Dear interviewers,
Please think about interviews first. And don’t use information asymmetry to hide or manipulate the candidates(good ones, hate those interviews). Try to think of it as a honest conversation to figure out if you can work together, instead of trying to play cat and mouse game.
And seriously rethink old habits of calling in people and asking them to write code on paper, and then criticizing the syntax.
And don’t really sit back and shift the “burden of proof” to the candidate altogether.
I tend to think of interviews as two-way sales process. Not one way,
where the candidate has to sell his skillset,with/without knowledge of the job roles.
If you are gonna sit there and question my skillsets, and ask about my interest in the job,
without divulging anything more than a vague “pure python framework”, then well,
we’re not likely to work together at all. Sorry cya.
Because:
1.you are employing information asymmetry
2.You are shifting “burden of proof”, all the while absolving yourself of any such thing.
3.You are refusing to provide enough information for me to judge my interests.
When I say, a two-way sales process, I mean:
1. Both the parties are trying to exchange some thing that’s of value to the other.
2. Both the parties have to convince the other, what they have is worth it.
3. Both the parties have to be able to trust the other won’t cheat them out of what they’re agreeing to.
Establishing all of these, takes deliberate attention to these ideas first, acceptance next and then open communication.
Unfortunately, real-life is filled with imperfect people trying to half-ass things,(some deliberately,some ignorantly, some just plain simply don’t have the time/attention,
but always to their self-advantage) and we end up with the messy abstractions we have.
And if you find it difficult to switch from an admittance gate mode to two-way sales communication mode,
I recommend you give atleast one read to Daniel H. Pink’s “To sell is human”. I highly recommend a read-pause-write/record-read cycle though.
softwaremechanic 