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I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

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Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#231

Post by jjav »

malvosenior wrote: post #116
tomp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you say sounds extremely reasonable... but still, there are plenty of stories (mostly online, so they might not actually be true) of people hiring a person that aces (mostly non-technical) interviews only to show absolutely 0 actual technical skills on the job.

In my experience (also interviewing hundreds of people) this is totally an urban (internet) legend. Not once has someone been able to talk intelligently and at length about a project they built and the underlying technology choices and then been unable to deliver. Once you gain experience building things yourself, it's pretty easy to suss out whether someone is any good just by talking to them. No coding tests needed…

Agreed. The best way to interview is to simply have a joint discussion about their past projects (from resume). There is no value in whiteboard puzzles. It is easy to gauge who is competent and who didn't do or didn't understand the work they claim on the resume.

In over 25 years of interviewing candidates, this approach has never failed me. I've never asked for whiteboard coding. Whiteboarding architectural concepts, sure.

The only caveat is the interviewer needs to have substantial experience in the same field to spot the wheat from the chaff in a casual conversation. If the interviewer is very junior, I can see how this might not work. Solution: don't have your most junior people run the interviews.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#232

Post by scarface74 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #221
scarface74 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for a position (and got the job) about four years ago for a C#/Angular senior developer and I was suppose to be “speaking my architectural experience into the team”. At the time, the only way I could document 10+ years of development experience was by putting a job I had worked at for a decade doing cross platform C and C++ with a little bit of assembly. Out of nowhere, after I thought the interview was…

I wasn't there, so I can't know how the interview went, but are you sure the motivation was "just to prove how smart he was" ? If I'm already 100% sure I'll recommend a hire, it's not rare for me to go off-script and dig into random stuff in the candidate's experience, first of all because I find it interesting or fun to talk about, and second because having deep knowledge about anything is positive signal, regardles…

My (would be) manager who was also technical (he has since self demoted to an IC role after his kids graduated college) was already satisfied. It was one of the other devs who was sitting in.

I think he asked me something about the difference between undefined and implementation defined behavior and the an example of each. This was in 2015. I had the same question when it was relevant for an interview in 1999.

I’ve geeked out with another hiring manager at an interview about some old 8 bit coding I did but that felt different.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#233

Post by pault »

sokoloff wrote: post #218
pault wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…

Is this person doing (valuable) work that would even require hiring a replacement? If not, fire them. If so, lobby to secure a backfill and then fire them.

The crux of the problem is that we've interviewed dozens of applicants and none of them have been able to pass the sniff test. We are setting the bar pretty low, but the average skill level of the people we've had access to is shocking. There just isn't a supply of good developers for companies that aren't FAANGs or unicorns. And before anyone says we aren't paying enough, or we are being unfair, the reason these interviewees are not passing is because they can't answer basic questions about the languages and frameworks they've been using for years. Things that you would know if you spent five minutes reading the first few pages of the official documentation. It's baffling. If I could even get a talented junior that I thought was capable of leveling up to a senior position in a few years I would be ecstatic.

Edit: for example, when interviewing for a react/redux position, one of the first questions I ask is "if you need to make a network request in an app using redux, where do you put it?" at least 3/4 interviewees answer "in the reducer". From page 3 of the "Basic Tutorial" in the redux documentation:

  Things you should never do inside a reducer:

  Mutate its arguments;
  Perform side effects like API calls and routing transitions;
  Call non-pure functions, e.g. Date.now() or Math.random().

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#234

Post by doitLP »

pault wrote: post #205
caymanjim wrote: post #85

Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…

> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…

I do the same for a “senior” developer with 20 years more experience than me and a bafflingly appalling understanding of how to write basic code.

Bless you sir, you are keeping the code legible and clean for everyone else on your team and doing a great service for your company — even if they don’t appreciate it.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#235

Post by Kurtz79 »

scottLobster wrote: post #12

In a few months I'm going to be sniffing around for embedded software engineering positions (c on microcontrollers, DSP, maybe even some PCB or FPGA design). I'm still buying a copy of cracking the coding interview and doing leetcode in the weeks leading up to applying for precisely this reason. It's dumb but I'm not going to give up an otherwise promising opportunity in protest, although in the interview I might pol…

As much the current interview process is broken, I honestly believe this is the best attitude.

In a way, it's nothing more than studying for some goal you think it will improve your current situation, and the good news that it is pretty much a solved problem, with plenty of information online that can be used to practice.

Just take into account that for an embedded position you might actually be asked more domain-specific questions.

I wish you the best in your seearch!

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#236

Post by thrower123 »

SubuSS wrote: post #119
tomp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you say sounds extremely reasonable... but still, there are plenty of stories (mostly online, so they might not actually be true) of people hiring a person that aces (mostly non-technical) interviews only to show absolutely 0 actual technical skills on the job.

I agree with the urban legend guess. Yeah it happens, but not as often as you think.

In my experience, I've seen close to 50% of the people that can talk their way through an interview and put up a good game wind up being absolutely useless at actually writing code once you hire them and set them to work. There is a huge disconnect between being able to understand the big-picture hand-wavey ideas of how software fits together and being able to turn that into nuts-and-bolts working code.

Something as simple as having somebody write a little web application that takes a request, calls an external service, parses the response, and returns a transformed response, filters out the bozos wonderfully.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#237

Post by pault »

jimcsharp wrote: post #214
pault wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My resume speaks for itself. At the time of this writing, I am working with someone who has 10+ years of experience, including former positions as a lead developer. I was involved in the interview process and made the recommendation to hire, as they were able to answer a lot of domain-specific questions very well and had a good knowledge of the ecosystem. Fast-forward three months, and I am spending hours per day s…

At least you have a constant source of code for interviewees to fix.

You jest, but the for loop example is now in our pre-screening questions!

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#238

Post by g-clef »

Stronico wrote: post #110

When interviewing people I usually push until I get the candidate to answer "I don't know" on SOMETHING, just to see if they can do it. Not everyone can, and a lot of people will happily come up with a technical word salad to hide their perfectly understandable ignorance on some obscure technical problem I just came up with. That way you get to hear how they ask technical questions. Asking questions is a valuable (an…

As a lot of other commenters are pointing out: there's an adversarial and a non-adversarial way to do this.

When I'm interviewing someone I will often preface groups of questions with "have you worked with {x}?" or "are you comfortable answering questions about {x}?" before asking the actual questions covering that area. A simple intro question like that goes a long way towards keeping an interview friendly. The interviewee can say "no" to a small-sounding question without feeling like they're embarrassing themselves.

For example, they may be comfortable with Python but not super-comfortable with the GIL/multiprocessing/multithreading. If I ask "have you worked with Python's multiprocessing or multithreading before?" that comes across as much less adversarial than asking them to describe Python's GIL and forcing them to say "I don't know."

Doing an intro question also allows them to give a partway answer like "I've touched it before, but I wouldn't call myself an expert". If they say something like that I can re-focus my questions to another area, or just ask higher-level questions, rather than hitting them over the head with a deep question about something they've just told me they're not an expert in.

You do want people to be honest about their own limitations, but you don't want your interviewee to think that your organization is driven by macho posturing about being King Nerd.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#239

Post by jkdufair »

Balgair wrote: post #171
Stronico wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any interview (of mine) is a conversation - they're not something you pass or fail - it's just a way for a potential employer and employee to get to know one another so they can make better decisions. Nobody won, lost, passed or failed. The interview is just there to provide more information to determine if the potential employer and employee would fit well together. If I were in an interview that was presented as a…

> Nobody won, lost, passed or failed I mean, like, yeah they did. They either got the job or they did not.

If I were the interviewee and discovered it was a poor fit, I’d consider the lack of an offer or the opportunity to refuse one a win

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#240

Post by autokad »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #174
skrebbel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a trick question. Trick questions are bad because they test interviewing skill and not programming skill. It's a trick question because you want the interviewee to answer something different (I don't know) than what you're asking them to answer. Confident applicants might feel up to saying they don't know, but nervous people who are very self conscious in an interview setting may respond completely differently…

It’s not a trick question. I am expecting them to answer the questions honestly. If they know the answer, go ahead and answer correctly. If not, don’t pretend. I don’t want to hire someone who isn’t going to admit the limits of their abilities, for whatever reason. Could be smugness or lack of confidence, either way it’s a bad signal.

its a trick question, period. The question is formulated with the expectation that it cant be answered, even if there is a small chance to answer it right.

its not a bad signal. to be honest its the smartest thing to do (like guessing on the GRE), especially since most people ask questions they expect the right answer too.

the only bad signal I see is in you. I would wager to say, in most situations in life, don't play tricks, just ask the question you really want answered.

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