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How to win the coding interview

blog.devmastery.com

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Re: How to win the coding interview

#141

Post by voidr »

EpicEng wrote: post #66
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…

>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. Work that is small enough to be done in 1 week and big enough to deliver some value. Except now I have to jump through hoops with HR (let's just assume they'd be OK with this, which they almost certainly won't), get the contract in place, work with IT to get your environment set up, and…

I'm a contractor with a decade's worth of experience, I automatically turn down places that ask me to do implement a linked list on a whiteboard, I do appreciate tests where I get an IDE and have to solve a simple problem, because after a certain level it's mainly about how you solve problems and how well you can explain what you are doing.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#142

Post by thomasahle »

voidr wrote: post #141
EpicEng wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Work that is small enough to be done in 1 week and big enough to deliver some value. Except now I have to jump through hoops with HR (let's just assume they'd be OK with this, which they almost certainly won't), get the contract in place, work with IT to get your environment set up, and…

I'm a contractor with a decade's worth of experience, I automatically turn down places that ask me to do implement a linked list on a whiteboard, I do appreciate tests where I get an IDE and have to solve a simple problem, because after a certain level it's mainly about how you solve problems and how well you can explain what you are doing.

Can it be any IDE?

Re: How to win the coding interview

#143

Post by iSnow »

NhanH wrote: post #32

> I'm not actually testing how well you write code on a whiteboard. I’m looking for something else Even if you believe so, it's more likely than not you're not actually doing that. You WILL judge how well someone write code on a whiteboard. I've done that too, and it's surprisingly easy not to notice. You can't stop yourself from judging, maybe you can realize that your snap judgement mean jackshit and don't make dec…

>As someone who can't figure out if (9+1 === 10) is true or not under interview

As someone who has probably the same problem, any ideas how to land a better job? Those typically involve a lot of coding while someone breathes down your neck.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#144

Post by arethuza »

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.

Having a contract saying that you shouldn't do something doesn't make it illegal it just means you are violating the terms of the contract. Which if you are leaving anyway might not be that big a worry.

Also, particularly with employment contracts, just because something is in the contract doesn't necessarily mean it is enforceable.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#145

Post by iSnow »

hvidgaard wrote: post #117

The author have a list of secret good questions, and that is not helping anyone. He expects the candidate to think loud and be explicit, but are himself very implicit in his requirements. What I consider production code is without a doubt different from what he things is production code. > Your code should be commented. Then put this requirement, because judging from the example, the authors expectations, is what I f…

But the author doesn't even advocate RegEx for testing if a string is a palindrome. He doesn't explain for which part he'd use it, but from the sound of it, removing whitespace and punctuation.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#146

Post by efaref »

enraged_camel wrote: post #119
richforrester wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, this was almost exactly what I was going to respond with. My only addition: "Alternatively, we can write/review some code on a whiteboard."

It's well documented that whiteboard exercises are terrible for evaluating candidates. A lot of people, developers especially, don't perform well under pressure (stress reduces cognitive ability). Not only that, but you will also alienate a great many experienced candidates. If you are OK with all that, fine I guess. But I thought it was widely agreed upon that the software industry needs better hiring practices.

If by "well documented" you mean "lots of people have whinged about it at great length", then I guess you're right. It's also a "tried and tested" method, too, so it's got that going for it.

I think if you approach them correctly (like the author suggests), then actually they're fine for their intended use. (Not perfect, but this is the real world, nothing's perfect).

If you can't cope with scrawling some pseudocode on a whiteboard because that's "too much pressure" then you're going to really struggle when a deadline looms and we "absolutely must get this code out to the customer by Friday because a $50M contract is on the line."

Re: How to win the coding interview

#147

Post by iSnow »

smartan wrote: post #93

Came across this link on here a while ago, curious if anyone has experience with similar interview experiments: http://goo.gl/fDGYhC .

>Candidates are requested to supply source code, from one large project, a week before the interview date

Not everyone is the author of a big OSS library. Lots of people do most of their coding as an employee and cannot legally show you their code. Hell, I cannot even discuss some of the more interesting challenges I faced because that would violate my NDA.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#148

Post by Kesty »

The problem with all this "advices" is that they boil down to "just study".

I agree that been prepared for an interview is a good thing, if you are ready and have studied you show that you are willing and that you put in the effort.

But what about people that are currently working ?

You are trying to get the best programmer, and chances are is that the best programmers out there are currently working (minus a small percentages of great programmer that are in between jobs, or that spent the last period on consulting or personal projects) so you automatically put people that are currently working and can't prepare for the interview as well as the other at a disadvantage and those are the people that you are probably most interested in.

To me it seems that in this world the only interview process is solely targeted at young people fresh out of college.

Re: How to win the coding interview

#149

Post by chvid »

Honestly; the example answer is not good. If I was in a hiring position, I would at least talk to the person writing this and ask them to change their style.

The problem is that the answer is slightly over-engineered, over-commented, checks for input type, logs in a corner-case, looks-like-it-has-been-written-by-a-teacher-with-too-much-time-on-their-hands.

These are not problems in themselves but when you have a new person on the team and they write code like that, it may be inconsistent with what the rest of the team is doing / what the rest of code base looks like.

For comparison here is another way to test for a palindrome:

   function isPalindrome(text) {
       for (var i = 0; i
(Possibly add "normalization" in the beginning as they do in the article.)

Re: How to win the coding interview

#150

Post by arethuza »

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?

"also are you seriously going to quiz someone about i18n for a interview?"

Absolutely - in fact asking whether that regex was a good way of matching all characters in an input might be a good interview question.

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