Start-ups can afford asking candidates puzzles? I thought everyone was struggling to find developers.
Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
81–90 of 354 posts
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#82After reading this I have a dumb question: The person behind the post is a CS major but only played a little bit with the C programming language in college — is this pretty common these days?
Yes, I have seen many CS graduates who couldn't write C or C++ if their life depended on it. In fact, I have seen CS graduates who could explain the theory behind, say, parallel computing in detail, but could barely write scripts.
Knowing everything about painting doesn't make you a good painter :).
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#83Dear god, what kind of startup hires a person with only basic Java and Python knowledge, then hands them K&R and expects them to churn out production-quality code?! That's unfair.
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#84I actually like asking math questions on interviews. It shows how people approach a problem. Asking code questions in an arbitrary interview setting shows just about nothing - no access to a reference doc, somebody peering over your shoulder. Heck, I couldn't code my way out of a wet paperback in that setting. Certainly, asking only math questions is stupid as well, people should know at least a little about the stuf…
Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates. I know more than a couple very productive programmers that did not go through a formal CS education. Asking math questions to those candidates could even scare them for no reason. I hired people who had no idea about Lagrange Multipliers but were able to ship code in various languages and even learn new paradigms when necessary. There are not only smart people…
> Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates.
Every question can exclude a good candidate, especially if you only ask the question and tick the "correct/incorrect answer" box. However, often you can learn the most interesting trait from asking a question which the candidate can't answer right off the bat: How does the candidate deal with failure or lack of knowledge. Does she/he start guessing? Does she/he ask the right questions moving in the general direction of solving the problem?
I'm not checking for academic knowledge in interviews.
> and even learn new paradigms when necessary.
This often requires knowledge about the stuff you don't know. That is a value of formal education: Not the stuff that you memorize, the bigger value I derive from my formal education is all that "I know that there's a solution to the problem but can't remember exactly" kind of knowledge. I can't remember all the sort algorithms I had to code, but I remember there's more than one and that there are tradeoffs between all of them. So if I'm constrained on memory and have a pre-sorted list I can go luck up how bubblesort is implemented exactly. That's a knowledge that self-taught programmers often lack [1].
> being good with maths and being a productive programmer are not necessarily two things that always come together.
No, nobody proclaimed so. But having a trait for problem solving and logical puzzles certainly helps :)
[1] n.b: often. Some of them have read and digested tons of theory books which could count as formal education.
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if all your most relevant work is owned by previous employers? Restricting hires to people with decent personal projects and/ or extensive open source contributions isn't ideal either.
I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find. (Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)
I used to believe that as well. Now I'm not so sure, mainly through my own personal experience.
For 5.5 years (2004-2009), I was a core developer and maintainer over at Xfce. Over that span of time I wrote tens of thousands of lines of code, perhaps more. I did this in addition to my job, which morphed from engineering project management to programming tasks that I didn't find very challenging.
After I left that job, I joined a tiny, early startup. The programming work there I found very challenging, and the insane hours quickly ate up any spare time I might put toward Xfce. Eventually I realized that lacking a life outside of work made me sad, so I left. Fast forward a little bit, and now I'm at another startup, which (while demanding, challenging, and rewarding) gives me time for outside pursuits and a social life. But I don't feel the desire to work on personal coding projects anymore. The job fulfills my desire to write code, and outside of that I'd rather be, well... outside.
It's interesting, because all my Xfce contributions are on git.xfce.org, and not on GitHub. My GitHub account contains 2 personal projects: a semi-finished Android UI library (which was really only relevant and useful in the 2.x days), and a script for building a Gentoo image for a Raspberry Pi (which I've since abandoned as I mainly run Debian nowadays). Looking at my GH account would be fairly unimpressive, and might even be worse than not having a GH account at all.
So I'd easily fail the GitHub test. If a particular company was making that a no-go for getting through an interview pipeline, well... their loss, I guess.
I'm responsible for a fair bit of hiring at my current company, and I rarely ask about personal projects anymore, unless a candidate has one listed on their resume. While I'm not always happy with the coding problems I usually give (they tend to be data-structure/algo problems that I'd probably have trouble solving in an interview setting), they do at least clearly show whether or not the candidate can write code, and I also get a rough idea of how cleanly they code, not to mention insights in how they approach and solve problems. And not being able to completely solve the problem isn't an auto-fail in my book either, as long as they tried to work on it and their approach (and whatever code they did write) was sound.
I do very strongly believe in the aptitude test + work sample formula as the best way to evaluate candidates, but the problem is more that it's not always so easy to apply those tests in a traditional interview setting. Maybe that just means we need to come up with a different way of interviewing, though.
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? These tests are kinda old and don't prove anything besides the fact that the person has a certain level of intelligence but that doesn't mean they can code.
> What kind of IQ tests? Math thinking? Language? Other? Both. They're not perfect, but I'm going to be picky and look for people who can generally reason well (both mathematically and verbally). > but that doesn't mean they can code. That's why you pair it with work samples. The ideal hire would be an impressive GitHub + evidence of intellect. The GitHub shows they have coding chops, while an IQ test usually means t…
And what about when all your work is internal only, so you can't show it off on GitHub?
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#87Here is an interesting idea that I had reading this. As a startup, what if you were to create a simple computer language that looked different from most other computer languages, at least somewhat different. Alternatively, just use one of the many really obscure programming languages out there, just make sure the applicant does not know it ahead of time. Give the applicant a 10-20 page reference manual for the langua…
It takes me a month or two to be comfortable with a new language.
How long do you expect your interview to last?
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#88I actually like asking math questions on interviews. It shows how people approach a problem. Asking code questions in an arbitrary interview setting shows just about nothing - no access to a reference doc, somebody peering over your shoulder. Heck, I couldn't code my way out of a wet paperback in that setting. Certainly, asking only math questions is stupid as well, people should know at least a little about the stuf…
I think you don't get the point. Learning a new language after you programmed for 5 years in a variety of paradigms like assembler, object-oriented, purely functional, will take you between a couple of hours and a week. But if you have NOT had those 5 years of varied programming experience, then the new language is not your problem. Learning the concepts is, and that will take time.
Learning a new language is fairly easy. Learning the language's standard library to the point that you don't have to look at the reference docs every 30 seconds takes a bit more time.
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you don't get the point. Learning a new language after you programmed for 5 years in a variety of paradigms like assembler, object-oriented, purely functional, will take you between a couple of hours and a week. But if you have NOT had those 5 years of varied programming experience, then the new language is not your problem. Learning the concepts is, and that will take time.
I think you don't get my point: I expect a domain expert to be a domain expert, but I don't expect a trainee to know anything and I'll structure my interview accordingly. I'll ask the domain expert questions about his domain. But I don't expect a domain expert to know the programming language that we work with just because he's a domain expert. And seriously, I'll prefer the eager-to-learn math graduate with little c…
I think you vastly underestimate the time it takes to learn these sorts of things. Sure, you can teach someone to write a simple, passable iOS app that does a few basic things in a couple weeks. But they're still going to be a raw-novice iOS developer. Maybe the app you need them to build is super simple, but if not, you're doing yourself and your company a disservice by not hiring someone who's done iOS before.
I'm speaking from experience here: I learned iOS (even after having previous MacOS X desktop devel experience) on the job, when a friend asked me to write an iOS app for her startup. I learned quickly, but made a lot of mistakes in how I structured the app that came back to bite me months later. If I'd had the time to start over from scratch, I would have done things quite differently and the whole thing would have been a lot easier.
And I was slow. Every new framework I had to learn slowed me down and added days to implementing the part of the app that needed it. A seasoned iOS developer wouldn't have run into problems like that.
Re: Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates. I know more than a couple very productive programmers that did not go through a formal CS education. Asking math questions to those candidates could even scare them for no reason. I hired people who had no idea about Lagrange Multipliers but were able to ship code in various languages and even learn new paradigms when necessary. There are not only smart people…
> Asking math questions might exclude some good candidates. Every question can exclude a good candidate, especially if you only ask the question and tick the "correct/incorrect answer" box. However, often you can learn the most interesting trait from asking a question which the candidate can't answer right off the bat: How does the candidate deal with failure or lack of knowledge. Does she/he start guessing? Does she…
> However, often you can learn the most interesting trait from asking a question which the candidate can't answer right off the bat: How does the candidate deal with failure or lack of knowledge.
Some research suggests that tests are much better at predicting performance than informal grading.