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What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#271

Post by dominotw »

christiansakai wrote: post #99
kentrado wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but it looks like you are guessing and penalizing people for using python or solving a problem you gave them too fast. Kind of like that math teacher accusing me of cheating because I did well on the exam.

I'm not penalizing them. I don't think it is bad if someone is a Leetcode junkies. Definitely not downing points if they use Python. But to actually answer your question. Say the role is in JavaScript, say a Frontend role and the candidates want to answer it in Python instead of JavaScript. Then it is possible that the candidate is a Leetcode junkies. Why I know? Because I do this myself. And definitely no points sub…

i am about 300 leets in java but i am always jealous of concise python solutions that people post in discuss.

Debating if would be worth taking the hit of switching to python now.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#272

Post by _nckn »

dominotw wrote: post #271
christiansakai wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not penalizing them. I don't think it is bad if someone is a Leetcode junkies. Definitely not downing points if they use Python. But to actually answer your question. Say the role is in JavaScript, say a Frontend role and the candidates want to answer it in Python instead of JavaScript. Then it is possible that the candidate is a Leetcode junkies. Why I know? Because I do this myself. And definitely no points sub…

i am about 300 leets in java but i am always jealous of concise python solutions that people post in discuss. Debating if would be worth taking the hit of switching to python now.

I think it is worth it. I did Leetcode in JS, then in Go, then in Python.

In Python you just need to focus on the actual algorithms than the actual minuteae details such as "let me create a function to copy this array". As long as you are aware of limitations such as Python int has no restriction like Java (int32, int64) etc, because some problems require you to look into that restrictions. Python string concatenation is also O(n^2) because there is no stringbuilder in Python. Just be aware of those and it should be fine.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#274

Post by christiansakai »

blub wrote: post #267
christiansakai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think I develop this ability as well through solving hundreds of Leetcode questions myself. At some point I actually have to step back and think, act not to solve it too quickly otherwise the interviewer will spot me as Leetcode junkies.

This is beautiful. As selection pressure increases, the candidates evolve to mimic all the criteria of the selector.

Natural selection at work, even in our man made world...

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#275

Post by christiansakai »

electroqueen wrote: post #224
christiansakai wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the update. It is an interesting read. I used to think naively that checking these boxes does nothing: - "I prefer not to disclose my sexual preference" - "I prefer not to disclose my race/ethnicity" - "I prefer not to disclose whether I'm a veteran or not" Anyway, it is a sad read for people like me who don't get preferential treatment. It seems like I'm being salty, but it is just the reality. People lik…

"preferential treatment"????? your baseline is privileged. diversity hiring is attempting to negate reduced or lack of privilege. your competition is not women or minorities. it's other majority groups, because more of them are interviewed and hired.

Well that's generalizing isn't it? Not every Asian male sounding name person actually have a good track record in their family, free of abuse, loving both dad and mom, good education, know how to do math to the point of memorizing the entire Pi numbers.

There are people who are outside of the normal as well. Why not give them privilege by hearing their stories as well?

Or better, why not discard the preferential treatment and do it based on meritocracy? I know this can't be done in today's world, just hoping.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#276

Post by kyralis »

Diederich wrote: post #163
Scea91 wrote: post #156

So I got contacted by Facebook London about 2 weeks ago. The job description sounded quite interesting, but when the recruiter described the interview process and actually sent me a deck with resources for preparation for coding interview he lost me. The reason is that I am absolutely satisfied with my current job and decided that I don't want to bother at this time with preparation for an interview. Maybe I would pa…

Over the past 27 years, I've worked for 8 different organizations, including two FAANGs, and I've never technically prepared for any interview. This is not some kind of indirect boasting about how smart I am. Far from it. I feel positively dumb compared to my peers. I rarely fully nail the most difficult algorithmic interviews, and I don't think that's the point. I think I get most of my 'points' by taking a very dir…

On the flip side, as an interviewer, this all incredibly true.

In particular, I frequently end up asking algorithmic questions during interviews. For all the hate that they seem to get, I find them to actually be quite predictive; in my experience, the people who are extended offers despite just barely getting by in that portion of the interview are also the ones that struggle when those types of issues come up during actual development- and yes, despite claims to the contrary, basic fundamental algorithmic knowledge really does turn out to be useful in a surprising number of circumstances.

However, I will say that the utility is entirely based on how the interviewer handles things. I've passed many candidates who have failed to complete the problem at hand because throughout their attempt they demonstrated an ability to communicate, an ability to reason about a problem, and an ability to respond to feedback during the course of trying to arrive at a solution. In particular, one of my favorite questions has a tendency to make candidates try an approach that ultimately ends up being a dead-end as their first attempt. That's fine! It's completely natural! The really interesting bit is how they they respond when I produce counterexamples that start showing the limitations of that approach (and, ultimately, its infeasibility.) Do they keep digging the whole? Do they rethink their approach? Do they say "Yep, that makes sense, but let's see if we can get this done for the easy case and then we can approach the more general problem?" Those sorts of questions are the ones that ultimately end up being the most valuable.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#277

Post by electroqueen »

christiansakai wrote: post #275
electroqueen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"preferential treatment"????? your baseline is privileged. diversity hiring is attempting to negate reduced or lack of privilege. your competition is not women or minorities. it's other majority groups, because more of them are interviewed and hired.

Well that's generalizing isn't it? Not every Asian male sounding name person actually have a good track record in their family, free of abuse, loving both dad and mom, good education, know how to do math to the point of memorizing the entire Pi numbers. There are people who are outside of the normal as well. Why not give them privilege by hearing their stories as well? Or better, why not discard the preferential trea…

Not every white person comes from a rich, educated family either. I'm very familiar with this being a white, uneducated, disabled female from the Midwest US with an uneducated, abusive, lower-middle class family.

Meritocracy does literally nothing to aid less privileged people to get ahead. It primarily helps those who started with privilege in the first place which is mostly limited to select groups.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#278

Post by dominotw »

_nckn wrote: post #272
dominotw wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am about 300 leets in java but i am always jealous of concise python solutions that people post in discuss. Debating if would be worth taking the hit of switching to python now.

I think it is worth it. I did Leetcode in JS, then in Go, then in Python. In Python you just need to focus on the actual algorithms than the actual minuteae details such as "let me create a function to copy this array". As long as you are aware of limitations such as Python int has no restriction like Java (int32, int64) etc, because some problems require you to look into that restrictions. Python string concatenatio…

thank you. what you said makes sense. job market seems to be down anyways. So might as well give this a shot.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#279

Post by monksy »

austincheney wrote: post #190
monksy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than hel…

I suppose they could have assumed I lied about the assistance, but surely they could have reasoned that would be less disqualifying than delivering nothing.

You need to have empathy for the person on the other side of the table.

Your relationship when questioning is very conditional. Answer question right == get the job.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#280

Post by randomdude402 »

redis_mlc wrote: post #232
austincheney wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one time I was hiring for a JavaScript developer. The most important technical competency was a brief working knowledge of the DOM. The actual position required modifications to pages for A/B tests and jQuery was either too slow or broke in production when other developers used it for their test code. Of everybody that passed through HR to me I sent out a notice that there would be a minor code assessment…

I've written a fair amount of vanilla JS over the past 20 years and know what you're talking about. But in the circle of people that I've talked to, everybody else uses frameworks, and I doubt they could make surgical changes in the browser console. So you're excluding most of today's working front-end developers, and appealing to "edge cases." I guess you could pre-screen candidates by asking, "Are you familiar with…

It seems insane to me that most working front end developers don't know how to manipulate a DOM with javascript.

Not saying this is or isn't true, but it seems insane.

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