… teams expect that everyone working within the team (IC’s and managers) to have hands-on expertise in core skills such as SQL, Data Modeling and basic coding. The technical portion is designed to help us understand your experience with these core skills.
Sidebar, while I’ll echo the sentiment that direct managers should have some coding experience, I’m not too convinced about the importance of it. Honestly, why stop at direct managers. In a software company, every level of leadership should have coding experience or only individual contributors. What I find confusing about the whole idea of technical managers needing technical expertise is that the majority of good developers don’t make good managers and vice versa. What we need instead is more trust and autonomy to make the decisions within an organisation at the level that we have the most expertise about a particular issue. Instead, we end up with the living embodiment of the Peter Principle – people promoted to their level of incompetence and making decisions on subjects that are out of their depth.
I interviewed with Amazon, Facebook, some of the smaller players. The propensity of these companies to waste everyone’s time with a meaningless technical interview never ceases to amaze me.
What do they prove? The ability of the candidate to remember the syntax of their language of choice under pressure? In what real life situation does it matter? Most of the problems are superficial anyway and have very little production value. The only person that would prepare for them in advance is a junior candidate with too much time and lack of offers. The really good people would just walk away. They can already find jobs without having to jump through hoops.
Indeed, startups rarely resort to technical screens when interviewing candidates. Why? Because they haven’t yet built up a crust of cancerous HR processes and they also know that is just easier and more effective to just ask the candidate for evidence of their past work. In fact, every time I’m wearing the hat of a hiring manager, it’s a huge red flag if the candidate stumbles on the show me your code samples question.
Over the ten years of my career, I gathered numerous entries on StackOverflow, GitHub, SourceForge, CPAN. Hell, you can probably even look up my Google Code Jam standing and make an opinion about my coding ability in less time than it took you to read this paragraph. Why bother with a technical screen then? Why indeed.
And finally, I leave you with this gem:
This is not a repeat of the same interview. All managers and directors go through 4 technical interviews. (2 code, 1 architecture, 1 hacker rank). You can refer to the original document I sent regarding our interview lineup. Not all of our managers pass all of these, but we look closely at how working with you in a technical environment would be and use them as data points combined with your management skills in a final decision.
This is what happens when I don’t read the materials that the recruiter forwards about the process. Or maybe I did read it but figured that they must have been joking. No one sane would go through four rounds of technical interview at a 3rd tier dev shop. To be fair the process sure gave me all the data points I needed to run for the hills.