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The Programming Interview Experiment

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Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#41

Post by jasonpeacock »

donretag wrote: post #22

At this point in my career (professional developer since the late '90s), I am extremely picky about who I work for. The interview is a two way street, where the prospective employee also gets to ask questions to the potential employer. In the described workflow, the candidate must spend several hours before talking to anyone in depth at a company. This scenario would simply not work for me. I will not spend hours of…

Would your rather that they have you come on-site and perform the coding challenge for half the day, then continue their normal interview process for the other half the day?

Or worse, go through a normal 5-6hr interview loop doing random questions on the whiteboard?

I think their approach is much more flexible and approachable. The overall time commitment is the same either way.

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#42

Post by at-fates-hands »

donretag wrote: post #22

At this point in my career (professional developer since the late '90s), I am extremely picky about who I work for. The interview is a two way street, where the prospective employee also gets to ask questions to the potential employer. In the described workflow, the candidate must spend several hours before talking to anyone in depth at a company. This scenario would simply not work for me. I will not spend hours of…

I'm completely the same way after getting burned early on in my career. I once did 5 interviews and several back-to-back code challenges for one company who in the end said, "Meh, we don't think your javascript skills are strong enough." I got this in a what amounted to a form email.

You want code challenges? Check out my GitHub account and pull some of my repos and check my code. THEN call me if you still want to interview me. I'm at a point now where I've amassed enough code samples (apps, games, plugins, etc) that you should be able to determine if my coding skills are up to what you're looking for.

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#43

Post by danbruc »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #35
danbruc wrote: post #19

Not 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 requireme…

I meant that Landau notation is a trivial concept, not finding a good algorithm to solve a given problem or determining the runtime of a given algorithm.

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#44

Post by donretag »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #41
donretag wrote: post #22

At this point in my career (professional developer since the late '90s), I am extremely picky about who I work for. The interview is a two way street, where the prospective employee also gets to ask questions to the potential employer. In the described workflow, the candidate must spend several hours before talking to anyone in depth at a company. This scenario would simply not work for me. I will not spend hours of…

Would your rather that they have you come on-site and perform the coding challenge for half the day, then continue their normal interview process for the other half the day? Or worse, go through a normal 5-6hr interview loop doing random questions on the whiteboard? I think their approach is much more flexible and approachable. The overall time commitment is the same either way.

You can achieve a mutual understanding during the initial technical (not HR) phone screen. This approach eliminates the candidate's ability to ask questions before a multi hour commitment. The traditional phone screen is important. Most questions cannot be answered by HR.

I have a much better understanding a company after the question portion of a half hour phone screen than I can get from searching the web for information about a company.

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#45

Post by georgemcbay »

fsk wrote: post #20

What about candidates who don't have several hours to spend on a programming assignment? Everyone seems to want one nowadays, and I don't have time to do one for everyone who asks. I've done a bunch of programming tests, without progressing to the interview stage after doing them, and now I usually refuse.

Agreed.

While I do think that there is plenty wrong with traditional programmer interviews and that new approaches are needed, it isn't really a scalable solution on the candidate's side to spend hours to days on challenges for individual companies if everyone is asking for one. It becomes sort of like everyone wanting their own app store, or their own always-running polling service running on a desktop or mobile or whatever. If there are just a couple of people doing that, no big deal, but once more than a couple of entities start doing it, the system falls apart. If you're Google, Apple, Github, or some other prestige employer you can probably get away with this system even despite the scalability issue; otherwise good luck with it.

As a practical compromise, companies should be willing to waive the specific challenge if the candidate already has their own existing shareable source code they can point to, thus allowing a candidate to reuse the same example as a portfolio piece with multiple companies.

However, few companies are likely to do this since the same basic ego problem that breaks traditional programmer interviews comes into play ("Well we do things very different here, we're very special, so we must make the candidate jump through hoops X, Y and Z").

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#46

Post by [deleted] »

donretag wrote: post #22

At this point in my career (professional developer since the late '90s), I am extremely picky about who I work for. The interview is a two way street, where the prospective employee also gets to ask questions to the potential employer. In the described workflow, the candidate must spend several hours before talking to anyone in depth at a company. This scenario would simply not work for me. I will not spend hours of…

[deleted]

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#48

Post by d3gamer »

fsk wrote: post #39
OhHeyItsE wrote: post #33

When 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.

But there isn't really a "trick" here, though. The point of these questions is to figure out if the candidate has enough CS fundamentals to construct a reasonable solution to a problem that they've never seen before.

Re: The Programming Interview Experiment

#50

Post by fsk »

d3gamer wrote: post #48
fsk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

But there isn't really a "trick" here, though. The point of these questions is to figure out if the candidate has enough CS fundamentals to construct a reasonable solution to a problem that they've never seen before.

There is a trick. Loop over the array, remembering the maximum and minimum. If you've seen it before, the question is MUCH easier, making it a bad question.
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