I Can See You

the problem(s) with tech interviews

I browse LinkedIn sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s a valuable use of my time, or if it’s just filling muscle memory vacated by my near abandonment from twitter…or …X (?!?), but it’s where I sometimes find Five for Friday fodder, and more often these days, where I catch up on how many of my old friends and colleagues are looking for work - and how many of those folks have to go through poor interviews.

As Appropriate

I spent about fifteen years at Microsoft as an “As Appropriate” - aka AA or AsApp interviewer. This meant that I was the last interviewer on an interview loop - assuming the candidate didn’t fail spectacularly before then. They saw me if it was “appropriate”. Sometimes, a candidate would be all hires, then my job was to sell them on the role and work on closing (or, in rare cases, veto the loop). More often, there was some split in the yeses and nos, an my role was to figure out what was what and make an overall recommendation. There was a little bit of orchestration / direc…