“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#31

Post by tomcat27 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

30 years ago software engineering was probably a few bunch of technical skills. Now it's a very big spectrum, no individual knows everything.

Someone applying to search quality team at Google that works on search algorithm really wants someone who knows algorithms..

but that may not be the case for a web of app developer.

but the same app developer needs to know have algorithmic sense to do some performance tuning.

The current interviews ignore all these nuances and simply ask a weird, sometimes boring, competitive coding question. That's fine too.. most engineers enjoy a puzzle once in a while.

But what really irritates me is sensitivity of assessment in these coding interviews.

Someone the other day was saying Cracking the Coding Interview book is no longer relevant. The problems are apparently simpler to what people ask in real interviews.

We don't just have to provide pseudocode. Write working, beautiful code, solve the edge cases and speak to the interviewer while doing all of this. I don't know since when engineers actually talk and code at the same time during working hours.

The phone interviews are a joke. In a 45mins meeting, where 10mins spent on introduction from both people has zero weight. In those days it was supposed to weed out non-serious candidates with fizz-buzz question. Well' agreed fizz buzz isn't really a good question, but neither a LeetCode Hard DP question to be solved in 30mins.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#32

Post by ghayes » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #16

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

This shouldn't be downvoted, it's exactly right. For every "do this instead" I've ever seen in articles bemoaning the state of tech interviewing, I've seen a dozen people attacking that other thing just as vehemently. There's nothing even remotely approaching a consensus viewpoint on what we should do instead.

And with all things in life, the answer lies in the middle. You should ask programming questions, but they should be applicable, universal and not “trick” questions. You can do a take home, but if you do, make it 60 minutes and fun. You will end up whiteboarding in a room, but you should train your team to be good at this, shadow them and help them get better at it. Nothing is wrong with these techniques, per se, but often they end up as a terrible candidate or hiring experience.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#33

Post by runT1ME » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

mberning wrote: post #5

I do sympathize, but there is a flip side to this. I have worked in large orgs with many developer and engineer titled employees that can’t code at all. Zero coding skills. And their title would be things like “Senior Enterprise Application Engineer”. Unfortunately their resume doesn’t read that differently than a similarly experienced engineer that actually writes code.

I think (hope?) you're getting downvoted because most folks aren't arguing against giving someone fizzbuzz or seeing if they can loop through a tree, it's the fact that some of these tests gives you what is an obviously O^3 algorithm and you have to use some non trivial trick to get it to O^2 or something.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#34

Post by Swizec » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #19

Swizec wrote: post #9

> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems. This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told. Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy…

I think someone who can approach a problem differently and effectively, can also follow orders just fine. I like to try new things and approach things differently, I don't do it with every task and recognize there is value in doing it the same old way at times too. Way too many tests and etc assume that people can only do X, or Y or Z.

Oh totally. The problem is that folks like that often get bored by the job.

The number of stories I’ve heard of engineers having to microdose just to get through the day because working on 1 button for 6 months kills their spirit ...

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#35

Post by alpha_squared » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

What if there were a certification authority that could claim that professionals are, indeed, competent in X, Y, Z within software? And, of course, that authority would need to be recognized by A, B, C companies. That'd certainly skip the endless, often mind-numbing, repetitiveness of technical interviews (especially for those with many years of experience) and can jump straight to culture/team/behavior fit.

This is basically what all engineering disciplines do and it's why I take "software engineer" with a massive grain of salt.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#36

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

[deleted]

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#37

Post by MattGaiser » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:13 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

I can leetcode hours for free or I can do small projects for free and usually learn a new thing while doing it instead of trying to memorize something about a binary tree.

Take home projects just make the hours overt.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#38

Post by azhenley » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #13

Swizec wrote: post #9

> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems. This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told. Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy…

> code archaelogy I've never heard this phrase, but it's so apt to most of every dev job I've had. I love it.

A colleague of mine teaches “Digital Archaeology” as a graduate course where students “mine” git repositories.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#39

Post by xiphias2 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #4

Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.

How many Petabytes of data are you working with?

Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real).

Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even if you just need it once in 3 years.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#40

Post by MattGaiser » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

I switched jobs just a few months ago. I interviewed for a couple places. Nobody cared about what I previously did. It was either all algos or architecture.