In which I interview so you don’t have to

Describing job interviews for technical roles in the software industry to people who have left or have always been outside the software industry requires two things: patience on the part of the one doing the describing, and the ability for the listener to take a joke. Over the last twelve years I have taken countless job interviews so that you don’t have to. Here’s what I’ve found: presented as a guide to running the average software developer interview. As with all descriptions of mediocrity, you should treat this as best practice.

[Be clear on this: not all interviews are like this. But this is an expectable baseline, derived from experience.]

Person Specification

The ideal candidate will be rich. We’re going to put them through hours – maybe even days – of tests, interviews, meetings, and “informal chats” that they’d better be on best behaviour for anyway. They need to be able to afford taking that time away from work, friends, other opportunities, so they’d better be rich.

That multiple-hour interview process means that they’d better be desperate for a job too. As you’ll find out in the section on our process, we pride ourselves on not giving away too much. We’re not selling our company to you, because we know we’re offering the chance to do what you’ve always wanted: sit in our open plan office space next to our own particular loud crisp-eater muttering at Eclipse.

The ability to go without food is desirable too. Even if a stage of the interview is planned to take so long that it would go over lunch, and even though we might put a break for lunch in, we might also forget to do any catering. Computers don’t need food and programmers are sort of like computers, we heard. We actually occasionally do feed our staff, and advertise this as a perk.

Our Process

The first thing we want to check is whether you can solve logical problems. We don’t actually need you to solve logical problems, after all, that’s what the computers are for. But we’ll give you an aptitude/basic reasoning test anyway [yes, although it’s no longer the 1960s and we aren’t IBM, this is still common if not universal].

The reasoning test is there to weed out people who didn’t have the same education as us, or were raised speaking a different language, or in a different culture. Empathy is hard, and to avoid unduly stressing our staff we want to make sure that their colleagues are as similar to them as possible. Additionally the hour you’ll take going through this test is an hour we don’t have to make eye contact or conversation with you: empathy is hard.

To be honest we have no idea what this test means or how to interpret its results. Everybody before you went through this test, and they’d raise merry hell if we “lowered the bar” by removing it now. As a holacracy/meritocracy/hypocrisy/this week’s organisational behaviour buzzword, we empower our employees to not see any changes that might raise a small amount of discomfort.

So after that test, depending on the seniority of the position and the candidate’s experience, we’ll…no, not really. We did nearly keep a straight face through that sentence though. In fact we didn’t read your CV except to find out whether the keywords that describe the problems we have right now and the solutions we have chosen last week appear. We didn’t read your GitHub/Lanyrd/Bitbucket profiles either, except to check that you have them so we know how much free work to expect out of you in addition to the paid stuff. Our project management system works on the Pareto Principle: 80 hours a week on our stuff, 20 hours a week on open source stuff that we can co-opt.

The next stage in the process is actually the same for everybody: a basic programming test to find out whether you even know what a computer is. We don’t care that you’re [glances at CV] Grace Hopper, we still don’t believe that you can reverse a linked list. None of our employees has ever had to reverse a linked list on the job, and we’d fire them if they did reverse a linked list on the job because there are libraries for that.

Now we’ll come onto the technical interview: a cross-examination by a panel of between one and twelve [not joking] people who have, or have had, a word like “engineer” in their job description at some point. These people are tasked with finding out whether you’ve solved the same problems in your career as they have in theirs. If you haven’t, you might not be clever enough. If you have, then what new experiences are you bringing to the table?

By the way, our flexibility on your technical skills will go down as you become more experienced. We appreciate that new grads might not have used our tools/frameworks/technology and are willing to train them, but if you have more than six months’ experience with Java we’re going to call you a Java developer and only consider you for Java roles.

After all of that, it’s still possible that you might have somehow snuck through the system despite not going to the same university or belonging to the same society as the founder. We can’t really quantify the idea of “culture fit” but that’s what we’re examining in the next part of the process and we’ll know it when we don’t see it.

The Offer

You’ll get a phone call from us while you’re in the bath. We’ll outline the position, pay and (unless this is an American company and there isn’t any) holiday provision. You then have two seconds in which to reply, with either “Yes” or whatever the other one is. You may have other irons in the fire but of course you’ll want to drop all of those when we tell you about the parking space we’ve already allocated for you [This has happened. I don’t have a car.].

The Job

You will be working with a team of people who all went through that same interview and decided they wanted to work in our environment. We will leave it to you to decide what that means.

The Alternative

There are some less…scientific…approaches to hiring that involve using the candidate’s stated and visible experience to have a conversation about what they’ve done, how they do and don’t like to work, how they’ve responded to success and failure, and whether the challenges they would like to see in their career match up with the environment we’re able to provide. While that sounds like quite a pleasant experience for everybody involved we fail to see how it could possibly translate into discovering whether we want to work with you or vice versa.