I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by mikeash » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #285

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…

Entrepreneurial engineer here... If I ever hire an engineer for my business -- I hope it'd be someone I've already worked with and know -- but if it had to be someone random, I'd pursue this method: 1) Solicit Resumes 2) Pick N candidates 3) Phone screen to make sure they aren't complete assholes 4) Stack rank & pop top candidate 5) Pay them to develop a feature on contract 6) If satisfied, repeat step 5 until ready…

Step 5 sounds awesome and I totally understand the desire to do it, but it will screen out a lot of top-tier candidates. A really good candidate is probably already employed. They probably don’t want to quit without another job lined up and they probably don’t want to work double hours for a week. If they’re job hunting then they likely have other offers you have to compete with, and are they going to chose the “maybe we’ll hire you if we like your work” over “sign here and you start in two weeks”?

Desperate people won’t be put off by this. If they’re desperate then they’ll have time to do your contract and the money will be attractive. They can keep job hunting in the meantime so there’s no downside.

That’s not to say this can’t produce someone good. I got my first full time programming job like this and I like to think I’m not completely useless.

And alas, I don’t have any answers for how to do it better....

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

#322

Post by billti » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

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…

I've interviewed hundreds of candidates over more than 20 years. I've lost count of the number of times that a candidate has talked-the-talk so well that I'm thinking "This guy/girl is amazing. They're a shoe-in. Better do a little coding just to make sure"... and then they literally couldn't even get close to solving something like fizz-buzz.

I agree asking highly specialized, deep CS-algorithm type problems is usually a terrible indicator. I typically start with a very rudimentary question that could go off in various directions and to various depths as time/progress allows. I let candidates choose the programming language, and to use either whiteboard, pen & paper, or laptop with choice of IDE.

I've seen candidates who claim to have years of "senior" experience struggle to get the basic syntax of their "language of choice" right - to the point where a competent hobbyist who spent a weekend doing a couple tutorials would wipe the floor with them.

There's just something about coding that makes it impossible to truly evaluate a candidate (for a developer role) unless you see them actually code.

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

#323

Post by perrygeo » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

docker_up wrote: post #280

I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak. Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have? The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything. Will I get asked: a pthread question? implement mergesort or quicksort? implement a Read/Write lock? implement a smart pointer? a bit manipulation question? topological search? dynamic programming? graph question? b…

> The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything.

Exactly. I have no problem coding up a solution if I have an hour to do some research. Either give the topics ahead of time or ask it as a homework assignment.

If the job requires hurry-up coding solutions to whatever crap falls on your desk without any design, research or discussion of alternative, the quality of their product and codebase probably reflect this.

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

#324

Post by neilv » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

ubershmekel wrote: post #274

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…

> This person is so convinced that they are a good developer that they refuse to take direction or ask questions While I agree a coding exercise is valuable - this is the actual problem. The way I test for that humility is by asking "tell me about a time you personally did a poor job." I then follow up by asking for a time they identified a failure of a colleague. I look to see if they're empathetical, open to being…

A difficulty with this kind of question is that the how-to-beat-the-coding-interview books and sites, which many students and professionals read, already prep them for how to answer.

People get step-by-step strategy for this kind of question, what the interviewer is looking for, and what notes to hit. And sometimes prep them for the exact question, so that they can have a prefab answer ready.

Then we might be selecting for more like what used to be MBA students, or at least people who know how to play along, and say the right corporate going-through-the-motions things.

Some organizations will want to select for test-prep specifically, as a good predictor for the kind of employee they want, but I like to think there's other organizations that decidedly don't want that.

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

#325

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

holtalanm wrote: post #296

threwawasy1228 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean it to be insulting or to imply that there are not talented people in the Midwest. What I mean is that if you look to places like Louisville, KY for just one example, or Dayton, OH and look at the type of pay that is being offered there, it is vastly below the coasts. Even adjusted for cost of living and other expenses, many cities across the midwest pay below what is a reasonable market value, and natur…

i'm not sure why location has anything to do with code quality. imo, it doesn't.

It doesn't, but it does.

We all know small businesses don't care about code quality. Ditto that best practices take a long time to trickle down from ivory towers to business, academia, to bootcamps.

Companies pushing the status quo tend to cluster. Poster probably shouldn't have picked on the midwest, it could be anywhere outside "cutting-edge" software centers.

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

#326

Post by malvosenior » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

billti wrote: post #322

malvosenior wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've interviewed hundreds of candidates over more than 20 years. I've lost count of the number of times that a candidate has talked-the-talk so well that I'm thinking "This guy/girl is amazing. They're a shoe-in. Better do a little coding just to make sure"... and then they literally couldn't even get close to solving something like fizz-buzz. I agree asking highly specialized, deep CS-algorithm type problems is usua…

I've not had this experience. How are you screening your pipeline? I have a hard time believing that someone who can tell you why they designed a particular REST api the way they did, describe the schema and talk about what performance issues they encountered and how they dealt with them and can intelligently discuss the language they're using but can't code fizzbuzz.

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

#327

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #125

arnvald wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter whether it's hard or not, it's at best a mediocre tool to determine programming skills. Also, it leads to a spiral of becoming worse: 1. being able to solve LeetCode tasks doesn't mean you're a good developer 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. So we have a tool that has a certain (IMHO high) rate of false positives and false negatives. 3. people start realisi…

> 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. Half of those questions are based on sophomore-level data structures and algorithms classes, the same concepts that operating systems, compilers, and most libraries/frameworks are based on. I would certainly hope that an experienced developer could effortlessly relearn basic concepts taught to college sophomores long enough to pass an inter…

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #321

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrepreneurial engineer here... If I ever hire an engineer for my business -- I hope it'd be someone I've already worked with and know -- but if it had to be someone random, I'd pursue this method: 1) Solicit Resumes 2) Pick N candidates 3) Phone screen to make sure they aren't complete assholes 4) Stack rank & pop top candidate 5) Pay them to develop a feature on contract 6) If satisfied, repeat step 5 until ready…

Step 5 sounds awesome and I totally understand the desire to do it, but it will screen out a lot of top-tier candidates. A really good candidate is probably already employed. They probably don’t want to quit without another job lined up and they probably don’t want to work double hours for a week. If they’re job hunting then they likely have other offers you have to compete with, and are they going to chose the “mayb…

There's no perfect way to hire, don't let it be the enemy of better.

For example, I like this one and I'm gainfully employed. Much rather work on a real side project than useless, unpaid coding challenges any day. For me, the first has a 98% chance of success, while the second has a 2% chance.

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

#329

Post by siscia » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:49 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #315

siscia wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But code like that pass your unit tests, integration test, CI, and LINT? If it does, you may consider to improve the quality of your tests. If you don't have all of those it is your fault since you are cowboy coding instead of doing engineering and at this point he is playing along.

Can you show me a linter or a unit test that would reject that code?

The introduction of such tools serve not to prevent bad code to land, but to force people and code into a process.

If somebody code is routinely denied to land on code base because of some of the issues catch by automatic tools, it is reasonable to assume that the quality of the code and the thought given to the code will improve.

Is this person routinely writing code so bad that passes all the automatic tests?

By the way, such code ends up having a quite high cyclomatic complexity.

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

#330

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

wippler wrote: post #306

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrepreneurial engineer here... If I ever hire an engineer for my business -- I hope it'd be someone I've already worked with and know -- but if it had to be someone random, I'd pursue this method: 1) Solicit Resumes 2) Pick N candidates 3) Phone screen to make sure they aren't complete assholes 4) Stack rank & pop top candidate 5) Pay them to develop a feature on contract 6) If satisfied, repeat step 5 until ready…

Just to provide an alternate perspective here, this seems to tilt the incentives towards people that are not working already. I wonder how many folks have time to take a week or more off from their current job to participate in this exercise. I understand this is paid but its still a huge risk that candidates would be taking.

> huge risk

Folks do side projects all the time. How often do they describe it as a "huge risk?"