Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#81

Post by elq »

1qaz2wsx3edc wrote: post #66
elq wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have plenty of open source code, if they cannot figure how good I am looking at... I've interviewed several people with lots of code on github and what looks like lots of accepted pull requests to many projects who still can't seem to reason through a problem described as "write a function that takes two unsorted lists and returns one sorted list". I think I'll continue asking technical/coding questions...

If someone asks me to code/problem solve in an interview these days, I don't even bother to try, I just pretend to try and answer the question to see their reaction, because by that point I've already lost interest in the position. It's the equivalent of a shit-test, so I like to turn the tables around and see how they react instead. I do this for many reasons, one of which, is they obviously weren't interested enoug…

Oddly enough, people lie, unknown references can be bullshit.

The cost of hiring someone who is incompetent is high. High enough that companies generally make several attempts at finding and filtering people that might be incompetent. I don't think anyone who interviews programmers actually believes the standard technical interview process is fun or necessarily even accurate, but there's nothing else as low cost to implement that works better.

Further, someone who treated a technical problem in an engineering interview as a "shit test" would be walked out at any company I've interviewed for... Good luck with that!

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#84

Post by akanet »

cnp wrote: post #71
gearoidoc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, if you're that passionate about that job you just described then I'd suggest calling the company up and explaining what happened. Having interviewed many people I'd certainly be open to giving someone a second chance if they explained a situation like yours to me.

After the second interview I had an entire email written out that I was going to send to their lead, but honestly, given that the app that they asked me to develop prior to the interview was well done, detailed, commented and modern, complete with a PR flow that me and one of their devs went through via GitHub, I felt that if they were willing to pass due to me obviously locking up on a Skype + Google-Doc shared whit…

For those interviewers and candidates looking for a better solution than the "google doc shared whiteboard" - I suggest checking out a product I make: https://coderpad.io/

You can think of it as a much higher fidelity Stypi, Etherpad, Collabedit, etc, except that you can run the code in the browser as you write it. It really helps alleviate the choking sensation of being asked to write out an entire problem on a whiteboard without any of the modern affordances we've come to know and love.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#85

Post by onislandtime »

Dear software professional: if you have been rejected because of a coding interview, don't feel bad or discouraged. It has little to do with how smart you are.

Unfortunately, this style of interviews is likely ineffective and leads to hiring people who look alike and have similar skills. Solving a problem with someone looking over your shoulder and forcing you to talk to explain what you are thinking is a skill that I've never seen used in the real world. I'm sure new grads spend a lot of time in classes training for this. Many great people don't function like this and still they may come up with brilliant ideas after a day or a week. Some people have breath of knowledge and study specific topics as needed. Some people can write very well and may not be super fast in tests. I know many brilliant engineers who have been rejected and are doing just fine, building amazing products, and leading teams.

If corporations really wanted a cookie cutter method to evaluate CS knowledge, then they should require a scientifically validated standardized test conducted by a third party. It would be cheaper than using engineers' time. So why don't they do that?

The reality is that they think they are doing more than that but there is no scientific proof that the interview method works. They don't want false positives but they cannot measure efficacy. If you are one of the guys who know how to perform, then you can get hired faster. In some cases if you are an outsider (older, female, different), then your chances of knowing the "secret interview code" is much lower.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#86

Post by eric_bullington »

I find code interviewing so nerve-wracking that I'm delaying my transition from another profession into a much-desired full-time programming job. I'm 40 and always aced interviews before I did my first coding interview last year. In my prior career, I literally never had an interview that failed to result in an offer.

But I blew my first coding interview both in the interview itself -- in which I repeatedly blanked out and froze -- and in my failure to show the company my best work (they asked what I was hacking on and so I showed them a half-assed blog engine I was rolling using the remnants of another project when I should have shown my more polished work.).

This interview was so bad that I cannot yet bring myself to try it again, despite spending lots of time polishing up on algorithms and data structures. Up to now, I had never experienced performance anxiety of any type -- I did very well on interviews and standardized tests like the GRE. Yet now I'm petrified of programming interviews.

By local standards, I'm a pretty good programmer (by HN standards I'm probably average). And what I lack in knowledge I made up for with enthusiasm and persistence. I've got a bunch of code of varying quality on Github, including small contributions to several very large open source projects and a moderately popular open source project that I created and maintain myself.

I'm also limited by the fact that due to my family situation, I can only consider remote jobs at the moment. But by far my main hurdle is this fear of programming interviews.

I'll definitely be taking a look at this. Maybe this will help be break through my mental block.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#87

Post by akanet »

onislandtime wrote: post #85

Dear software professional: if you have been rejected because of a coding interview, don't feel bad or discouraged. It has little to do with how smart you are. Unfortunately, this style of interviews is likely ineffective and leads to hiring people who look alike and have similar skills. Solving a problem with someone looking over your shoulder and forcing you to talk to explain what you are thinking is a skill that…

"Solving a problem with someone looking over your shoulder and forcing you to talk to explain what you are thinking" is actually how problems are generally solved in most fields. Software engineering is perhaps one of the lone exceptions, and I think the pair programming movement has a bone or two to pick with your premise.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#88

Post by Omnipresent »

elq wrote: post #47
general_failure wrote: post #25

This looks great. These days I skip all interviews which require me to code in the interview. I have plenty of open source code, if they cannot figure how good I am looking at, then they definitely cannot figure how good I am with a 3 hour coding interview. IMO, coding interviews is like public speaking. Many people get nervous in front of a crowd. It's a skill one has to obtain should it be required. Coding intervie…

>I have plenty of open source code, if they cannot figure how good I am looking at... I've interviewed several people with lots of code on github and what looks like lots of accepted pull requests to many projects who still can't seem to reason through a problem described as "write a function that takes two unsorted lists and returns one sorted list". I think I'll continue asking technical/coding questions...

list2.each {list1 << it} list1.sort()

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#89

Post by 10098 »

general_failure wrote: post #25

This looks great. These days I skip all interviews which require me to code in the interview. I have plenty of open source code, if they cannot figure how good I am looking at, then they definitely cannot figure how good I am with a 3 hour coding interview. IMO, coding interviews is like public speaking. Many people get nervous in front of a crowd. It's a skill one has to obtain should it be required. Coding intervie…

Yeah, having public github repos is great, but it doesn't scale when the company has a bunch of candidates waiting AND the interviewers have some other work to get done. Also, don't forget that communication is a part of the job too. If you're so introverted that you can't reason your way through a 45-minute problem that has a clearly defined "good" answer, how are we going to discuss designs for an actual system?

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#90

Post by domluna »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #43

I've been using https://www.interviewcake.com and highly recommend it. It's just a series of problems you work through combined with advice.

Haha thanks for this, I actually signed up for this a while back and completely forgot the name of the site.
Post reply on HN