] Jon Evans @rezendi - Traditional technical interviews are terrible for everyone. They’re a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. They’re a bad way for candidates to evaluate companies. They waste time and generate stress on both sides. Almost everyone, if pressed, will admit this. And yet they persist.
[WHY]
] I humbly suggest that it is time for engineers who have the luxury of choice to start to flatly refuse to participate in them. Don’t panic. I have a better alternative. Read on.
More companies are asking candidates to do test projects rather than whiteboard interviews.
Companies want to filter out obviously inappropriate candidates early, and it's hard to fight the feeling that while you're at it, you might as well ask them just one or two slightly more technical questions which feature-creeps into a full-on traditional interview in a hurry.
So: if we were to find a reliable replacement for the traditional technical interview, it would be good for companies, it would be good for candidates, and it would help to increase the numbers of underrepresented groups who are currently implicitly overlooked by the recommendation process.
Nothing will force companies to move on to better techniques faster than losing appealing candidates before they even get to interview them.
The interviewer takes 30-60 minutes to familiarize themself with the candidate's project They then spend an hour or two discussing the project, the architectural and implementation decisions the candidate made, alternatives they could have chosen, features they'd like to add, the structure and line-by-line quality of the code, environment and configuration issues, etc.
Voila: a replacement for the technical interview, one with no whiteboard coding, no gotcha questions, no demands for intimate knowledge of the implementation details of algorithms the candidate will never have to write again.
Four years ago, when I first started ranting here about the ineffective counterproductivity of the traditional software interview, I wrote: "Don't interview anyone who hasn't accomplished anything. Ever. Certificates and degrees are not accomplishments; I mean real-world projects with real-world users. There is no excuse for software developers who don't have a site, app, or service they can point to and say,"I did this, all by myself!" in a world where Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services have free service tiers, and it costs all of $25 to register as an Android developer and publish an app on the Android Market.