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Hacking job interviews

mycareerstack.com

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Re: Hacking job interviews

#31

Post by vonmoltke »

skormos wrote: post #20

The grammar alone on this site is just dreadful, who the heck says "Codes"? And then career v. careers in the same slogan two different places. If I saw this on a resume, it would be placed straight into the circular file.

The grammar alone on this site is just dreadful, who the heck says "Codes"?

I see this quite a bit in the scientific community, and find it somewhat annoying. Of course, the people who use that form are the same who insist that "data" must always be used as a plural.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#32

Post by maslam »

ancymon wrote: post #22

Some time ago I was surprised that there isn't (or I couldn't find one) any site with recruitment questions based on Stack Overflow engine. Anyway, the best one I found was http://www.careercup.com/page with a lots of questions from various companies.

Full disclosure: I'm a CareerCup interviewer.

+1. CareerCup is run with a lot of love by Gayle, who really cares about providing the right content and advice.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#33

Post by justinlau »

SG90 wrote: post #7
rb2k_ wrote: post #2

Personally I think that most of these questions are horrible and as somebody being interviewed, I'd be a little bit annoyed at a company trying to make me jump through hoops. I'm sure there are tons of developers that can sort arrays like there is no tomorrow, but sometimes I would like to work with people that can create software. People that write tests, are able to set up a sane build process, keep the clutter to…

I think each company has their own recruitment process, and it depends on the kind of job openings they have. I recently had my Google interview which was totally algorithmic. Despite of a number of projects and research papers in my resume, the interviewer did not ask me any questions pertaining to those projects. But at the same time no way did it appear to me that the interviewer was not looking for passion in me.…

Getting responses about those projects isn't interesting. By now all the answers you will give will essentially be committed to rote memory, so the interviewer won't be seeing any actual thinking going on. It's also hard to gauge which contributions came from you, or from the people around you, based on your responses and your resume -- most people are happy to steal credit if they think it won't actually hurt anybody.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#34

Post by justinlau »

j_dg23 wrote: post #9
syst3mw0rm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when you said "increasing user interaction" ? Which features do you think are lacking in the site at the moment.. ?

i would love to see more number of users actively discussing challenging problems and the online compiler can be presented in a more intelligent way.

I, too, would love to see a list of questions that I should avoid asking in interviews. :)

Re: Hacking job interviews

#35

Post by justinlau »

I can't believe how many people here are averse to the idea of demonstrating coding ability in an interview.

Github doesn't reflect the amount of time that somebody put into writing that code. It doesn't reflect how long it took for them to iron out bugs from a poor initial implementation.

My experience is that correctness AND speed both count when a person is developing software. I'm sure you guys have worked with people who are really sharp, can talk the talk, but just flail around helplessly in an IDE, constantly solicit help from their neighbors, and burn up milestones doing very little. I want to make sure that those people don't get hired.

I also want to know that these people are going to use idioms that aren't wasteful, that their naming conventions are sane, that they are being thoughtful and methodical about their implementation rather than grafting edge cases onto edge cases.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#36

Post by prodigal_erik »

justinlau wrote: post #35

I can't believe how many people here are averse to the idea of demonstrating coding ability in an interview. Github doesn't reflect the amount of time that somebody put into writing that code. It doesn't reflect how long it took for them to iron out bugs from a poor initial implementation. My experience is that correctness AND speed both count when a person is developing software. I'm sure you guys have worked with p…

Github doesn't even reflect whether somebody actually wrote that code themselves or merely copied it and tweaked some identifiers. It's not that I want to be this suspicious, but I find I have to now that the salaries have attracted so many losers and con artists to the industry.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#37

Post by earl »

nirvana wrote: post #24

Its a good thing I stopped working for other people, because I feel sorry for anyone who tries to interview me with these prejudiced questions: Q: What's your github id? A: Tell you what, tell me yours and I'll criticize your project and language choices. I'm sure I can find multiple reasons to conclude you're incompetent. Oh, look at this, every language you've checked code in is a scripting language. Do you realize…

My employer (not posting the name since I don't care to be directly googleable) de facto forbids open source work. In order to share essentially any code we're supposed to pre-clear it with our internal "open source council" by filing a jira ticket and asking permission. Each time, every time. They meet monthly, so you potentially wait up to 30 days. Of course the company realizes they only own our work that is directly related to our employment or that is done with company property. On the other hand, they have two in house attorneys, one of whom was a partner at a very high end law firm. So in practical terms, in any legal pissing match I'd lose, no matter the merits of the case, since I can't afford my own $600/hour IP attorney.

Which is a long way of explaining that many people have very high barriers to sharing code. So the only code I really have to share is written for my employer, and I obviously won't be sharing that. I think that having shared code on github is a poor estimator for quality of an employee.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#38

Post by justinlau »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #36
justinlau wrote: post #35

I can't believe how many people here are averse to the idea of demonstrating coding ability in an interview. Github doesn't reflect the amount of time that somebody put into writing that code. It doesn't reflect how long it took for them to iron out bugs from a poor initial implementation. My experience is that correctness AND speed both count when a person is developing software. I'm sure you guys have worked with p…

Github doesn't even reflect whether somebody actually wrote that code themselves or merely copied it and tweaked some identifiers. It's not that I want to be this suspicious, but I find I have to now that the salaries have attracted so many losers and con artists to the industry.

This too. It's much too easy to lift source from somewhere else, or hire somebody from India to write code on your behalf.

I generally don't trust anything that I can't verify firsthand. Stated experience gets a guy in the door for the interview, but their performance during the interview is all that matters to me.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#39

Post by wahnfrieden »

earl wrote: post #37
nirvana wrote: post #24

Its a good thing I stopped working for other people, because I feel sorry for anyone who tries to interview me with these prejudiced questions: Q: What's your github id? A: Tell you what, tell me yours and I'll criticize your project and language choices. I'm sure I can find multiple reasons to conclude you're incompetent. Oh, look at this, every language you've checked code in is a scripting language. Do you realize…

My employer (not posting the name since I don't care to be directly googleable) de facto forbids open source work. In order to share essentially any code we're supposed to pre-clear it with our internal "open source council" by filing a jira ticket and asking permission. Each time, every time. They meet monthly, so you potentially wait up to 30 days. Of course the company realizes they only own our work that is direc…

It's a misconception that every employer who asks for a Github ID as part of a job application process is looking to use it as a way to screen applicants. For us, it's just a shortcut to see whether someone can code. If they don't have a Github (or bitbucket, or technical blog, or whatever else is Googleable or that a candidate wants to provide us), it just means that I have to spend extra time during the phone screen or in-person interview on their coding abilities.

Re: Hacking job interviews

#40

Post by epper »

jurre wrote: post #17
epper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure there are tons of developers that can sort arrays like there is no tomorrow, but sometimes I would like to work with people that can create software. Companies should search for developers that can do both .

Then they should focus on both during their interview process, right?

I agree with you that there should be focus on both during an interview process.

However I see no problem in a post/discussion/website focusing on a part of the interview process such as coding/algorithmic questions.

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