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Since you are trying to optimize the hiring process have you looked into something like video interviewing with HireVue?
Disclaimer I work here so I am already sold on the concept.
The Programming Interview Experiment
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#32Anyone interested in doing more complicated questions during the phone screen should check out https://coderpad.io - you get a live REPL or compiler (depending on whichever language you're using), and can run code instantly from your browser.
The best part is the environment is shared between you and your candidate, so you can both see the code being written and execute, live.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#33When I get asked things like: “Write a function that finds the longest positive-sum subsequence in an int array and runs in O(n) time.”
I really wonder if those places ever find people that can do this. I never get offers from the places that ask this. I always get offers from the ones that have a similar process to the one in the article. I don't think I've ever even met someone who could answer these questions on-the-spot, with a marker on a whiteboard.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#34I would add that the respect for candidate time is critical. I applied to one place and they requested a similiar coding project but this was just before the christmas holiday and they gave me a deadline of christmas day which just struck me as a little arrogant to think that I am really going to be doing their challenge on christmas.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#35Not in a single interview ever have I been asked about the runtime of an algorithm. On the other hand it is mentioned in almost every article about interviews for programming jobs. How many companies do actually ask such questions? If your future job is mainly building standard business applications, web sites or whatever, no one cares about theoretical runtimes. If your future job is somewhere in research, game, dat…
All those companies should be care about algorithmic runtime, it's part of performance and scalability. If you're not thinking about that then you're not writing production software.
I ask about runtime at every interview (part of "coding, data structures, and algorithms"). It is most definitely not a trivial concept - how do I define the correct solution to a problem when there are multiple approaches?
The requirements for a correct solution (even simple coding problems) include style, correctness, performance, and scalability.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#36When I get asked things like: “Write a function that finds the longest positive-sum subsequence in an int array and runs in O(n) time.” I really wonder if those places ever find people that can do this. I never get offers from the places that ask this. I always get offers from the ones that have a similar process to the one in the article. I don't think I've ever even met someone who could answer these questions on-t…
It mostly filters for people who spend a lot of time preparing for interviews, practicing that problem or similar ones, from books of problems known to be asked by interviewers. In a more general sense it filters for people who want a job badly enough to do the goofy dance that many companies expect of candidates, and are savvy enough to know the dance exists.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#37[deleted]
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#38When I get asked things like: “Write a function that finds the longest positive-sum subsequence in an int array and runs in O(n) time.” I really wonder if those places ever find people that can do this. I never get offers from the places that ask this. I always get offers from the ones that have a similar process to the one in the article. I don't think I've ever even met someone who could answer these questions on-t…
Problems like that are the distilled versions of problems you'll often see at places like TopCoder where you have an hour and a half to solve 3 of them. They're looking for skilled TopCoder competitors, basically.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#39When I get asked things like: “Write a function that finds the longest positive-sum subsequence in an int array and runs in O(n) time.” I really wonder if those places ever find people that can do this. I never get offers from the places that ask this. I always get offers from the ones that have a similar process to the one in the article. I don't think I've ever even met someone who could answer these questions on-t…
“Write a function that finds the longest positive-sum subsequence in an int array and runs in O(n) time.”
That's a horrible interview question. If you know the trick (saw the question before), it's easy. If you don't know the trick, it isn't reasonable to expect someone to figure it out in 5-15 minutes.
That's a brainteaser question disguised as an algorithms question.
Re: The Programming Interview Experiment
#40"Bring the source code—we’ll ask to take a look at it." Seriously?? What actual company do you know that would allow its IP to walk out the door? And possibly to a competitor? Additionally, projects are usually the work of a team, and are heavily iterated upon. "your contribution" is usually hundreds of little changes building upon other changes, not "this is the application I wrote".
This is a good point, and one I forgot to address. We would never ask to see proprietary source code. Hopefully, a candidate would have a side project or open source work they're willing to share. If not, we'd definitely work around this. For team projects, we'd ask them to describe their contribution. So far, this hasn't been a big problem, but we're still iterating and making the process better!
The article is definitely not clear about this. In fact it says "bonus points if it's open source" implying that you expect to see proprietary work. It was a bit of a red flag for me while reading.