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Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

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Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

Flemlord, a lot of responses seem based on hypotheses about what a good answer would have been. Could you follow up and give examples of what you'd have considered correct?

My hobby-programming experience suggests...

simple - int add(int a, int b){int result; result = a + b; return result}

recursive - um, I like fibonacci sequences: void fib(int term){if term = 1 return 0; if term = 2 return 1, else return fib(term - 1) + fib (term - 2)}

SQL join: no idea, I haven't used SQL for years. I assume you mean something like for(i = 0; i Car as an object: well I guess I'd have a struct with variables for size, weight, power, turning circle and so on, and methods for accelerating, setting direction [steering heading, speed (forward and reverse, or multipliers for forward gearing)] and braking...then I'd have create multiple instances of that object using a table of values...do you make racing games?

I'm not looking for a job, but I'm interested in knowing what sort of answers you were after. The above seems super-simplistic to me, I'd feel nervous they were trick questions of some sort and the obvious answers are actually the failing ones.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#82

Post by philwelch »

Pistos2 wrote: post #39
soc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. When I first meet someone over the phone or in person I'm in a social mood and prefer to talk rather than do a code dance for them. Once I'm alone at my desk though it's easy to get down to business. Think it would be cool if companies just said show up to work, and you work for free for the first week. After that both parties can decide if they want to continue.

I thought it was very common practice to have a [paid] probation period, where the company is free to keep someone or let them go. Usually the period is less than 6 months. That seems a sensible approach to making sure your hiring decision was good or not.

Under US law (in most states), the company is free to let someone go at any time barring a specific contract to the contrary. I guess if you tell someone the first n months are a probationary period, they'll have their feelings less hurt if they're fired during that period.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#84

Post by pj »

seasoup wrote: post #40
pj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... I see your point. Perhaps we disagree on the word "work." When I think of "work" I think of moving a company in a desired direction. A lot of people think of work as "sitting in a cube." The question is, "How do we determine if the candidate's definition of work matches the employer's definition of work?" Maybe what you think you are doing when you are working is actually causing more problems and moving the c…

What are you going to do in one week at a place? It could easily take that long and much longer to ramp up and even understand a part of the existing code base.

I've gone into a company with software systems that were a complete rat's nest, learned the enviroment, accessed files and utilities needed to make changes, and implemented a significant change in 2 days. A lasting and flexible change that will enable the company to operate more cheaply and be more agile in the future.

Many information systems can be implemented in a week. You could set up email, an e-commerce site, a CRM, SCM, or even substantial portions, if not an entire ERP system depending on the size of the company.

A week is a long time if you know what you are doing.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#85

Post by [deleted] »

blankity_blank wrote: post #44
tocomment wrote: post #3

Just out of personal curiosity, you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up? For example I consider myself a reasonable programmer, I can certainly do any project put in front of me. But I failed a YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest commo…

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 ..."

[deleted]

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#86

Post by tocomment »

blankity_blank wrote: post #44
tocomment wrote: post #3

Just out of personal curiosity, you should try to find out if any of these failed candidates are actually skilled developers but there's something about the questions or interview that's messing them up? For example I consider myself a reasonable programmer, I can certainly do any project put in front of me. But I failed a YouTube phone interview because they asked me to "say" a function for finding the longest commo…

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 ..."

No, they wanted a working function. I used Python :-(

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#87

Post by tocomment »

kscaldef wrote: post #77
tocomment wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I mentioned, I just get flustered when people are watching me, or want me to speak my though process aloud. Those skills, (being able to code complex problems when people are watching) have never been a requirement of any job I've seen so I've come out of many interviews feeling that they got an inaccurate picture of my skills.

Really? You never get together in a room with other devs to talk through & pseudocode a solution to a tough problem?

Yeah, I guess it's different with people I know. And to already be familiar with the problem helps too.

But to solve something say from project Euler on a whiteboard in front of three strangers and talk about my thought process at the same time, that's hard.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#88

Post by tocomment »

anigbrowl wrote: post #81

Flemlord, a lot of responses seem based on hypotheses about what a good answer would have been. Could you follow up and give examples of what you'd have considered correct? My hobby-programming experience suggests... simple - int add(int a, int b){int result; result = a + b; return result} recursive - um, I like fibonacci sequences: void fib(int term){if term = 1 return 0; if term = 2 return 1, else return fib(term -…

Join question:

select * from books join authors on books.author_id=authors.id

Now you get the fields from each table in your result matched up correctly.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#89

Post by rjurney »

Interviewing leaves me depressed. I just spent most of an hour proving I can't verify whether a tree is binary. Mostly, we didn't focus on anything relating directly to the position or talk about my experience in any way. We proved that there are holes in my education pertaining to basic CS, that I never encounter on a daily basis as a web developer. I guess the rest of the stuff was taken for granted.

I understand that these tests can be important, but I can't help but feel that I will fail to qualify for any position that requires me to hold a host of basic CS algorithms in my head, but that I could still do a good job in the position - because I'm very good at learn as you go, and have learned lots of higher level stuff while building elegant, complex systems - without knowing how to verify a tree's binary nature.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#90

Post by vax_11 »

plinkplonk wrote: post #48
vax_11 wrote: post #31

Part 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…

> if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app

Depends on what you mean by "trivial".

You can use a database for most of the things most websites use them for without ever using a JOIN. It just takes application logic instead of SQL.

Sites like this aren't exactly heavy on the SQL. This site doesn't even use SQL. Something like Reddit or Slashdot would, but still wouldn't need JOINs.

> I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app where the existence of an ORM absolved developers from having a good grasp of SQL when they needed to drop below the abstraction layer provided by the ORM.

You don't have to drop below it; you can go "above" it into the application layer.

> 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, [...] But then if you could do all that why would you look for a job?

Let's consider the case of someone with a PhD who ISN'T famous, and then you give him some kind of SQL test and he fails. "Man, what a load of bullcrap his PhD is! He can't even do a simple JOIN!"

There are a lot of people who aren't "PhD millionaires" or famous open-source magnates and yet are vastly capable. A lot of them don't write joins. And a lot of people who CAN write joins can't do a bunch of other stuff.

You know what else PG doesn't do? CSS. He runs a website but doesn't use CSS or SQL.

So, once again, the danger of using any litmus test is you can end up filtering out extremely capable people who don't do X (but could obviously pick it up quickly), while passing minimally-capable people who CAN do X.

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