How effective are the technical interviews?
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 24 May 2011, 04:22 IST   |    4 Comments
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Bangalore: Recruiters are desperately looking for options to overcome the stigma of hiring a productive developer as they are often wonderstruck seeing the performance of the new hires, who they thought are the best ones, lacking speed and are below average in competency. The bureaucratic hierarchy of the HR department screens the candidates over and over again to weed out the less skilled. However, often it all goes futile because of the wrong interview procedures. Many interviewers go the Google-Microsoft way with the so-called brain-teaser interview questions like - How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? So, in many cases, it seems that the skills required to pass industry-standard software interviews are not the skills required to be a good software developer. An excellent coder can be 50 times more productive than an average one, but a bad one is sure to ultimately have negative productivity. Interviewer should be looking for people who are smart and who can get things done. Certificates and degrees should not define accomplishments; rather it should be measured in terms of real-world projects with real-world users. A competent software engineer should be able to showcase a site, service or app that he has done. An interviewer can analyze the skills of a candidate by asking him to show his code, explain the design decisions and describe what he would do differently on it. By making him to implement a feature or two while you watch, you can easily understand how he works and how he implements his innovative thoughts while working. And this is the ultimate aim of a technical interview and not to measure the depth of subject knowledge. Hiring the wrong developer will turn to be a terrible mistake for any organization and from a startup's point of view, it can be a disaster. The interviewers should focus on the task of weeding out people who doesn't interview well but would actually do a good job. The typical theory-heavy interviews don't always figure out the coding skills of the candidates neither their ability to work as a team.