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Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#231

Post by vog »

xiaoma wrote: post #220
vog wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers still look very high from a European point of view. It seems it makes a huge difference whether a society deeply cares about educating the population, or cares just superficially. For example, in Berlin you spend less than 300€ per semester, a CS master takes 10 semesters regular time. Add two semesters to make the time more realistic, and you end up with 3,600€ which are roughly $3,800. Oh, and it cont…

A society that cared deeply about educating the population wouldn't confuse schooling for education. Yes there's some education conferred along with the schooling, but credentialism is a huge part of it and even more so in Germany than most countries.

> wouldn't schooling for education

I agree that there are not-yet-mainstream concepts for schools/universities/etc. that should be covered by public money as well, at least partly. Currently, this exploration happens entirely in the private sector, which is simply inadequate (read: too small and too slow) for the society to move forwards with its educational system. A society should actively invest into improving their education the same way they improve on science, and that investment is clearly lacking in Germany and many other countries. We advance the educational topics, but not the educational system itself.

But: Investing into classic schools and universities is still better than not heavily investing into education at all, which is the only real-world alternative I've seen so far. (And I would be glad to be introduced into a real-world third alternative.)

> Yes there's some education conferred along with the schooling

Some? Maybe I was just lucky, but at school and especially at university I got a very good foundation and always felt well prepared to educate myself later on (through books, websites, technical manuals, and so on). Contrary to conventional wisdom, I learned more about critical thinking and judging sources in school/university than anywhere else. Not in all lectures, but in enough lectures that I would otherwise have missed. Without that initial foundation, educating myself later on would have been much harder.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#232

Post by collyw »

graffic wrote: post #170
fecak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a problem with... "people looking for shiny things". There are many shiny things, and they loose their shine quite fast. It is true that many managers, recruiting agencies (almost 100%), and HR, will look for the keywords of the technologies the company is using. So if they use the new Angular 4, they will look for that. But there are companies that look for the basics: do you know javascript? Have you worked…

One thing that annoys me at present is NoSQL experience (or similar).

I know enough about relational databases and NoSQL to know that unless you have a specific use case, relational is likely a better choice. If you are not scaling beyond one server, and want to view your data from different angles its almost certainly a better choice. As such I haven't really got a great deal of NoSQL experience. I will build a better application than someone who does resume driven development, but won't get past many HR drones.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#233

Post by sgt101 »

When you are interviewing for a specialist post (and most posts are specialist to some degree) you are looking for evidence that the candidate can do that particular job. Therefore a course that indicates that they have the particular skills required is highly desirable!

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#234

Post by vog »

witty_username wrote: post #216
vog wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers still look very high from a European point of view. It seems it makes a huge difference whether a society deeply cares about educating the population, or cares just superficially. For example, in Berlin you spend less than 300€ per semester, a CS master takes 10 semesters regular time. Add two semesters to make the time more realistic, and you end up with 3,600€ which are roughly $3,800. Oh, and it cont…

But it's subsidized; so people who aren't getting an education are paying for those who do.

> But it's subsidized; so people who aren't getting an education are paying for those who do.

This is just another way of saying that the society cares about this issue!

To put an analogy: When a society cares about parenthood and children, non-parents pay some share to parents. This is how financial solidarity works. How else should that work? By telling parents that they do a great job, that you appreciate what they do for society, but not giving a single cent to them? That would be hypocritical, not solidary.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#235

Post by 8a »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #168
stale2002 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because interviewing skill is how you get a job. If I am looking for a job, I care a whole lot about what would make me better at getting jobs.

Interviewing skill is one way you get a job. After you've been doing this for long enough, and have a reputation, you tend to just get jobs by referrals. I decided in my last change of positions to try interviewing for jobs like most people without referrals, since I had several other referral positions open. And I was horrible. I was ridiculously bad, and couldn't get a job at jobs that paid less, and were for less…

This is an important data point surveys like this ignore.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#236

Post by richmarr »

graffic wrote: post #167
ktRolster wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest, traversing a linked-list and implemented a B-tree (assuming someone reminds you what a B-tree is) are not particularly difficult problems. If you have trouble with those, I'm going to really wonder if your programming skills are really very good to begin with.

They're not particularly difficult. You usually take the algorithm definition and implement one, as you did in the university or in the Coursera algorithms course. Fun, you might learn a thing or two about the language you're using. If the point of the exercise is a TRIVIA question, leave the interview. On the other hand, if the point of the exercise is not to get the right solution but see how you think and how you…

You refer to the interviewers as 'peers' but that's very much not the relationship that exists in an interviewer. The context is different, therefore the behaviour is different.

What you're describing is a confidence bias filter, dressed as an objective test.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#237

Post by matthewmacleod »

collyw wrote: post #226
blindhippo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think along these lines. Then I started doing 10+ interviews a month and realized a very clear reality: basic CS knowledge and problem skills is far more important to me and my team then knowing how to slap together some semblance of a working CRUD system. I ask "algorithmic" questions, normally expressed as a legitimate business case (invent a real world problem, solution is implement some algorithm or use…

Some of us don't "slap together some semblance of a working CRUD system", but put a bit of thought into it in order to make a maintainable app that works as it should and is scalable when necessary. That requires plenty of knowledge, but algorithmic CS stuff isn't high on that list.

That requires plenty of knowledge, but algorithmic CS stuff isn't high on that list.

I'm not sure I agree – in my experience there is at least a direct correlation between 'knows about scalability, performance and maintainability' and 'knows about data structures and algorithms'. Maybe they aren't going to be able to tell you about the performance edge-cases of different sorts or whatever, but I'd probably still expect to see at least awareness of a difference existing.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#238

Post by Matthias247 »

witty_username wrote: post #216
vog wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers still look very high from a European point of view. It seems it makes a huge difference whether a society deeply cares about educating the population, or cares just superficially. For example, in Berlin you spend less than 300€ per semester, a CS master takes 10 semesters regular time. Add two semesters to make the time more realistic, and you end up with 3,600€ which are roughly $3,800. Oh, and it cont…

But it's subsidized; so people who aren't getting an education are paying for those who do.

Subsized - yes. But I don't agree to the second sentence: Generally the higher educated people are getting higher salaries afterwards and are paying way more taxes. These taxes are then used for providing education to the next generation (and also for lots of social programs which target the low/no income population).

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#239

Post by ascorbic »

chvid wrote: post #227

I have been through an interview process many times; I have never been asked a technical question / asked to do on blackboard or on computer problem solving. I guess that that form of interviewing is simply not common in my neck of the woods (Denmark). I am curious to what sort of questions / tasks are actually given to the interviewee? And are they in any way biased towards more textbook/academic ones? (I.e. "implem…

Out of interest, what sort of questions do you get asked in interviews for Danish tech jobs?

To answer your question, when I have interviewed people the tasks I have set have always been job-related. I set pre-interview at-home tasks, as well as smaller tasks during the interview. I did this for the same reason I avoided whiteboard exercises: I wanted it to be realistic. One example I used was to implement an app that shows sunrise and sunset times. They were allowed to do this in any way they wanted, using open source libraries if they wanted, and add whichever features they wanted.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#240

Post by shanwang »

I'm not surprised that MOOCs are a big factor, people like me who have left school years ago have forgotten how to write a BFS, we need something to brush up those knowledge.

If you run statistics against using sites like careercup, you may find that being the top factor.

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