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Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#71

Post by forrestbrazeal »

The author draws a hard distinction between Udacity/Coursera MOOCs (good) and traditional master's degrees (bad). I'll interject that with Georgia Tech's Online Master's in Computer Science program [0], which is delivered via Udacity and insanely cheap [1], you can get the best of both! (Their "Computability, Complexity and Algorithms" class is one of the top Udacity courses cited in the article.)

Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability. It sounds good to say that anybody can go push themselves through one of these courses. Try pushing yourself through ten, and actually writing all the papers and implementing all the code, while working full time and having a family. That grade looming at the end of the semester really does wonders for your motivation. Plus you can get help from live professors and TAs, and the Piazza forums for OMSCS are full of smart, curious students who love talking about the subject at hand. There's a richness to the degree experience that I don't think you get with scattered classes.

(Obvious disclaimer: I'm a current OMSCS student)

[0] http://omscs.gatech.edu [1] https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/cost-payment-sched...

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#72

Post by _w6l2 »

FT_intern wrote: post #53
nickbauman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top school is also serving as a proxy for wealth and privilege. Good grades are also a proxy for wealth. Kids who have rich parents get private tutoring.

The privilege to value education and to spend time studying, yes. Almost all resources can be found online nowadays. If you've ever been to an SAT tutoring class, you know that the only benefit the kids have is the benefit of being forced to take practice tests. A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with m…

> A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with much worse scores and GPA.

For the truly competitive schools, the affirmative action students still need very high scores and GPA, they just tend to be given a little more of a pass on the extracurricular activities and essays in the application. I'd argue that for the most part, students of any demographic have to do some pretty crazy things to get the attention of top schools. The probabilities of an affirmative action student being granted admittance are just much higher than for an equivalent non-affirmative action student, but that doesn't mean that affirmative action students can get away with having poorer grades and scores. I'd argue they just have to be less well-rounded.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#73

Post by fecak »

moxious wrote: post #59
fecak wrote: post #56

Thanks for writing this Aline. As a recruiter for almost 20 years, I wish I had access to all my data and then the time to compile it, and anecdotally I'd expect the finding about MOOCs would be similar. The most selective of my hiring clients over the years tended to stress intellectual curiosity as a leading criterion and factor in their hiring decisions, as they felt that trait had led to better outcomes (good hir…

> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. This is true, and one of the things that tends to stack disadvantages against people who are older in the industry. There's a good correlation between free time and age in some ways, as people get to mid-career they tend to…

I see this pattern time and time again in both my recruiting work and in my resume business. Someone gets a rather non-challenging job that pays market rate or better, starts a family, pays little attention to any tech outside their day job, and suddenly finds that their marketability outside the current job has suffered greatly.

As developers get older, they need to be conscious of the relevance of their work in regards to current trends, and if the day job is largely irrelevant they may need to find access to projects (often unpaid) that will serve to impress new employers.

I don't think that the value of experience has truly diminished, but I think what is now classified as 'experience' may have shifted a bit.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#74

Post by ohwello »

geebee wrote: post #14

Interesting bit on the MS degree. I followed the link, and I'm not quite as surprised that the correlation is poor, or even negative, given the way the data was collected and analyzed. Absolutely agree that some MS degrees are pretty much less rigorous cash cows by now, that allow students to skip the fundamentals such as data structures, operating systems, and compilers. However, many CS MS degrees actually do requi…

In my experience almost all candidates applying recently with an MS in CS have been H1B visa seekers. Presumably, many of them obtained the MS specifically because it increases the odds of winning the H1B lottery.

The Bay Area had several shady MSCS-granting institutions. Some of them have gotten in trouble with ICE.

Even at programs run by major public research universities, the same economic incentives apply.

It's always hard to tell the value-add of a degree apart from selection bias. This case is no different.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#75

Post by serge2k »

faitswulff wrote: post #3

It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company: "...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."

I view it as evidence that their interviews are easily gamed. You cram in some algorithms knowledge and off you go.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#76

Post by fecak »

BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #68
fecak wrote: post #56

Thanks for writing this Aline. As a recruiter for almost 20 years, I wish I had access to all my data and then the time to compile it, and anecdotally I'd expect the finding about MOOCs would be similar. The most selective of my hiring clients over the years tended to stress intellectual curiosity as a leading criterion and factor in their hiring decisions, as they felt that trait had led to better outcomes (good hir…

Im not quite understand why recruiters asked books on reading list?

What you do at your job during the day is usually imposed on the employee. Few employees get to choose the languages, tools, etc. that their company uses, so their interests aren't always relevant to their day jobs.

Your reading list on the other hand is entirely up to you. It's likely an indicator of something to the person asking the question. People who don't like math (or aren't skilled in math) aren't reading advanced math textbooks for pleasure.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#77

Post by [deleted] »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #49
geebee wrote: post #14

Interesting bit on the MS degree. I followed the link, and I'm not quite as surprised that the correlation is poor, or even negative, given the way the data was collected and analyzed. Absolutely agree that some MS degrees are pretty much less rigorous cash cows by now, that allow students to skip the fundamentals such as data structures, operating systems, and compilers. However, many CS MS degrees actually do requi…

> Absolutely agree that some MS degrees are pretty much less rigorous cash cows by now, that allow students to skip the fundamentals such as data structures, operating systems, and compilers. At what point do we not consider operating systems and compilers "fundamental"? What percentage of CS/programming jobs require deep knowledge in these arenas?

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#78

Post by kowdermeister »

guntars wrote: post #67
kowdermeister wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be optional or advanced level. If you are a web developer for example OS and compilers are totally not important to get along and have a healthy career.

I disagree, compilers are relevant to web development because of all the compiling and transpiling that a single source file goes through in large application development.

If you are interested in _writing_ compilers then sure. If I just want to use those compilers, then I don't really need to understand them just use them as specified.

Now you'll say that I'll make a mess if I don't know what the compiler does. That's what best practices are for if say I pick TypeScript. Also, optimization is the compilers responsibility.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#79

Post by rhizome »

FT_intern wrote: post #53
nickbauman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top school is also serving as a proxy for wealth and privilege. Good grades are also a proxy for wealth. Kids who have rich parents get private tutoring.

The privilege to value education and to spend time studying, yes. Almost all resources can be found online nowadays. If you've ever been to an SAT tutoring class, you know that the only benefit the kids have is the benefit of being forced to take practice tests. A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with m…

A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school

Assuming all high schools are the same.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#80

Post by hcatlin »

fecak wrote: post #73
moxious wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. This is true, and one of the things that tends to stack disadvantages against people who are older in the industry. There's a good correlation between free time and age in some ways, as people get to mid-career they tend to…

I see this pattern time and time again in both my recruiting work and in my resume business. Someone gets a rather non-challenging job that pays market rate or better, starts a family, pays little attention to any tech outside their day job, and suddenly finds that their marketability outside the current job has suffered greatly. As developers get older, they need to be conscious of the relevance of their work in reg…

I'm sure this happens, yes. But, that's not what's going on here, IMHO.

Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job'

Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter.

Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think experienced people would do fine.

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