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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#41

Post by gedy »

citizen_friend wrote: post #20
teeray wrote: post #10

The coding interview looks different when you view it for what it would be called in other industries: a licensure examination. It looks particularly insane to relicense for every single job you apply to. It also looks supremely unfair to have proctors for this exam with varying expectations and training to actually correctly administer it.

- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality - people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling - licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

Maybe for the devs, but "solves fun puzzles" is not a measure of quality either.

The number of people who "aced the interview" but are borderline worthless for real product development is not trivial in my experience.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#42

Post by jessekv »

sshine wrote: post #18

At this point, I’ve had enough successful positions at hard jobs that I don’t question my competency when I fail a pop quiz. I still don’t know what my favourite Rust crate is. I feel I should have one after being asked more than a couple of times.

I'd say regex, mostly for the well written blog posts.

https://blog.burntsushi.net/regex-internals/

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#44

Post by spicyusername »

lazide wrote: post #35

To bastardize a quote - ‘it’s a terrible system of government, but it’s the least terrible one we’ve been able to find’ Seriously, what are the alternatives?

Standardized licenses, per language / domain / etc, that expire and / or something analogous to professional engineering licensure in harder engineering disciplines.

Take the leetcode tests once every 5 years or so. Mentor for a few years with an experienced, and already licensed, engineer and get their approval. Then the interviews can skip the drudgery and can be higher level and higher quality.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#45

Post by coev »

yodon wrote: post #34

I'm a believer in Joel Spolsky's recruiting goal: "Smart and gets things done."[0] Add "not a jerk" (which I find is part of "gets things done" on an ongoing basis) and everything else is either vanity or decision paralysis on the part of the interviewer. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/05/smart-and-gets-thi...

The article is from someone whose final-boss interview was with...joel spolsky. And it was a pretty useless-in-the-real-world question he was given as a coding exercise (base -2 number conversion).

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#46

Post by parpfish »

eep_social wrote: post #21
dgfitz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to know the company name so I don't accidently ever apply there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211188

The company that demands cutting edge experience is a strava for skateboarders app?

I thought he was going to say that it was something like a foundational R&D lab or cybersecurity firm

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#47

Post by andrewingram »

foobarian wrote: post #37
secondcoming wrote: post #22

We scrapped coding tests at our last round of hiring, but the interviewees were so bad they everyone’s time was wasted. We had to bring it back just to filter people out.

We talk about something like this now and then but the thing is, if fizzbuzz is still managing to eliminate more than half the candidates I don't think it's useless.

That does loosely suggest that something of fizzbuzz-level triviality may be sufficient for first-round filtering.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#48

Post by fileeditview »

citizen_friend wrote: post #20
teeray wrote: post #10

The coding interview looks different when you view it for what it would be called in other industries: a licensure examination. It looks particularly insane to relicense for every single job you apply to. It also looks supremely unfair to have proctors for this exam with varying expectations and training to actually correctly administer it.

- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality - people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling - licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

Only in other countries than the US there are also these interviews and you make far from 400k :)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#49

Post by citizen_friend »

gedy wrote: post #41
citizen_friend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality - people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling - licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

Maybe for the devs, but "solves fun puzzles" is not a measure of quality either. The number of people who "aced the interview" but are borderline worthless for real product development is not trivial in my experience.

I still haven’t met the guy who is an algorithms genius who can’t program, but I can guarantee a license isn’t going to solve that problem.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#50

Post by gedy »

lazide wrote: post #35

To bastardize a quote - ‘it’s a terrible system of government, but it’s the least terrible one we’ve been able to find’ Seriously, what are the alternatives?

- Don't let the hr 20-something non-engineers be your first filter - the hiring eng manager reviews resumes. Let HR review the work history, references, and W2 stuff later.

- Simple, practical coding questions related to your company need (so not algos/leetcode for 90% SaaS CRUD app companies)

- Engineer or manager talk to candidate about past work and projects.

If you are giant FAANG okay fine that won't scale. But most companies smaller than this will do just fine without the assumption of "everyone's a faker! Gotta prove you wanna work here!". This has worked fine for me in hiring past 20 years.

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