Anyone else feels technical rounds in interviews should be prohibited?
Posted by KnightWolf217@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 8 comments
As someone who has both given and taken interviews, I feel technical interviews are overused and badly affect the process, often defeating the purpose of the hiring.
Technical interviews often have targeted coding challenges which one barely encounters during his/her job. This creates a divide between people who are constantly spending time on coding challenges, and others who are a regular programmer. Due to this they end up shortlisting candidates who are geeks at programming, and arguably less experienced to real life scenarios. Ironically, they want someone with real life experience and also want someone who can solve geeky problems.
More importantly, the person getting interviewed gets nervous doing challenges in front of people during a job interview which is already tense enough. This highly affects their ability to solve the problem especially in a short duration. A normal programmer doesn't work with such short time frames let alone with people watching him like an owl.
The person getting interviewed would have a qualification and experience, which naturally denotes his capability to do programming. I strongly feel technical interviews should be limited and focus should be on the person's achievements and profile, and how he/she fits in into the role.
AKostur@reddit
No. Leetcode/hackerrank/etc problems should be prohibited. Technical things definitely should be interviewed on.
jack-of-some@reddit
Roughly 20% of my interview is live coding. The live coding questions are simplified versions of the kind of coding my engineers do daily. The remaining interviews are conversations. Some may be a bit technical and others are less so.
I think that's plenty fair. Maybe I'm bring overly selective and picking only the kind of people who can do pair programming and present their work to an audience. That's fine by me.
parc@reddit
“Trust me, I totally know Java!”
Yeah, no thanks. I’ll continue to give technical interviews via pair programming.
732@reddit
Strong disagree.
Software engineering is a technical profession. A technical interview is how an employer can vett a candidate for being able to do the job.
A technical interview round is also very telling of how you problem solve. What questions do you ask, what assumptions do you make, what tradeoffs do you debate.
Technical rounds are collaborative with a peer on the team. Leave an impression that you would be a good teammate.
ryuzaki49@reddit
What's the alternative?
a_printer_daemon@reddit
Buddy of mine told me that they gave him a chunk of one of their products systems with some issues they created. They wanted to see how well he would be able to diagnose issues in a controlled, but quite real setting.
jack-of-some@reddit
That still runs into the same issues OP is pointing out. The interviewee is being tested in front of someone else? What if they get nervous and can't think?
Loaatao@reddit
No, technical rounds are absolutely necessary but they should be testing candidates on the skills they would use on the job. For some folks, that’s reversing linked lists. For others, it’s a todo app in fact.