Backlog: Weirdest result to a phone screen ever

[dr4b]

It occurs to me that I haven't told this story yet, because it happened during the Week That I Didn't Blog (most of May 8-14). But another LJ friend or two work there, and the "we're hiring a ton of people" recently came up, hence me realizing I hadn't related this.

I had a second phone screen for a software engineering position on May 4th, which I also didn't really talk about. This was with a local company in downtown Seattle, which I'm deliberately not attaching a name to here. (I can if anyone cares.) The first phone screen was actually in early March, before I went back to Japan, and it was with an HR person who was clearly reading from a script of sorts and listening for keywords in her questions. So I passed that for the most part, though there were a few things, like she gave me an algorithms question, which I solved (my solution takes constant memory and O(2n) time; she was like "But you can do better", of course not really knowing how to explain AND not getting what I meant when I said "This is constant time and constant memory, what exactly do you WANT? O(2n) and O(n) are not enough different for you to spend 5 minutes trying to tell me I suck.")

Anyway, so, this second phone screen happens. With an actual engineer. Who has apparently been spending 90% of her time phone screening people, from what I've heard. But yeah, she was competent, and we had a good conversation. I think she might have asked some of the same questions as the first HR lady did, but some different, too, plus since it was like 2 months apart I didn't really remember.

And then she asks the same algorithms question.

And I go "Okay WTF. When I talked to ____ a few months ago, she said that..." and I explained my solution, and said "You're an engineer, do you know what I'm talking about?"

She says "Oh, no, your solution is just fine, 2n is just as good as n for the purpose of this. Wait, you talked to ____? I didn't know that. She's no longer with the company. Am I asking all the same questions?"

"You're not. Well, you might be. I don't know. But I remembered this algorithms question because it PISSED ME OFF SO MUCH."

Well, I field another few questions, and then we sit down with the web thingy where she wanted me to write code for her. She gave me a list-manipulating question to do... which I solved recursively in a pretty inefficient way. "Can you tell the me the runtime of that?" "Big. Ugly. Factorial?" The problem was that she said "Yeah. So, please make it run less stupid."

And I dunno, I couldn't think of the right way to do it, at least not in code. Very frustrating. Like I even had an idea of one approach to take but couldn't think how to code it out quickly.

So I figured I failed the interview. Shrug. I'm not REALLY qualified for what they wanted in a software engineer right now anyway. Even if I'm really good at understanding and explaining concepts.

Well, so on Tuesday May 10, I get an email saying they want to talk to me about "another" possible part-time opportunity... that yes, I didn't have what they were looking for in a software engineer. After I press hard enough, this is the message I got:

I had a chat with [MANAGER]: in a nutshell, [COMPANY] is expanding faster than you can say "can't touch this". Hammer joke aside, we need help interviewing potential Software Engineers from someone who knows what they are talking about, knows how to ask challenging questions, and knows what it is we do here. That said, we are looking for an interviewer. Of course, if things work out between us, there is growth potential. We are also open to telecommuting :)

You are smart, and know your stuff, and we want to utilize that skill set! Obviously, we would work around your schedule and do what we can to make this easy on you. If you are still interested in learning more please let us know!

Apparently, said manager was very impressed with the way I talked about stuff and could understand concepts, and enjoyed talking to me on the phone, and was sad that I couldn't write code for her. But she thought I communicate well and was very engaging in the conversation.

But, WTF? "You're not good enough to be an engineer for us, but we want you to help us find people who are"?

It's a really bizarre way to fail a phone screen, to be sure. I made it clear, though, that I had just taken this contract that would be taking up a LOT of my time, and there was no way I'd be able to do such a job for them.

And well, it's yet another weird thing to come out of the interviewing loop....

Comments

[georgejas.livejournal.com]

That is wacko. Wash your hands and move on. Can you tell me what company it was so I don't interview there?

[dr4b]

...it's where Tom McElroy works...

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

Wow. Uh. I'd be annoyed, too. I'm reminded of the anagrams question I failed because I didn't interrupt the interviewer when he said "this is what I was hoping you would do" and the light went on in my head. Well, probably would've failed it anyway. But is it a *requirement* to get the right answer, or to think in an interesting way?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

At good companies and with competent interviewers, the latter.

Edit: As a clarification, what I mean is that "getting the right answer" isn't even possible a lot of the time. When I was interviewing we'd constantly ask no-right-answer questions, usually of a type where there are many possible solutions all with various trade-offs and the goal is to see what the candidate considers and chooses. Even for technical questions with a clearly optimal answer in terms of efficiency or whatever, just recognizing the issues without too much hinting will get you half credit.

"This is what I was hoping you would do..." is a very bizarre thing for an interviewer to say IMO. I prefer the strategy of asking lots of leading questions instead, and if the candidate just doesn't get it, end the question with "this has been pretty good, but in the interests of time I'd like to move on." In no case would you ever be more negative about what they say than totally noncommittal, because you need to maintain company image and goodwill &c.

[cellio]

Wow, that's bizarre.

I grok contracting with people to do interviewing, but I don't grok contracting with someone you rejected for a job to do so.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

It's not out of the question, but I suspect the more usual situation would be the rejectee themselves choosing to apply for an advertised interviewer position with a lower technical bar. The company proactively contacting you is rather odd.

[dr4b]

I have to wonder how people recruit technical interviewers though? I mean... the funny thing is, anyone who's really technical enough to do these technical phone screens, probably has much better stuff to be doing with their time than phone screening people.

[cellio]

I don't think I actually know of a case where a technical interviewer was hired as such. HR people who've been coached in some keywords, yes, and regular technical people who are taking their turn in the interviewing seat, yes, but those are different.

I do know of cases where somebody was hired as a consultant to do technical screens, but they all involved people who the company couldn't just hire (geography, consultant happy where he was, etc). If you're trying to hire your first X and you don't know a lot about the domain, it can be wiser to hire an expert X to screen for the relevant skills than to try to do it yourself. But that's not this case.

[jeliza]

Actually, that makes perfect sense to me -- just like the best PM's know more about project management and less (but still something) about programming than their team, and a technical writer knows the language and the concepts but doesn't necessarily need to be able to execute it. (And if you've ever dealt with software manuals written by software engineers instead of technical writers, it becomes obvious that programming skill does not translate into language skill.)

Being able to evaluate someone's technical competence is a different skill set than excelling in those technical skills. Having someone with your skills do the interview is far preferable to no-context keyword HR screens, and frees up their current engineers to actually do code.

[ka3ytl.livejournal.com]

++

[alicelee.livejournal.com]

I know companies that do this for QA slots. If they are serious that there are other opportunities in the future, it might not suck.

...and I did see it blow up hard with the QA team in one case. They were known to be second-class citizens, and when they clawed their way out to engineering jobs, they were still treated like dirt. Not good.

[shandrew.livejournal.com]

Almost all of the engineers I've known hate running phone screen interviews. Sounds like they were trying to dump off temporary work that they didn't want to do themselves.