231–240 of 340 posts
For a good candidate, it's a jumping off point for a deeper discussion.
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Your mention of Joel's post made me curious to find and read it. I assume this is the post in question: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid... I'd say much has changed since he wrote that, and even for the time it contains some odd advice which he tries to force down the throat of the reader, but I'd be more interested to hear other's thoughts on the article.
To Joel Spolsky's defense, leet code questions where probably a great idea for him, when it was not an industry wide thing. He also had this, what seems to me, nightmarish, dev. speed and progress estimation tracking app he made. I don't remember what blog post, but he described it and jokingly wrote that Lisa needed to get the speed up, or something. Fast forward to today and it is a predecessor to our agile nightma…
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
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I could substitute it for child, another group of people who are broadly less likely to know where the setting is, and it wouldn't be offensive that way either.
As someone who was born before the moon landing and saw one of the last IMPs get installed on the ARPANET, yeah that was offensive. You should apologize. Knowing to silence your phone in meetings is a matter of having manners, not age.
I'm afraid I just don't get your outrage at an innocent comment poking fun at the most dominant section of society. But, as you're the second person to have taken offence, I'm going to delete it anyway.
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same thing, same thing better spend more time maintaining those connections i myself never really practiced algorithms, so in an interview they’ll see me as a weak learner however the reality is complete opposite - i have spent thousands of hours on piano and guitar and speak 3 languages i have the opposite of learning disability and learn stuff quicker than many of your algorithm-knowing employees can
Side effect of this is probably making much less than your counterparts. If you can ace a leetcode style interview, you are much more likely to have competing offers (or retention offers later on) that allow you to make MUCH more. It’s a horrible system but just something I noticed before I got really good at them.
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For example: The idea that there are many programmers who cannot even write fizzbuzz sounds like a very strong claim. It seems far more likely that there are many programmers who have socially-induced anxiety.
I have interviewed senior candidates (more than two, fewer than five) who couldn’t write code to sum an array of ints (ignoring overflow). * Not in the sense of missed a bit of punctuation, but rather in the sense of “couldn’t get started with anything that vaguely smelled like an answer, didn’t understand the type system of the language they claim 5 years of experience with, etc”. I’ve probably interviewed fewer tha…
I still wonder if we couldn't remove most of these games though if we improved our hiring, onboarding, and firing processes in other ways than just trying to make a better hiring filter. Accidentally letting in someone wholly unsuitable for the job shouldn't be a big deal if 1) you can detect that like in the first day, or at least first week 2) the amount of damage they can do before detected is small 3) they actually start very soon after the decision to hire is made 4) you can fire them immediately after deciding a mistake was made and they don't work another day.
Startups can handle this better already and I think is reflected in a lot of them still doing more casual "single lunch conversation" style interviews before a "welcome aboard, see you on Monday" decision. For big cos, work will have to be done on getting away from the mentality of "it's ok if you're not contributing much of anything for the first x days because onboarding" where x is high (I've seen over 30), and firming up access controls (no facebook style all-access of new hires (or anyone if possible) being able to just query the production db and access the private messages of exes or whoever), and removing the "ok you're hired, see you in x weeks" policies where new hires can only start after a significant delay or all on a certain date for whatever reasons, and only getting rid of someone through a long and drawn out PIP process... Maybe it can be done some day.
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What an ass. I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers. Maybe some tech media company will do hidden camera interviews and publish a scathing rebuke of the practice.
> I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers. You can always tell the recruiter/coordinator. It's just tricky because you don't want to burn bridges, doing it before you hear back could be read as you asking for a do-over, doing it after could come across as bitter.
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If you really want to test someone's coding, let them do some coding in their own time with their own tools and send it to you. This isn't ideal, since it can be time consuming, but I think it's more humane than live coding in some weird environment.
This is subjective.
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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).
I'd rather filter out good candidate than let bad in. It's a domino effect. You let one bad, he will hire more in the future.
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What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts? While I agree that "disk" stuff is "low level" compared to a web developer, it's definitely a very relevant question. You might ask it and if the candidate is interviewing for a web developer position rephrase it after getting a blank stare: Why is it bad retrieving 50 users from a REST endpoint like `/api/users/{id}`, one at a time? Oh sure, print-based debuggi…
> Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Sounds like a mental gymnastics to me.