Don’t declare the death of the technical interview. If you make such a declaration, then I will declare with as much confidence (and more correctness) that you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.
The technical interview is fine, assuming you have a competent person doing it. If you don’t, then you’re already screwed.
A competent engineer can do an effective technical interview. (Of course, there are competent engineers who can’t do a good technical interview.) Those vapid brainteasers about ping-pong balls in 747s and being shrunk to the size of an ant and dropped in a blender? I never saw one. Not even in 2005. That’s not what a technical interview is. Even in the worst companies, people don’t ask those questions in 2013. Even VC-istan isn’t that behind the times.
The problem is that few companies have the people who can run a technical interview, because most of them aren’t technical themselves. Sturgeon’s Law kicks in on both sides with all things job-search related. If you’re a typical company trying to find talent, you have to sift through hundreds of depressing resumes and interviewing non-Fizzbuzzers. If you’re a software engineer, you’ll spend a lot of time searching through awful companies and gradually learn that the VC-funded stuff isn’t an alternative to Corporate America, but an even-worse caricature of it. Again, Sturgeon’s Law.
This whole ecosystem around the engineer-t0-VP-to-CTO-to-founder-to-EIR-to-angel-to-VC career ladder is dying. People are learning, through painful experience, that a 0.02% “equity” slice of a typical startup isn’t real ownership; it’s a half-hearted apology for the long hours and the 60%-of-market wages. By adulthood– an optional transition usually happening at some age between 22 and 40, seeming to come later in high-cost-of-living areas that prolong adolescence– people tend to tune out of the VC-funded world unless they can go quickly to the top– as executives, founders or investors. In fact, the best way to think about the VC-funded world’s success is that it is child labor. (Hell, most VC-funded managers are children!) Even at ages like 28 that were full adulthood at one time, there are a lot of privileged, socially awkward males who are still effectively kids, and those are the ones who’ll put up with fucking pager duty if given 0.02% “ownership” of an entity they cannot possibly valuate (because they never get within 22.3 miles of an investor meeting).
VC-istan is horrible. It deserves to die. Its increasing inability to garner talent (as good engineers leave it for hedge funds, lifestyle businesses, or exit from software altogether in adulthood) is leaving it worse at performing technical interviews (as well as mentoring high-potential juniors, planning projects, and, like, everything else that requires maturity) and therefore it is getting less signal from those, as code-sample evaluations increasingly come down to tabs/spaces rather than overall effectiveness in communication. But that’s not a problem with the concept of the technical interview itself. As a programmer who has lost years of his life to shitty code I’d like to see more technical interviews.
Long live technical interviews. Long live technology.
