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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#151

Post by humansareok1 »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #88
fileeditview wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Do you work in California for a company in this list? Meta Amazon Google Netflix Airbnb Stripe Square Microsoft

If not it's unsurprising. But these actually are typical offers at those companies including Base Salary + Stock + Bonus.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#152

Post by arp242 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #63

Honestly, as somebody who is hiring senior devs I can't imagine not doing a coding interview. Unfortunately, it is very hard to judge somebody's coding ability in discussion alone. You can sort of get the idea whether they have or don't have experience and whether they have luck being asked about topics they know (although you can help your luck just knowing a lot of stuff). I have seen a lot of candidates who were q…

I can't really code myself out of a paper bag either with a stranger watching and questioning me while I'm doing it. I just get so nervous and can barely think straight (in general I get rather nervous being watched). One time they asked me to do a function I literally exactly have on my public GitHub as part of a project (remove duplicate entries from an array without sorting; it's just a few lines and pretty straight-forward) and I couldn't really do it in the interview setting.

Of course I wasn't present in your interviews and I'm not saying some of those people really couldn't code at all. I've worked (well, "worked") with some of them so I know they exist. But I'm not so sure all of those who flunked couldn't code at all. In my experience I'm not a hugely unique individual.

If you don't want to accommodate that then fair enough; it's your interview process. But just saying your perspective is perhaps not entirely correct.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#153

Post by humansareok1 »

citizen_friend wrote: post #49
gedy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about being able to program. It's much more about product sense and system design.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#154

Post by humansareok1 »

roenxi wrote: post #40
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.

The roughest outline for hiring as far as I can follow it is start with 100 resumes, filter it down to 10 by picking ones that are nicely formatted, then filter down to 1 by interviewing. Each level of filtering should be structured so that it biases towards technical competence. It isn't really a licensure examination because, as you point out, the industry doesn't bother to put the resources in to make sure anythin…

Missed the step where they filter out anyone w/o a degree in CS from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/UIUC/CMU.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#155

Post by skohan »

benreesman wrote: post #19

The modern FAANG Frankenstein interview is a mess. It was so/so at Google 15-20 years ago, it was so/so when initially FB but most everyone cargo-culted it 10-15 years ago. It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode. The trouble is it’s a hard problem, and it usually gives - some signal, so it’s sort of better than nothing? I guess? In cases where contract-to-hire make sense for both the company and…

> It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode.

I have no insider knowledge, but I always wondered if those kinds of cultures had a hazing / blind-leading-the-blind aspect to them. I.e. the people who got hired were the ones who jumped through some arbitrary hoops, so they doubled down on those hoops being the right hoops to choose the best candidates.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#156

Post by humansareok1 »

max_ wrote: post #131

What exactly is an alternative way to hire good candidates that any of you think is better than coding interviews?

The ways every other field on earth interviews people? Do Surgeons need to perform mock surgeries before they are hired? Do Accountants need to complete a test audit? Do Lawyers perform a mock trial?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#157

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jerf wrote: post #64

I find a simple realignment would solve a lot of this interview angst: Interviewers seem to interview on the premise that they need to find out what the candidate can't do. But this is not useful. I can tell you what they can't do. To a first approximation, the answer is "everything". I am an experienced and skillful developer, yadda yadda yadda, and I've never touched React, have no game development experience, have…

> Who sits down and designs a system for all twelve adjectives ("reliable", "concurrent", "redundant", "runs on a Z80") we want anyhow?

Wait, is Z80 seriously something that you want/design for?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#158

Post by munificent »

dilyevsky wrote: post #139

Classic 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 st…

I love the typo at the end. I have definitely worked with some stakeholders that I would have loved to stuff in a jar of pickling spices and leave on a shelf for several years to ferment.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#159

Post by ClimaxGravely »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #33
tantalor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As written this problem is impossible to solve. Proof: suppose there is only 1 infinite stream which is always descending. You will never find a lowest value, so you cannot rewrite the stream "in order".

That could be part of the question. At one job interview I was deliberately given a problem which had no efficient solution. The idea was to find a heuristic which would get close to the optimal solution and run in a reasonable time.

I got one of those at a FAANG interview. I was a bit less experienced and less confident at the time so I left the interview thinking I was misunderstanding some fundamental CS laws.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#160

Post by corytheboyd »

benreesman wrote: post #19

The modern FAANG Frankenstein interview is a mess. It was so/so at Google 15-20 years ago, it was so/so when initially FB but most everyone cargo-culted it 10-15 years ago. It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode. The trouble is it’s a hard problem, and it usually gives - some signal, so it’s sort of better than nothing? I guess? In cases where contract-to-hire make sense for both the company and…

Leetcode has the side-effect of filtering on “can code yes/no” which is a completely fair filter… I just wish it wasn’t difficult DSA problems we used.

The same screen can be done with much simpler problems. This light coding interview should also be more or less pass/fail. Do it before everything else to short circuit those who have no idea how to write a for loop.

Save the interesting insights for real problem solving, code reviews, systems design… DSA under pressure is not something that actually happens on the job IME.

Still, I’m conflicted, because a solid DSA understanding is incredibly helpful at times. At the very least, a solid understanding of the commonly used data structures, how to transform data structures, a good understanding of memory allocation with respect to code and runtime, reference vs copy… All things that if not understood, can cause serious problems.

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