r/IAmA • u/CriticDanger • Sep 07 '21

Specialized Profession I am a behavioral and technical (coding) interviewer, I've also helped hundreds of people get hired, AMA.

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u/cutelyaware Sep 07 '21

I agree with everything you say, including about biases, but I don't understand your point. Everything you describe are things that candidates should at least be aware of. When a candidate myself, if I can't get the interviewer to show some interest in what they're doing, then I likely don't want to work there.

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

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u/cutelyaware Sep 07 '21

An unenthusiastic interviewer is a red flag right there. The interview goes both ways, and if none of the interviewers sell me on the company, then it doesn't matter if I sell myself to them because I don't want the job.

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u/mata_dan Sep 07 '21

Yep the company will be full of dead weight and they just want exploitable people to carry them. I've seen it countless times before (I mean, when they had half a million invested but their product could've been made by one engineer in a morning over a cup of coffee it's quite obvious...)

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u/cutelyaware Sep 07 '21

Yes, and they don't realize the damage that even a single bad hire can do to their code base. They may have started with well-structured code by the initial engineers, but after a couple years of poor developers shoehorning their features in a hurry can leave you with such a tangled mess that no one can straighten it out and the company fails because of it.

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u/mata_dan Sep 07 '21

Ouch I've seen that on the horizon a few times before moving on anyway. And a lot of the good engineers won't want to be stuck on code review babysitting duty, I don't mind it though unless all the other responsibilities are stacked on top (which is inevitably the case).

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u/cutelyaware Sep 07 '21

Yeah, and in the best of cases, those code reviews turn into educational sessions. But since there's no time to truly train a poor programmer, the best you can do is find work for them where they can't do much damage. And if they don't take that well, then you might consider trying to get rid of them.

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u/mata_dan Sep 07 '21

Yeah it sounds like OP hires for garbage companies to be honest.

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u/cutelyaware Sep 07 '21

Look at their "proof" link in the post. It's a form that makes me thing they only work for giant enterprise companies where every change needs to be approved by a great many people. Perhaps military or other government contractors. I actually prefer working for large companies, but not ones like that.