Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 330 posts

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#251

Post by timr »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #241
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…

>The average coder should be able to solve this type of thing, on their own, in about 10 minutes max, 15 with some feedback on improvements. >Yet, 80% of my candidates take nearly 45 minutes and cannot deliver a workable solution without massive handholding, and I don't even get to my higher order, "real questions". You need to ask yourself why you believe the "average coder" should be able to solve that because clea…

"You need to ask yourself why you believe the "average coder" should be able to solve that because clearly your beliefs are not founded in reality."

Oh, stop.

The problem he describes is trivial, and something that you'll encounter as an entry-level web developer on a regular basis. If you can't solve it, you're absolutely not up to the job. In fact, I'll go further: if you literally cannot find an efficient way to filter a list of stuff based on a criteria, you're not even a programmer yet. It doesn't matter if you've "written" a dozen toy webapps by stringing together NPM modules -- not knowing these basic things makes you a danger to any team that hires you.

You can't judge the quality of a test exclusively by the number of people who fail it. If you resume screen for "has written code before" and 80% of your applicants fail that test, is your standard set too high?

(In case you're wondering, that's not a hypothetical example.)

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#252

Post by vitus »

zigzigzag wrote: post #244
Matthias247 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If education was always profitable like that, governments wouldn't subsidize it, they wouldn't need to. Heck people would be fighting to give student loans. The reality is lots of people study subjects that don't result in higher salaries but political correctness insists that people be able to study the arts easily, so governments "have" to subsidize education.

Well, no, the cost of education is ridiculous. Not many people get out of undergrad without any loans, and especially if you want to go on to get higher education (yes, even law degrees which pay nicely after you graduate), you'll be stuck with a mountain of debt that you won't be paying off any time soon.

I know someone in particular who went on to get a law degree (and was steadily employed in her field from her time of graduation) but was only managing to pay in the double digits toward her loan's principal on a monthly basis -- the rest went toward interest.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#253

Post by chvid »

ascorbic wrote: post #239
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 tha…

I do a lot of short term consulting contracts. Typically for 6 months or so. My role is either Java/JavaScript senior developer or architect.

In the general the interviews runs for 30 minutes. The first 15 minutes, the client presents themselves and the particular project they are working on.

Then I spent typically 5-10 minutes running thru my resume; focusing on any relevant previous projects.

If there is any technical talk it will be based on the projects in my resume or the client's project. The most technical it will get would be pros and cons of particular technology choices.

I have never been asked a "quiz question" - that is a question where the interviewer knew the correct answer in advance.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#254

Post by FLUX-YOU »

timr wrote: post #251
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The average coder should be able to solve this type of thing, on their own, in about 10 minutes max, 15 with some feedback on improvements. >Yet, 80% of my candidates take nearly 45 minutes and cannot deliver a workable solution without massive handholding, and I don't even get to my higher order, "real questions". You need to ask yourself why you believe the "average coder" should be able to solve that because clea…

"You need to ask yourself why you believe the "average coder" should be able to solve that because clearly your beliefs are not founded in reality." Oh, stop. The problem he describes is trivial, and something that you'll encounter as an entry-level web developer on a regular basis. If you can't solve it, you're absolutely not up to the job. In fact, I'll go further: if you literally cannot find an efficient way to f…

Is he talking about this problem (with a filter at the end)?

http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/finding-all-subsets-of-a-given-...

Because I have never done that. That's different than just running through a list and picking out items that meet a criteria.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#255

Post by nmat »

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.

When the government pays for health care (like what happens in most european countries) it means that people that are not sick are paying for people that are sick. Why should they, right?

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#256

Post by [deleted] »

greenhatman wrote: post #173
ooqr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that MOOCs lack face time, I was a terrible traditional student and excel when given the opportunity to structure my time as I see fit. Accountability is overrated.

I'm im the same camp. I've start studying at a university a few times now, and I keep failing because other oportunities come up that are more important than passing the course. I need to be able to self study at my own pace according to how my free time allowes. I'm also not that interested in formal tests and exams. And even course projects. I want to learn what I need for whatever project I'm currenty working on o…

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#257

Post by jkovacs »

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.

Yes, but so are the trade schools/apprenticeships where people go that don't go to university, so what's your point? Your education is subsidized either way, unless you don't attend either of those options, in which case the individual is probably not going to pay for anything at all.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#258

Post by timr »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #254
timr wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You need to ask yourself why you believe the "average coder" should be able to solve that because clearly your beliefs are not founded in reality." Oh, stop. The problem he describes is trivial, and something that you'll encounter as an entry-level web developer on a regular basis. If you can't solve it, you're absolutely not up to the job. In fact, I'll go further: if you literally cannot find an efficient way to f…

Is he talking about this problem (with a filter at the end)? http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/finding-all-subsets-of-a-given-... Because I have never done that. That's different than just running through a list and picking out items that meet a criteria.

Not that I can see. The OP said:

"find the subset in a given collection that matches this specific criteria"

So basically, a loop through a single table. That's as simple as it gets. You can make the problem more complicated, of course (e.g. "write a method to find the minimum and maximum ages of the male users"), but it's still pretty simple stuff.

A slightly less trivial "algorithm" question that should be equally easy for any decent programmer: I give you a document of english words. Write a function that counts the words, and returns the top ten words seen, by frequency. Now...solve the same problem when it's not a single document, but a stream of words of unspecified length. Don't run out of memory.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#259

Post by [deleted] »

forrestbrazeal wrote: post #71

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…

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#260

Post by kenoyer130 »

We really need a further correlation between people who pass the interviews and job performance a year later. I do a lot of interviewing at my current job and we have found no strong correlation at all between CS skills and actual ability to "get things done".

We toned down the CS type questions since they tend to take too long. We still ask a few basic tree and string manipulation questions to weed out the people who have no idea how to program and get insight into how the person thinks.

I still feel at the end of the day we could flip a coin on accepting an interview candidate once they have shown basic competency and have the same results.

I have been telling candidates that a public github repo with a nice commit history carries much more weight with me then a CS degree since we have been burned so many times before.

Post reply on HN