How to get hired
Candidate resources
It’s tech hiring season! These are red flags to watch out for as you apply
Here are some red flags to watch out for as you apply for new jobs.
Guardian Coding Exercises
A repository of coding exercises used as part of the Guardian’s interview process.
Hiring Without Whiteboards
A list of companies (or teams) that don’t do “whiteboard” interviews. “Whiteboards” is used as a metaphor, and is a symbol for the kinds of CS trivia questions that are associated with bad interview practices. Whiteboards are not bad – CS trivia questions are. Using sites like HackerRank/LeetCode probably fall into a similar category.
Questions you can ask about compensation
Questions you can ask about compensation
Questions I’m asking in interviews
Questions I’m asking in interviews
Hiring manager resources
How to interview job applicants fairly
Interviews are not a great way to find out how good someone will actually be at the job. They can also make it easy for your unconscious biases to have too much influence. This has led some to suggest that interviews are broken and we need to find other ways; but it is possible to do interviews in a much fairer and more informative way.
The Secret Rules For Getting Hired
A job interview isn’t a set of trick questions. You’re working collaboratively to see if you can work in the future – not trying to prove your intellectual dominance. It shouldn’t be a test to see if they’ve read the same interviewing books as you.
Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews
It sucks for everyone when a candidate is surprised with an unexpected interview. For example, at the time the debugging interview required candidates to have a dev environment set up on their computer that let them install a library & run the tests. Sometimes candidates didn’t have their environment set up the right way, which was a waste of everyone’s time! The point of the interview wasn’t to watch people install bundler!
Making recruitment fair for people of colour
Our original goal was to increase the number of people of colour we were interviewing and ensure our interview process is fair for people of colour. Our recruitment team has separately been working on getting a racially diverse pool of candidates. But rather than looking at the recruitment pipeline our changes have targeted removing bias, and ensuring that people of colour who do apply get an equal chance to demonstrate their abilities, and then judge everyone using the same criteria.
Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. I’ve worked on large telecommunications systems, console games, blogging software, a bunch of personal tools, and very rarely is there some tricky data structure or algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else. But there’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there.