Do interviews really go like this at many companies?
Here in NYC I have
never had unreasonable interviews even close to that. And I interviewed for a lot of senior developer positions and consultant positions.
In our own startup we have a completely different approach. Our motto is "People live lives. Companies build products."
We like to hire and work remotely because that eliminates geographic restrictions and lets people work asynchronously. We've found that the better the system for asynchronous communication, the better the long-term productivity and maintainability.
We use a common folder structure, code conventions, for each project. Developers build fully documented reusable components that are re-used across projects. Every developer is very replaceable (meaning our losses are limited if they leave or scale back their time). This is actually a great thing for developers given our compensation model (see below).
If a developer does something wrong (like checking in syntax error), we first check if this is something we should fix in the system (add a linter to the pre-commut hook). There are so many amazing open-source tools today. It's a compoundibg snowball to design a good system. Sometimes the COO job feels like an architect/developer, just like DevOps, but for people and configuring processes and systems instead of programs or servers.
The best talent is the one who already knows or can learn your platform (in our case https://qbix.com/platform) and become productive. Who is eager to grasp new SKILLS (like debugging javascript with asynchronous call stacks) and get familiar with useful TOOLS (like Google Chrome).
We hire from anywhere and prefer to work over the internet. Even our compensation model is different than what most companies do - it aims to attract independent people and entire teams, and compensate them based on the contributions they actually do. We want to grow a snowball in a transparent way, and motivate people by giving them ownership of a product or feature instead of focusing on making them sell their time as full-time employees who commute to an office.
Here in NYC I have never had unreasonable interviews even close to that. And I interviewed for a lot of senior developer positions and consultant positions.
In our own startup we have a completely different approach. Our motto is "People live lives. Companies build products."
We like to hire and work remotely because that eliminates geographic restrictions and lets people work asynchronously. We've found that the better the system for asynchronous communication, the better the long-term productivity and maintainability.
We use a common folder structure, code conventions, for each project. Developers build fully documented reusable components that are re-used across projects. Every developer is very replaceable (meaning our losses are limited if they leave or scale back their time). This is actually a great thing for developers given our compensation model (see below).
If a developer does something wrong (like checking in syntax error), we first check if this is something we should fix in the system (add a linter to the pre-commut hook). There are so many amazing open-source tools today. It's a compoundibg snowball to design a good system. Sometimes the COO job feels like an architect/developer, just like DevOps, but for people and configuring processes and systems instead of programs or servers.
The best talent is the one who already knows or can learn your platform (in our case https://qbix.com/platform) and become productive. Who is eager to grasp new SKILLS (like debugging javascript with asynchronous call stacks) and get familiar with useful TOOLS (like Google Chrome).
We hire from anywhere and prefer to work over the internet. Even our compensation model is different than what most companies do - it aims to attract independent people and entire teams, and compensate them based on the contributions they actually do. We want to grow a snowball in a transparent way, and motivate people by giving them ownership of a product or feature instead of focusing on making them sell their time as full-time employees who commute to an office.
I'd love to get feedback on the compensation model btw: https://qbix.com/blog