91–100 of 238 posts
Somehow I still don't buy that dhh would fail to implement Bubble Sort.
> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…
Except that the continued success and popularity of books like Cracking the Coding Interview suggest that this really isn't the case.
The candidate who has spent the last month cramming on the best way to reverse a string in place, or the difference between the plethora of types of trees isn't guaranteed to be the best candidate for your position. All they're proving is that they can pass your screening process.
Edit: and to answer your question, I'd rather have the person with 20 years of experience in the field who can't remember how to draw the Lewis structures for arbitrary molecules off the top of their head than the doctor fresh out of school who doesn't have the slightest clue what this blotch on my abdomen might be.
I've been doing this coding thing longer than many (most?) of you have been alive. I know enough to choose a suitable algorithm for the task at hand. I ship product. I copy paste out the wazoo.
That said, the people interviewing you aren't professional interviewers, they are developers who are winging it. They may have never have had a "good" interview so they repeat how they were interviewed i.e. a bad interview. Like the candidate at the whiteboard, the interviewer is out of their element as well.
“Never memorize something that you can look up.” -- Albert Einstein
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 sor…
Edit: I guess companies should at least have a screening and training process for the people they allow to interview but, generically, I think this often gets overlooked in a lot of big companies.
> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…
The one who's raised kids† obviously.
As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important), but of the more generalized cognitive skills necessary do to high-quality software development -- than the ability to memorize a bunch of scarcely-used algorithms. Because, you know, all those websites and Big 4 recruiters told you to.
† And, to bend your requirements (which is necessary because you're presenting us with a false dichotomy), has darn well "seen this stuff" not only in college (unless you think they're lying about that degree), but in the 0.5% or so of real-life development work which actually requires you to conceive, analyze, and flawlessly implement some non-trivial (if not outright esoteric) algorithm right there, on the spot.
That is, I don't dispute that these skills have some importance -- just that the current default interview process assigns a ridiculous degree of importance to these skills, way out of proportion to their actual importance in the field. And to the exclusion of other, more generalized skills which are actually way more important, but alas, much harder to measure -- with the current crop of faddish (turn-the-crank) interview techniques, anyway.
> 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.
quicksort would be fine too :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…
then comes interviews, where i was pitted against students who took 2 classes a semester that spent many hours a day practicing with things like leetcode and cracking the code interview.
I have never had to use any code I have seen in that book or the website's competitions. asking people to memorize it for a white board interview seems crazy.
one time someone asked me then what? i dont know what is best, but seeing who finds the best answer on stack overflow would be more realistic.