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0 pointsthe_snooze11mo ago0 comments

>The only problem is taking into account those that are not good at public speaking.

A very common concern, but overblown in my experience. If you notice, I never actually said "judge the candidate's presentation skills" (or anything of the sort) in why I think this process is great. The presenation is really just level-setting; the candidate gets to set the topic and give sufficient context for a conversation to occur. The presentation is at most the first 15 minutes out of a ~3 hour in-person interview process. That's how little it matters.

It's the Q&A and subsequent discussions that matter.

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ameliaquining11mo ago

The problem is that interviewers have a strong tendency to judge candidates based on whether they come across as self-confident, even when instructed not to. It's possible to get people to not do this, but it requires fairly rigorous training. tptacek wrote about this a decade ago: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

the_snoozeOP11mo ago

I'd argue the "presentation and Q&A" format addresses that directly. The candidate gets to pick exactly what the interview is going to be about, at least at the beginning, so they have full control over first impressions. No gotchas at all. Who wouldn't pick something they're confident about?

If someone thinks Cmake is super cool and knows all sorts of great use cases for it, then they should present that. They should also be prepared to answer open-ended follow-up questions like "broadly speaking, how could a project transition from something like Automake to Cmake?" or "what are some footguns in Cmake and how can we avoid them?"

gavinhoward11mo ago

Those sound like very good adjustments.

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