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The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

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Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#751

Post by marsrover »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #537
speby wrote: post #218

Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. e.g. "I've written large production programs in C." Ok, great, so then clearly this person knows C so there should be no need to dissect code or run them thru some linked list algorithm and see if they know how to use pointers correctly. Yet, we do. Ok, then what about open source contributions (if they have…

> Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. In an ideal world, you could trust someone's resume. Working for nothing __is__ obnoxious. Not to belittle anyone but...a plumber is licensed. An electrician is licensed. Even a hair stylist is licensed. Perhaps licensing a programmer / developer / engineer would be over doing it. (Read: Yes, it would be. But the examples do help.) That said, can't there be…

> Not to belittle anyone but...a plumber is licensed. An electrician is licensed. Even a hair stylist is licensed.

How often do you hire some one based on certificates?

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#752

Post by marsrover »

learc83 wrote: post #183
nicolashahn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, there are people with those degrees who still can't even code fizzbuzz.

I question that bit of common knowledge. I went to a large state school for undergrad and tutored people regularly. By senior year, even the bottom performing students wouldn't have had a problem with fizzbuzz or similar screening problems. We regularly had coding problems much harder than that on tests. Unless there were other factors involved like maybe the pressure caused by the weirdly adversarial hazing process…

I personally went to college with someone who could not program at all when he graduated. He made a lot of friends and had a lot of help the entire way through.

It's been 7 years and he has never worked as a developer.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#753

Post by lsaferite »

Paul-ish wrote: post #202
gowld wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried developing your junior talent instead of driving them away so you need to fill a gap at mid-level?

Are there companies where people don't periodically move on? The culture right now is to hop between companies. It's not necessarily a bad thing. People get tired of their work and need novelty.

People frequently jump SE jobs for pay raises since many companies don't seem to see the value in retaining talent through raises.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#754

Post by typon »

Franciscouzo wrote: post #472
BjoernKW wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An informal network of trust (which in fact already exists, it's just that many companies and many engineers don't use it), i.e. personal references, referrals, open source contributions, a project portfolio. Many participants in the game unfortunately insist on hiring and marketing by three-letter acronyms.

And then people that aren't part of that network of trust (like minorities or women) can't get work.

Bingo. You end up becoming like all the other industries dominated by white men at positions of power (Law e.g.)

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#755

Post by Retra »

toephu2 wrote: post #568
ModernMech wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a PhD in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry, and I've never not been asked to do some trivial programming task in an interview. Thanks for showing some common sense, but most interviewers are just lazy. One time I couldn't implement a skiplist, and the feedback I got was "we were concerned about your problem solving skills".

As it should have been. The fact that you have a PhD means nothing to Google, Facebook, and the like (except possibly a slightly higher base salary than a new grad w/ only a BS) The question is, can you whiteboard? They will be testing that. If you can, then all is golden and you probably didn't need to waste those 4-6 years getting that PhD because what you will be working on will have nothing to do with your topic…

I didn't have to answer any hackneyed technical questions or take any tests to get a job. The most technical thing I did was explain how a data structure I wrote works, which came up naturally in a conversation about what kind of programming I have done.

If you can demonstrate that you understand programming concepts and can learn, then it's not much more to assume you can write code. If you need someone who can hit the ground running with some specific technology, then you might need to go deep into it, but not to find out if someone can program.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#756

Post by matchagaucho »

teachrdan wrote: post #374
neurobashing wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real talk? There is nothing wrong with being in IT. Imagine if someone said "I would be concerned I'd be seen as a carpenter and not a woodworking artisan". You're a carpenter. You nail boards together to serve the business interests of the company. Even if the boards are SQL queries or ReactJS or whatever. Companies need tech. You can bring value by making everyone's jobs better with your technology - sand off those…

I think I've made myself misunderstood. I'm not intending to put down IT work or the people who do it. But from a career perspective, if I want job security and a higher salary, I think it'd be a mistake, in the long term, to be seen as IT. IT is seen as a cost center, which leads to corner-cutting and outsourcing--even when it ends up costing way more in the long run.[0] 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/05…

Tell that to $250 hr SAP and Salesforce Architects/Developers, or to Baby Boomer COBOL programmers who are given ever increasing incentives to post-pone retirement.

IT is by far more lucrative in the long run. It's just the structure of RSUs and stock options that gives start-ups the illusion of relatively larger comp gains.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#757

Post by ubernostrum »

monocasa wrote: post #725
ubernostrum wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW my FizzBuzz solution involves no 'for' loops, and in fact involves no control-flow keywords at all.

Haha, I'd love to see it if that's true. I love cool approaches to computation. FWIW as long as you can back it up with knowledge of what the relevant tradeoffs are (and don't scoff at a more KISS attitude for doing actual work), you're pretty much guaranteed to get a thumbs up from me if you give an answer off the beaten path.

I dislike traditional phone screens enough that I hone unusual solutions for them. And when they get evil enough, I put them in a public repository.

Here's my FizzBuzz:

https://github.com/ubernostrum/interviewer-hell/blob/master/...

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#758

Post by Retra »

BjoernKW wrote: post #607
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likewise, we get cliques of bullshit artists. Literally this guy just proposed "It's not what you know, its who you know" as the solution.

No, he didn’t. I said ‘network of trust’, not ‘cronyism’. - People starring your GitHub repository. - Someone following you on Twitter. - Someone linking to a blog post you wrote. - Someone recommending you to someone else because you did a great job on a project. These are all examples of informal networks of trust. I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.

Fuck that would be awful.

I have 0 stars on Github. Don't use twitter. Don't have a blog. Only a few coworkers I even talk to.

I spend my time writing code and interacting with my family, not trying to win popularity contests. Now if you're looking to hire celebrities instead of programmers, you're maybe onto something. I'm not a self-promotion artist. If I were, I would work in advertising.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#759

Post by azinman2 »

erichurkman wrote: post #300
azinman2 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s interesting. How does one build test cases in excel?

It was a combinatorial sum-of-n problem. Given a sequence of integers, can you produce a target by summing N of the values. He used Excel to put the expected return value in column A, the target in B, and C+ were values. Saved as a CSV which his program ingested. It was neat, actually: the rationale he gave was that it made it easy for anyone to add test cases. (The candidate was previously in the accounting biz, so…

Sounds like you appreciated his solution, but your first post made it sound like he was incompetent. I’m confused.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#760

Post by Torn »

ryandrake wrote: post #549
newobj wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your friend's situation is not a bad interview process, it's that they're being taken advantage of, and for some reason not improving their own situation, in a market where a good candidate is calling the shots on the terms of their employment.

99.9% of candidates are not calling any shots in this employer’s market. Unless you are a celebrity, widely known as a top candidate, the employer is pretty much going to be dictating the interview process, the job description, the compensation, and the terms of employment. If this were an actual employee‘s market, the friend might not be so underemployed.

Software is 100% an employees market. Everyone wants coders, and can be hard to pin down good ones. I think software engineers either don't know what they are worth, or are uncomfortable negotiating comp.
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