my senior contractor was insulted when I insisted that he hang sheetrock, install a bathroom sink and wire an overhead light with two switches, in front of me, on video.. as an interview to lead a 2 story addition on my second home
a good percentage of ordinary males can hang sheetrock, or be taught to do so by on-the-job training in short order. That uninteresting skill is not required to be lead on a large, multi-part project either. The sheetrock job is physically hard, time-consuming and ultimately there is almost no difference in skill levels. In other words it is easily replaceable and not rare.
This reduction to "things I can understand, while I am watching" demonstrates the paternalism of a simpleton while wasting the time of valuable people.
Exactly. Hanging sheetrock is such an elementary construction skill [*] that if someone who purports to be a master contractor does not know how to do it, it is a good sign that they have completely lied about their experience. In order to be at the level of a master contractor, you certainly have hung a lot of sheetrock over the course of your life.
Likewise, it is so easy to do fizzbuzz that if someone who claims to be a senior developer cannot do it, it is a good sign that they have lied about their experience, and have wasted my valuable time I spent interviewing them. Thankfully, I managed to catch them before they could waste the even more valuable time of my team.
[*] at a basic level; mudding and taping sheetrock to a smooth surface is actually quite difficult
you have essentially admitted that you cannot tell the difference between someone lying about journeyman skills, and those who are not. Your solution is to resort to "do an entry level thing while I am watching" as a test for advanced skills.
If they can’t pass an entry level test, there’s no possible way they have any advanced skills. Once we’ve established that they have a pulse, then we can spend time discussing their more advanced accomplishments. Unfortunately, I can’t assume right off the bat that people with 20 years of experience can actually code; there are too many people who look good on paper and can talk a big game but don’t actually have any basic technical chops to back it up.
I am guessing that you are part of a C++ crew somehow, and that you are talking about advanced C++ and entry level C++, for a "senior" C++ production job. If that is true, it inserts multiple contextual restrictions that were not addressed in this exchange.
Secondly, a colleague in California, another twenty veteran coder (like me) told me that he recently took one of these interviews we are talking about, and his first reply to me was "It does seem designed to disadvantage senior coders" .. his words without prompting.
Tons of the context here (and verbal pugilism) is about the human interaction and not the skill set. You may be flooded with fakers, and I may have no time for being treated like a truant at the Principal's office.
