I was reading an article the other day and it led me to another article and another, it got me thinking…how can I get hired after graduating a coding bootcamp? But that’s another story. Let’s talk about this tech issue, the hiring/interviewing issue.

The importance of having an elaborate interview system is to weed out the “secretly terrible programmers” from the good ones. So here we are still using whiteboard interviews, logic puzzles and algorithms to test the abilities of the candidates because if you can’t figure out how to solve a basic programming task then maybe you aren’t cut out to be a software developer. But what about the really good candidates that suck at interviewing, or the ones that are good at interviews but are terrible at the job? That’s probably why many software developers and hiring companies would say that technical interviews are not effective.

It’s tough on both sides, I agree that we should have some way to measure the candidate’s aptitude, but my thoughts are to also, focus on the candidate’s potential, their skills, talent and what they can offer, find out how curious they are and have a growth mindset. Look at the work they’ve done and ask the people they have worked with.

“In a time of engineer austerity, we simply can’t afford to throw away so much talent.