If they don't do whiteboards, what does foursquare do now?
There's a link to their blog post where they describe it in that exact sentence.
Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
41–50 of 238 posts
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#42This 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…
Agreed. The Google style questions are silly. But an engineer really should be able to at least answer an EASY question. Stick with a question where the answer is "put it in a hash table". No trick questions. Just a baseline, does this person have a pulse, so nobody's time gets wasted.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#43I've come to the conclusion that the 3 algorithms on whiteboard interview is generally worthless for determining an engineer's on-the-job performance.
Instead, "Build X in 1-2 hours using your computer and resources available" was always a better proxy for productive engineers and largely removing both false positives and false negatives.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#44Weird 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.
figuring out why that is happening would be a good interview question!
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#45Somehow I still don't buy that dhh would fail to implement Bubble Sort.
this. maybe he would need to be reminded which sort it is, but he could do it. unless the white board interviewer expected perfect syntax in a particular language.
which, I agree that is usually always silly
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#46Wasn't this in reaction to the story that Homeland Security had asked the question to a programmer entering the US? I don't know how this was extrapolated to a broken job interview process.
can you share a link?
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/travellers-stori...
There have been others come to light since, but this was two weeks ago.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#47Hello, 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…
I used Python for years, although I'm a little rusty now. I ran into that kind of problem all the time. Your first two examples are what came to mind first.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#48Its counter intuitive but whiteboarding is actually more inclusive IMO. Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. You cant do that in any other industry.
If we judge candidates purely on work experience that just favors the incumbents who have already broken into the industry and presumably already quite comfortable in life.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#49Somehow I still don't buy that dhh would fail to implement Bubble Sort.
30 years in the business, just recently failed a screen coding test call because I blanked on find string pairs question. Just couldn't think for a minute.
During the normal day, look it up, slap head and go on.
Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process
#50Whiteboard 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?
Not sarcasm. If you don't know what fizz buzz means, it means that you didn't even bother to spend 5 minutes googling "programming interview questions".
Do you really want to hire someone who didn't bother to put in even the tiniest, most basic level of effort into preparing for your interview?
Its like going to an onsite interview and asking "so what does this company even do anyway? I didn't check before coming here today."