I have had Aline Lerner reach out to me as a recruiter before. She is one of the best. She worked hard to find great matches.
ohai josh! thanks!
Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
121–130 of 223 posts
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#122Earlier 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...
I wonder if those people you're talking about just froze in the interview process, like others in this thread have mentioned doing? Presumably it's possible to distinguish people who interview badly from people who lie on their résumé. The question is "How?" Followed by "How many interviewers know how to do this?"
The interviewers in these loops are generally quite introverted themselves, I know I certainly am. I believe we are sensitive to people who are the same and cut them slack.
My goal when interviewing someone is to determine if they will, on net, add more lift or more drag. If someone is so nervous that they can't communicate, they (sadly) will almost certainly not be able to demonstrate this.
Luckily, there are personal referrals. A strong engineer who interviews very poorly but has good first hand references will be given MUCH more slack.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#123Earlier 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...
list2.each {list1 << it} list1.sort()
Better:
merge_sorted(list1.sort(), list2.sort())
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#124This 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...
What is the correct answer to this? Let's try a little experiment.. I've never heard this question before, so I'm in the same boat as a naive interviewer right now. Let me elaborate my thought process.
"H'm, this looks a bit like mergesort, where you take two sorted sublists and form a bigger sorted list. So...sort the sublists using mergesort, then call the merging algorithm? (compare the heads of the two lists, and form the bigger list)"
This would be the answer I'd start giving. Tell me if it corresponds even remotely with what your idea of a correct answer is, or what points would you deduct from if it is incorrect. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure I'd be able to write the exact python code for this that covers all edge cases in less than 15 minutes.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#125Whiteboard coding problems are absolute garbage. I recently had a remote code problem where I was given a Visual Studio IDE (albeit minus Resharper) and absolutely killed it.
If I'm going to be challenged to write code in front of you, give me the tools I use every day, let me use the resources I use to solve problems efficiently (which btw can include StackOverflow) and you will get a much better picture of me. I don't write perfect code the moment it's written. Often I will mentally acknowledge something needs further thought and my brain will revisit it, sometimes days later, sometimes after multiple iterations. I'm fastidious about those types of things, and as a result I can realistically say I write some of the best and least buggy code in my company. I'm also very good at theorizing about problems and debugging, which is never looked at in an interview.
I guarantee you should hire me, but how can I show you that, and how can you gain confidence in that?
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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).
Another aspect of the funhouse of one-way mirrors that is the modern conventional tech interview process:
Candidate is fast and chatty: "I don't know. He seems smart, but he was also talking a lot of fluff. Kind of pretentious and arrogant."
Candidate is slow and hesitant (and perhaps pauses awkwardly now and then): "I don't know. He seems smart, but he seems a bit underconfident. We need someone with more energy."
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#127Coding interview practice is absolutely key. I recently began interviewing for the first time with a number of companies (I'm about to graduate). I noticed that over the course of a month and 3 interviews with 3 separate companies my interviewing skills had increased hugely.
The 4th company I interviewed at had a very different perception of me than the 1st because of the month's practice, even though I had essentially the same technical skills. Coding interviews test "coding interview ability" rather than "coding ability", unfortunately the other ways (Github, aptitude tests etc..) have their own problems.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#128I 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…
Seriously: thanks for sharing. It really takes a lot of courage to post such an honest self-examination like that (even anonymously).
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#129Is it just me or shouldn't we be moving towards projects rather than code interviews? I think you can recover far more about a person in a project setting than by asking them a couple of random questions to solve in X time.
Time wise it costs too much for the candidate.
Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice
#130A friend of mine surprised me recently - he is starting a "new kind of job board". Which struck me as "meh" till he explained - it's more of a "Developer Relationship Management" system.
The idea is if you have developers they will interact with other developers - so track those interactions and you get a good idea of where and how to fish