Today I’m going to delve into speaking my piece on what tech interviews are, what their purpose is and their many many failings…

What is a Tech Interview? Link to heading

A Tech Interview is basically a term we use to refer to a multi-stage marathon in which a company looking for talent decides to put applicants through a series of rigorous and ultimately pointless exercises in an effort to prove that they have enough willpower to work there.

It has absolutely nothing to do with determining how much of a fit you are or with determining how talented you are or with anything that matters to anybody with two brain cells to rub together.

What Does a Tech Interview Consist Of? Link to heading

Typically tech interviews consist of multiple phases. The number of phases and which phases you encounter tend to vary quite a bit from employer to employer, with the only consistency being that on the whole the process will be grueling and require lots of your free time to work through.

Please note: You do not receive compensation for any of this. I firmly believe the purpose of this process is to test how much shit you are willing to eat on behalf of your would-be employer. Pragmatists interested in any semblance of a work-life balance need not apply.

In any event, here is a general list of possible phases one can expect when interviewing for any kind of IT related position:

  1. Personality Test

    This one of course is absolute bullshit. If you have a terrible personality and have two brain cells to rub together you know what they want to hear and lie. If you don’t, well great. Get the fuck out.

  2. Logic Quizzes

    Honestly I just took one of these last week and it was fucking over the top stupid. They tested my spatial reasoning by showing me an unfolded piece of paper and then having me identify which of the folded options is possible given the starting piece of paper.

    I don’t know what the fuck this has to do with IT or Software Development. You probably don’t either.

    Oh and the kicker - they recorded me via my webcam and microphone while I did it. And insisted I use a pencil and paper to work shit out. Yeah because God Forbid I just take notes and use the calculator app on my second monitor to work shit out. Like an actual IT professional might do, right?

  3. HackerRank / LeetCode

    Hey aren’t you a descendant of monkeys? Well since you are, please feel free to live code solutions to pointless abstract problems that some random asshole concocted out of thin air. To be fair, if you are a professional software dev, much like I am, this is pretty much what you do for a living. Also these exercises will probably make way more sense than whatever problems your actual bosses will give you to solve.

    Maybe these aren’t so bad then?

    Nope. They are. Even if my sarcastic criticisms are totally accurate, they don’t really test your ability to do the job in question, so what’s the point?

    Oh yeah, will I eat a metric ton of pointless shit as your employee? Well of course I will. Let’s write some code!

  4. Take Home Problems

    I want to hate this one. I really do. Because it has proven to be such a time sink for me over the years. But when I’m on the other side of the equation as an interviewer I kind of like doing this to applicants because in theory it gives me some idea of how they might actually solve a scenario that at least remotely resembles something that will come up on the job.

    Yes there are a million ways to cheat this. Especially if some asshat posts their code into a public Github repo. But whatever. Thems the breaks. Nothing is perfect.

  5. Panel Interviews

    I despise this one. The idea of being interviewed by multiple people at the same time has always been and will always be terrifying to me on some level. You don’t get enough time with any single individual to achieve any sort of comradery or to get to know each other and they don’t get enough time with you to get to know you either.

    I’ve been on both sides of this equation multiple times and as interviewer in a group of interviewers it basically just comes down to whether or not you said something that rubbed certain people the wrong way. If you did, they generally don’t have time to follow up on it and determine whether or not there is a legit issue, so they are forced to go with “their gut”.

    If any part of your interview process relies on people going with “their gut”, it’s an epic fail.

  6. One on One Executive Interviews

    Okay so I’m not a big fan of executives. I largely feel that they are useless wastes of space for the most part. So having to shoot the shit with one for half an hour to an hour is generally not my favorite thing. This sometimes does make sense, but the further away from you (assuming you got the job) they are on the org chart, the bigger waste of time it tends to be.

    If you are the CEO and this is isn’t a small business / startup and you insist on interviewing every single software developer - you are clearly neglecting other more important duties. Reconsider your priorities and stop wasting our time and your own time.

  7. HR Interviews

    Can I be honest? Never mind, I am gonna to be honest regardless of your opinion.

    I fucking hate HR people. They are Corporate America’s answer to “What if you siphoned every ounce of soul away from a human being, effectively turning them into a robot devoid of emotion, context and any sort of understanding and turned them loose upon your unsuspecting workforce?”

    The only thing HR people are good for is helping me fill out benefits related paperwork and sending me my COBRA paperwork after I quit or am fired. Beyond that, I got literally zero use for them.

    Fact: They exist only to protect the company from their employees.

  8. Recruiter Interviews

    Going back to my absolute unstoppable hatred of HR people, why the fuck am I even talking to a recruiter? Doesn’t maintaining the illusion that HR doesn’t just protect the company require them to occassionally show an interest in the Human Part of human resources? So why aren’t they out there finding talent?

    Is a LinkedIn Premium membership too expensive? Can the company not afford the fee to post their jobs to Glassdoor / Indeed?

    Talking with Recruiters is so pointless. They don’t know anything about the job and the skills required to do it. Yet you have to deal with them because most companies utilize recruiters as a way to keep from talking to more than the minimum number of applicants possible. I actually had a recruiter kick me to the curb a couple weeks back because I hadn’t used Entity Framework for C# in the last few years and had spent all of my time using Dapper.

    They said their client was concerned that people without recent Entity Framework experience couldn’t properly optimize database queries. I was flabbergasted. In my experience if the only thing you work with is Entity Framework you generally have no idea how to optimize your database queries whereas with Dapper you actually have to write all of your own SQL queries, so naturally you end up becoming much more proficient at optimizing things.

  9. Credit Checks / Background Checks

    I’m a little sympathetic when it comes to Background Checks but this whole Credit Check thing is absurd. Now I am willing to submit to this shit because my background is clean and my credit is quite good so that makes it an easy win. If you are me in today’s market you need to take every win you can get.

    Nevertheless when the fuck did invading the hell out of the privacy of your applicants become standard operating procedure? Why the fuck are we allowing potential employers to do this to us?

    I mean even if my background is full of felonies and my credit is a flaming dumpster fire, doesn’t everybody deserve a second chance?

    Yeah you got me. I’m a bleeding heart liberal. Goddammit.

  10. Drug Tests

    This one really gets under my craw, mostly because a few years ago I discovered hemp-derived THC products (federally legal and generally shippable to all 50 states) so I tend to get stoned a couple times a week. Sadly even though the federal government themselves made this legal via the 2018 Farm Bill, the punitive testing standards for THC remain and quite a few would-be employers employ these measures. Some are required by federal law to do so.

    This gets even dumber when you realize that most of the jobs I apply for are remote jobs, so I think around half the states in the United States have actually legalized non-hemp derived marijuana in either medical or recreational form. So testing for THC is essentially just asking for reasons to not hire people.

    Over the last year I have adopted a policy of being up front with recruiters about this and confirming whether or not the potential employer tests for THC. This has NOT worked out in my favor as recruiter reactions range the gamut from, “Its cool, they don’t drug test” to “Brah - all of us are high and they know it - so I wouldn’t worry about it” and even “Well if it becomes an issue I can give you some tips on acquiring some clean piss”.

    Yes I have gotten all three of these responses. However the vast majority of time it essentially results in a “Sorry we aren’t interested” response or the recruiter acting like its a non-issue and then pretending you don’t exist and essentially ghosting you as soon as you get off the phone.

    Can’t we just get over the anti-weed shit? The testing standards are punitive which means they are designed to test for such low levels that you can be nailed up to eight to twelve weeks after you last partook. Thanks for that “reefer madness” / DARE morons.

    The cold hard reality is that weed is insanely less dangerous than alcohol but has a much longer half life because of the way its metabolized. I could be a functional alcoholic, stay off the sauce for 12 hours and pass your test with flying colors. Whereas I could be a recreational toker on weekends, oh wait that’s what I am, and fail a test three months later even if I kick it to the curb for a month.

    Don’t even start me on the fact that way worse drugs like Opiods have a way shorter half life and testing for those isn’t nearly as punitive.

Conclusion Link to heading

I hate Tech Interviews. You should too. Writing about all of this has been extremely stressful. Alas it’s too late for me to toke up now, plus its a weeknight, so I’m just going to pour myself another rye whiskey because apparently that’s the socially acceptable way to foster a chemical dependency and still be 100% employable.

Nevertheless, I don’t understand the point of all of these hoops. Like any classic hypocrite, I was mostly fine with this system as long as it worked to my advantage but now at the age of 44 that is clearly not the case anymore. So yeah here I am bitching about it.

The reality is that I have no idea how we should be interviewing people. But this ties back into the fact that nobody in this industry has any clue how to measure the performance of people within it. Without the ability to consistently measure on the job performance, you can’t really hope to ever be able to adequately separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to job applicants in this industry.