Is there a business model here? Why are the talented engineers running the practice interviews devoting time to this?
Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
101–110 of 223 posts
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#102Dear 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.
People are very diverse, some are fast and chatty, others are quiet and slow. Usually I perceive the fast and chatty types a bit arrogant. Personality and cultural background is probably an influence. Best teams have a great mix. Often caring about the work is more important than having a genius. (Of course people should be competent).
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#103This 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?
> the interviewers have some other work to get done
Work they'd otherwise be doing during the 3-hour coding interview?
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#104As someone who is going into my senior year of college, this looks fantastic. I don't have a ton of experience with technical interviews and I would love to get some more.
I've had 3-4 so far and even for similar jobs I feel like the interviewers are looking for totally different things. Some want me to spit definitions back at them and others are looking for me solve problems. It is hard to know what to expect, especially when interviewing at startups.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#105I 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 o…
I'm right there with you. 39 years old and I've been doing Linux systems administration and writing code since college in the mid 90s. Aced every interview I ever went to up until a couple of years ago. These Google-style coding interviews for systems/operations roles are the death of me and it's a shame. I have deep systems experience and I spend a lot of my spare time coding in Go [1] but I have little formal CS education and my full-time gig does not involve writing code all day, errrr' day. It's so frustrating, these interviews. You want to tell them, "Look, hire me and I will make your infrastructure scaling issues disappear and I'll save you money doing it" but that never happens because they see me get hung up on a sorting algorithm and immediately lose interest.
I'm not looking for a new gig but I'll give their site a shot when I am.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#106This 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...
> 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
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#107I 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 o…
Don't feel bad that you blew your first interview. Unfortunately, software interviewing skills are orthogonal to software development skills, and the only time most people get experience with interviews is during the actual interviews (no pressure or anything! :).
As such, you should fully expect to completely blow your first 1/2 dozen interviews (this includes your first 1/2 dozen when changing jobs after a couple of years). Go in with the expectation that you are going to fail. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, just that you expect to walk out with nothing more than an hour or five behind you. You'll find a couple things happen: first, the pressure to perform will be reduced, so you'll be more comfortable and confident answering questions; second, you'll be able to better analyze where you might have gone wrong on any given interview to perform better next time.
No matter how badly you failed that first interview, you are better off now for having done it and failed than not doing it at all. The same will be true for each future interview until you land that job you want.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> the interviewers have some other work to get done Work they'd otherwise be doing during the 3-hour coding interview?
1) wrong to assume that you'll be interviewing with the same person for 3 hours
2) if they're doing something not related to your interview during your interview, you don't want to work with them anyway
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#109Dear 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…
The analogy I use is a coding interview is like asking a musician to play a specific song; chances are, a classically trained pianist won't know the chords to a specific pop song, but that isn't any indication of their skill as a musician. The interviews I had with the company I work for now were amazing; they asked me some basic questions to verify my resume wasn't completely BS, then asked me to discuss previous pr…
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Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#110Dear 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…
The analogy I use is a coding interview is like asking a musician to play a specific song; chances are, a classically trained pianist won't know the chords to a specific pop song, but that isn't any indication of their skill as a musician. The interviews I had with the company I work for now were amazing; they asked me some basic questions to verify my resume wasn't completely BS, then asked me to discuss previous pr…
Better analogy is that classical musician is given sheet music to pop song and is told to play it on his favorite instrument. If he is good musician, he should be able to play it reasonably well even without practicing. There are musician who play extremely well but only after practicing one song for a long time - this type of interview sucks for them but they are minority. Most musicians suck with or without practicing so this type of interview is a good filter. Not ideal but no one came up with better one that scales up to thousands of applicants.