Better Interviews

An Open source framework for conducting technical interviews.

As someone who does hiring, I find the interview process is broken. So I'm hoping to do my part to help fix this. In this repo/site you will find an open source framework for technical interviews which I hope anyone and everyone can use to improve on the dreaded technical interview (white boarding / live coding).

Note: this is not going to be a perfect solution, but it is a start which I'm hoping will evolve overtime to be better, more inclusive, and less stressful.

Problem

The current state of technical (white boarding) interviews is broken. See:

• THEY WHITEBOARDED ME
• The Mental Impact of Tech Interviews (YouTube)

We need to find a better way to handle for the above problem where we minimize:

• The power imbalance between interviewer and interviewee.
• Removing bias from the interview process which can many times penalize:
  • interviewees with families (age, or gender discrimination)
  • extra family commitments (taking care of a sick family member or one with special needs)
  • mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, etc.
  • the list goes on...

All the while further contributing to impostor syndrome

What we should be maximizing is:

• Learning what the candidate is good at
• What they have accomplished as a whole
  • there are other facets other than programming skills which make up the job and candidate
• What is relevant to the actual job!

and most importantly their technical skills in an accurate setting.

Potential Solution(s) and the Framework

Choose your path

As a initial option the thought is you allow the candidate to pick from several options which they are comfortable with in terms of conducting their technical interview.

While these option may not solve for all the potential issues it helps minimize some of the bias and allow for candidates to select a path they are most comfortable with. Again this is a work in progress! Please consider contributing.

1. Take home exam

   • Company specific curated take home assignment which the candidate would do on their own time and turn in for grading

2. Complete an assignment (from a list of smallish problems):

   • Candidate would get this "homework" before their interview to complete.
   • They would submit their solution 1-2 hours before for review by the
     interviewee. This allows for time to review and formulate some questions and suggestions in response.
   • Interviewer would then asking probing questions about the solution to get a sense of the reasons for their design choices, thought process, and over all structure.
   • A final step might be to perform a small refactoring of the code to properly verify the knowledge of the candidate, and get a sense of their working style. This might be a pair-programming session.

3. Their own personal project

   • TBD

4. Live coding / white boarding (else option)

   • TBD

Additional framework thoughts

We should also lay out some sort of best practices for the engagement between parties.

• clear instructions and expectations of the tasks and outcomes
• fair timelines and next steps
• respecting the time of both parties
• making sure there is follow up
• tracking all this to ensure we can make data driven decisions and continue to improve.

Generating this site

For now the site is being generated with docsify. You can install / setup it via the following:

# if you don't have node installed (macOS)
brew install node

# install docsify
npm i docsify-cli

# clone repo and serve up the pages
git clone https://github.com/fdosani/better-interviews.git
cd better-interviews
docsify serve ./docs

Contributing

I need your (the community at large) help with this project. Please feel free to submit issues, comments, PRs etc. The only way this works is through a collaborative effort where everyone has a say.