Tech Job Interviews... Derp

I'm not saying who for, and I'm not saying what for, but over the last three months I've been on a little spree within the jobs market for my kind of career, I've been through phone interviews, technical tests and face to face meetings.

And I've noted a pattern in how things to, they go one of three basic ways...

The first is that the interviewer likes how I hold myself, how I present myself, but they've read nothing about me.  Now this is a large blog, I've written a book, and I publish quite a lot of information about how I work and what I do... To not read this is tantamount to negligence, either on the part of the interviewer or the recruitment folks putting you through for a role.

When I find myself in this situation however it lends itself to my favour, as I can answer questions posed to me, and beware that as thorough as the opposite party aimed to present themselves they've already demonstrated to me that I have to tick the boxes in their filter live, so to speak.

The next is that they've read the information about me but then they don't like me, either how I come across in person, or just some trivial problem like a technical tests; more about those in a moment.  Finding myself in this situation can be tough, for instance having a near four hour interview experience, face to face, meeting not one, not two but three lots of people and being invited to tour the work space, you'd be forgiven for thinking "I think I'm in here"... Just to be told "no" later (yes this actually happened, because I told a chap I don't like TDD, and he frothed at the mouth a little).

The final is where the interviewer has no interest in you as a human being, you have to tick the right boxes, and that's it.  I've had this twice recently, out of very many tests and interviews, one verbally and one via a written form.  Many years ago I graduated, and I walked as a new (one of the first in the UK actually) graduates with a pure software engineering degree... This essentially means I use a computer as a tool, to communicate, to process or gather information, whether I leverage that with C++, Python, Word or just as a paper weight makes no odds to me, so long as the task is done effectively, in a maintainable, secure and under-budget manner.  However, I walked into a room with five other people and was handed an A-Level maths paper... I sat there looking around the dingy room, looked at the paper's title and just got up and left.

This final situation is perhaps the hardest to explain, unless you've been there, you are you, you are a value you are an idea, you are a font of experience and the culmination of your life to date, you are not completing an A-Level maths paper, you are not writing a bit of data processing, you are certainly not some online multi-choice quiz.

But doing these menial tasks proves to someone that you know what you're doing... Apparently?  In the latter case it's almost as though the online quizzed expect you not to just google an answer... I myself would much rather just state "don't know"... but above that I'd rather NOT perform such odd tasks.

If I were to hire staff today, I'd sit down and talk to them, the CV is the main filter, do they have any skills I desire?  Do they have any insight or experience which is of use?  Talk to them.

Then, once I'm happy at the personal level I'd not ask them to perform some monkey tricks, I'd just hand them production code, or a snippet there of... "Comment on this", openly, freely.... The spelling, the layout, the coding approach, any bugs, any suggestions.  But I would not do this without knowing who they are, and never without myself being there, being a personal touch.

I don't know, maybe it's the vogue of today, maybe it's a never ending spiral, but it appears to me that slowly we are divorcing ourselves from one another, online.  This maybe something important to note, the most successful online communities, or sites, involve interacting with one another, take facebook or snapchat as examples, you don't get in there at the ground floor by asking impersonal questions in a static box.  You get the young, the scared, the ones willing to please answering those questions.  The rebels, the technologists like me, we tear up the rule book, we're here to innovate, not tell you where a non-mutable variable is attemptedly being assigned to in a subroutine to make you feel better.