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What's the best interview process you've experienced? (self.ask_experienced_devs)

submitted 9 months ago by swordsmanluke to c/ask_experienced_devs

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I've interviewed for and been interviewed by companies large and small. We all know software engineer job interviews suck. But it's hard on the other side of the table too.

One of the better places I worked for had a lightweight process of one phone screen and a four hour on-site. The company also prepared offers before the on-site interview round.

When you finished interviewing, you got a same-day yes or no answer, and if it was yes, you had the offer in your inbox within an hour.

What interview practices have you found effective?

... And by what metric?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Bar is on the floor. This is easily my best interview experience:

My prospective manager was clearly present and engaged in the process
All other interviewers were also prospective team members, and very engaged
I can’t state this enough, nobody didn’t want to be there. This is my absolute biggest peeve when interviewing, and I will leave if you clearly don’t give a shit. If you don’t care, you’re either just bad at interviewing and should not do it, or you know the role doesn’t really matter. You get an hour to judge me, perhaps erroneously, I’m going to do the same
The questions were deep, offering plenty of ways to express my experience. I get that I need to do some coding because even very tenured engineers can be very bad at it, but making me do 3 leetcode questions is fucking dumb for a Rails interview, and they clearly knew that
There was no punishment for answering with few words when it was warranted— the interviewers were good enough to riff off that to make the questions deeper. You can’t just put any random junior on an interview panel (do have them shadow if they are interested though), it’s a skill, and if you don’t respect that I won’t respect you
My point of contact was attentive and helpful