I don't think interviewing as a concept should even exist. In a perfect world, everyone should be able to freely learn new things and help contribute their life experience in a positive way. In tech, there are plenty of opportunities to do that in the way of open source.
So what I started was a local library program (pre-covid) that I would attend before / after work to be around people who are doing career switch to coding.
Then when students learn enough and have strong foundations that I look for, I recruit them to work on open source side projects that benefit new students who are learning.
For the students who have shown the maturity to build and maintain production features, I refer them to the company I work at and they interview and (hopefully get in).
In the past 2 years, I've referred 5 students successfully and they're all doing pretty really well (I secretly stalk their internal code contributions).
I hope that one day, I could have enough reputation at my company to hire engineers based on their open source contributions. I also hope that the stock market doesn't crash next year because I plan to use my RSUs to start a fund to hire junior engineers students so they don't worry about medical benefits while they contribute to open source projects and have a hard time finding a job.
If you mentor a student as they are learning, you can instill good engineering practices: like taking the time to communicate and write good documentation, write code and comments to make life easy for the next engineer to take over, how to handle tradeoffs between time and quality, etc. These are critical engineering skills that are very hard to test in 1 hours but are very effective if mentored early on.
So what I started was a local library program (pre-covid) that I would attend before / after work to be around people who are doing career switch to coding.
Then when students learn enough and have strong foundations that I look for, I recruit them to work on open source side projects that benefit new students who are learning.
For the students who have shown the maturity to build and maintain production features, I refer them to the company I work at and they interview and (hopefully get in).
In the past 2 years, I've referred 5 students successfully and they're all doing pretty really well (I secretly stalk their internal code contributions).
I hope that one day, I could have enough reputation at my company to hire engineers based on their open source contributions. I also hope that the stock market doesn't crash next year because I plan to use my RSUs to start a fund to hire junior engineers students so they don't worry about medical benefits while they contribute to open source projects and have a hard time finding a job.
If you mentor a student as they are learning, you can instill good engineering practices: like taking the time to communicate and write good documentation, write code and comments to make life easy for the next engineer to take over, how to handle tradeoffs between time and quality, etc. These are critical engineering skills that are very hard to test in 1 hours but are very effective if mentored early on.