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Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

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Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#31

Post by modzu »

yes the process is broken. why? because optimizing the process itself is a Hard problem

the naive solution would say, hey, this whiteboard stuff is a synthetic benchmark. just use a real one! (ex: solve a coding problem with access to the internet)

but for large companies (and this applies to school applications as well), it is not merely a process of evaluation, but of filtering.

there are more qualified candidates than there are positions. and thus whatever process is used to reduce this number will always be somewhat arbitrary

perhaps it would seem less "unfair" if it were random, but is it really?

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#32

Post by [deleted] »

ng12 wrote: post #6

> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Does the interviewer explain what bubble sort is, or do they expect the candidate to know it? The first is a reasonable interview, the second one isn't.

[deleted]

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#34

Post by canadian_voter »

Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string.

The problem with Python is the arcane, arbitrary and nonsensical syntax. It sure as hell isn't anything as obvious as length(str) or string.length like any reasonable language.

And god help you if you want to do something complicated like define a function.

But seriously: I have no problems with the rest of the article, but that one just seems silly. How many times do you have to look something like that up before it sticks? For those of you not versed in the more esoteric secrets of Python, you would use the built-in function len, as in len(str).

Of course there are alternatives: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3992192/string-length-wit...

Edit: Added tags for clarity.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#35

Post by CoolGuySteve »

Weird that this post got 90 points in about 20 minutes but has suddenly dropped more 10 places from the top of the front page.

I was interested in seeing the discussion here but it looks like the article is getting penalized for some reason.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#36

Post by ClayM »

sidlls wrote: post #18

This is a tough subject. I don't believe deep understanding of algorithms and data structures is necessary for the vast majority of engineering tasks. Most (almost all) engineers can get by understanding complexity notation and a matrix comparing time/space complexity for various algorithms and data stuctures, no memorization required. And even that is overkill, as most of time the "natural" one suggested by a proble…

I throw real life problems I've run into (and fixed!) at people and ask them to give me things they would do to troubleshoot, and compare it to what I did. Always nice when somebody suggests something new.

I also ask 10,000 foot questions. "Say you're wanting to build a new app that behaves like Instagram. What's your hosting platform, your technology stack, and explain why?".

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#37

Post by m3kw9 »

stale2002 wrote: post #26

Whiteboard coding questions are useful as a baseline test of preparedness. You don't need to be a genius to solve them. You just need to spend some time practicing them and reading cracking the code interview(OR you need to be a recent college graduate who did well in their classes). I agree that the super difficult Google style questions are silly, but if an engineer can't solve an easy-mid level difficulty whiteboa…

Sarcasm much?

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#38

Post by Nition »

ng12 wrote: post #6

> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Does the interviewer explain what bubble sort is, or do they expect the candidate to know it? The first is a reasonable interview, the second one isn't.

Or tell them you want them to write an implementation of bubble sort on the whiteboard and then give them a 1 minute allowance to use the Internet. Then you can test their Google skills too!

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#39

Post by facepalm »

antiroyalty wrote: post #29

Liz's recent tweets on the subject have struck close to home and have so much insight. https://twitter.com/feministy/status/836407798476881920

"how would you distill an unwieldy set of options into a concise API?"

I'd rather implement Bubble Sort, tbh...

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#40

Post by adsims2001 »

canadian_voter wrote: post #34

Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string. The problem with Python is the arcane, arbitrary and nonsensical syntax. It sure as hell isn't anything as obvious as length(str) or string.length like any reasonable language. And god help you if you want to do something complicated like define a function. But seriously: I have…

Seems overly harsh. Why is the actual code, "len(s)" so much worse than your suggestion of "length(s)"?
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