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Not Kotlin specific, but includes Kotlin developer...
# hiring
a
Not Kotlin specific, but includes Kotlin developers and any other mainstream language 🙂. This is for you if you have some experience conducting technical interviews: Looking for freelance technical interviewers to interview job candidates for some key tech companies. Pay is US $100 per interview (each takes an hour, plus some minutes to do write-up afterward, 10-30 minutes depending on you), contract, remote from anywhere as long as your internet is good for HD calls (solid upload/download speeds). You can do anywhere between 6 and 30+ interviews a week, schedule is flexible (you decide your available times) although there are some hotter time zones than others. Work is ongoing, no end in sight. You need to pass a technical coding interview (Kotlin is fine!), as well as one focusing on the softer skills of interviewing. All interviews are in English, so verbal and writing skills should be near native level. Company covers 50% of rate on cancelled interview (less than 24 hours notice), and no-shows. Both are fairly uncommon. There are a lot of open spots. Contact me in DM for more.
n
outsourcing hiring i’d have never thought of it! pretty smart when you need to scale the process 🙂
and by the way, the offer is pretty good
a
@nfrankel yes. It helps in many ways including scaling the process. And also making sure you can get to candidates faster since hiring good people is time sensitive. Plus being able to offer interview times during days, evenings, and weekends helps as well. It is a very professional group, and growing. I've been doing it about a year and have almost dropped all of my other consulting. Now just interviews and free time working on open-source.
s
Sounds promising :)
👍 4
f
Personally I find the outsourced tech interviews very off putting. It’s in the same bucket as asking candidate to take an online exam. Very impersonal and detached.
a
@fuad other than it is not impersonal nor detached. These interviews are based on questions and problem statements directly worked through with the client companies, and helps give those companies way more ability to reach candidates quickly, thoroughly and consistently. Their alternative is automated tests, but instead they use high level engineers that have similar skills to who would be doing the same interview in-house for them. And of course those in-house people are trying to get work done, and can't be flexible with their schedule for nights and weekends, nor can they get through enough candidates fast enough. So your delay in being scheduled for an interview could cost you the position. The inconsistent or personality conflict with a bad interviewer could cost you the position. These things don't happen in this model of using outside interviewers.
Given many (if not most) of all the candidates say "this is one of the best interviews I have had" that must mean they like it more than you imagine that you'd dislike it.
The one person (out of 500+ I've done) that had an issue with the idea, cost him his chance with a top company by being inflamed with not liking the idea, while his competing candidates were glad to do it and therefore could move through the process.
Some quotes from feedback sent after interviews:
>> “The process was very positive. I felt relaxed throughout the whole interview.
The interviewer was kind and helpful, and he communicated very well. I interviewed using other tools before where there was no interviewer present, and while they remove a potential "stage fright", they feel very impersonal.”
so, compared to the automated ones, they seem very happy with this.
>> "The interviewer was spot on.”
>> [Interviewer] was very professional and friendly! I was glad that there were some Q&A questions at the beginning before diving into the code and that I had a chance to introduce myself. That helped ease the transition from "hey, I'm on a Google Hangout" to "problem solving time.”
>> “It was interactive and fun. Would definitely enjoy doing this again.”
>> "Honestly this is one of the nicest interviews I have ever had, [Interviewer] was very nice to talk to."
>> "It was friendly and effective conversation"
>> "It was the best interview process I have ever experienced"
...and those are just a handful of those from the past week. so. I'll leave you to your doubts, but no one working with us has the same doubts.
f
@apatrida glad it’s working for you guys, it sounds like you’ve worked out a good model. I’ve only ever once done an interview with this style, where there was a third party interviewer team who’s only job was to interview candidates. I guess I had a bad experience in comparison, I found them rude and impersonal, and also they had bad English. The company also expressed zero interest in my personality or soft-skills, and they had nothing to share about the work environment or other details. I got the impression they were just looking for code monkeys to fill seats and bill hourly for them. But in general, I really hate technical interviews, regardless of whether the interview goes well or not, I get offered the position or not, going in I am always filled with a sense of dread. I wrote a short post about my (admittedly one sided) feelings about tech interviews in general here, but in the first sentence I link to a much more balanced article on the same topic https://fuadkamal.org/2013/11/25/the-idiocy-of-technical-interviews/
Keep in mind I’ve been building Enterprise software for over two decades, and I’ve been a lead mobile dev for nearly seven years. I’m writing a book on Kotlin. I still hate technical interviews.
I’ll admit hiring the right talent for your company is always a challenge, and a very hard problem to solve.
The approach I’ve found in my opinion to work mutually well for both the hiring company and the candidates, is bringing on short term contractors, establishing that they work well together and then if it makes sense hiring or making a long term relationship. It’s an investment, but so is brining on full timers right off the bat.
You can always request a code sample, do a code review etc. if you want to know what their coding style is like before bringing them on. Can that be faked? sure it can, but folks tend to study for technical interviews like an academic exam, and in my experience a lot of the time the interview itself is very academic, and completely detached from the reality of how we develop software.
a
Yes, there are bad technical interviews out there, and there are bad coding problems that favor academic. Then there are others that just exercise the basics you should have given the experience you say you have. Sadly, many people coding 10 years at a bank, sometimes do not know at all what they are really doing and have some crazy bad habits including an inability to do the basics correctly. You see crazy things out there in the wild that you need some way to catch. And we also do offline code with reviews in some interviews as well by the way, it depends on the role and position.
👍 2
n
bringing on short term contractors
that doesn’t work with people already being employed... and you still need to recruit (not all technical interviews are whiteboard 😉)
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