611–620 of 735 posts
Its a sad world out there these days.
tbh it's very hard, in general, to assess someone skills in ~1 hour, with the diverse set of problems we face everyday and people/companies often focus too much on "previous relevant experience" (do you know this?) instead of thought process and depth of understanding (how much have you understood what you have done) which, to me, gives more insights on someone personality and attitude and ability to learn new things and becomes harder to cheat on (you can memorize "cracking the code interview" and be a hero on leetcode and still have no idea about how to write good software, take decisions or work in a team :)
I had this one interview where I had to remove nodes from a linkedlist. Pretty trivial, right? It is, but as I was writing out the solution, probably for the 200th time, I thought "Ive never used a linkedlist, ever"
And I thought, I just cant do it anymore. I cant reverse one single more binary tree. I cant listen to some CTO tech bro in his early 30s explain to me why I need to be in an office he'll never set foot in for the 'company culture'.
Ive had so many interviews just like this. Ive done 7 hour on sites where you break down algorithms, system design, app development. Its brutal out there, no one seems to have any idea what their looking for so they just put you through the ringer.
So now im not interviewing, Im happy and content in my bank programming job. Im probably not a very good programmer, thats okay, Im a wonderful partner, family member, musician. Ill get by, hopefully, for another decade until everything collapses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over the years, I've walked from several "live coding" interviews. Arguably though, if you're looking for "social coders" maybe the interview is working as intended? But for me, it's just not how my brain works. If someone is watching me, I'll be so self-conscious the entire time you'll get a stream of absolute nonsense that makes me look like I learned programming from YouTube last night. So it's not worth the time.…
What do you do if a junior asks for help and it's easiest to code through with them?
In an interview, the coding challenge is often to produce something new from scratch while being closely monitored by people you don't know, who control your financial future.
When working with a "junior," you'd already be fairly familiar with the code base, build system, and best practices. And with a junior, you're not likely to be solving things that require deep concentration, like never-before-seen problems or architectural work (or screwball interview-tests). And, unlike an interview, if something does require all my focus, it's very easy to defer. Take a break and think about it alone.
What I usually do is case study that I also do not know at the start of the interview. The case study does not imagine spherical cows and are not usually leetcode style. Its a case of role playing a problem. We brainstorm it together and I determine if I can work with them.
I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc. So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So…
My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…
I do not want AI. The human is the value add.
I understand that people won't feel super comfortable with this, and I try not to roast the candidate with leetcode. It should be a conversation where I surface technical reality and understanding.
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(Not the OP.) The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. When I was younger, I would get distracted and play computer games (or comment on HN..), rather than churn out mountains of mediocre code all the time.
> The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. My process right now when working LLMs is to do the following: - Create problem and solution statement - Create requirements and user stories - Create architecture - Create skeleton code - Map the skeleton code - Create the full code At every step, where I don't need the full code, the LLM will start coding and I need to stop it and add "Do not gener…