that's exactly why i always prefer doing conversation-style interviews rather than quizzing people. knowledge is fine, but you only really get opinions by actually using tools.

[–] lobut@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I much prefer conversational style interviews. I also like having them tell me about shit and then getting into the weeds of what they've been through.

I've been through so many stupid quizzing type interviews. I remember one where they wanted to ask about covariance and contravariance and I roughly stated I learned about it when writing my own compiler and it's about types and how one can follow the typing direction of typing, for let's say parameter/return values and the other can go the other way but I forget which is which typically. The guy was like, "guess which one is which?" I said, "why? it'd just be a guess, I thought I demonstrated that I'm at least familiar with the concepts", he said, "I can't mark down you got this question is right unless you get the right answer" ... I said, "let's skip it then".

Another one was where he asked me if I knew "WPF" which is a Microsoft framework to write desktop apps. I said, "it's not on my CV, and I've only used it at home a few times but you can ask me questions if you'd like", he then said with a smirk on his face, "if you want to answer the WPF portion, and you get it wrong then you look bad, but if you get it right then you look good, so what do you want to do?", I said, "I think this is up to you as an interviewer -- I've told you where I stand"

There was a lot of that ... like based on THEIR questions -- I don't know shit ... but they're not quizzing my experience at all.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

whoof.

conversational style interviews can go wrong quickly though; i recently interviewed for a position where the conversation turned into the interviewer explaining how he'd connected everything in his rv to home assistant. i'm not really into home automation but the communication bit was at least interesting until he dropped that he'd let claude do everything and he didn't actually care how it worked.

[–] lobut@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

he’d let claude do everything and he didn’t actually care how it worked.

😱

I hired someone that recently put up PRs and when I asked what they were for, he had no idea ... he hasn't ran or tested a single one ... just vibing everything.

When I saw his Terraform PRs ... I was like, "show me how you run this". I shortly found out he never had Terraform installed and didn't know how to switch AWS profile at all. He let's AI do everything. Also, he kept sending me AI convos and I was like, "if you send me another one without reading it first and summarizing it for me, I'm going to lose my shit". He said, "I wanted to send you the proof" ... I said, "you sent me half a page of nonsense where you didn't respect my time enough to read yourself first"