If You Passed On Me, Your Interview Process Is Garbage — 1
Odds are, so is your organization.
This is a blog series about you and what you’re doing wrong.
Not because I believe you about your so-called DE&I initiative , but rather because I don’t. Which, if your DE&I initiative is any degree of sincere or maybe if just you yourself are, you’ll want to know why.
If it or you are not — tl;dr, I’m better at this than your entire team combined and that’s just one reason why they’ll do anything to avoid having me on the team.
Mostly, though, this is about how you’re using weaponized stereotype threat to maintain your mirror-tocracy.
Women reading this: the upshot of this is, check the whispernet and don’t even interview anywhere that’s on it. It’s the EEO equivalent of boycotting clickbait. Most importantly, though, there’s no point in wasting your time with them. They’re sexists. They’ll never pick you and even if they did, they’ll just fire you in three weeks for “culture fit.” You can safely skip them entirely.
[3D printed houses; Stack: JS]
Role: Senior JavaScript Developer or something like that.
You Done Fucked Up Inflection Point: Round 2 Technical Interview
We spent the first hour and change with just me grilling him on the machine and how it does things and what happens in various situations and contexts, etc. After I proposed the hired falcon solution to the grackles problem, he asked me how I’d solve an endpoint situation and I told him I’d create more listeners to so each had a chance of finding the next operation sooner, and then create an operation execution queue from those listeners. It wouldn’t result in 1:1 but it would potentially improve performance. He brought up garbage collection, which I had not considered because normally it is handled automatically well enough that you don’t have to mess directly with it. I told him that in that approach, I would try to realize higher performance by scheduling dumps in advance so latency occurrences would happen at predictable intervals for expected durations, we could then compensate for those intervals, potentially.
The system I was being asked to hand-wave through connecting with is not something I’ve ever seen before. I correctly guessed the output would be signals, however, which I’ve handled in the past especially with drones. I’m not sure what more I could possibly have done with that.
When we talked about SOLID, my “O” was Observability, which I’ve seen with JS. I guess that’s not as common as I thought. His was Open/Close and if you know what Observability refers to, then you know it’s related. In my experience, the Observability paradigm has to do with both disambiguating logical and mutative operations, etc. and avoiding mutative operations taking place as a consequence of inheritance or chaining, which is directly related to Open/Close’s inheritance rule. I made a joke about how object chaining with unintentional mutation can violate Open/Close as a result of bad implementation in JS if this is not well-understood.
For the first code question, I admit I was testing him a little bit to see how he handled uncertainty etc. that you’d see from a junior dev, for example. Like with Ehren, he asked what it returns and I said “the value of this property” and he said “Well it returns a Promise object” and I said “okay I was too specific or not specific enough, it returns a Promise object containing this property to be evaluated.” I’m not sure he understood that I originally was talking about what it returns per how it can be expected to be used.
For the next one, we had differing ideas of how to make the test pass. He wanted to set the time using the Date object and I wanted to use the setter, because it’s better to be explicit than implicit and using the setter shows intentionality and allows you to test each case. So I might have overcompensated for the Promise thing, lol although either solution would have worked for the way the test was written.
For the third one, I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to fix the issues I identified in the second exercise myself or go through how I’d do a code review for example for a pull request. He said the latter, but then I asked him if this was a stub he cracked up, nobody had ever come up with that before but he could immediately see how it absolutely could be a stub intended for scaffolding something. I told him I would stop right at X point, comment and open a discussion about the purpose of the commit to understand its context because if this is just a stub, aside from a couple of items that would need to be addressed in any case (which I noted) and a typo, it’s not wrong and there’s no need to spend tons of time correcting something like that. I told them I’d expect a config file with settings, etc.
He said he’d never had anyone come up with that before, and that he agreed with me and after I identified the items that would need to be corrected even if it is just a stub, we moved on. I don’t know if I spent enough time deep diving, for example that even though technically the argument could work, the definition for that object was inconsistent and the arg list in the method calling it was also not self-documenting.
Conclusion: “Just got the word. Unfortunately they are not going to move forward with you :(
They said your hands on development wasn’t quite where they wanted it to be. Sorry Leah. If I come across anything I will let you know.”
Translation: I DON’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT JAVASCRIPT.
Diagnosis: At every juncture, the dude was determined to correct me regardless of the functional validity of my answers. When my way adhered more closely to formal best practices, he argued for faster development. When my answer prioritized rapid development, he wanted me to deep dive through all the things it could be. The goalposts clearly could move if he wanted them to, and since the objective was never revealed in advance, in retrospect it’s easy to tell that the point here is for me to be wrong so he can be right.
He probably does this with all women. That’s usually the case. He also probably doesn’t realize he does this. I have no doubt that he would have accepted my answers as valid if they had come from a man.
In What Universe Would I Let This Slide: It’s possible, but if I did it would only be because your project is one of the rare gems that’s 3 or more right things (robotics, space, human rights.) However, the dudes with biases can’t be anywhere in my line of sight, much less in positions of authority relative to me.
