It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate • Hacker News Board

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#331

Post by throwaway2037 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

eschneider wrote: post #269

kebman wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…

Ok, I interview and hire folks where I work. (Mostly looking for C/C++ folks.) If you list projects or GitHub links, I'll DEFINITELY go through them and probably spend a lot of time asking questions about your design and implementation because it's great seeing what folks can tell you about things they wrote. In the absence of that, why might I ask you to implement a binary search or maybe a linked list: I want to gi…

I had a co-worker about ten years ago. His coding question was always: Please implement a linked list for me in any language. He said more than 80% of candidates failed. Incredible. LinkedList! I can understand that people will struggle to write a HashMap, BinaryTree, or BinarySearch (always full of bugs), but LinkedList is just crazy.

To be fair, I always get tripped up by the classic interview question of reverse-a-single-linked-list. It's not something I ever do outside an interview!

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#332

Post by paganel » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #254

cableshaft wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume. Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almo…

I've made lots (thousands? hundreds at least) of commits to the Linux kernel and have been working on it since pre (git) history, have developed a number of novel concurrent data structures / algorithms for it. I decided to talk with a FANG recruiter a couple of years ago who must have scraped my name from mailing list or commit histories. Despite first making it clear by email I wasn't interested in a job interview…

For what it's worth I spent the last few days wfh-ing with a close family friend who happens to be a manager at a FANG company. Those few days convinced me to not wanting to work at a FANG company (or at any big company, for that matter) unless there's no other way to pay the bills and buy food for out two pets, it seemed like almost everything at that company was based on politics and how to sell yourself as a programmer (or IC-er, or whatever the correct term is) or as a manager, almost no talk about the product itself.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#333

Post by sgtnoodle » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #239

sgtnoodle wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code running on a microcontroller with very limited RAM, operating on data structures that don't naturally plug into generic algorithm implementations. For example, finding the end of a several GB long append-only log file stored on the raw blocks of an SD card.

In these cases did you write it from scratch or were you able to copy paste a working solution? Because most pragmatic to me would be to google for a solution on Stack overflow, see what is upvoted and seems reasonably vetted, then potentially go over the code yourself to see if there's any issues and maybe write few tests to be extra sure. Maybe your use case is too niche though to be able to copy paste though, I'm…

Sure, I'll find some example code on Wikipedia or whatever as a reference. It's faster than deriving it all again from scratch. I don't really copy paste algorithms like that, though. Instead, I review the reference material until I understand the algorithm and any potential edge cases and optimizations that may apply, and then code it up and unit test it.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#334

Post by kragen » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #237

kragen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, but he said "forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes". This came up here three months ago: "school was years ago...I've forgotten how to implement a hash table in C within 30 minutes. Is that really the gatekeeper we want?" Well, I thought, yes, I think it is, actually? So I tried implementing a hash table in C—without testing it, as if I were writing it in an interview without programming tools. It too…

> But it's easy for the algorithm to hide subtle bugs. For sure, but I guarantee you the interviewer from the grandparent comment wasn't looking for correctness and safety when they asked to implement a binary search. They ask the binary search question to check if the applicant knows what an algorithm is and if they ever had to implement one. ( Any algorithm.) Sadly, 90% of programmers these days don't and haven't.…

> I guarantee you the interviewer from the grandparent comment wasn't looking for

What, the company that interviewed James Hush about binary search was your company? Have you thought about the possibility that maybe he also interviewed at at least one other company which used different evaluation criteria? Maybe you should put a little bit more effort into correctness yourself!

> They ask the binary search question to check if the applicant knows what an algorithm is and if they ever had to implement one. (Any algorithm.)

> Sadly, 90% of programmers these days don't and haven't.

That makes no sense. Every program or subroutine implements an algorithm. If you haven't written any programs or subroutines you aren't a programmer.

> Well, yes, most developers ship software without ever having to actually program.

This reminds me of when I was a kid and we thought it wasn't "actually programming" when we programmed in BASIC or Pascal because actual programs were written in assembly. We were wrong about that.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#335

Post by ramesh31 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

obedm wrote: post #229

sdevonoes wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while presenting the appearance of being passionate about what you do during work Why would anyone want this? It's fake. Let's try to keep the IT world free of as much BS as we can please. Don't follow this nonsense trends.

Why? You don't need to be passionate about your work to be a great employee. Many days I don't feel like working and I'm not motivated. But I still do (I think) a great job and try my best. Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases, but it's not requirement to do a great job.

>Passion is bullshit. Passion is useful in some cases, but it's not requirement to do a great job.

I strongly disagree. Maybe for other professions, sure. But to write great software requires passion. Showing up and doing the bare minimum leads to the garbage software that proliferates the world today. Not that that really matters to the individual; if you're doing what's asked of you and nothing more, then more power to you for finding a good work life balance. But you simply cannot produce top quality software without being passionate about it.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#336

Post by simonw » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #329

watwut wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Folk post this on every thread as if denying the effect somehow makes it go away. As both a candidate and hiring manager, the effect is very real and it is folly to ignore it. Overwhelming majority of employed developers has literally no public presence.

Then you'll have a leg up on the overwhelming majority of employed developers. Just because lots of people don't have public presence, doesn't mean that you having public presence doesn't make you stand out. Quite literally the opposite: it will make you stand out.

Thanks - that's exactly the point I was trying to make in the article.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#337

Post by jimbob45 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

Where are you finding public speaking training? I’m asking because that’s a skill I would myself like to develop.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#338

Post by TheCoelacanth » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #138

an_opabinia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, for every engineering subordinate that turned out to be good that I didn't bother testing with leetcode, there were 19 who sucked and also failed their coding test, or sucked and we should have tested them. So far, among people who studied programming as their major in college, the best predictor was the prestige of the university they attended.

If you've hired over 20 people, and 19 of them have been bad, it just sounds like there's something wrong with your process. It also sounds like you're hiring a lot of novices, which isn't what's being discussed really. The uni thing is not exactly a revelation. It's the same for every single field/job. Better uni, usually better worker. All you're actually saying is that novice programmers straight from uni mildly c…

Yes, the thing that is wrong with the process is that they didn't check to see if the person was able to write code.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#339

Post by Jochim » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #243

trhway wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point isn't about whether the question is hard. It is about understanding that other people are different and especially when the people stumble for whatever reason. The manifested "holier than thou" and lack of humility probabilistically suggest relative youth and inexperience.

Yes other people are different, but I have yet to meet good developer who struggle to understand binary search. Yes, people can randomly fail in interview due to stress or whatever. But that can happen on any question. This particular question really should weed out all that many otherwise good people.

I learned the common search algorithms in school. I haven't had to touch them since, if you asked me to write psuedo-code for them on the spot I'd almost definitely fail to implement them properly. There's a huge difference between struggling to understand something and not being able to do it from memory on a whiteboard.

Imo conversational questions are much better indicators in an interview of whether someone will be a good hire, the candidate knowing why you would use a binary tree over another data structure offers much more insight than asking them to write one. The more conversational approach also allows the interviewee to demonstrate their knowledge and gives you a better idea of how they approach a problem or whether they'd be a good fit on your team.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#340

Post by dheera » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

lodovic wrote: post #145

dheera wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this such a hard problem to solve? When I was a founder it was incredibly hard to find people who are "available" and skilled because they feared listing themselves as available on LinkedIn. When I'm not a founder and skilled it's incredibly hard to get to hiring managers. Usually I get warm intros from people within companies I'm interested in, it works way better, and usually often results in jumping straigh…

This may not provide you with the desired results - you usually want to hire people for their technical skills, not how good they are building an online presence and marketing themselves.

They don't need to build an online presence, they just need to join the app and upload a resume.