> incorrect/inflexible quizzing about tech questions is inappropriate full stop
I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway through this screen was because of combativeness / personality, not phone screen performance per se.
> You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.
I think I disagree with this though - there are certain people who are going to be predisposed to complaining about things that don't go their way, and you want to make sure you fail them as early as possible. At a company small enough that its strength is the CEO's coding abilities, a curmudgeon with significant raw technical talent can do very well. At a Google-sized company they just can't.
The OP is misremembering (slightly) some questions.
Also, this quiz is given by non-technical recruiters just to get a guage on how tech-savvy the candidate is. If I remember correctly, the passmark is 6/10.
The questions (when not misremembered) are very precise in their wording, and recruiters are given a pretty comprehensive list of correct answers.
I'm sure a few great candidates fail this stage, but that's the nature of hiring. Google gets a lot of job applications per day, and a first stage screening like this needs to be able to be executed by non-technical staff in a few minutes. Other companies use online tests, which tend to take the candidate more time and are easier to cheat at.
They can, actually...the culture needs to learn to adopt them is all.
Having real talent and having to basically navigate terrain of those with less skill than you and yet, oddly enough, more power, is very frustrating. These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.
If anyone feels even remotely insecure because of your prowess you are shot down. I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
You might say I'm the problem...I point to the stack of clowns that said it couldn't be done and go...yeah sure.
> These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.
These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.
> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.
... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.
I don't think there was any problem with the applicants attitude, but plenty wrong with the screener's attitude. As in, I wouldn't want to work for an arrogant prat like that.
I don't disagree with this, but (to the best of my memory - this was in 2011), when this initial phone screen was presented to me, it was presented with some amount of "We want to figure out what you're good at so we're having the right people interview you for the right roles." Which is to say, I suspect that him failing out halfway through this screen was because of combativeness / personality, not phone screen performance per se.
> You can't ensure that there will be no hurt feelings ever, but ideally the candidates you fail don't go around talking about how poor your interview process is.
I think I disagree with this though - there are certain people who are going to be predisposed to complaining about things that don't go their way, and you want to make sure you fail them as early as possible. At a company small enough that its strength is the CEO's coding abilities, a curmudgeon with significant raw technical talent can do very well. At a Google-sized company they just can't.