This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
The interview process for most front-end developer roles is fundamentally broken.
These days, most tech role interviews involve some sort of coding challenge, where the job candidate is asked to work through a problem either in abstract on a white board, or with actual code in a text editor.
I understand why interviewers do this. They want to get a sense for what candidates actually know versus what they’ve copy/pasted from the web. But this process is stupid for a variety of reasons.
First, developers rarely need to go from “here’s a problem” to “here’s a solution” is just 15-minutes to an hour. Sometimes, the right answer will come to you immediately. Sometimes it will take hours, or days, or weeks.
Problem-solving is not linear, and effective programming is mostly solving problems.
Second, every single developer I know, from junior to senior, looks up basic shit all the time. None of us have everything memorized. Hell, I built a whole ass website of things I kept copy/pasting from past code I’d written to reduce the amount of time I spent searching for stuff.
Coding is solving problems. A big part of that is looking stuff up.
Like, seriously, the most important skill a developer can have it knowing how to research solutions to problems. Specifically…
- Breaking problems into parts
- Identifying what to search for
- Knowing how to sort good info from junk
A better tech interview process might involve presenting a candidate with a problem and then letting them actually Google stuff. Hell, don’t just let them—encourage them!
This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Go Make Things | Sciencx (2021-06-01T14:30:00+00:00) Tech interviews are stupid. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/06/01/tech-interviews-are-stupid/
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