Some people are terrible at interviews. A few months ago I interviewed a developer in his thirties who had a great looking resume. Worked on lots of big projects in positions of both making decisions about software architecture, technology to use, etc.. and also being a programmer doing the actual work. His resume was really awesome.
When we received him in our interview, we asked him to tell us a bit about his past projects, what he liked, disliked, etc. He didn't talk much and it took us a lot of questions to dig up helpful things.
Then we asked a couple programming related questions and he bombed them all. He couldn't put an algorithm into words, write code that compiles or gives the proper results. Our interview programming questions start very easy and we slowly iterate by adding more constraints that shows if a dev has a deep knowledge of the language and framework.
I have a feeling like this developer was good when he's working alone on a project with no one to talk to. He would have never fit in our company culture and we couldn't evaluate his skills in an interview.
> developer was good when he's working alone on a project with no one to talk to
or he/she could have faked the resume, or dressed it in a good way. I find that excellent programmers tend to be good communicators, because good, clean programming is about communicating with future programmers (which could be yourself in 5 yrs time). Having clarity in thought and being able to express ideas to other people is so crucial that i would rank that above experience with a certain stack/tech.
He might have made it look better but it definitely wasn't fake, since he worked at one company I had previously worked at too. We weren't there at the same time but I asked him which team he worked in, who he worked with, who was his team lead, etc.. and he gave me all legit answers. We talked about the processes there and what he liked/disliked since we had both worked in the same environment.
It's possible he wasn't prepared for the interview, and was thrown for a loop early on and failed to recover. It happens. Although that is equally as bad.
When we received him in our interview, we asked him to tell us a bit about his past projects, what he liked, disliked, etc. He didn't talk much and it took us a lot of questions to dig up helpful things.
Then we asked a couple programming related questions and he bombed them all. He couldn't put an algorithm into words, write code that compiles or gives the proper results. Our interview programming questions start very easy and we slowly iterate by adding more constraints that shows if a dev has a deep knowledge of the language and framework.
I have a feeling like this developer was good when he's working alone on a project with no one to talk to. He would have never fit in our company culture and we couldn't evaluate his skills in an interview.