What exactly is an alternative way to hire good candidates that any of you think is better than coding interviews?
Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
131–140 of 679 posts
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#132To 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?
Passing one significant whiteboard interview once is all you need, that's your "licensure."
Flip a coin whether I'll ace or fail a random leetcode question but after the one and only time my little monkey dance successfully got me into a "desireable" company, I started confidently rejecting other proposals to whiteboard me.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#133To 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.
This is what Triplebyte pretended to be. Then companies who got your resume from Triplebyte just whiteboarded you again anyway.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, exactly, was the substance of their complaint(s), if any? Was it just that you made them do their job in a way different from how they are used to?
The "point" of the whiteboard interview is to see how you think and converse and interact around your coding process, not (necessarily) how accurate/good you are at writing the code. You could write pseudocode that can't compile, and as long as you can explain the algorithm and talk about its complexity you could "pass" (in theory) Screening interviews do take place in a shared doc or other editor, I believe.
I've never had any company let me write pseudocode. I once tried to write "vec" instead of "std::vector" and the interview told me to write valid code on the whiteboard. (And I did explain that I was to avoid writing "std::vector" repeatedly).
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only in other countries than the US there are also these interviews and you make far from 400k :)
Even in the US, "$400k" is almost certainly an outlier and not the typical case. Ever notice how people making these claims never provide data about actual comp distributions? I've been an engineer for almost 10 years and never had an offer come close to $400k per year.
It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies, and specialist roles beyond that.
"software engineering" doesn't print money any more than being "in finance" does, you'll make more or less depending on what company you do it for.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#136I've found that asking them to review some obviously bad code with glaring errors and problems is more informative than asking them to solve some random DSA problem. Candidates who can code well can point out code that has obvious problems. Just ask if this is good or bad, and if it is bad, how they could improve it. This demonstrates competency and doesn't make the interview seem like a grind but instead more like a…
Just got be careful with the “how to improve” part. In my experience as an interviewee sometimes it becomes a regular algorithmic interview. A couple times I found some N+1 queries or inner loops and was asked to “fix it”, which might just turn into leetcode.
The best code review interviews are the ones where there is a healthy amount of actual code, with a handful of functions and classes, some badly named variables, bad comments, some misleading code paths, couple bad patterns, etc… the worst ones are a non-optimal solution and you’re asked to make it optimal. That’s just leetcode disguised as “code review”.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#137What exactly is an alternative way to hire good candidates that any of you think is better than coding interviews?
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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed All the good programmers I know have side projects and live and breathe code. None of the mediocre/bad ones I know do. Think of it this way: what's likely to make you a better programmer: spending half (0.5x) of every day on (a work-mandated subset of) code or spending most (1x) of every day on code? The answer is obviously the latter. And it sounds weird, but most of my programming knowledge comes fr…
Sure, but a good employee is not just a good programmer. You don't want an obsessive, you want someone who is stable and has other things going on in his life.
Tangentially related. I was trying to describe to a friend of mine how being discerning after a few years of experience means I do less work (or toil) for a better outcome, and why it's worth the higher salary I command.
Young me would've enjoyed the process of building a thing, ignoring problems like maintenance burden, how fragile or brittle the new tool is, lessons learned from the old tool, etc. etc. (you know how it goes)
Current me will take a task and mull on it. No pen to paper for _days_, preferring a minor adaptation to the existing process, or discovering that the desire was misguided in the first place. The work not done and wisdom to not do it is worth its weight in gold.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#139Classic mistake of overthinking it and failing to realize what interviewer really wants - which is to make sure the candidate can actually write code, like at all. The question itself doesn't really matter as much as it's just a pretext. I actually asked a variation of this question for many years at Google and it was clear within first 5 mins who has been writing code day-to-day and who's been mostly "brining key stakeholders into conversations at appropriate time".
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#140The 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.
You could view the trial-by-Leetcode that people undergo when they switch jobs every 4 years or so as a form of relicensing. One advantage that the current setup has over officially proctored examinations is that you get to try again repeatedly until you are successful.