Looking for the right Javascript Developer. Part 2.
Note: This series of stories are not meant to criticize nor to speak badly about someone. The objective is to laugh, while analyzing, about common interactions while trying to figure out how to keep the pace on the technology and users demands on the consumption of the products we already have.
If you haven’t read the first part go ahead and do it!
So here we hare with HHRR and they asked me for 5 questions to test a new format where they record a video-call with the candidate and then they send me the video to decide whether call him or not for a technical interview.
Have you heard of an IIFE? Can you briefly describe what is it?
Do you know what hoisting is?
What’s the difference between a Service and a Factory in Angular 1.x?
What’s a directive in Angular 1.x?
How would you put 2 divs next to each other on the same row?
Next thing I know is they already have 3 video-candidates ready for me to watch and give some feedback. So I did, and first thing I hear is this:
What’s an IFE in Java? (For those outside Mexico, IFE is an official id we used to have a few years back.)
Right at this point I knew this wasn’t going to work, but I kept on watching anyways, because I think HHRR deserves credit for their work.
Can you please tell me what hosting is?
Okay… this isn’t going to be very helpful, but let’s keep watching.
How would you put a div from one side to the other?
Okay… he didn’t even catch the IFE nor the hosting thing, so he certainly haven’t heard about them or some kind of bell would have rang in his head, right?
The two remaining videos had almost zero volume so I couldn’t listen what they were asked or their answers. New format that promised to improve the time they take to find a candidate, and for us to evaluate if he/she should be called. But we will always have the trusty…
So we called HHRR to help them on the questioning thing, just to let them know that Auto has nothing to do with Autobots, so please tell them JavaScript instead of Java next time. Also, please be specific on the IIFE because IFE is not exactly a javascript thing. (Unless I’m completely wrong, so please do let me know because I’m not the expert it may seem.)
The lesson here is that we, as professionals, try to do our job as best as we can. Unfortunately the desire to do it is not enough. We have to dig a bit, ask our selfs what are we talking about and asking for help if the need comes. HHRR does a terrific job searching for people who seems to be a good fit to what we ask within thousands of people claiming to know what we are looking for, but they need to take a breath and read a bit over just to be sure they’re understanding what we ask or at least know a bit the scenario on how to know if the person is candidate material or not.
On the other hand, sometimes, we, as developers, tend to forget that we have more than one language to speak, and that technical language is not common outside our world. I know this might come as a shocking surprise for some, but it’s true. I did my research and with all the pain in my heart discovered not everyone understands what we’re talking about most of the time.
So, again the same lesson applies. Let’s dig a bit on how to help HHRR to help us and be the team we should be.
Next time you get a call from HHRR asking for the ideal characteristics of a candidate, make sure they know the basic so they can stop wasting their time on people we are not looking for. Because you know… I’ve been asking for a front-end developer and they kept sending Java developers.
