Video interview with the CTO with frosted tips, the waiting game, and technical difficulties

Off to a good start, the guy was late 10 mins. Apparently, they emailed the recruiter but he never passed it on. I would have waited 15 mins and logged off but he just made it in time. Lucky SOB.

His webex didn’t work. I could hear his voice. I could see the little icon showing that I’m transmitting audio from my end but he couldn’t hear me. Sidebar, I pretty much live and breathe webex in my daily job, so it was immediately clear to me his speakers or audio were fucking up. Especially since I was on a phone line. You always call into a webex with a phone line, cause the computer audio is sensitive to network slowdowns and weird audio feedbacks. But I digress…

webex, motherfucker, do you speak it?

I ended up calling him on his cellphone. He didn’t have a headset and had to hold his phone next to his ear for the remainder of the call. Sad!

We chatted. I mentioned I did X, Y, and Z in the past but the last two and a half years I’ve been focusing on my skills as a beetroot pickling line cleaner, the one skill they were looking for.

The interview ended fifteen minutes later. It felt OK but since it was a sequel to Inviting the wrong candidate only they fucked up and wanted me in the first place, and it was a peach cleaning kind of job, I didn’t exactly have high hopes for it.

Two days later, the recruiter came back with the feedback, that they felt my experience was mostly with X and fuck the last couple of years I spent cleaning beetroot pickling lines, just too recent experience on the pickling line. Oh well.

When they invite you for an onsite only to have folks videoconference in

Above my reaction, after learning I took not one but two red-eye flights only to have two of my interviewers call in via videoconference from across the fucking campus and or town.

Hey, assholes how about letting me skype into the interview next time and only fly me across the continent once you sure you want to hire me.

Admittedly, my mood was already low after being accommodated at one of the shittiest hotels I’ve ever stayed at and also the first one to run out of the fucking key cards at check-in. And don’t even start me on breakfast.

“So why do you want to join us”, they asked. “I could really use an offer right now to leverage a deal at some other places I applied”, would have been my honest answer. Fingers crossed.

Recruiters – the good, the bad and the ugly

Typical day, typical message from a recruiter:

Dear X,

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

I am currently working on several roles.

[or]

Let me know if you would be interested in having an introductory conversation.

[or]

I am working with a very successful and growing company.

[and finally]

Let me know when you are available to speak!

[or]

Are you available to speak tomorrow?

[or]

Could be worth a quick call.

Yeah… no.

I spent the first 15 seconds trying to figure out if they’re trying to hire me or sell me a candidate for one of the positions I’m hiring. Or both – these are the most confusing.

Next comes the company name. The good recruiters, sadly in minority, would include their client’s name at this point and provide a job description, which makes for a quick and easy assessment if it’s a good fit. No one wastes time, it’s either a yes or a no.

The mediocre ones will provide some basic info once I fire back asking for more detail. I understand that they worry I go and apply directly, and I had in the past when they pissed me off at this stage, but at the same time, this is a major red flag, as it means they scared of my direct application and they don’t really have any preferential treatment with the employer. If I work with them it will be just as good as applying directly if not worse as the employer would have to pay a premium to the recruiter and may consequently want a cheaper candidate.

The really bad recruiters, when asked outright for their client name, will start spinning a yarn how the search is confidential, they need to get me on the phone, or better yet have my resume blindly, or some other bullshit. This is where I stop responding.

Time and time again I found that getting on a phone with a recruiter at this early stage is a waste of time. I almost never get a follow-up interview. My theory is that it’s a sign of incompetence, they can’t assess my profile without speaking with me, and that translates to an inability to sell me as a candidate.

The problem with a quick chat is that it all adds up. If I agreed to every single chat request I would be spending a significant amount of a day just explaining my career path, confirming my employment authorisation or avoiding the salary question over and over again.

 

Inviting the wrong candidate

A common occurrence as a hiring manager is that you do a cursory screen of a bunch of resumes and invite the people for a quick follow up call. Now at this stage, you actually do read the resume more thoroughly, and while it’s not common, sometimes you realize that you invited the candidate for the wrong reasons. Or you follow the link to their portfolio only to realize they use it to air their religious grievances. Don’t get me wrong, anyone is entitled to their private personal opinion, but I’m not going to link this blog on my resume for a reason. I’m not stupid.

You’re deeply thankful because the candidate took themselves early out of the process, but on the other hand, you still have to talk to them even though it’s a complete waste of time. Unless you realize your mistake half an hour before the interview and still manage to cancel. Spoken from experience.

This post is about a different kind of the wrong candidate though. Twice in my professional career now, I have been invited to an interview, only to realize halfway through the scheduling process that they meant to invite a different person but got our names confused. I can’t even.

Technical screens are a waste of time

… 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.

 

Ghosted by the CEO

Four hour-long interviews. Finally, excited to hear from CEO, thinking this is it – offer time. We arrange a time to talk. Only to be completely ignored. No response to IM or even quick email apologizing we missed each other yet again (sic), or a confirmation that they decided to move on with a different candidate. Not even a “Hey, we had a great time, but I don’t think we’re a match.” A rare occasion when a recruiter would come in handy, alas.