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Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

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Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#211

Post by MachineElf »

benihana wrote: post #139
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…

> forcing you to talk to explain what you are thinking is a skill that I've never seen used in the real world You've never once explained your thought process to a coworker? Explained how you arrived at a conclusion? Tried to elucidate your reasoning on a piece of code to someone? These are absolutely real world skills and they are absolutely applicable when working on an engineering team with other humans. I underst…

I really love the arguments in the category "You criticize 'X' but you offer no real alternative, solution, etc..." as if you can only criticize something if you have the alternative solution at hand. This is not one of those questions with an easy answer.

"Boy you sure criticize those Nazis a lot for genocide, but you offer no _real_ solution." "Dude... stop criticizing those banks for their greediness when you have no solution". I realize these are rather hyperbolic examples, but you see where I'm getting at.

As for the OP, this does seems like really cool stuff, even if I don't really agree with "the interview" method myself because I don't do too well at them. I mean sure, there should be some on the spot questions to get sort of an outlook feel on the candidate, but that really isn't sufficient.

Why not give the the candidate a real world problem - maybe even related to something your company is trying to solve - and a few days to come up with a solution. I don't care if they also do some copy/paste from SO and other sources on the internet. That's why the interwebz is there in the first place. What would be more important in my view, is how the candidate is able to integrate all the information he finds - be it on the internet, books or his own head - and converge to a solution. And even if he doesn't come up with a working solution, you as an interviewer can now infer a lot more useful pieces of information than with a basic interview. You can ask questions like: 'why did you choose that library over the other ones?', 'why that programming language over the others', 'how did you come across the code on Stack Overflow; is it correct?', 'why that database and not that other one?', 'why is your solution single threaded and event based, rather than multi-threaded?', 'how would you further optimize that piece of code?' and so on.

I think this kind of conversation is something much more likely to happen day to day between the candidate and his coworkers if he does get the job.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#212

Post by claus1860 »

bleak999 wrote: post #196
claus1860 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very interesting discussion. Would love to hear your thoughts on our London based startup www.Prehash.com which is going in a similar direction. Companies can host organization specific coding challenges on our website and developers apply by solving them. There is no time limit for developers and no one is looking over your shoulder. The only thing is that each time you run the test we take a snapshot in a…

I would like to know how it is different from the likes of different website which seemingly do the same thing - HackerRank, Codility, HackerEarth etc., Mind explaining what is it that you are planning to do different?

Hi bleak, Prehash helps companies to attract and engage with developers through coding challenges. Codility is a pure code testing site IMHO. HackerEarth according to crunchbase provides a SaaS application to do automated assessment of technical and logical skills of candidates HackerRank is going more in our direction with coding challenges to engage with and find candidates as opposed to testing them.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#213

Post by cnp »

justinpaulson wrote: post #160
cnp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thinking as well. Dig in, look around, its obvious what I can do, and what I'm capable of learning. Ask me to code a sample app and comment every function with detailed explanations of my thought process. Add me as a collaborator to GitHub and request that I make some pull requests on your product. Live coding interviews are more irrelevant than irrelevant and completely ignore the fact that many people --…

Maybe doing well in front of groups is a skill that companies want in their employees.

...which has nothing to do with high-pressure interviews with people you've never met.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#214

Post by sgeisenh »

gabbo wrote: post #204
sgeisenh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what kind of a solution are you looking for with that problem? The trivial solution of concatenating the lists and then using a library sort (or cobbling together quicksort) is about as good as it gets for small lists. For large lists, the best you can do is copy the lists into an array, use a parallel n * log n array sort, then fix the pointers. The problem doesn't seem to require any real thought. It i…

You can do better by taking advantage of the fact that the lists are already sorted. O(n1 + n2) time, where n1 and n2 are the sizes of the original lists and O(n1 + n2) space for the output. The "trick" is to iteratively merge your two lists: at each step you select the smallest of the two items you're at in both lists then move forward on the list whose item you picked. An extension to this problem (I've asked, and…

Yeah, when the lists are sorted, you need the intuition that you can merge two sorted lists in less than n * log n time. Like you say, the best you can do for merging several sorted lists is (sum of lengths) * log(# of lists).

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#215

Post by thedufer »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #107
eric_bullington wrote: post #86

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 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 o…

I have to disagree with "orthogonal". That means that there is no relation whatsoever between dev skills and interviewing skills. This just can't be true. To set the bar really low - someone who has never programmed before will never pass a code screen, while someone who has clearly has a greater than 0 chance of passing. This doesn't show much correlation, but there's clearly _some_.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#216

Post by pmiller2 »

runamok wrote: post #147
eric_bullington wrote: post #86

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 o…

It can be all that you described. Very humbling. My strategy was to start interviewing a lot. Don't go to your "first pick" companies first. Just go to any that look at all interesting as practice. That will take quite a bit of pressure off too. Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks I did phone screens at 20 or so companies and progressed to a code interview on most of those and then about 6 in person interviews which led…

I would like to know how you got 20 phone screens in 3 weeks. :)

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#217

Post by eru »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #189
eru wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an interesting way to apply something like re-captcha: ask them to fix two bugs in open source applications. One bug that you've actually already fixed, so you know how hard it should be and can calibrate; the second bug is open.

How about just asking them to code something - anything - in say, a couple of hours?

To make this useful for an interview, you have to set it up so that people can't submit things they've coded up before in a much larger timeslot.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#219

Post by woah »

smm2000 wrote: post #110
robbyking wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 practic…

In a lot of cases, it's like a classical musician being asked to make a violin.

Re: Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice

#220

Post by RogerL »

dreamweapon wrote: post #48
CaveTech wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, even worse than an in person interview is a remote coding interview over the phone. Usually some sort of screen sharing + phone call. I find it incredibly nerve wracking because it gives me that feeling of someone standing over my shoulder without me being able to fully interact with them or read their body language. When you sit down to hammer out a solution you have all the additional pressure of trying to…

Worse, you simply have no way of knowing what their evaluation criteria are. Maybe they want you to be slow and thorough (I've been nailed for not checking the exit status of print statements). OR maybe they want it quick and dirty, in which case you'll get nailed for "overengineering", or you just wont have time to do it the imaginary time frames they set for these tasks, if you go for any of the defensive practices…

And you have the ever fun "I'm not worried about whether it compiles", followed up with endless "you forgot a semi-colon", "you didn't declare that variable", and so on.
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