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

How to Interview Engineers

blog.triplebyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 489 posts

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#251

Post by famil »

ammon wrote: post #103
gaylemcd wrote: post #95

I agree with much of this. Some additional comments: > Ask questions as close as possible to real work: This is achieved by making interview question as similar as possible to the job you want the candidate to do (or to the skill you're trying to measure). This "or" thing in parentheses is really important. Interviews should not be "as similar as possible to the job." They should be all about the skill you want to me…

So, we've gathered data on exactly these points over the last 2 years. And what we've found that the decision that gets the best signal is often not what feels most accurate to the interviewer. For example, my guess before running these experiments would have been that simply looking at progress (how far a candidate gets through a problem) would be a bad measure of interview performance. I'd expect that things like s…

Have you tried IQ testing instead of algorithm questions to measure intelligence?

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#252

Post by rf15 »

Loomie wrote: post #219
watwut wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how all those people unable to answer interview question passed school. I don't think they are fraudsters, they are simply not too good programmers who can't solve simple problems by themselves. Many dudes believe themselves to have technical talent just for memorising done basis. That does bit imply problem solving ability. Momentary blackouts happen - rarely.

When people are actively watching me to judge me, my brain just goes blank. It's happened to me almost every time in technical interviews where I was asked to solve a problem in front of the interviewers, and it's happened to me at school too in oral examinations. Written exams were not a problem. This never happens in normal work, even when working under pressure with a deadline that has to be met and not enough tim…

Suffering from the same problem, though it happens to me even in written exams - doing something for the sole purpose of being judged makes me incredibly uncomfortable, and I'm happy to be out of school/university and just have a job. It's all just infinitely easier and less stressful, even at the worst of times and with the worst of people.

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#254

Post by peacemaker »

fnord123 wrote: post #246
mychael wrote: post #239

> background-blind interviews, looking at coding skills, not credentials or resumes. Subtext: "Did you create a famous open source tool, write a book, have patents in your name or architect some amazing system at a big company? Doesn't matter! Our hiring process prefers code monkeys who can solve our puzzles instead of system thinkers." > An interview can result in a bad engineer being hired and later fired (a false…

>Subtext: "A hire can either be good or bad. It's never management's fault if it doesn't work out." I agree that the article gets this wrong. It reminds me of Diego Forlan's time at Manchester United. Diego Forlan is/was an Uruguayan striker at Independiente (Arg) where he scored 36 goals in 77 games (a very good rate). He then moved to Manchester United (Eng) in January of 2002 and was anticipated to take off. He ma…

Delighted to see the unexpected Diego Forlan story here! Such a great talent and the thing was, EVERYONE wanted him to do well at United. I don't believe it was a case of management or team mates not liking him or not working well together, it was just some strange combination of factors that resulted in his performances never living up to expectations.

It really does draw parallels to other jobs as you say. I recall a company I joined that had a great mission, interesting work, friendly team and lovely atmosphere but something about it just didnt gel with me. I still have no idea what it was but I guess sometimes it just doesn't work.

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#255

Post by taejo »

saagarjha wrote: post #249
lurker83256 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question is trickier than it sounds. Sure 10 9 clock cycles per second, but estimating for actual human-perceived ops for an algorithmic problem one should use 10 6. (Source: USA Computing Olympiad problems.)

Would you mind explaining in a bit more detail what you mean here? I'm not quite sure where you're getting those numbers from.

They mean 10^9 and 10^6, and that each "operation" in a complex algorithm is often something like a hash-table lookup, which may be constant time, but takes closer to 1000 clock cycles than 1.

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#258

Post by pfarnsworth »

mikebenfield wrote: post #189
symlinkk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the hell would you ever need to know that? Do you ask carpenters how many times their screwdrivers spin per minute? It just seems like useless trivia.

Whether this is a good interview question I don't know, but: > When the hell would you ever need to know that? I find this such a strange perspective. You're writing code for a computer. Sometimes you need to estimate how quickly it should run, or else estimate how quickly it could run with optimal code. Surely it's obvious that knowing how fast your computer does stuff, at least within 3 orders of magnitude , is a n…

What is the clock speed of your iPhone or android phone?

I personally have no idea and it's the one computer I use most frequently.

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#259

Post by moduspol »

hvidgaard wrote: post #242
moduspol wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carpenter may simply know that turning the screw is imperceptibly instant in his experience, and that if the bookshelf isn't getting built quickly, the bottleneck is virtually never because he's waiting on screws to be turned. He's going to have to make a trip to the store anyway so he isn't concerned with whether turning the screw requires a tenth or a thousandth of a second. He's more focused on the design and…

If he is good, he can reason about it on the spot. If he can't, I very much doubt that he can design anything excellent. That requires critical thinking to understand what it is being used for, what is good, and importantly what solutions are unsuitable for the problem he is trying to solve.

Sure, although I was addressing the parent comment, and more specifically, "knows it in his bones."

Re: How to Interview Engineers

#260

Post by meggar »

gilbetron wrote: post #168
pklausler wrote: post #73

The sad reality of programming interviews is that it's absolutely necessary to ask several near-trivial questions in order to flush out the candidates with awesome resumes and impressive degrees who simply have no idea how to analyze a simple problem and solve it using a computer. Lately, I've been asking "given the starting and ending times of two calendar appointments, determine whether or not they conflict." No lo…

A weeder question I've used: How many operations can a modern CPU perform per second: A) Thousands, B) Millions, C) Billions We'll accept C, and B with explanation. I'd say roughly 75% of the people I've asked (who have gotten through a phone interview) cannot answer it with any ability. People whine about the difficulty of interviews, but honestly, almost everyone we've ever hired have said the interview was pretty…

Technically, all three answers are correct. (A) is correct because a modern CPU CAN perform Thousands of operations per second.
Post reply on HN