Speaking of someone who's basically right out of school, I can tell you that I probably wouldn't hire most of my classmates. It _was_ depressing.
Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest common subsequence of a set of strings. That's rough, asking for a solution to an NP-hard problem over the phone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence_prob... Or maybe they were just expecting you to say "for each combination of subsequences of each string, check if they are equal ..."
We may be mishearing their intended formulation, which could have been asking for the longest common substring (described here: difference is that subsequences don't have to be entirely contiguous, just in the same order.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_substring_proble... That's an interesting problem with some simple solutions worth understanding. I don't think it would be unrealistic to expect a high-…
"We may be mishearing their intended formulation, which could have been asking for the longest common substring "
Good Point. And asking a clarifying question would be a very strong positive in a candidate.
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#53Part of it may be your questions, and part may be HOW you're asking (e.g. over the phone, or putting someone on the spot). 2) Not a lot of people write SQL by hand anymore. I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join. Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything. I've written far, fa…
Well, if you're using ORMs to handle all your SQL needs (and they literally must be handling all your needs if you're never writing anything with a join) then I don't think that you actually have a working knowledge of SQL in any sense. There are certainly plenty of jobs which require that knowledge, and I'm not sure an employer would want someone who didn't have direct SQL language experience.
To be honest, I don't understand how you manage not writing joins even if your ORM is perfect and flawless. I use the SQL prompt like an interactive debugger, writing queries to look at the internal state of my database.
(I assume that the original post refers to applicants that listed "SQL" somewhere on their resume, or else he wouldn't be asking SQL syntax questions -- I hold that if you have "SQL" on your resume, you had better know how to write a join.)
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#54I think the best solution is to ask the questions in as many possible ways you can think of.
Some people are great at coding, but suck at whiteboard, others aren't comfortable talking about their thought process.
So why not give them numerous ways to show their stuff? Have them find bugs, have them code on whiteboard, have them write code in a compiler, etc etc.
Your goal is to find a good programmer, not a programmer who is good at white board.
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#55Yes. I used to do the chatty bit first before subjecting interviewees to the "technical evaluation"; it seemed polite to engage people first.
That was depressing. At least I found out the technical evaluation was worth giving. An astonishing proportion of people that came off well in less technical conversation would utterly flunk the test.
I'm not talking minor errors caused by interview pressure. I mean people with "5 years of C++ experience" writing void reverse_string(char* in) { char b[] = new char; b = in; ... }
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#56Part of it may be your questions, and part may be HOW you're asking (e.g. over the phone, or putting someone on the spot). 2) Not a lot of people write SQL by hand anymore. I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join. Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. So not being able to do it without looking it up doesn't really tell you anything. I've written far, fa…
"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join." Scary! I wonder about your definition of "used", if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app "for years" and never wrote a join! The database design must be very ... unusual :-). And this was in the days before ORMs :-D. " Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. " I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app w…
I would fail if this was a 'live' screening. It's rare that I write SQL by hand, and remembering the syntax for a JOIN is something I pretty much always look up. I just don't do it by hand very anymore.
I'm a very good developer (my track record would suggest as such), but I would fail at least one part of this test due to the simple inability to remember elementary SQL syntax.
The interesting thing about this statement is that it shows one way out of potentially being asked to code on a whiteboard/over the phone. If you have a PhD' from MIT and/or have a strong track record of writing Open Source software, creating and selling a startup, build robots (and electric unicylces ) for fun etc, in other words, if you can show , well before the interview, that you are as good or better than the job demands, you are very unlikely to face the "find the longest subsequence in a string" or "write a join" type questions. But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job?
That's just not true, particularly at the larger companies out there. Amazon, for instance, has a rigorous process that you can't (more or less) circumvent. It involves a lot of saying algorithms over the phone. It was one of the most challenging interviews I've done in my life. Not because of the content, but because of the method.
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all? I think you'd understand how I can take your argument to its extreme conclusion and justify posing psychotherapy problems to candidates. You're seeing complaining where there isn't any. It's in the employers interest to ask questions that will narrow down candidates in a way that best fits the job. Putting candidates under…
Are you saying that the context and type of the problem in the interview doesn't matter at all? I think it doesn't matter if it is consistent for all the candidates. A company can't change to suit every employee. Working for a startup like Youtube is high pressure. You have to be very self-aware and able to work under extreme circumstances. When your app crashes and millions of people are angry, you have to fix it! Y…
This is not a question about whether an interviewer needs to customize the questions for each interviewee. This is about a possible mismatch between the environments of the interview versus the workplace and the relevance of the questions to the actual job.
You make a case for developers needing to be able to handle "high stress" or "high pressure" conditions. Those are pretty broad terms, as they could mean anything from "very competitive and high standards" to "quick firefighting emergency work 24/7" to "your boss will micromanage the living hell out of you". So, in effect, you're saying, "Look, you complainer, working for YouTube is like being in a phone interview all day." All I can say is that if that is true, I am certainly not a match.
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join." Scary! I wonder about your definition of "used", if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app "for years" and never wrote a join! The database design must be very ... unusual :-). And this was in the days before ORMs :-D. " Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. " I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app w…
I would fail if this was a 'live' screening. It's rare that I write SQL by hand, and remembering the syntax for a JOIN is something I pretty much always look up. I just don't do it by hand very anymore. I'm a very good developer (my track record would suggest as such), but I would fail at least one part of this test due to the simple inability to remember elementary SQL syntax. The interesting thing about this statem…
"That's just not true, particularly at the larger companies out there. Amazon, for instance, has a rigorous process that you can't (more or less) circumvent. "
"more or less" is key. If someone at the level of PG or RTM (or Linus or Hejlsberg, say) were to apply to Amazon (or Google or Yahoo), I am sure they aren't going to be asked to code "subsequence of a string" on the phone! They'd no doubt get a good interview but i highly doubt thatthis kind of "ask trivial questions" interview would occur. The purpose of such phone interviews is to eliminate clueless people who have the knack of writing good resumes , the "all hat and no cattle" types.
I was specifically responding to this sentence "PG, RTM, and TLB would probably fail your test". I doubt that somehow!
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. The questions the OP asked are all very easy. It'd be easy to describe a function to find the longest common subsequence of a set of strings as well. The reason such a question is asked is because it isn't something that we do everyday and how we solve problems that we don't immediately know how to solve is what sets good programmers apart from bad programmers. I find anyone who immediately blames the enviro…
Case appealed. There are definitely people who are capable of solving problems but whose performance drops appreciably under pressure. Now, you may not want to hire those people, but that doesn't mean it has anything to do with external motivation or making excuses, and you can keep your contempt for yourself.
This is @ pj:
There are many different kinds of pressure. The pressure in an interview is very different from the kind of pressure experienced when the database is down.
For example, I have no problem at all with on-site interviews but I choke pretty easily during phone interviews. I also have no problem with public speaking, but I have trouble engaging people I don't know in one-on-one conversations.
Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
#60Good developers get hired and removed from the pool. Bad developers go to the next interview.