561–570 of 1001 posts
"Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry’s ability to find and hire skilled software engineers." It doesn't hurt "the industry", there's a competitive edge to hiring otherwise superior engineers that are passed up by poor hiring practices at certain companies. Not everybody needs to work at FAANG, or worse, companies…
I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…
There's a class problem with C2H in almost all companies. Contractors are always seen as less than by management and especially hiring committees. I work at a company that I've been hired thru C2H. Everyone on the team, my manager knew I was one of the strongest programmers on the team. But when it came for my conversion interview I bombed. It was run by 3 of the most senior principles with the lowest acceptance rate…
If you've already worked with the candidate, you already know this so there's no point in having an interview.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean this would apply to going on a first date as well. First impression is what matters and once the impression has been ruined, all bets are off. It is not specific to the interview process.
Rescheduling a date or an interview at the last minute doesn’t make a great first impression either.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…
If not algorithms then what would you use to test a generic programmer? You would have to setup a custom panel based on each candidate. A person who has only worked for PHP would need a different panel from someone who has worked on C++ all his life. Algorithms is language and framework agnostic. It doesn't matter if you work in embedded or data science. It doesn't matter if you code in C or Python. The same question…
From this relatively simple question, I get a lot of insight into the candidate's skill level, i.e. how well do they write code? and it has nothing to do with algorithms.
I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…
I am focusing on the algorithmic part, which is the only thing I can influence in my company's interviews. I wish we would evaluate candidates with some pair programming, but that's never going to happen. > incredibly high stakes algorithm riddles Yeah there you go. This is your problem (Google/Facebook I assume?). It's more than questionable to expect candidates to solves complex algorithmic problems on a whiteboard…
I liked the experience and the process, in the morning it was a blast. We really clicked.
In the afternoon I had to use the same setup as the guy I was collaborating with -- Vim with his bindings and Golang. I had never used Golang before and even tho I was proficient with vim his binding were quite opinionated.
I felt the guy from the afternoon had 0 interest in being programming with me. He wasn't collaborating and was looking at his cellphone the whole time.
The problem was to write a functional test for a CLI that would spawn a web service in Golang, parse some json and run some assertions.
Golang had some quirks with JSON and new line encoding that I spent my whole afternoon with. It is something he could have unblocked me as it a very specific problem, instead he kept telling me to read the official golang docs, not even to google the error.
As someone being interviewed I followed what he asked me to do and worked in his environment but it wasn't a representative of how I would have worked.
That said, I feel it could work! I just should be able to judge the person who pair programmed with me instead of just being judged :) the person in the morning would be a 10/10 and in the afternoon a 4/10.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but C2H sounds like a great idea to you because you have the luxury of having already earned FAANG money on your side. You'd have to pay me considerable money for me to consider taking a C2H role so I could cover health insurance across the usual suspects (general health, dental, vision, specialists just in case). Like many people outside of this website (and enough here), I don't have the luxury of FAANG mone…
Many consultant/contractor firms esp for programmers provider insurance. Its usually not as good as a top tier company benefit package of course. The biggest issue for me is you're unlikely to get a 401k or tax-benefited investment vehicle, which means if you're making programmer money you can't even do a ROTH or a traditional IRA due to income restrictions. So make sure its a really good jump in pay due to that at m…
[0] https://www.fidelity.com/retirement-ira/contribution-limits-... [1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/ira-deduction-limits
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming in general is language and framework agnostic. Someone who can write an extensible and maintainable C++ application can most likely do the same in C#, Java, Rust etc. There's decades of best practices and knowledge around what makes good software and almost none of it is specific to a language. Most devs use a handful of algorithms in their entire career. And any algorithm they do use was probably adapted…
Would you agree that interviewing in psudocode is a good idea then? But what's the content they should be interviewed on? You say no to quicksort. How about date parsing? That shows you have to handle messy cases. What do you want them to write if not algorithms? Maybe we have a different expectation of what "algorithm" means? The term is pretty generic, but I feel captures more of the cross language stuff. Compare a…
I disagree, anyone can write out an algorithm from memory. That's not hard, and does not prove that you know what you're doing.
I've done my small share of interviewing, and I always did a little bit of whiteboard coding, but the objective was never to see if the candidate remembered algorithms, but to see if they could execute code in their head.
Because I've encountered "programmers" who clearly couldn't execute code in their head, and whose idea of programming was copy-pasting something and heuristically modifying it until it did what it was supposed to do, instead of knowing what the code does. And you really want to make sure you screen for this group so that they fail the interview.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Couldn't tell an average from a median Without meaning to attack you personally (especially in the context of the rest of your comment), a comment like this annoys me a bit. I presume by "average" you mean arithmetic mean, but the median is also an average, and depending on the context the median might be a far more useful statistic than the mean. Confusing the mean and the median is one thing, and perhaps you actu…
...I always learned in grade school math class that "average" = "mean", very specifically. I'm pretty sure there would have been test questions that required this knowledge. It's very possible my schooling was wrong, but presumably I'm not the only one.
The arithmetic mean is colloquially called the average and differentiated from the median and mode, but technically speaking these are all averages. They are all estimators of central tendency. It would be not be out of the ordinary if a statistician asked, "which average do you mean" for clarity. Which definition of average is best depends on what you're trying to measure.
I dislike this interview question because it's an area where it's 1) more trivia than practical knowledge, and 2) easy to not recognize someone who knows more about it than you do. It's like if I tried to test your knowledge of the difference between "affect" and "effect", and then you correctly used "effect" as a verb and I thought you were wrong.
If I repeated everything I just said about estimators in an interview, the interviewer might think I'm too ivory tower to realize that "of course he's just talking about the mean!" But then I could also ask why I'm being asked a question like this in a software engineering interview.
It's a language game where no one wins (somewhat in the sense of Wittgenstein).
Hmm...but if everybody is stressed out, then it equalizes and you're testing for skills again, just skills under pressure. And having skills retained under pressure is actually a valuable trait in this industry. And at least at desirable companies, the process is designed to minimize false positive, it doesn't care that much about false negatives. This is by design. My guess would be that they filter out orders of ma…
I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…
There's a class problem with C2H in almost all companies. Contractors are always seen as less than by management and especially hiring committees. I work at a company that I've been hired thru C2H. Everyone on the team, my manager knew I was one of the strongest programmers on the team. But when it came for my conversion interview I bombed. It was run by 3 of the most senior principles with the lowest acceptance rate…