381–390 of 497 posts
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But, at least in California, don't employment laws make the firing process kind of slow and expensive?
California is an at-will work state, which means that either the employee or the company may terminate employment at any time, with or without cause or prior notice.
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How are tests supposed to help when someone writes atrocious code that works? The posted pseudocode probably gets the job done.
I answer to brother below. Anyhow, if it get the job done, just carry on. The importance of a random snippet of code of a random company is so small that is pointless to discuss about it. Just don't let him do any design work and be quick to throw away bad code and refactor. You got all your tests and procedure in place so it should not be that hard. We are really overestimating the importance and difficulties of our…
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I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I work for small companies mostly and I’ve conducted interviews for small companies. We have a limited budget for a limited number of positions. One developer can be working on a project that can individually move the needle. We need to hire “engineers” in the truest sense of the word not “coders”. For instance, currently my title is “senior software engineer”. But I am the “D…
I don't know your scale for small, but my current org is tiny compared to AWS (my previous). So yes - we have to do all those things. I am directly responsible for ALL of data analytics infrastructure in snapchat. Pretty much most senior engineers have a similar scope. We might be talking over one another though: I am not saying any of that is useless: I am saying they're hard to measure. We still do it though. We al…
It’s really not that hard to ask a few technical questions based on what they purport to know, the soft skill behavioral questions, some design questions, and ask them about previous projects. The hands on part is the part where they fix the code to make the unit tests pass.
I wasn’t asked a single technical coding question for my current job. I was given real world questions about issues they are having with process and how I would go about (re)architecting some processes.
Now that I think about, my job before that when I was interviewing for the dev lead position I was only asked about process, system design, and a lot of high level theory - both jobs were hands on coding positions. Both of the managers were highly technical with current programming experience.
But, I’m not completely disagreeing with you, if you are solving hard problems(tm) at scale you need people who understand algorithms and you may not be able to use off the shelf solutions - I would say Snapchat qualifies for “at scale”.
But, for you typical yet another software as a service CRUD app or your typical dark matter corporate developer - and those positions are a lot more numerous than HN seems to realize - the complications aren’t in the complexity of the code, it’s in translating the business needs to code and shipping software that the company needs.
As strange as it sounds, the “coding” side of software engineering has gotten a lot simpler 20 years into my career than it was when I started (C, C++, and a little x86 assembly). The “engineering” side has gotten a lot more complex and requires me to know a lot more technology.
I don’t think it’s because I am better “coder” now either. When I got my first job, I had already been a hobbyist for a decade doing assembly.
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It's a great point we hear often, so I incorporated it into our last round of hiring. Some still couldn't do it with an IDE, their language of choice and access to Google. (sorting an array, with any algorithm you want)
I must have written a couple dozen sorts, but only in high-school or when preparing for interviews. It's the one thing that is very well supported in most programming languages. C++ has stable/unstable sorts, partial sorts, whatever you want. Accepting things like bubble sort also makes the exercise doubly pointless.
Now if someone did a BogoSort, I would hire them just for their ingenuity and sense of humor.
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It's a great point we hear often, so I incorporated it into our last round of hiring. Some still couldn't do it with an IDE, their language of choice and access to Google. (sorting an array, with any algorithm you want)
I must have written a couple dozen sorts, but only in high-school or when preparing for interviews. It's the one thing that is very well supported in most programming languages. C++ has stable/unstable sorts, partial sorts, whatever you want. Accepting things like bubble sort also makes the exercise doubly pointless.
And if you are unable to sort an array it's a strong signal that command in all other areas of CS is lacking. Does C++ has a standard library for RSTP? Do you think a person who can't sort an array after 5 years of school would be able to fix a bug in a switch' spanning tree implementation?
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When you need a doctor or lawyer or pilot, because they are certified, you at least know that they all have at least a bare minimum amount of competence. You may not know if they are elite ninja skilled, but you know they know the basics. Literally anyone can say they know how to program, and there is nothing on the resume that can confirm or deny this. I’ve interviewed Senior Software Engineers with years of experie…
I'm sorry but this is such BS. There are what, a dozen other engineering industries out there? EE, Civil, Mechanical, Aeronautical etc. and in not a single one of them do they do this monkey dance. It would be absurd to ask a Aeronautical Engineer to do something like derive the Navier-Stokes Equation on a whiteboard and its equally absurd to play the same game with SWE's, you all have just been bamboozled and strong…
A thorough interview in physical engineering disciplines will often expect you to demonstrate/validate something about your technical skill in-person, unless you are being interviewed because people already have validated knowledge about your capabilities (e.g., hiring a known individual from a competitor that is well-respected among peers).
To your point, a physical engineering interview might be more about "spot checks" than "assume the person is lying so ask them to complete a bevy of undergraduate final exam questions". In the software world, maybe that would be akin to starting with FizzBuzz and finding other ways to get solid proof the person can implement, not just talk. To me, if you have open source work that can be read by an interviewer, I would find it disrespectful for that interviewer to act as though the work doesn't exist and they should verify from scratch you can actually write working code.
It's comparatively a lot harder to just have a conversation with a software person and be certain they have the technical competence they claim vs. other technical realms. I tend to think it is the nature of the subject, as well as the salaries drawing in more charlatans than in physical engineering realms.
> In fact one might say that the Aeronautics industry is in far better shape than the Software industry, a failure in one of their systems results in people dying but I can go to any major tech companies websites and experience a bug on any given day.
This probably has more to do with Aeronautics actually practicing engineering as compared to today's software development practices. Also software development as a field is far less mature than traditional engineering disciplines. That's not meant to be pejorative - it's just where humanity is.
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You have to consider the perspective of a company or a recruiter. Their goal is not to simply find somebody who is capable, it's to take the hundreds if not thousands of prospective applicants they have and then cull that down to the tiny handful that they advance along for the openings that they have available. You're not looking for reasons to accept people, but for reasons to reject them. It's just the nature of e…
I feel this perspective gets lost a bit. Big companies don't roll through 1000 applications with 50 open spots and try to hire the best 50 candidates. They want to find maybe people in the top quartile of that, while spending the minimal amount of time on costs to find the adequate fits, and the cost of a false positive is way higher than the cost of a false negative. Is the process great? Absolutely not, and I'm sur…
Understaffed projects might lead to failures, people quitting, expensive consultant aid etc.
Hireing a bad programmer and two good and ending up giving the poor one easy tasks or letting him go might be cheaper than hireing two good more slowly.
In general I feel the recruitement process is so random anyway that employers should just get it done and pick someone after throwing darts at a billboard with resumés for picking some to interview.
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…
This will easily pitch you into an adversarial position and give you and your company a black eye. Remember: interviews are bidirectional. If I was pushed to the breaking point like this in your interview, I'd walk out without saying a word. You're only going to be selecting candidates who can handle pressure -- not skill or ability with this.
Truly, the best interviews I've had have also been the hardest. Different strokes for different folks.
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I think it's a holdover from hiring more junior candidates: after a few years interviewing and sitting on HCs at Google, I hired for a tiny startup that had tons of trouble sourcing candidates. My interviews at the latter place eventually devolved into basic IQ tests. Simple coding problems are pretty ideal for this, since they also lightly test necessary domain skills. The problem is that this doesn't scale with tal…
> My interviews at the latter place eventually devolved into basic IQ tests... The problem is that this doesn't scale with talent and/or experience. Industrial psychology has consistently found that IQ is a better predictor of job performance than experience. The reason being is that intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Intelligent people literally learn faster than others. The skil…
There's also this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/, which says "Supporters of IQ testing have been quick to point to correlations between IQ and job performance as evidence of test validity. A closer look at the data and results, however, suggests a rather murkier picture."
> The skill acquired by a low IQ in five years is often surpassed by a high IQ person with a few months of experience.
This looks wrong to me, most things take more than a few months to learn.
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We have ~4 hours to judge a candidate. Like it or not, we are going to have to choose :) The complex questions, if I can get answers are awesome. They are also the ones that are hard to objectively describe. Based on the number of blogs read, candidate charisma, my own work pressures - there is a big chance a senior enough person can wave their hands through those. Hence the tilt towards the surety of coding. Also TB…
I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. I work for small companies mostly and I’ve conducted interviews for small companies. We have a limited budget for a limited number of positions. One developer can be working on a project that can individually move the needle. We need to hire “engineers” in the truest sense of the word not “coders”. For instance, currently my title is “senior software engineer”. But I am the “D…