The Terrible Technical Interview

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.

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.

In the last month Danny Crichton has written a couple of excellent posts about technical interviews: you should read them, but let me just cite some highlights:

Few professions seem so openly hostile to their current members as software engineering … we expect people to do live engineering on a white board under stressful interview conditions because, well, because that is what we have always done … In a time of engineer austerity, we simply can’t afford to throw away so much talent.

He in turn was inspired by Thomas Ptacek:

The software developer job interview doesn’t work. Companies should stop relying on them. The savviest teams will outcompete their peers by devising alternative hiring schemes.

Indeed. And, anecdotally, I do have the impression that things are finally changing. More companies are asking candidates to do test projects rather than whiteboard interviews. Others are becoming less fanatical about eliminating false positives at the interview stage (but more ruthless about firing them after a couple of months.) It helped that Google’s head of HR admitted, a few years ago: “Brainteasers are a complete waste of time” and “test scores are worthless.”

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