31–40 of 104 posts
I disagree with this. Coding interviews are great. The interviewer needs to realise though that they're not there to be an adversary or a judge, but to help the candidate demonstrate their skills, to help the candidate get the job.
As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. A full week is pretty close to insane. It means that application is effectively limited to the currently unemployed (or those who are willing to burn what might be all the vacation they can take for months). That said, it does make pretty clear that Weebly doesn't give a single shit about employee's lives; so it's kind of Weebly to make clear, ri…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do you handle the case that candidates already have a job somewhere else? They can't take a whole week off for this.
I took a week off at my previous job to trial at Weebly. My previous job had a very strict vacation policy, but I knew the importance of what I was doing. Weebly has an unlimited vacation policy, so, it worked out pretty well.
Also, from the Weebly end of things, what if you know a couple days in that the candidate isn't going to work out? Cut them off right then or finish out the week?
I disagree with this. Coding interviews are great. The interviewer needs to realise though that they're not there to be an adversary or a judge, but to help the candidate demonstrate their skills, to help the candidate get the job.
As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
This is pretty rough on any interviewee who already has a job as they'd have to take holiday days to interview. Do you give them a week off in lieu if they get the job?
"People who have a master’s degree in CS but seemingly can’t code their way out of a paper bag probably actually aren’t bad; more likely they had an education which de-emphasized practical hands-on programming in favor of heavy theory. People who post “please give me the code” questions on mailing lists and forums probably actually aren’t bad; more likely they had an education which was based around memorizing and re…
(and I say this, ironically, as a lifelong opponent of theory-heavy CS programs which churn out people who can derive an answer to your question straight from the Church-Turing thesis but couldn't code it up to save their lives)
I get the overall rant. I understand the frustrations - but this is wrong-headed. If you can't see the value of understanding algorithms - learning both how to write them and how to evaluate them (including proving their correctness), then you've misunderstood computer science education altogether. Nevermind all the rest of CS, which encompasses far more than just "names of algorithms".
As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. A full week is pretty close to insane. It means that application is effectively limited to the currently unemployed (or those who are willing to burn what might be all the vacation they can take for months). That said, it does make pretty clear that Weebly doesn't give a single shit about employee's lives; so it's kind of Weebly to make clear, ri…
As both an interviewer and interviewee at Weebly, I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. It really gives a great opportunity for the candidate to show off their skills without the on-the-spot pressure of a coding interview. A great side-effect is the candidate gets to determine if they like the team, and vice versa. I honestly wouldn't work somewhere else where I couldn't come in for…
I'm pretty confident in saying I prefer our approach of the trial week. A full week is pretty close to insane. It means that application is effectively limited to the currently unemployed (or those who are willing to burn what might be all the vacation they can take for months). That said, it does make pretty clear that Weebly doesn't give a single shit about employee's lives; so it's kind of Weebly to make clear, ri…
A couple of years back, I was hiring some vendor developers for my team, and since I had some flexibility in the interviews that wouldn't be allowed for full-time employees, I tried an experiment: For one of the vendor candidates, I told him a day ahead of time that I'd be asking him to implement System.Collections.Hashtable in C#, with behavior equivalent to the one in .Net. The day of the interview came, and he whi…
When I'm giving interviews I really like it when a candidate posed with a fairly complicated problem or design question pauses and actually thinks, then says something like "..well, I don't really know, I'd probably want to think about it more, but here's an idea" before putting forward their likely non-optimal but totally plausible and on-the-right-track design or solution that they thought of on the spot.
Under-confidence in an answer (straight up asking for validation i.e. is this right?) or over-confidence (expecting to shoot straight from the hip with the perfect, 'right' solution, or just a plain old bullshitter implicitly insisting that anything they say is correct) are usually red flags for an extreme personality type - always exceptions to this but as a general rule, I've found it to be true - and the happy middle ground, coupled with answers that obviously point towards a depth of knowledge and skill, is what you're looking for.
Trying to follow my own advice, I've done this myself as well when I'm the interviewee. Side benefit - if the interviewer actually is looking for a 'right answer' to complex questions out of the blue and on the spot - good for them if that's what they want but I'd want to self-select myself out of that type of expectation and working relationship. So everybody wins.