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Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

So here's my read on this, based on the post.

The author is focused with technical review, and as such he probably fails to see just how important personal review is. Yes, you are being reviewed technically, but you are also being reviewed personally. You may know a lot of technical things, but do I want you on my team? The phone interview is what i'm going to use to make that decision. Technical we can work over later, but only if you sound like someone I want on my team.

I'm always willing to say, "They look like a great fit for the team and our goals, and let's give them a chance to learn the tech" versus, "They know a lot of technical stuff and let's give them a chance to see if they can learn to work with other people."

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> "They look like a great fit for the team and our goals, and let's give them a chance to learn the tech"

I wish more were like you.

I've definitely had my fair share of interviews that bombed so I feel like I have a good bearing of when I don't leave a good impression, but it's always the worst feeling to have an interview that you think went well based on the overall mood/feeling, only to receive the eventual rejection later in the day that they went with someone more senior or that they wanted someone with more experience in x.

My mentor who didn't got to a well-known college once told me he joined a very solid company not knowing anything about the frontend framework they used but they gave him documentation and let him learn it for weeks without touching the code base. He said it was honestly one of the strongest engineering teams he's worked on in his career. The idea of managers seeing potential in someone and thinking "let's go with that person who has never done x" seems so foreign to me.

Re: your last paragraph, I feel like that's symptomatic of a change in the relationship between capital and labor that has happened to some extent at every level of the market.

Companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in the wellbeing or value of individual workers, instead treating workers as fungible assets to minimize the cost of which serve as solutions to current (rather than long-term) problems. We see this with the near-universal embracement of short-staffing in service-level jobs, lack of career mobility from starting positions, and even in the tech industry with the expectation that you usually have to switch companies to get a raise.

I worked as a sole proprietor/consultant for several years, which involved lots of “personal review” during the sales process. I am well aware of how important that is.

Then address it and be willing to evaluate and discuss how you come across in your post.

I’m very confident that I come across in interviews as someone that you want on your team.

And yet...

But the author is specifically complaining about the technical phone screens using vastly inferior tools and processes than what you work with day-to-day. Being asked to write code on demand in a notepad with no way to test or compile is not a personal review, it is a monkey show.

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