London / UK / EU
jaymz.eu
System Architect / Python / ops / *nix Math @OpenUniversity ISE @ImperialCollege / INTJ
jaymz [at] jaymz [dot] eu
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Some of this has been mentioned so far but from my side I'd say the 5 minute timer yet very complex scenario is something that sets the "candidate" up to fail immediately, certainly if they're typing all this out. You're lulled into trying to cover the big picture but needing sufficient detail (it's not clear how low to go) to make sense. Having a multi-step process where it's progressively more low level as you drill in would be great. When we do interviews we tend to do very high level boxes then drill into increasing detail covering edge cases. This is hard to do in a one shot response.
This could actually be a useful tool - I regularly do loops of "critique this design" via AI and find it immensely useful, but you're being disingenuous if you're serious that you built this to address getting "honest feedback". I guess you are trying to be edgy, but really this is just a bad attempt for some viral marketing. I'm also fully aware that developer rage baiting was probably half the goal too, and I'm falling for it.
In these situations I will frame my contributions directly without the "we" part, speaking to how I contributed to a particular team output, or if it was 100%, I'll just say as much. My comment was in terms of general talk to stakeholders / presentations / casual conversations - then I default to "we".
E.g. if I add some new feature to a tool and deploy it, I'll say "we've just pushed X...". If I do 99% of some particular feature, I'll still say "we've added Y...". In an annual review I can still speak to what I specifically did. I have probably been lucky in the teams and team sizes I've been in, but I've not had a problem with this.
For context I've mainly stuck to small (<50) and medium (<500) companies. My one experience (due to acquisition) of directly working within a 5000+ company was certainly starting to feel like what you described, I got out.
I've always used "we" when describing and presenting work done as part of a team, even if solo. There's a certain skill in knowing when to promote yourself, and how you do so. These days I tend to be positive in a group sense, and take direct specific ownership of failings. I may be lucky but I think this has led to a lot of respect from coworkers and c-suite that I've engaged with. I've never once felt like people don't know who is getting the work done in the end.
It's not an answer to this, but tangentially related as we had a similar conversation at work very recently. Not many people know about Google and Apple's inactive account manager setup (https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en). If you've not already done this I'd highly recommend adding your spouse/kin/best mate etc as a contact. I set this up to transfer over access to my Google Drive to my wife if I've been inactive for some period. We have separate offline docs around keys and access, but if the worst happened, then eventually she'll get a message with instructions on decrypting and accessing the critical info she needs. A lot of my (tech savvy) co-workers had no idea this was a thing.
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