This is absolutely embarrassing for the industry.
Caltech's CS interview prep course
11–20 of 336 posts
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#12Sometime around my Junior year of college my goals shifted from "I'm here because I want to learn" to "I'm here because I want a job". I was surprised to find that doing well at learning (getting As) not only wasn't good enough for an entry level job, it wasn't even really correlated. The more time I spent on coursework the less time I had to grind through interview questions. I wonder if there are any other industries like this.
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#13If 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…
> OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub
I'm in the same boat, yet most companies don't seem to care about OSS contributions, despite their rhetoric.
They want us to solve a few leetcode medium/hard questions within the span of an interview.
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#14No clue if this is even remotely true, but here is what I think: the most successful companies can basically pick and chose from a really large set of applicants. Given this luxury, the can, in essence, filter by any kind of metric they want and still get loads of suitable people.
I short: if you have a million applications you can sort by GPA and still have a hundred people to chose from. Sorting by GPA means you will overlook lots of raw talent, but who cares, there is still enough real talent in your funnel as well.
For me, someone hiring for a way smaller and poorer company, this is actually good. These processes overlook lots of great people, which we can snag up.
This observation is based on the behavior of big companies in Germany (think carmakers and similar), not sure how well it translates to the silicon valley situation, but seems similar.
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#15I feel that the interview format heavily already favors new grads who just spent an entire year or more focused on algorithms courses and learning a lot of the theory you might get pop quizzed on.
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#16Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as live performance art?
No. Normal economic sectors without decades long explosive growth have some kind of licensing system to keep people out so that insiders make more money. Merely being able to teach, engineer or reason about the law taking into account precedent is not sufficient to get a license for it. In some cases this probably has some attached quality control implications but we know education degrees have no effect on teacher effectiveness[1] so there’s at least one case where that’s pure rent seeking, where the insiders benefit and everyone else pays.
[1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#17Are there other major economic sectors which have circled the wagons around making job applicants do remedial coursework as live performance art?
This is largely a result of low barriers to entry into the profession. You do not need to have a qualification from an accredited institution to be a practicing software engineer/programmer/developer.
Unlike doctors, lawyers, dentists, civil engineers...
So you have a well paying profession, hot demand, good working conditions, and no external framework to ensure a base level of competence. Of course people will try and game the system (wittingly or otherwise).
IMO this is a good thing. It allows people from all walks of life to get into the industry, and has helped it to grow more rapidly. But it does introduce a big issue, that its very difficult to know if someone is an expert, or just trying to fool you (and perhaps themselves) into thinking they know what they are talking about.
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#18If 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 go…
> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that?
This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this nonsense—there are entire companies that serve at the white-board interviewing altar (Triplebyte, Coderbyte, Hackerrank, Leetcode, Turing, Toptal).
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#19If 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…
Do you think companies would make more money if they altered their interview practices? Or is this way of interviewing somehow morally wrong ("insulting")?
Re: Caltech's CS interview prep course
#20Sometime around my Junior year of college my goals shifted from "I'm here because I want to learn" to "I'm here because I want a job". I was surprised to find that doing well at learning (getting As) not only wasn't good enough for an entry level job, it wasn't even really correlated. The more time I spent on coursework the less time I had to grind through interview questions. I wonder if there are any other industri…
Symphonic musician. The first stage is nailing a blind audition, perfectly.