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Hired – Technical Interview Score

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Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#101

Post by Terr_ »

auxym wrote: post #77
ng12 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do tell what lofty work you do that deserves the holy moniker of engineering.

I'm not trying to make a point (namely, that programming isn't engineering) here, but for kicks, here's something I was told by an experienced (mechanical) engineer when I obtained my engineering license after 3 years experience as a junior engineer (aka Engineer In Training in a lot of jurisdictions): "The only difference now is that you'll constantly have an ethical and deontological loop running in your head." As…

Hey, software developers do that too... Management just doesn't reward us for it.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#102

Post by nnd »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #98
mkozlows wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take home is great, except people cheat. People even cheat on early screening questions knowing that an interview is coming up. (In a previous role, I gave applicants the same -- very trivial -- question that they had already coded the answer for in a do-at-home screening. I wasn't secretive about this, either, I told them that this is the exact same question they had already answered. A significant percentage of the…

is take home great? if you have a full time job, any sense of home life, is being asked to code a small project in your spare time (and on a limited time basis) sane? I did two this year, and tbh I think the next company that assigns me one I'll just decline.

I think take-home projects are great for evaluating domain experience and general programming aptitude but should be relatively small. Anything that would take more than 1-2 hours is an overkills, although sadly I see a lot of companies expecting you to build a full product (e.g. production ready iOS app with custom design and full test coverage).

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#103

Post by nnd »

jnordwick wrote: post #95
koala_man wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we never get told what we're being scored on in advance I make a point of not telling you. I want you to demonstrate that you're able to work out the requirements when you're given a task. Some people will take a task, go off for a few weeks, develop ill-fitting solutions, and then say "well, you didn't say you wanted unit tests" or "you didn't tell me it had to support files that can't fit in memory". Others will…

I generally give all the important parts of the question up front. Having to fish for requirement isn't the point.

Depends on the role, if it requires high levels of autonomy and working with highly ambiguous product definitions (e.g. most freelancing jobs) - then it's a part of your role to constantly fish for requirements or even suggest your own requirements.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#104

Post by nnd »

wellpast wrote: post #10

How well can you decouple? That's all I need to know about you. If you can do this well, I (or you) can fix all your bugs quickly. I (or you) can fix (most of) your performance issues quickly. If you can decouple, you can isolate whatever other areas of ignorance you have with ease. How well can you decouple? Is it instinctual for you to riddle off code architectures and solutions that are decoupled? It takes time +…

What do you mean by decoupling?

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#105

Post by NTDF9 »

kyberias wrote: post #9
notmuchtotell wrote: post #4

Clearly the person didn't run the code. The factorial function returns an int. The factorial of 13 is already too big for a 32-bit int. The factorial of 21 is bigger than a 64-bit int.

I think the code people have to write in interviews is not supposed to work/scale in the real world. The purpose usually is to test whether the candidate can implement a correct algorithm. Even though this is Java (?), it's used more like pseudo code. A follow up question could be: "Do you see some problems with running this with big numbers? How would you scale it?"

>> I think the code people have to write in interviews is not supposed to work/scale in the real world. The purpose usually is to test whether the candidate can implement a correct algorithm

Do you check for nulls in linked list traversals? Potential stack overflows? How about array out of bounds?

If yes, why don't you check their data type?

Do you now see why this process is fucked up? The candidate doesn't know what is your definition of "ok"

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#106

Post by pseudonom- »

Redsquare wrote: post #86
pseudonom- wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, most evidence suggests unstructured interviews (talking to the candidates) have very low predictive power about job performance and that work sample tests (take home problems and on-site coding) fare much better in that regard.

Where is the evidence?

Table 1 here: http://www.flume.com.br/pdf/Scmidt_The_validity_and_utility....

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#107

Post by nnd »

I've tried Refdash twice as a candidate. Frist time I used, I couldn't connect with the interviewer because of the issues with VOIP, the second time it went smoother and the interviewer appeared to be doing a great job at providing written feedback after the interview.

On the downside, scheduling seems to be awkward: you have to manually select your availability, instead of picking a timeslot, then the interview is scheduled for you. Personally, I prefer to select my own timeslots like with interviewing.io, unfortunately, the latter ironically is almost always out of availability.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#108

Post by dajohnson89 »

nnd wrote: post #102
dajohnson89 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is take home great? if you have a full time job, any sense of home life, is being asked to code a small project in your spare time (and on a limited time basis) sane? I did two this year, and tbh I think the next company that assigns me one I'll just decline.

I think take-home projects are great for evaluating domain experience and general programming aptitude but should be relatively small. Anything that would take more than 1-2 hours is an overkills, although sadly I see a lot of companies expecting you to build a full product (e.g. production ready iOS app with custom design and full test coverage).

The ones I've taken this year were two days of effort and five days of effort. Because I was so busy with other things, both submissions were littered with TODOs and hacks, and both were given no-pass with zero feedback.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#109

Post by nine_k »

bogomipz wrote: post #94
bit_logic wrote: post #24

Have we reached the tipping point yet? How much worse does the technical interview process need to get before the industry finally decides enough is enough? When this all began, it was with the justification that it's not about getting the right answer, it's about seeing how you think and approach a problem. Companies don't even pretend this is the case anymore. It's now just expected rote memorization of algorithm p…

>"When this all began, it was with the justification that it's not about getting the right answer, it's about seeing how you think and approach a problem." Indeed. Now the default seems to be companies sending out a Hacker Ranks test consisting of 5 separate problems, a countdown timer and zero human interaction. I can't help but think that recruiters are playing a part in pushing for this online Hacker Rank test bul…

I still suppose it's a reasonable input filter. If you can solve a few simple coding problems, you're worth talking to face to face onsite.

This depends on the problems being reasonable, though.

Re: Hired – Technical Interview Score

#110

Post by nine_k »

auxym wrote: post #71
mkozlows wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memorization? It's a factorial function. You shouldn't need to study or memorize anything to implement a factorial function. If you can't come up with this algorithm off the top of your head, that is legit telling something about your problem-solving ability.

I'd still ask for the definition of factorial. Sure, for various reasons, most programmers know the factorial, but I'd consider remembering the definition of some mathematical operation only common in certain domains (statistics and finance?), that most people only learn in high school and never use again, to be rote memorization.

Ability to detect your deficiencies of knowledge and ask questions is hugely important, and is worth testing.

Or you can use a search engine.

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