Out Of Scope - #10

Written interviews?

Emily Kager

May 9, 2022

Hi all! Hope you’re all having an awesome week.

Pros of a running a marathon is you get to tell everyone you ran a marathon casually in conversation for the next few weeks and have an excuse to be as lazy as you want. Fortunately or unfortunately I needed some lazy time because I got a nasty cold this week (negative for COVID) and this is about the 4th time I’ve been sick since January… Really feeling the pain of being out in the world again.

Written Interviews?

If we evaluated my ability to execute operations on Jira tickets I think I would fail the interview.

Laura Tacho 🌮 @rhein_wein

The biggest mistake companies making when hiring engineers is not including an async written interview stage. Engineering roles are heavy on writing - tickets, PRs, Slack, internal & external docs. If you're not assessing for written communication, you've got a huge blind spot.

But on a serious note, I think Laura has a great point! While we can evaluate some oral communication skills via our current interviews, if we were rethinking our current interview system I think written communication is huge gap in our current assessments. Especially with the rise of remote work, we all need to communicate more effectively asynchronously. I could see this working well with some sort of take home challenge* where you need to write up API docs/READMEs to go along with your code. Or maybe an async bug fix! The candidate could get access to a test repo with some unknown issues and have to file bugs, report your investigations, and submit a fix? I think there are a lot of creative ideas that could replace a lot of the tedious challenges that are the norm today. Is anyone doing something like this today?

Okay one more very serious suggestion for a test: Do you just message “Hi” on Slack with no context and wait for a reply?

*I know take home challenges have their own issues. They can be unpaid work. They often take way longer than the “suggested time”. Most companies still require all day on-sites after completing the take home challenge. For the purpose of this post let’s imagine the take home is unproblematic.

ICMYI

ICMYI American people with uteruses are slated to be nothing more than baby incubators. This is a topic I am passionate about and while I don’t know how this will all play out I can tell you the solution is not Web3.

Satvik Sethi @sxtvik

Idea: AbortionDAO. Web3 community funds it together. We appoint sub-councils in cities around the world who are responsible for identifying and paying for resources using their allocated DAO treasury. We use Web3 to create an underground network of abortion info and resources.

Without even getting into the arguments of whether managers should be writing code or not can we just appreciate that out of all the relationships he chose riding a horse to compare managing software teams?