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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

#71

Post by TillE »

digler999 wrote: post #62
entee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

> a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time than to donate it to your fun programming escapade. Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

No, it's just moving those 1-2 hours to home instead of at the interview. If you can take time off for an hours-long interview, you have the time to complete that kind of task.

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

#72

Post by bovermyer »

We interview people based on their passion for the craft and never use code tests or whiteboard tests. If they have a GitHub account, great, we'll look at what they have available. It's not required.

Our team is bright, engaged, and productive. This system seems to work pretty well for us. And yes, we have a pretty diverse group of engineers.

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

#73

Post by impish19 »

Anytime there's a blog post or a thread complaining about the 'broken coding interview process' it ends up being upvoted by everyone and their brother on HN but very rarely have I seen people offer a reasonable alternative instead.

I work for a big tech company and for our org, typically we have a couple of Algorithms/Coding rounds, a system design round, a technical communication round and a loosely structured interview/chat with a hiring manager. I think this works because people, at least on my teams, have to work on a wide array of features that could involve writing backend queues, or Hadoop jobs or some business logic on the API layer that would need to leverage caches/DBs/other appropriate key-value stores. It definitely does help to have people who have broader knowledge of Computer Science to be working on those features.

I feel our interviews have low recall and precision but a good accuracy (we end up hiring smart people we can count on to pick new things up). And FWIW I don't think we ask unreasonable questions during the coding rounds. I also feel it's a reasonably scalable way to organize a generic 'objective' and 'fair to all' interviewing process at a big company that can hold a reasonable hiring bar.

If I was running a smaller company then I probably would have kept in place a process that was closer to the bare practical requirements of the job.

Also, if the existing interview process was really that bad in practice with an abysmal correlation with successful hiring, wouldn't the companies have dropped it already?

I know this kind of sucks for applicants who think they have all the skills that are needed to practically do the things they'd have to do at the job they're interviewing for (and in some cases rightly so), but arguments bashing the current interview process would seem more valuable with the proposal for a better alternative that can comes off as reasonable after the same amount of critique and scrutiny that the current process gets.

Also, I often get confused - do people not agree that there's any correlation with hiring good engineers and the current process, or do they just think companies should have a more developer-friendly interview process? If it's the latter, then do the companies have any incentive to do so? It can't be that 'their potential hiring pool becomes wider' because if that really was such a big problem they would have changed already.

(All opinions mentioned here are mine and none are my employer's, obviously)

(Edited comment twice to attempt to make thoughts more coherent)

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

#74

Post by philbo »

digler999 wrote: post #62
entee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

> a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time than to donate it to your fun programming escapade. Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

> then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time

1-2 hours on a practical assignment vs 3 months cramming suggested by the parent comment. Which of those has nothing better to do with their time?

> Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

Will they? I'm an experienced dev and think this approach sounds great.

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

#75

Post by branchless »

vp89 wrote: post #48

Its 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 l…

This is the amazing thing about IT. Also once you are in the computer doesn't care what your background is, what your colour is etc. It will refuse to compile the bad code of an ivy league grad.

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

#76

Post by mdturnerphys »

vp89 wrote: post #48

Its 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 l…

I get your point, but I'll also point out that costs a lot more than $35 to lock yourself in a room for 3 months. Many people don't have guaranteed room and board for that long.

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

#77

Post by jackmott »

subatomic wrote: post #70
jackmott wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the answer you find is a good one? Say you think you need a binary tree, so you can get Log(n) lookup, you look it up, implement it, it works, great. Not bad. Then a lady comes along who actually understands the problem domain, and knows that cache locality will be a big win in this case, and she uses a sorted array with a binary search. Latency is cut in half and the company makes a brazillon dollars…

For 99% of situations in normal software dev, just being able to find X in collection is enough.

I interact with slow and/or battery draining software every day that annoys me.

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

#78

Post by runT1ME »

impish19 wrote: post #73

Anytime there's a blog post or a thread complaining about the 'broken coding interview process' it ends up being upvoted by everyone and their brother on HN but very rarely have I seen people offer a reasonable alternative instead. I work for a big tech company and for our org, typically we have a couple of Algorithms/Coding rounds, a system design round, a technical communication round and a loosely structured inter…

I think there is nothing wrong with asking a candidate to do live coding/algorithms given that they could be solved in reasonable amounts of time and the interviewer has practice in helping a candidate feel comfortable doing so.

If I'm in an interview and I feel judged/nervous enough I'm going to struggle to spell my own name, much less write a merge sort. If I feel like I'm having fun and the interviewer is just sort of pair programming with me to make sure I'm not BSing that I could code, then sure, I can probably do most medium level algorithmic problems after some stumbling around and mis starts.

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

#79

Post by vp89 »

entee wrote: post #56
vp89 wrote: post #48

Its 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 l…

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

Good design instincts takes lots of hard earned real world experience to develop. I wouldnt expect the average 21 year old programmer to really know how to design stuff maybe they can provide me crammed textbook answers but that is as "irrelevant" as whiteboarding.

I think a good approach is to not emphasize the whiteboard as much for senior hires, so people with good work experience can mostly get in on their resume and design questions and people with lesser experience still have the opportunity to break into these top companies by grinding algo questions.

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

#80

Post by vp89 »

entee wrote: post #56
vp89 wrote: post #48

Its 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 l…

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

Good design instincts takes lots of hard earned real world experience to develop. I wouldnt expect the average 21 year old programmer to really know how to design stuff maybe they can provide me crammed textbook answers but that is as "irrelevant" as whiteboarding.

I think a good approach is to not emphasize the whiteboard as much for senior hires, so people with good work experience can mostly get in on their resume and design questions and people with lesser experience still have the opportunity to break into these top companies by grinding algo questions.

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