Timeline for How can one interview somebody for a job requiring work under severe stress?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 22, 2018 at 20:44 | comment | added | user47813 | I disagree. If you need probation period to evaluate a candidate skills, your interview process is deeply flawed. Probation period are for rare cases, and not a replacement of good interview process. | |
| Apr 2, 2014 at 11:38 | comment | added | o0'. | @Dunk I agreen only partially: it's perfectly normal and fine for any job to have a small probation period, but what you said is perfectly fine for companies who try exploit this and have long "probation" periods. | |
| Apr 1, 2014 at 9:39 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Ian | ||
| Oct 5, 2012 at 9:54 | comment | added | jwenting | @MarkBooth maybe I got lucky, maybe corporate culture here is different, maybe it's because when I've had such work it was as a contractor rather than an employee. And there's a difference between being thrown in the deep end and being left dangling there. A proper process would have you run a period of support work under supervision of a more experienced person for example, acting as a mentor and source of wisdom (or at least knowledge). | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 9:40 | comment | added | Mark Booth | @jwenting - I don't think I've had a job yet where I haven't been thrown in the deep end during my probation period, usually due to resource pressure elsewhere, but my current job is there first (in almost 20 years working for UK companies) where I have actually been explicitly compensated for out of hours support calls. | |
| Oct 5, 2012 at 6:21 | comment | added | jwenting | except that probation periods are exactly not the time to put someone in that high stress on-call pattern as to do that job properly demands in-depth knowledge of the system they're going to be supporting, knowledge they won't have yet. @Dunk most jobs I've had such on-call duty was part of the job description, as is a probation period of several months (this is in fact so normal here there are government limits on the duration of it), usually on-call time is compensated on a lower rate for inactive hours, overtime pay while actively handling a support call. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 23:33 | comment | added | Erik Reppen | Emergency on-call expectations are one thing but if I got the sense a company was more focused on the employee's high-stress 3am aptitude than his ability to avoid such issues in the first place, there'd be a me-shaped hole in your wall in short order. Don't ever forget that unless you're scraping at the bottom of the barrel, developers have options. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 22:05 | comment | added | Dunk | If you are going to hire me with a "probation period" then you'd better be prepared to pay me a contractor's pay rate, since "contractor" is the word I hear when I hear the phrases "Contract-to-hire" and "Probation Period". So many employers use these phrases and then offer the same pay they would a full employee hire. I once told a potential employer that I would be fine with a contract to hire position but the pay rate was going to be 50% higher and their reply was, we don't want you to get used to the higher pay so we can't do that. Needless to say, I didn't take the job. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 18:52 | comment | added | Oded | @Angelo - true, but the question is about assessing someone for existing skills, not about training them up to have those skills (in this case the skill is working well under pressure). | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 16:53 | comment | added | Angelo | You might substitute "probation" with "training". This kind of problem is faced by network operators (for example long haul telecom). Such networks are maintained 24-7 by staff who are expected to respond to problems and are measured in terms of seconds. Customers of these networks have service level agreements that put the company on the hook for big money in the event of unscheduled down-time. The way they hire operator personnel is by training candidates for weeks and then evaluating them prior to putting them on a live network. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 14:05 | comment | added | Telastyn | @oded - Sure, sticking around can be the opposite. The interview should focus on that previous experience to see if it was a good experience or prolonged stagnation. For the sort of situation where an outage is high business impact (and thus high stress) it seems to me to be too risky to depend on probationary periods (and their added stress) to evaluate candidates. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 13:46 | comment | added | Oded | @Telastyn - Not always an indicator. Sometimes the opposite - see the dead sea effect. A probation period is the best insurance against those that talk the talk but can't walk the walk. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 13:38 | comment | added | Telastyn | @oded - How do you prove prior success with any job? If they were there for a long time then they probably did an adequate enough job. | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 13:34 | comment | added | Oded | @Telastyn - But how do you prove prior success in the interview room? | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 13:32 | comment | added | Telastyn | @maple_shaft - I would argue that prior success in a similarly demanding position would be a fairly strong indicator as well. Probably with less risk to business too... | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 11:29 | comment | added | maple_shaft | +1 Probation periods or contract to hire are the only way to test if a person can handle the stress of being on the job | |
| Oct 4, 2012 at 10:54 | history | answered | Oded | CC BY-SA 3.0 |