In my role as a Software Engineer here at Ad Hoc, I help out with the engineer hiring and recruiting process, including homeworks. We recently conducted a session over video with potential candidates, and we recorded it so that others can get a feel for how things work.
Here’s some annotations if you want to skip right to your area of interest:
0:26: Introduction. Aubrey is the tech lead on our Quality Payments Program Front End project with our client, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Also worked quite a bit on the engineer hiring process
1:55: Summary. Covers company history, culture, remote work, and the hiring process
2:22: Company history, including our founder’s role in the HealthCare.gov recovery efforts, map of team members across the country, the nature of our current work, the changing face of government IT contracting,
7:46: Company philosophy, including agile practices modern toolsets, and best practices for development workflows. Covers details around languages and tools as well as deployments and tool choice process
10:26: Discussion of remote-first work, including twice-yearly retreats
11:27: Recruitment process: the types of roles we recruit for, what we look for, current open positions, homework, technical interviews, contingent hires
13:27: Homework: a set of exercises to demonstrate skills. They are designed to be fun, but they are work. Blind grading by all team members. We seek to remove bias in evaluation, give people the time they need to produce a quality answer, give us a bigger sample size of work to evaluate, and give our engineers a real chance to participate in the recruiting process
16:27: What we look for in evaluations. We look at the code as if it were a pull request— would we want to merge this code into production? Would we want to work with the person who wrote this code? Does it show attention to detail? We favor simplicity over complexity. Follow directions, solve the problem, and show you know how to structure code
18:00: Recruiting process: apply for a position, create an account on homework submissions app, choose the proper homework, complete and submit the homework. Use our chat application for technical help around homework. Write to recruiting@adhocteam.us for non-technical recruiting questions
18:57: After submission: we get to the homeworks as quickly as we can and the recruiting team follows up with a response. If you move forward from the homework, we do a series of interviews, focusing on things you’ve worked on, your approach to development in the context of our needs
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