A Quick Guide to Hiring People in IT
I employ more than 15,000 people -- designers and IT developers. And still often conduct interviews for key positions on my own, remotely. So today I decided to put all my experience in this short article. Here are a few key principles and ideas which I find invaluable
By | Vasily Voropaev | www.entrepreneur.com
Or, at least, it has not been invented yet. Even the standard junior-middle-senior levels gradation does not help much. Because each company has its own needs, and a senior from one firm may barely qualify as a middle in another.
The main reason for this is the extreme variety of required skills. There are hundreds of programming languages, tools, styles, frameworks. Testing them all just doesn’t work in an hour (or two hours, or three hours) format. You would need to conduct two hundred different tests. And each company would have its own set of questions. As a society, we are not at that level yet.
Remember the famous story about the author of Homebrew, who was not hired by Google, despite the fact that most of its engineers use his software. As you can see, even Google’s vetting processes are not always working properly.
There is no objectivity in interviews. If you think there is, you are lying to yourself. This is important to understand and accept.
Understand: you are not Google
Popular industry practice is to wholesale copy interviews from the biggest companies. After the release of the book about interviews at Microsoft people asked about manholes, moving mountains, and golf balls for years (and many are still asking). But it just does not work. At least if you are not Microsoft and don’t need to solve problems of their level.
