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Software engineering interview questions

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Re: Software engineering interview questions

#5

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current culture. That's really the only good way.

Asking questions in an interview, no matter how clever or insightful they may be, has been and will forever be a crap shoot.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#6

Post by MoOmer »

Sites down; but, I wanted to add that at the peak of Hadoop hype, an unnamed company asked how I'd tally up occurrences of a value in a 1gb flat file, where the job would need to be done recurringly on multiple files, quickly. Without wanting to overthink it, I suggested a simple script iterating over the file, incrementing the key/values as they occur.

Apparently the correct answer was a Hadoop job.

Now, given that my experience with Hadoop was limited at the time, and even now only includes use of small clusters, that was surprising. It's sooooooo slow in comparison, and for single 1gb files, it still doesn't quite seem the best tool for the task to me.

Questions/Answers will sometimes be biased based on what the interviewer prefers.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#7

Post by daniel-cussen »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #5

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current culture. That's really the only good way. Asking questions in an interview, no matter how clever or insightful they may be, has been and will forever be a crap shoot.

It's the only really good way for the company, provided that it doesn't filter out good applicants who would have very good reason to decline leaving a full-time position for a chance at full-time somewhere else. I don't see how it's good for the employee though: the company is effectively shunting the risk of a bad hire from someone who is reasonably positioned to take the risk (despite what entrepreneur blogs may say) to someone who is very poorly positioned to take this risk, and pay them nothing for taking on that same risk.

Sure, it'd be nice if you could hire all your great employees this way, but forgetting for a moment whether it's fair, it's not realistic.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#8

Post by soperj »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #5

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current culture. That's really the only good way. Asking questions in an interview, no matter how clever or insightful they may be, has been and will forever be a crap shoot.

Honestly, as someone who would have to quit their current job to go work for another company, why on earth would I agree to that instability?

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#10

Post by rcoder »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #5

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current culture. That's really the only good way. Asking questions in an interview, no matter how clever or insightful they may be, has been and will forever be a crap shoot.

I agree strongly this is the best way to interview a candidate. It's even relatively easy to set up for a new grad or junior candidate who isn't currently working. They should of course also be local or have no family or professional commitments that make a week-long non-work trip difficult.

Sadly, many of the best engineers I've worked with do have families, are working, don't live in the same town, and would absolutely balk at the idea of taking a week away from all that to "try out" a new job.

Of course, there's a wide spectrum between "work together for a week" and "write some C++ on a whiteboard for 40 minutes" that gets dropped from most screening processes. That's the zone where I'm most interested in finding creative evaluation tools.

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