The Art of Modern Interview
Originally published at www.ikriv.com. Please leave any comments there.
I have just finished (successfully) an intensive round of job interviews, and I wanted to write down my take on the modern trends. Disclaimer: this is a general discussion that is not meant to disparage or defame any particular company or person, I am deliberately leaving all personal information out of it.
The good
- More focus than before is put on writing actual code as opposed to theoretical technical questions.
The bad
- Proliferation of behavioral/"cultural fit" questions. It is a decent idea when done right, but the thing is, it is rarely done right.
- Popularity of "system design" questions that are impossible to answer when taken at face value. E.g. "how would you design Twitter"?
- If you fail, they rarely tell you why, presumably for legal reasons.
The ugly (this part is not new)
- Interviewers who build their questions around pre-determined answers, and get annnoyed when they hear anything else.
- People that ask an open-ended question, take a few words from your answer, rehash them in a random way that makes zero sense, and quickly write you off as an idiot. As any communication gap, this is usually mutual fault, but it does not make it less ugly.
I will probably expand on each of these topics (and how to deal with them) in separate posts, otherwise I risk to turn this one into a very long and boring reading if I haven't already. To be continued...