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Caltech's CS interview prep course

courses.cms.caltech.edu

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Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#3

Post by dvt »

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic.

Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't even write one line of code"—let me pre-empt that by saying if you ever get to that stage, your screening process must absolutely suck and it's still your fault. I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, published material, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. It's not rocket science.

I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#6

Post by santiagobasulto »

dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

I agree with you; the whole interview process is broken.

But looking at the bright sight, teaching young people how to “work the system” is not a bad thing. Again, we should fix interview. But in the meantime, a class specializes on “how to beat the man”, looks like a fun class where you can learn more than just CS.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#8

Post by TrackerFF »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #5

Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as live performance art?

I feel that it's mostly a certain part of the tech scene. FAANG companies, startups, and those cargo-culting those. I've actually been to dev. interviews that were 1-2 interviews long, almost zero technical questions.

Now, those places were in now way "prestigious", or paying $250k starting salaries. Just your garden variety F500 companies / gov. agencies / non-tech companies.

Also, my experience with "traditional" engineering companies have been similar, 1/10th duration of tech interviews, some fundamental questions related to your trade, then mostly questions on personality, you experience, etc.

The closest I've been to tech, was finance. It's very much a predictable process - you know what kind of questions you'll be asked, what the next round will include, and all that...but still not anywhere near the rigor of prestigious or trendy tech firms.

Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course

#9

Post by barry-cotter »

dvt wrote: post #3

If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…

> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion.

How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t going to be much more than that if it b even gets that high. And most people who are good at programming will have nothing for either. If you’re not going to spend at least ten, more likely 20 hours calling up references your going to be fishing from a pretty narrow pool there.

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