Time for more Interviewmania.

As I said in the last blog, this time is my turn to be the interviewer, that means I need to prepare the rubrics needed to evaluate the interviewee. To create those rubrics is not easy as it seems, to be able to evaluate it’s necessary to be able to recognize what you know and what you consider correct. How do you know this? If you don’t know then you ask someone with experience to review your rubrics.

Thanks to the experience from the previous interviews I was able to identify what is evaluated and helped me to write the first revision of the rubrics and, at the same time, was able to identify what they may evaluate in an interview.

Another part of the interview is a code interview, we have to choose a problem and give it to the interviewee to solve it. The main purpose of this is not to test their technical skill but to make them feel comfortable and help them to improve their performance during an interview.

For me it was important to create a script for the interview, mainly because, as I said before, I tend to ramble a lot when I talk, but what I didn’t expect was improvising during the interview because you don’t know what the interviewee could say.

During the interview I tried to make it so the interviewee was ready for the coding problem, so the round of questions was short, only the most basics and about their experience.

Before the interview I tried to cover the possible approaches so I could be able to help the interviewee in case they ask questions about the problems. To my surprise, the interviewee chose an approach that I had not considered at all. Fortunately, after the interview I learned that this approach worked and was able to consider the problem solved.

I don’t know if I was more nervous being the interviewer or the interviewee. Being the interviewee made me nervous because it was my first time being evaluated like this, but in the end, I learned a lot from the feedback they gave me.

Being the interviewer is also hard because you are in charge of guiding the interview, so almost everything depends on you, but that is part of the experience.

And that’s for this week’s essay, I really liked being the interviewer, one of the interviewee’s programming language is one I use, but the other one is one that I’m not very familiar yet which also made it necessary for me to study that language. All the experience I gained from this activity is very good and I’m sure it will be useful for me in the future.