fish tank in the background. They will fail this soft of interview. Do a Google search for the article "Developers rise against whiteboard interviews" and what David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails said.

I failed an interview a month ago. I learned a tremendously important lesson though: interviewers tend to ask meaningful questions. There were 4 interviewers asking me Angularistic questions. They all had papers in front of them. I had a mind block. I know my stuff. The "how" wasn't satisfactory to them. They insisted on "so..what you call it? What do you call tat term? or What do you call that life-cycle?" Who cares!!!x10 A switch went off in my mind: "All interview I do from now on I AM the interviewer. I'm the one who knows what I can do. I'm evaluating you. Just because you're seeking to hire me doesn't mean you're the best interviewer. You have a requirement and I am here to fulfill it."

I'd like to see interviewers put their stupid papers and notes away and talk. Interviewees can't bring in notes or search Google/SO. When I started programming in the 80s we never had these linting tools and intellisense to guide us. In 1990 when I was a freelance developer I once spent 3 days hunting down a compilation error in a desktop application. How could your problem-solving interview-technique tackle that one?

All this talk about how you interview is simple Applied opinion. It's not even a golden rule because there are lots of holes in all interview processes. It's not even a science. I've literally seen, before my VERY eyes, interviewers who laugh at candidates after interviewing them and how they fail miserably. They would laugh about the content of some resumes: "What? This is not even a skill, etc". None could deter them to treat them as themselves. We all want a better world. The questions are: what does that world look like? How are we going to get there? What are you willing to give up, ergo, your way (opinion) to achieve it?