An article from Tech Crunch by Jon Evans on how bad current interview practices are. It’s quite interesting and echoes a lot of my coworkers’ and my recent sentiments.
Traditional technical interviews are terrible for everyone. They’re a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. They’re a bad way for candidates to evaluate companies. They waste time and generate stress on both sides. Almost everyone, if pressed, will admit this. And yet they persist.
His solution: Every candidate should bring with them a personal side project the have done (this assumes a programming project) that they can present in detail including code walk throughs and answering questions. The interviewer should be prepared to look at this in lieu of asking white board questions and such. This is a fascinating idea, an excellent use of everyone’s time, and could really change the whole process for the better. I don’t hold a lot of hope this idea would ever be widely adopted, if even adopted at all, but maybe.