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How does GitHub test its interviewees? #504

Closed bartzy closed 10 years ago

bartzy commented 10 years ago

How does an interview process usually look like?

What questions are you asking?

What are the hands-on tests you give back-end devs, front-end devs and devops interviewees?

Thanks!

holman commented 10 years ago

Usually we'll talk with you over email briefly just to get a better background of you. At some point, we'll usually Skype with you, talk about your experience and your thoughts, and get your opinion on why you want to work for GitHub, why you're interested in the product, why you think you'd be a good fit, and so on.

If the phone screen works well, we'll bring you into the office in SF for a day. That day is usually 4-5 interviews with hubbers throughout the course of the day: a few of them with people on your prospective team, a few with people who are not at all in your line of work, and then usually (if you're a tech applicant) an hour or so of pairing on a real-world problem with a hubber that you might work with in the future. No gotchya questions, no stupid abstract theoretical approaches... a lot of the time we'll just sit down at our issue tracker, find something that's legit broken right now that would require an hour to fix, and then just pair on it together.

Hope that sheds some light on it! Let me know if you have any other questions.

bartzy commented 10 years ago

So you only bring on people that are very comfortable on the technologies/languages you use?

Do you perhaps know how do you test Devops applicants? That's usually a hard one...

Thanks again.

holman commented 10 years ago

So you only bring on people that are very comfortable on the technologies/languages you use?

Yeah- we don't typically bring on people new to our tech stack.

Do you perhaps know how do you test Devops applicants?

I'm actually not too sure- I think they pair on some similar problems together, perhaps.

bartzy commented 10 years ago

Awesome!

It never happened that you didn't have a real-time bug that was big enough to tackle together with an applicant ?

On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 4:22 AM, Zach Holman notifications@github.comwrote:

So you only bring on people that are very comfortable on the technologies/languages you use?

Yeah- we don't typically bring on people new to our tech stack.

Do you perhaps know how do you test Devops applicants?

I'm actually not too sure- I think they pair on some similar problems together, perhaps.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/holman/feedback/issues/504#issuecomment-36413236 .

holman commented 10 years ago

Haha. We have a thousand issues open on our repo right now. And if we didn't have something like that, usually we'll just hack on whatever project the interviewer is working on at that point.