A dev I knew used whether somebody knew string intern() as his main indicator that someone was proficient with Java. This one trivia fact determined whether or not you were considered proficient.
The flipside is also unfortunately true. When I first interviewed, I drank the hn koolaid and began with the talking, figuring that the resume screen and a quick chat world filter out the fakers.
5 candidates who could talk but could barely write a line of code later, three technical screen was then the first layer.
I'm not talking difficult leetcode style problems either, my initial questions were barely a step a above fizzbuzz.
If you have any style of interview, some candidates will be against it and they will shit on you for that.
When you use algo questions, people complain that it's not practical.
When you do use practical questions, people complain that they can't study one thing for all jobs like with algo.
When you do a take-home, people complain that it takes their personal time with no commitment from company's side.
When you take more than 1h for an interview, people complain that it takes too much time, some will demand payment.
When you do remote interviews, people complain that the dynamics is not the same and they'd prefer to whiteboard stuff, or that they'd rather not turn their camera on for whatever reason.
When you do on-site interviews, people complain about commuting and coding with people watching.
If you do fizzbuzz, people will be offended because they think you think they are idiots (this includes people who can't do fizzbuzz)
If you interview people with many years of experience in the industry, some will complain that they have to do anything during interviews since their credentials speak for themselves. Some of them will try to pressure you into changing the interview process just for them. These people are typically the worst candidates you get in terms of skills and personality.
When you don't give feedback, people complain about it.
When you give feedback, people will disagree with it, sometimes violently (I was stalked by one particular weirdo).
If you ask soft questions, some people will complain the questions have nothing to do with the job.
If you don't ask soft questions, some people will think that the interview is very impersonal.
I agree people will complain about anything, however, some of those you enumerated are valid complaints.
Complaining about the take-home, fizbuzz is a little unreasonable. Complaining about needing a perfect Leetcode medium answer in 30 min is not an unreasonable complaint.
Okay, so it was for a DevOps Engineer role and not an SDE role, but we did have one guy who refused. He didn’t feel that he was a good enough programmer to do that on a whiteboard in front of a panel of interviewers, and so he refused. He even refused to talk about the core functions you’d need to make fizzbuzz work. He felt that he could work it out over time outside of the pressure of a hiring situation, but he didn’t feel he could do it on the spot.
To be honest, I felt that his recognition of that lack of skill and talent and his refusal to be pushed down that road, that was one of his strongest features for me. He was willing to stand up in front of the whole group and say “I Don’t Know”. I pushed hard for him to be hired, and the guy who had asked the fizzbuzz question didn’t feel as strongly that we shouldn’t hire this person.
To this day, I think he was the best hire the company ever made. I don’t know if he ever learned how to do a fizzbuzz program, but he was definitely one of the best DevOps Engineers we had.
A dev I knew used whether somebody knew string intern() as his main indicator that someone was proficient with Java. This one trivia fact determined whether or not you were considered proficient.