Maybe. I tend to think that's a cynical take. Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.
This is a...youthful...industry, and a lot of junior people (with "senior" titles!) are out there doing interviews. It takes experience to become a good interviewer, and if you've never had that experience, you don't know what you don't know.
I mean I don't know. A joke which may have been intended to give a hint, while putting applicant at ease, has clearly backfired ; but if that's the worst interview they have had, they're pretty lucky.
I also notice the paragraph near the end with couple of general lines on good interview and the "that's how I hold interviews".
Here's the thing. Nobody sets off to intentionally be a bad interviewer or coder or manager or whatever. It helps to have humility and significant open introspection to be good at something (not the only path but for most of us it's the best path). We ascribe wilful incompetence to others while we have excuses and lessons learned for ourselves. Maybe - likely - the other interviewer too thought they were giving opportunities and signals and letting people at ease?
I think ageism sometimes shows in the assumption that the "rusty skills" phenomenon is so much more prevalent than the "untalented graduate" phenomenon. So, yes, I agree that interviewers need to be skeptical. But they need to be skeptical about their own preconceptions as well.
Absolutely. As paul buccheit likes to say, limited life experience + overgeneralization = advice. Take what I'm saying with several grains of salt, and recognize that every interview will be VERY different in tone, style, and content
It goes even further than the "difficult to work with" vibes. If someone has 20+ years of experience and hundreds of interviews under their belts, they ought to know about candidate caliber variability and the meaning of standardization practices, aka why interview panels are setup the way they are.
As an interviewer, I might even entertain the idea of going along w/ said "two-way interview" charade, if only to see how the candidate deals w/ hiring (since for the sort of roles I evaluate for, that does come up as a job task), but I suspect that I'd see a holier-than-thou attitude that I've seen from bad interviewers and that that would be a negative flag (and, no, the "I'm not fired, I quit" thing won't work with me, because - not to brag - I'm pretty confident in my interviewee skills even without cramming leetcode)
Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained?
True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me.
My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo looks ____ let's discuss a bit..." Instead I got ovetly basic questions, some of which didn't map to the role / opportunity.
Furthermore, I could only find one of them on GitHub and it was routine stuff (e.g., wedding website). Apparently, neither understood I was interviewing them as well.
I'll never get that hour of my life back.
I have a phrase:
"How you hire is who you hire."
It's sadly funny how many outfits still don't get that.
It depends on the company, I guess. The first-round interviews, which are the subject of this topic, that I have seen, were all Fizz Buzz level to cull the obviously incompetent.
We knew we (collectively as a team) weren’t experts in everything, but the prospects called for expertise in x, y and z. Most of the time we knew a lot about x and y but not much about z. But at the same time we also knew no one is a perfect fit and we were pretty good for the job. In a lot of ways it’s very much like most interviews. It’s a back and forth of some BS and attempts to detect BS. The BSing wasn’t always successful I’m sure, but seemed necessary in most cases.
Yes, you would think. But for some reason, a lot of interviewers seem to treat interviews as an opportunity for them to prove that they're superior to the person that they're interviewing.
This is a...youthful...industry, and a lot of junior people (with "senior" titles!) are out there doing interviews. It takes experience to become a good interviewer, and if you've never had that experience, you don't know what you don't know.
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