I know a number of people who have been laid off recently – the market is on a downturn and this is more common than seems to be being talked about. I’ve spent time helping a few people try and find their next thing lately, and after some iterations I now have a process. 1. What […]
The final part of interviewing for my last job involved coming to Colombia for 3 days and having 21 1:1s. FYI, this is the kind of thing that immigration finds very suspicious and resulted in me being detained and searched for drugs in Canada. But I digress. I firmly believe that people should interview their […]
Generally, I’ve really focused on doing technical interviews, but towards the end of last year and start of this I did a bunch of hiring manager interviews. This was a new and scary thing for me – whilst some things (like seeming warm) remained the same, the things I was evaluating were different. It was […]
The tech industry prides itself on its rationality, and yet is filled with trite slogans that are demonstrably untrue… and further, harmful. Originally published in Model View Culture, November 2014. “We hire the best.” It’s a slogan we can rally around in company meetings, a tagline to put on the jobs page… a shoring up […]
We know technical interviewing is a problem but rather than asking interviewers to do better, a lot of suggested solutions push that problem off onto people we interview rather than those who are doing the interviewing. This comes up a lot because the hiring process is the second most popular place to improve “diversity” after […]
When I worked at The Conglomerate, I used to interview mostly women. Not slightly more. We’re talking a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. Why? Well The Conglomerate was (probably still is) a Pipeline Organization. They believed that the problem with diversity was that they just needed to Hire More Women. And so they would want […]
What Makes a Good Technical Interview Question? Three criteria of a good interview question: Gives a sense of problem-solving and understanding. Explorable and extendable. Deeply understood by the interviewer. Problem Solving and Understanding What does this look like? The problem presented needs to be decomposed into smaller problems in order to be solved. There are […]
Notes from my @TheLeadDev talk on interviewing. Do you follow the discussion about technical interviews? I find it interesting, and worthwhile. I think we kind of tiptoe around two fundamental problems though. 1. Most technical interviewers are bad. 2. We think that technical interviews teach us more than they do. Today we’re going to talk […]
I spend more time than I thought I would thinking about technical interviews lately, because something I’ve been doing is conducting technical interviews for a few startups including Glowforge (they’re hiring!). Since March I’ve done ~36 interviews. Designing hiring systems is hard because you only have partial data – specifically you don’t know who your […]
I have interviewed a lot more people than I have myself done interviews. This is mostly because I am terrified of interviewing. But I also used to be extremely nervous to be the interviewer. It’s a lot of pressure to try and evaluate someone in 30-60 minutes, and it matters a lot to me to […]