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Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

kevin.burke.dev

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Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#81

Post by dehrmann »

gilbetron wrote: post #28

Interviewing is really tough. The OP replaced some coding questions with other questions and if he were to interview a bunch of people with them, we'd get another set of blog posts complaining how ridiculous his interview questions were. "Why is it bad to write a file to the disk one byte at a time?" What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts? "Here's a stack trace from an open source project, can you tel…

> What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts?

Writing one byte at a time is a pretty quick way to ruin flash on a mobile device (or really, any flash).

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#82

Post by cosmotic »

Justsignedup wrote: post #4

I have 15 years of experience, and seem to woo teams every time we do screening calls. Could be how he describes the problem. Most of the time during code screens they don't want you to perfectly solve it. Talk it out. Someone who feels that perfect or bust is the only way to go will fail most of the time. Idk feels like something is missing. He's right, feedback loops suck. Question is... Can he practice doing a pho…

I talked it out recently and it quickly became apparent that the interviewer considered my list of "this is how I wouldn't do it" as a list of "these are approaches I would actually consider".

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#83

Post by kevinburke »

vanusa wrote: post #76
nijave wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not a huge fan of leetcode or work samples but on the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. We'd get tons of copy/pasted together infra as code from top Google results that wasn't even close to runnable (usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission)

On the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. Along with (as was the main point of the original blog post) probably quite a few false negatives, Like the author of that post, for example. Meanwhile, you can achieve the same filtering benefit by far less obnoxious and more accurate means (a cursory glance at their repo, fore example).

People say this but then they reject answers that e.g correctly code the brute force solution or they don’t provide an algorithm to code for, so it’s not just “can you code,” it’s can you find the optimal algorithm and also code it, and usually the algorithm isn’t trivial or one you’d ever run into at work.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#84

Post by kingcharles »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#85

Post by ikawe »

kingcharles wrote: post #84
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

.

wrong thread I think.

edit: If you delete your reply to this, I'll delete this. and we can unfuck this whole thing. ;)

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#86

Post by kingcharles »

ikawe wrote: post #85
kingcharles wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

wrong thread I think. edit: If you delete your reply to this, I'll delete this. and we can unfuck this whole thing. ;)

LOL. Yep! And I tried to delete it but I can't because there is a reply ;)

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#87

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

spoonjim wrote: post #36
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

Well he could also be pissed off that he’s interviewing someone who claims to be an expert in something he can’t even install.

That may be true, but there's no justification for taking it out on the candidate.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#88

Post by questiondev »

yeah and if you are an anxious person like me, (i may be on the spectrum, i have some social issues), writing code in front of people makes me very anxious, it takes me back to my childhood when my dad would scream at me for being dyslexic, i got my b’s and d’s mixed up.

i know that is not what is happening during an interview but, it’s how i feel. and this prevents me from getting ahead in an industry i am madly passionate about

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#89

Post by google234123 »

willcipriano wrote: post #18
redis_mlc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…

I generally write some naïve code and if it doesn't work, get out the debugger and fix it from there. I can work a lot faster when everything is laid out and I don't have to guess about what the data structures are going to look like. If it's performance sensitive like some tests I've seen, I'd use a profiler. I often use the jetbrains find and replace tool, as well as the search tool, I also like that I can click in…

A profile can’t suggest a better algorithm.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#90

Post by phnofive »

ljhsiung wrote: post #74
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

I recall voicing an opinion that we should record interviews we give candidates and re-review it during the hiring committee, much like we do code reviews. Have the interviewer justify certain beliefs about the candidate with hard timestamps rather than platitudes ("not confident", "wanted to see how they react under pressure", etc. etc.). My comment always gets pushback. Privacy, respect for interviewer ("If I work…

This is an excellent idea that will surely be nixed by legal - why gather evidence against yourself?
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