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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#461

Post by dclowd9901 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #406
godelski wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a senior person can't in 30/45 min of talking with someone figure out the general experience level then the problem is them, really. This is why I've always been so confused. Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview (seniors sit down with candidates and discuss how to solve a relevant proxy problem the team is currently undergoing (has the side benefit…

> Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview One angle is that SWE is one of the very few professions where you don't need a formal degree to have a career. It's also a common hobby among a sizable population. I think this is truly great. A holdout breathing hole where people can have lucrative careers without convincing and paying off a ton of gatekeepers! B…

Nnno. You start from their experience and give the benefit of the doubt. As someone who’s been in software for 12 years, I don’t want to talk about writing algorithms. I want to talk about how to motivate 150 engineers to actually write code correctly or inspire a technical initiative.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#462

Post by dclowd9901 »

moregrist wrote: post #443
epolanski wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a chemist by education, so all my college friends are chemists. Being asked a theoretical chemistry question at a job interview would be...odd. You can be asked about your proficiency with some lab equipment, your experience with various procedures and what not. But the very thought of being asked theoretical questions is beyond ridiculous.

Hmm… I have a twist on this. Chemistry is a really big field. My degree is in computational/theoretical chemistry. Even before I went into software engineering, it would have been really odd for me to be asked questions about wet chemistry. Admittedly it would have been odd to be quizzed on theory out of the blue as well. What would not have been odd was to give a job talk and be asked questions based on that talk; i…

And software and computing isn’t a big field? Ever heard of EE?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#463

Post by dclowd9901 »

godelski wrote: post #365
esafak wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, don't they get imposters? You sure run into people who can't code in coding interviews.

Because to actually have those types of conversations you have to have legitimate experience. To be a bit flippant, here's a relevant xkcd[0]. To be less so, "in groups" are pretty good at detecting others in their groups. I mean can you not talk to another and not figure out who's also a domain expert? It's because people "in-group" understand nuance of the subject matter. [0] https://xkcd.com/451/

Doesn’t that comic more closely hew to the idea that some fields are complete bullshit?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#464

Post by dclowd9901 »

mandevil wrote: post #429
godelski wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if a senior person can't in 30/45 min of talking with someone figure out the general experience level then the problem is them, really. This is why I've always been so confused. Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview (seniors sit down with candidates and discuss how to solve a relevant proxy problem the team is currently undergoing (has the side benefit…

Half a dozen years ago in a conference talk, Joel Spolsky claimed credit for inventing these sorts of whiteboard interviews (with his Guerilla Guide to Interviewing), and that it had broken software engineering hiring. https://thenewstack.io/joel-spolsky-on-stack-overflow-inclus...

FTA:

“I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two.”

Well, if he fucked it up, I don’t see any reason why his ideas can’t also fix it.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#465

Post by dclowd9901 »

spankalee wrote: post #189
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…

Exactly this. In the interviews I give I care about whether the candidate can write code, yes, but also talk and think about code. The conversation is the most important part of the interview, and the thinking (and communication) is the most important thing I'm trying to judge after basic skills. Like you said, you can get a good sense within the first few lines of pseudocode if someone's at least competent at writin…

Meh. I’ve met dozens like you. People who swear they just want to see “how you think.”

Then, in the post interview roundup we talk about the candidates and you’re a bit disheartened that they didn’t complete the exercise, so you give a pass even when every other person in the room gives a thumbs up.

Nah. Re evaluate yourself and your biases.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#466

Post by rahkiin »

tetromino_ wrote: post #442
zrn900 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I also think that when you hire in other industries, you can get much more milage from looking at the candidate's formal degrees and certifications. > In our industry, you kinda have to start from scratch with every person. Not really - in software people leave a bigger and more easily trackable track record than any other engineering field. From previous work projects/experience to open source projects/experie…

> Not really - in software people leave a bigger and more easily trackable track record than any other engineering field. From previous work projects/experience to open source projects/experience, from personal projects to the communities a person belongs to. That only apply to software people who either (a) are getting paid to work on open source or (b) have enough spare time to work on open source as a hobby after…

And b also implies programming is also a hobby. For a lot of people it is their work. We can not filter on that as not many will be left to hire.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#467

Post by thbb123 »

hintymad wrote: post #239

Assuming that a company does not look for candidates who are naturally good at ICPC-type of questions or geniuses who can come up with amazing algorithms in a matter of minutes, there is actually a different way to do coding interview: just give a high-level description of a sophisticated enough algorithm to a candidate and ask the candidate to turn that into code. I think it strikes a good balance between depth in C…

My approach is to ask the candidate to show me some code they've written ( could be for class project, but one requirement for me to interview them is that they have a GitHub) and explain the choices they made or other anecdotes that surround the project.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#468

Post by Terr_ »

triceratops wrote: post #80
speeder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of job pay 400k? Even when I worked as C++ guru at BMW and was hired as very senior my before taxes compensation was 40k (year).

Jobs at software companies in the US. Other industries don't pay very much for technical talent. $40k is extremely low for a senior role. Even in places like India or China.

> Jobs at software companies in the US.

A few very rare jobs at software companies in the US.

The BLS median for 2024 is way lower, at $110k. (Yet at the same time, still much higher than parent-poster's $40k figure.)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#469

Post by xandrius »

esafak wrote: post #378
xandrius wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got any tips/suggestions on how not to be filtered out because of "formatting"? Got any great examples to share?

I'm allergic to resumes that recite every single technology the candidate has ever used, leaving little said about what they accomplished using said technologies.

That's true and that's how I tried to have my resume but I've had quite a few recruiters saying something like "I cannot see a list of technologies you know". Which has been the opposite of what I've been told in the past, where impact and goals are more important.

So one can never win it seems :D

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#470

Post by itronitron »

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…

Related to not knowing everything, there's also this mal-assumption that if the candidate doesn't know something simple (and obvious to the interviewer) that they will never be able to figure it out on their own.
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