• There are real Jokes out there... (unregistered)

    The article in right in every point. Our tech screen is more oriented to finding out how the CV really corresponds to the person, and what is her attitude towards everything technical. We also are in the position (being EU work market what it is) of having to sell our tech landscape to them, and try to prove that we're not just another ERP byte-pushing mill. On the other, hand, there are Jokers and worse characters out there; our profession tends to attract, and sometimes create, such people. I personally witnessed an interview (3rd round, with our organizational coach - the tech round was "passed with notes") where the candidate could be described only as "Gollum": someone talented and capable, twisted and tortured by years of bad working environments; sadly, beyond recovery (without straight-out therapy). The memory still haunts me.

  • (nodebb)

    We-ell... I'd do a two-phase approach: first a really simple problem, FizzBuzz level or even simpler, to weed out actual jokers, because once you get them talking they'll bullshit through everything you can ask them without writing a single line of code. Yes, I had (thankfully, past tense) acquaintances like that, and no, they are not an exception, sadly. Then you actually start talking and trying to bring out the best out of them.

  • (nodebb) in reply to There are real Jokes out there...

    Ugh. Sometimes I think whether I am such a Gollum, but I have no measuring stick in the vicinity.

  • Brian Boorman (unregistered) in reply to Allexxann

    Easy test - does the rope "burns your skinses"?

  • (nodebb)

    I interviewed for a senior C programming position in 1993 for a performance-monitoring application. All three levels of technical questioning --- performance, C, operating system (VAX/VMS) --- happened simultaneously at one table, so I was facing three experts and trying not to be intimidated. The very first question was from the C expert, who simply wrote "char foo[10];" on the whiteboard and asked what it did. For about ten seconds they figured I was not only a joker but an incompetent one, because I just stood there speechless . . . but my confusion was due to wondering why they were asking such a kindergarten question. Fortunately I recovered and the interview quickly shifted gears to more complex topics. They explained that they were indeed trying to weed out people who knew nothing and tried to bluff their way into employment, a concept which was alien to me at the time. (Yes, I was hired, and it was a great place.)

  • Paul (unregistered)

    I think you are conflating a technical screen with a technical interview. A screen is designed to filter candidates out quickly before investing more time. The effort spent so far has been minimal (someone thought their application looked ok, maybe an HR screen happened to make sure expectations are aligned). It is explicitly to filter out the jokers, before longer, more in depth interviews happen with more nuance available. Screens should be fast to administer, with a simple rubric that leads to a binary pass/fail, and be trivial for actually qualified candidates to complete.

  • (nodebb)

    The smaller the company, the more likely that the "screen" and the "interview" are a single event.

  • (nodebb) in reply to dpm

    The 'char foo[10];' question may have caused your body language to scream, "Are they trying to trick me?" or "Why are you asking such a stupid question?" or something along those lines.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Brian Boorman

    You mean the hanging noose? Haven't touched it since making some time ago, so dunno.

  • Argle (unregistered) in reply to miquelfire

    I once was given an online test on C. It was clearly written in-house and was loaded down with C questions that were either nonsensical or the multiple choice answers had no correct choice. I knew only a few questions into the test that this was no company I wanted to work for.

  • Pag (unregistered)

    If you want to test three values for equality, you can't it do it this way in any language I know:

    board[temp1][temp2]==board[temp1][temp2+1]==board[temp1][temp2+2]

  • (author) in reply to Pag

    It would work if the board is full of booleans. Like, it's not a strict comparison, but it at least makes semantic sense.

  • Kleyguerth (github)

    Instructions unclear, used an AI to pick which candidate to hire and got the worse joker ever

  • (author) in reply to Kleyguerth

    Hiring Jared Leto was 100% a mistake. I hope your HR and legal departments are ready for what's about to happen.

  • Dev tool guy (unregistered)

    A number of years back, I picked up the habit of making my first question "can you tell me a bit about your background so I can make sure I'm asking the right type of questions?" That's the closest I get to "weeding". I do ask that in part to get a quick feel for if the person is remotely correct for the job (I've had it surface people grossly over qualified as often as under qualified) but the major reason I ask is because the first minute or two of someone talking can be hard to follow while my brain calibrates to any accents or background noise and I don't want to get the the technical stuff till that's finished and I can give them my full attention.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Pag

    you can do that in lots of languages, both newer and older than C/C++. you just can't do it in C/C++ and maybe ones derived from those (and @remy that wouldn't work in C/C++ even with booleans).

    C/C++ parsing of chained comparisons is as bad as the original basic handling of 2 + 3 * 4

    Addendum 2025-10-02 15:16: Addendum: And operator overloading has killed any hope of it ever being fixed.

  • (nodebb)

    I'll admit my interviews tend to start with "tell me where you're strong/weak" - with the admonishment to focus on the area we're interviewing for. At that point, I have some standard scenario type questions, but will drill into their areas of claimed expertise. I get a lot of candidates for DB Admin positions who say they're experts in "perf tuning" or "backup/restore" ... sadly, most attempts to drill into those get "I ran a wizard" or "I added an index and it sped up this one process".

    For the better candidates, we get into good conversations about various practices, the particulars of their choices, and sometimes general stories. For those who aren't quite so good - I finish the standard questions, but they usually get a "no" vote from me. Had one candidate reading me a checklist and had no idea how to deviate from it. :( A co-worker of mine interviewed one candidate who kept saying "this is an interview question" about some question asked. He was eventually told "yes, this is an interview - answer the question". I think after that, they went deep into his area of expertise - far beyond anything he knew about.

    I only had one case where the recruiter was trying to push someone on us again a couple months later. We didn't bite then because they had nearly no experience and we needed someone with much more. I think we did a cursory interview for the next pass to see if anything had changed, but ... Sadly, I think our choice of recruiters may have needed some revisiting as well, but that's a whole different issue. :)

  • Argle (unregistered)

    Dev tool guy said:

    A number of years back, I picked up the habit of making my first question "can you tell me a bit about your background so I can make sure I'm asking the right type of questions?"

    paschott said

    I'll admit my interviews tend to start with "tell me where you're strong/weak"

    The guy who hired me out of college weeded people out by asking them to show him something they personally wrote.

    It intrigues me to read the assorted comments on this site about how people conduct interviews to weed out the hopelessly incompetent. It's remarkably instructive.

  • Duke of New York (unregistered)

    Every interview seems to turn to the subject of how I got my scars.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Argle

    I clearly remember a story here about a guy who "personally wrote" some stuff and brought it to the interview. Turns out he stole someone else's github public repo and tried to erase all the pointers to the actual author (unsuccessfully). At least he was shot down immediately during cross-examination.

  • S.H. Panda (unregistered)

    (similar to what others already have said) When interviewing students, either for intern positions or recent graduates, I've felt that the best way to get an idea if they can code is to ask them to bring something they've written. Sure, they can cheat and post someone else's code, but so far I haven't had that happen. You either get someone who has their own hobby project which so far always have turned out to be great hires, or you get those that send in programming labs from university. In the latter category, you get those that have obviously just done the bare minimum and their code is badly structured and filled with "println", or you get those that have good-looking code and usually have things like exception-handling, code documentation etc. And that usually makes it very obvious who I'll recommend.

    Programming tests, I've had bad experiences with though. Doesn't really say if the person knows how to structure things, only if they can memorize an API, or write on-the-fly code for some synthetic problem. Which doesn't necessarily translate into what we need from a developer.

  • Duke of New York (unregistered) in reply to dpm

    Small companies like Facemeta, where the screen is an algorithm coding session and the interview has two more algorithm coding sessions at a "higher" (actually the same) level.

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