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

#341

Post by pault » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

siscia wrote: post #329

pault wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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

Yes, a linter or a test cannot know if you are writing silly, unnecessary code, or re-implementing functionality that already exists elsewhere, or making multiple changes downstream when you could make it once upstream. Only a human can see those things, which is why we have code reviews. And for posterity, yes we are using CI, pre-commit linters, unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and have formal branching, merging, review process, and coding standards. There are no cowboys here, and nothing that you are suggesting will prevent someone from writing low quality code that requires an excessive amount of time to protect the codebase from.

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

#342

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:06 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #334

mixmastamyk wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This pushing of best practices you speak of is clustering especially in the geographic area where the norm is frequent job-hopping (before you fully reap what your practices sow), and where many also celebrate "move fast, and break things" during each employment stopover?

Yes, almost all of these companies are still doing better than the IT shops I remember from the 90's.

The "Joel Test" was a thing, for a reason.

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

#343

Post by ikiris » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #309

rectaway wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by your posts in this thread, have you considered the problem might be that you (and many other companies) hire people based on their ability to answer theoretical questions (which also happens to be while under a lot of pressure), rather than their ability to code? I'd like to think there are plenty of candidates that have open source projects that showcase their coding skills, or that have made impressive s…

It's not really a theoretical question though. It's a very concrete example of the most common operation you would need to perform in a front end developer role. And none of the applicants we've seen have side projects or code on github. If you know of a method to ascertain someone's ability to code in a professional environment in a one hour interview, I'm all ears!

Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment and it feels like you expect to hire experts in some random framework instead of good software engineers. I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing or have done basic pixel dev applying that don't meet your bar.

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

#344

Post by UweSchmidt » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:09 PM UTC

Stronico wrote: post #216

UweSchmidt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could give the critical replies to your comment some consideration. There seem to be many interviewers who abuse their temporary power over candidates by freestyling a psychological excercise, and brag about it in threads like this. In a way forcing the other party to give up with an "I don't know" is humiliating, and graciously allowing this answer doesn't make things better. You'd put yourself above the o…

I thought I had given consideration. I do not regard "I don't know" as giving up. Giving up would be not finding the answer eventually. I certainly don't find myself "under" some other person if they know the answer to a particular technical question. As for interviewing a luminary of open source what would be the difference? I imagine they (much like everyone else) don't know lots of things and are probably comforta…

Fair enough.

Of course it depends a lot on the overall tone of the interview, and as I read more I'm sure you're doing it very well.

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

#345

Post by achenatx » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

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…

ok Im stumped :) Would be interested to read some clarification on this.

the try always throws an exception, and if iIf continue returns to the beginning of the for loop then I could see that the code is pointless. But if continue resumes execution inside of dosomething the line after the exception was thrown, then it could actually be useful.

Is your issue that the code does actually work, but conceptually it is horrendous to implement the branching in that way, or is it that the code doesnt work at all, or is that it actually does nothing?

When I see things like this I integrate them into our interview process.

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

#346

Post by tptacek » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

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…

The problem is, your resume doesn't speak for itself, or, more accurately, resumes in general don't speak for themselves. It's not because people lie on their resumes, but because there's a pattern in this industry of people failing laterally and upwards.

It takes much longer than people assume to get a dysfunctional team member off the payroll. In most shops, new hires spend months in a (reasonable!) reduced-expectation state of on-boarding and ramping up, during which their performance can't readily be measured. It then takes several engineering cycles to figure out that they're not working out on a particular project, after which the normal response is often to try moving them to another project. You can be more than 6 months in with an employee before there's a confident assessment in engineering management that someone isn't working out. In many shops, at that point the next step is to begin the process of "managing them out" (often with multiple stages of PIPs), which includes a fig-leaf premise that performance can be fixed and the team member retained.

And that's if things are carefully managed. Lots of teams, even good teams, aren't carefully managed, and it can take more than a year to detect and propagate the signal that someone isn't working out.

The net result is that people can accumulate impressive-looking resumes without ever effectively delivering for any team, and because resumes get more impressive over time, the roles people get offered improve as well, compounding the effect.

I'm an evangelist for evidence-based hiring techniques and a fierce critic of standard interviewing practices, which I agree are dehumanizing and unreliable. But we started our hiring practice[1] not because we wanted to include more people, though that was a happy result of it, but rather because we'd been burned repeatedly by good resumes and strong interviewing skills.

At this point in my career, for a technical/IC role (really, any role), I'd be alarmed if I wasn't given practical tests to verify I can actually back up my talk. Their absence would make me suspicious (though perhaps not dispositively so) about the technical ability of the team I was considering joining.

[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

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

#347

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:11 PM UTC

pault wrote: post #270

sokoloff wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's a competitive salary for your area (you would know better than me, but that range in the middle of the country certainly seems competitive), then have a look at your recruiting sourcing funnel. If you're only sourcing the same 75% of active job seekers who are bombing most of their other interviews [thus leaving them available to come in and bomb yours as well], start advertising your positions elsewhere or…

You're correct. The problem is that the positions we have open are for front end developers, and for a variety of reasons (mostly that the scale of complexity on the front end has increased so rapidly that the industry still has a lot of people in it that were writing mostly HTML and CSS a few years back) the supply of competent developers is far lower than the demand, and anyone worth their salt is already happily e…

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by pault » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:12 PM UTC

ikiris wrote: post #340

pault wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. The problem is that the positions we have open are for front end developers, and for a variety of reasons (mostly that the scale of complexity on the front end has increased so rapidly that the industry still has a lot of people in it that were writing mostly HTML and CSS a few years back) the supply of competent developers is far lower than the demand, and anyone worth their salt is already happily e…

... so you're not paying enough to entice them. Which is what was said three posts up.

Thanks. Unfortunately we can't afford to pay front end developers $300k/year. And what we are paying is more than competitive. It's not an issue of pay, it's an issue of availability and not having the resources to stalk and poach developers from other companies. We also have a generous internal referral bonus, and various recruiters sourcing candidates. Is there something else I'm missing?

Edit: I don't think you are understanding what I'm saying. We are offering higher than average pay for a job with average requirements, and we haven't been able to find average candidates. And I'm well aware of average, upper, and lower bounds to salaries here.

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

#349

Post by kjgkjhfkjf » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

My guess is that whoever was organizing the interviews couldn't find a devops person to do the interview. They found a regular dev to do it instead, and that interviewer was inexperienced and asked one of the only questions they knew.

Moral: Take interview training and make yourself available to do interviews, especially if you're in a relatively niche role. Make this attitude the norm in the industry.

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

#350

Post by Kuraj » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

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…

Since they are knowledgeable about your domain, maybe there is a position at your company that they would be able to fill better?

Edit: I apologize - I wrote that comment before reading the rest of the discussion, after which I had more context.