I've never done a real interview

I was listening to a recent ShopTalk Show episode where Dave Rupert was sharing about his experience of looking for a developer job this year. It made me reflect on my own career.

I have a confession to make: I’ve never done a “real” interview, like in my whole professional life.

I started development as a contractor for advertising agencies. They didn’t do interviews, they would just pay you to work for a day, and if you could code at all, they would keep paying you to come back for more days. This was in the era of peak demand for developers, so the bar was super, super low to get a gig.

After that I had two permanent jobs. Both were for young companies started up by three guys who had no idea how hire people, or to properly vet potential candidates. I was the first employee (or one of the first) in both situations. The “interview” was like a 20 minute chat.

I’ve been with CodePen for over 8 years now. It’s been sooo long since I’ve had to “prove myself” to anyone, the thought of having to go through some drawn out recruitment process is just… ugh. I don’t know if I could hack it.

I imagine a whiteboard interview going something like this:

interviewer: “show me how you can turn this array in to a hash map” me: “how dare you?! I built an IDE backed by an entire social platform with my bare hands! Good day sir!!!”

I’m kidding… kinda. I would be more than happy to talk through a legit software engineering problem and solution so the people hiring me could see how I think and communicate. But when I hear about all the performative hoop-jumping that has to go on for people to get a gig these days, it makes me think that maybe I’ll just stay at this company forever¹.

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This has been post no. 17 for #WeblogPoMo2024 and it is what I was interested in today.

Footnotes

1. If I’m so lucky/privileged to do so. ↩