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How to win the coding interview

blog.devmastery.com

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Re: How to win the coding interview

#131

Post by tigershark »

DigitalSea wrote: post #100
kayman wrote: post #36

I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…

I have done what you have proposed and it worked for my latest job (2 years and counting). I flat out refused a coding interview. I openly said, in my experience as a developer, great candidates fall through the cracks because they fail under a controlled environment which does not reflect the real world. They actually agreed with me. I came in and did a one week trial, I brought in my own computer, they gave me acce…

It's actually illegal in all the contracts that I ever had to work for someone else while you are employed for a company. And even if it was legal I would never lose a week salary for some fancy interview that takes a week, plus all the time that it takes to test the other n-people to have an answer.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#132

Post by BinaryIdiot »

kayman wrote: post #36

I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…

While I agree with your sentiment entirely I think you idea is faulty. Too much up-front cost for the employer and high risk for the employee if you need that job. I would like to see a short homework assignment which is then used to work with the interviewee. At least in some form (idea needs refinement).

Re: How to win the coding interview

#133

Post by BinaryIdiot »

gedrap wrote: post #118
kayman wrote: post #36

I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…

>>> I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. I don't really agree with this statement. The truth is that there are a lot of folks with 10+ years of experience who wouldn't even pass as junior devs at many places. I've seen people with 10+…

> The truth is that there are a lot of folks with 10+ years of experience who wouldn't even pass as junior devs at many places.

Sure but this really has nothing to do with the parent's post. The parent said they have references and the experience and code in production. All of this is verifiable short of, say, DoD contract work.

I doubt you have worked with folks with 10+ years of experience who wouldn't pass as junior developers who also had references and verifiable code running in a production environment (and if you did I would imagine that's a fluke negative hire).

> But hiring is a 2-way street. If you completely disagree with the hiring procedure at a company, then you are probably not a good fit, and that's fine :)

Considering almost every technology company hires the same way and the employees typically have the "I went through it so you have to do" attitude you're not really going to find another company that has a "better" hiring procedure. Your response is more facetious than realistic. If you want to be a developer you don't have much choice than to go through the system that has been studied to death and known to be flawed.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#134

Post by jacalata »

amorphid wrote: post #43
kayman wrote: post #36

I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…

Some reasons against a 1 week working interview: * It can take up to a week just to get someone ramped up with access to things in many environments (setting up accounts, configuring dev environment, etc.) It's not free to create and disable a dev's access. * Most places I've seen aren't set up to ramp someone up in a week. I think Pivotal Labs gives people a try for 3 week contracts, and they have a culture of rampi…

Pivotal Labs definitely doesn't require a 3 week contract before hiring, and it never even came up as a theoretical option when I interviewed with them and got an offer last year.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#135

Post by sklogic »

> Who on Earth writes code on a whiteboard? Like, seriously

You know, professionals do this. Anyone who value time and quality.

Hipsters may find it weird, but, well, they have decades to learn before they'll become professionals.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#136

Post by dcw303 »

gedrap wrote: post #123
dcw303 wrote: post #111

> Some interviewers will ask you to code an implementation of a particular algorithm. Personally, I think that’s just a giant waste of time. It’s far more important to me that you understand which algorithm to apply to which problem. You can always Google the implementation. > It’s not unreasonable to expect that you know the basics of RegEx So that's a fairly arbitrary distinction. Regex has a famously terse syntax.…

Basics of RegEx, in my opinion, is a very subjective thing. Personally, I'd interpret it as 'able to write a simple expression with a few minutes of googling', where simple expression is something like 'up to 5 lower case letters immediately followed by a digit'. It'd would be a reasonable indicator if someone has used them outside tutorials and class rooms in the past year or two. However, you (or anyone else) might…

I generally agree with your interpretation, but as the author wrote this later in the piece:

> If I give you a challenge to take home, my expectations are even higher. If you get a week to code something with full access to Google, etc… There’s no excuse for giving me a solution that is anything less than top-notch.

I saw that as an implication that he expected a candidate to be able to recall regex basics from memory.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#137

Post by iSnow »

tigershark wrote: post #131
DigitalSea wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done what you have proposed and it worked for my latest job (2 years and counting). I flat out refused a coding interview. I openly said, in my experience as a developer, great candidates fall through the cracks because they fail under a controlled environment which does not reflect the real world. They actually agreed with me. I came in and did a one week trial, I brought in my own computer, they gave me acce…

It's actually illegal in all the contracts that I ever had to work for someone else while you are employed for a company. And even if it was legal I would never lose a week salary for some fancy interview that takes a week, plus all the time that it takes to test the other n-people to have an answer.

> I would never lose a week salary for some fancy interview that takes a week

I'd actually love to do that. The company I work for currently presented itself in a very professional light and all the questions I had were answered promptly and professionally. No red flags.

Only when I started work, I noticed immediately their code base contained unfixed bugs, tests were not up to date and the databases (so called data-warehouses) were a mess. Unfortunately, the only real good developer was on the interview and answered my questions.

During a one-week stint, I'd have discovered enough bad practices that I would have declined the job.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#138

Post by iSnow »

parennoob wrote: post #16
alexandercrohde wrote: post #5

Perhaps better named "How to win my coding interview." Author goes into the specifics he personally expects from an interview. Since he's not positing these as universal standards (and rightly not) I'm not sure if this is relevant to anybody other than the people who intend to interview at dev mastery.

Yes, I don't understand the suggestion for regexes as the correct and optimal way to detect palindromes. I hope this is not the expectation in general.

> I don't understand the suggestion for regexes as the correct and optimal way to detect palindromes

That made me pause as well, but he actually doesn't say that. He says a "many will use RegEx as a part of the solution" - typically to strip whitespace and punctuation signs - something like /\W/.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#139

Post by di4na »

hvidgaard wrote: post #102
twblalock wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

n++; // increment n

I've had students that did this. It's a real pain to read code like that, and the 2nd time they handed it in, it was an automatic fail. Comments explain assumptions, and often "the why", never "the what" unless it's obscure because of optimizations.

As someone that was a student until last year, the real hard problem is that we have teachers that want this type of comments. Having different standards for different teachers the same day is a lot of context switching...

A better idea would be to get a standard code style for all course...

Re: How to win the coding interview

#140

Post by germanier »

swang wrote: post #26
revetkn wrote: post #19

1. "On this particular challenge, I am expecting many will use RegEx as a part of the solution" Really? 2. "replace(/[^a-z0–9]/ig, '');" If I were interviewing and a candidate did this I would ask if he/she knows what i18n is

one of his questions is, "does this need to support utf-8" and i'm assuming in his hypothetical interview it is, "no it does not" also are you seriously going to quiz someone about i18n for a interview? does that really tell whether they are a hire/no hire?

Given how many sites fail as soon as I start entering an "ä" in the name field (even on websites marketed internationally) I'd prefer if people would. At least the very basics or else you get a bunch of people that won't think about those issues when developing.
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