Enough of Binary Trees

Technical Interviews

Technical interview process looks broken. Engineers with even 10+ years of experience are asked to work on coding challenges that they rarely/never use at work. How many times have you balanced a Binary tree at work in your software engineering career ? Senior engineers now have to dust their college level algorithms and data structures books just to clear that hurdle in technical screening.? People who spend a lot of time “preparing” for these coding challenges appear brilliantly skilled, yet real performers who have not prepared for interviews look poorly. This could result in costly hiring mistakes.?

This problem is much worse in fields of DevOps, Data Engineering, Cloud, and Data Science. How do we test those engineers for their real world hands-on skills ??

Cost of a wrong hire

A wrong hire costs a company about 6 months of salary of the engineer, roughly about $75,000. If you consider other collateral damage such as team moral, time lost in product delivery, time spent by other team members to coach the new hire, the cost could be much higher

Cases of people cracking the interviews, yet perform very poorly on the job is on the rise, thanks to standardised coding challenges

Employers spend an average of 1 month of salary or approximately $10,000 per engineer in the United States. This cost is significantly higher when you add the time of engineers in the hiring team, that spent filtering the candidates with interviews.

Problem #1: Testing wrong skills???

Testing real world skills is not easy. Mainly due to following reasons?

1. Friction of setting up a project environment to offer to applicant/interviewee to work on
2. Security issues of allowing applicant to access a company's network/resources
3. Time and resources to set up a project based challenges
4. Proctoring/monitoring and reviewing the candidate’s work can get messy

Given so much difficulty and? friction in offering project based environments, we take the easy route of asking to balance a binary tree

Solution ??

To solve this issue, we have built TrueSkill Labs, a cloud platform that eliminates all the issues mentioned above. Hiring managers/engineers can select from pre-cooked project stacks and offer them as challenges to the candidates. Once candidates logs in, TrueSkill would do the heavy lifting of orchestrating the dev environment in the cloud. It is a purpose built cloud that combines dev environment orchestration, ready to use test content, video collaboration and automated scoring, all in one the browser interface.

Problem #2: Cost of Engineers time

As engineering teams are already fighting their battles of meeting the deadlines and serving the customers, getting their time for interviewing is a challenge for HR managers.?Any time they spend on interviewing is the time taken away from the product building.

Solution

With the TrueSkill platform, even HR managers can choose project based challenges based on skills and difficulty level and screen candidates. This would not only save many man hours of precious engineering resources, but also increase the interview to hire ratio of the people presented to the engineering team.

Here are some of the issues that the TrueSkill platform solves for Hiring a manager.

Sneak Peek of how it works?

Although it doesn't cover all the features, let's take a quick sneak peak at how easy it is to offer a project based screening

Step 1: Chooses a challenge/test to offer and modify, if needed

TrueSkill comes with 100s of pre-cooked ready to use mini-projects/challenges/tests. Based on the skills and the difficulty level, you can choose the ready to use challenges. You can also edit the challenge to make it specific to that interview or applicant

Step 2: Invite applicant to take the challenge

Step 3: Applicant logs in to access to TrueSkill

Candidates get a full copy of the project environment including a browser based full visual code IDE, own instance of a database (Eg. PostgreSQL shown below).

Step 5: Applicant works on the project challenge?

Most project based challenges will have a working web app. This app will be visible in the browser. For example, a task to debug a broken web app might involve checking the working page of that web app.

Step 6: See the results in the results dashboard

Once applicant completes the test, work will be verified automatically and results will be shown in the dashboard. HR managers can then make a decision based on the results.

Environment Specific Quizzes

Environment specific quizzes provide a dev environment/stack and asks questions specific to that environment. Applicant has to work in that environment, like running commands, to answer the quiz. These quizzes test the true hands on skills of the candidate as opposed to just theoretical knowledge.

Ready to launch Stacks

We support many popular tech stacks along with ready to use project based challenges.

Many other features

There are many other features including lab authoring, quizzes, course content, proctoring etc. Would be happy to give a demo if you think this can add value to your hiring process.

Would love to hear your feedback,/suggestions.

Feel free to reach out to us if we can assist you with your hiring needs.

-Srini Koganti

Team TrueSkill , [email protected]

Www.TrueSkillLabs.com,