long time no post gents

So I started full-time work in January of this year.

Since then, I've definitely established I am a good communicator and someone the team can rely on to get shit done. (I hate tooting my own horn, but this is the only way I can justify the following)

Beginning of this month, we began doing our annual interview fest for new hires.


Out of fucking no where, I got an email from our recruiter that ME, as well as two team leads, would be interviewing some incoming candidates!


Now to be fair, we were mostly going as "advocates of the company", to answer questions and kind of see if the candidates are a good fit.


My first two interviews, I took the candidates out to lunch and kind of just chatted them up.

But this week, I had a closed-office 1on1 interview with a guy.



It was a pretty nerve wracking experience for me, and I already have a job! I wanted to make sure I gave a good impression of the company, but I wasn't really there to make him do white board programming or answer really specific shit about require js or knockout


Mostly, I am just mind fucked as to why a less-than-1-year-old developer was picked to interview people.

The world may never know.


Regardless, cool experience, and I definitely had some fun.

When i was an intern, i was interviewing full time position candidates for dev and qa positions. all the devs generally got in a room and questioned them, so it wasn't 1 on 1. My coworkers commented i was the most grueling interrogator of the group. I'd adjust the questions based on position / experience level. When i was interviewing 35 year old senior devs with years of experience in .net, i expect them to know more than i do about .net. Surprisingly, quite a few of them didn't. I tend to look at their resume and listen to their answers, then ask follow up questions. one guy mentioned he likes c# better than c because it has garbage collection. so....i asked him to describe the garbage collection process to me, and he fumbled around saying "it cleans up unused objects". great for an intern, terrible for a senior dev. Another guy was making comparisons between java and c#. i asked him how generics is different between the two. he used typical BS like "they're completely different systems, but of course they're very similar". another thumbs down.

and the QAs were worse. they said they came from a QA background, but it was complete horse shit. it was obvious they were probably promoted from a different position and just did some manual testing for their projects. i took a simple screenshot from our app that doesn't involve much background knowledge, explained the business scenario and a brief description on how the backend worked, and asked them to tell me a few test cases. one dude responded he'd put some data in and press the button, repeat a few times. *thumbs down*. out of 5ish QAs we interviewed, only one could cover any edge cases and mention plugins to help fill data / unit test.

at my company now there are a lot of mediocre programmers / testers. the oracle devs seem to hate giving us error messages, so they always wrap everything in a single generic message that doesn't give us any info, and they dont do any logging. it gets really frustrating. our testers dont have testing backgrounds, and it shows. i try to compensate with more unit tests and by explicitly listing edge cases for them.

This post was edited by carteblanche on Nov 3 2015 10:37pm

damn, seems you have had a lot of different experience on that front.


The guys I interviewed are all 100% fresh grads with only some basic intern experience.


To be fully hired they end up interviewed by 4 people total, Me (or the other 2 team leads), a dev manager, our Technical Director/Lead Architect, and the VP of SE.

I tried not to do some of the interrogation stuff because I knew the other interviews up the chain would cover some of that.


edit: we have a dedicated QA member for each dev team at my place, and the QA for our team is insane. She is really good at finding obscure shit.

This post was edited by Eep on Nov 3 2015 11:22pm

At my company, when our service goes through pen testing, we get marked for this shit. We log events with detail, but what goes out in a service response is generic as fuck. It's annoying, but I also understand the reasoning behind it. Plus, it creates numerous fucking support positions. Someone has to man the fucking phones when clients call in wondering why they are receiving "Generic error 5".

is she 16-35, single, asexual, and ticklish?

one of them is, but she isn't the one on our team

the one on our team is like 70 yrs old lol

kinda weird tbh. in the same way you dont see many older developers, you usually dont see many older testers due to pay freezes.

I think she was originally a software engineer at a really prominent local engineering firm before she came to work for us as QA