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Software engineering interview questions

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Re: Software engineering interview questions

#71

Post by jschulenklopper »

jschulenklopper wrote: post #63

From the description: "Pick from an expanding library of more than 150 questions, code and submit your solution to see if you have solved it correctly" the Project Euler site tops that number with a similar proposition. Project Euler has almost 500 problems at https://projecteuler.net/ . OK, perhaps it is more targeted to the mathematically inclined, instead towards engineers on their route to a technical coding inte…

Oh, forgot to add that after a hack in June and a period of limited functionality, Project Euler seems to be fully operational again since end of September. New progress can be registered again, and solution history has been restored (if you remembered your account). Happy for them, and for the community.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#72

Post by jghn »

mkramlich wrote: post #61
rcoder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 absolu…

it could be done evenings or weekends. i'd make it async/flextime as much as possible. the main point is to try a real project, however small, and pay the person, therefore it's real and fair for both parties. from my observation over a few decades, all other methods are noise and circuses and mysticism and propaganda in comparison. at least, I'm so done letting myself be the victim of other people's theories and gue…

Don't forget, they might also have a non-compete which would be violated by such an arrangement regardless of timing/flexing

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#73

Post by csallen »

AYBABTME wrote: post #37
eeeemmm wrote: post #2

I never asked any of these question, a good engineer is not a mathematician.

A good engineer should have a good base in algorithms, know which one to use for which problems, and when the algorithms matter and when they don't. And be able to research literature for appropriate ones when the need arise. That's not the end of what qualifies a good engineer, but it certainly is part of it. CS and math researchers write papers (partially) so that engineers can pick them up and use them to improve…

The types of "good engineers" that exist are numerous and varied. For many, possessing (and retaining) detailed knowledge of algorithms is a waste of time that will practically never be useful.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#74

Post by jschulenklopper »

atrilumen wrote: post #4

I would love it if it supported more languages. I'm currently obsessed with learning Haskell, so I'm tempted to attack all these problems with it.

Try Project Euler, https://projecteuler.net/. It doesn't care the language in which you code the solution... as long as your answer is the right number. Since the problem set starts with some easy ones, it is a great site to try out new languages (or new techniques like dynamic programming) and start with a low problem number.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#75

Post by jghn »

sheepmullet wrote: post #52
tn13 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more better methods but eventually if a method is better it also means it is expensive. Hiring a paid intern would involve lot of legal crap + lot of time wasted on a person. Also number of interns we can have is super limited and we will need some sort of interview to select interns in first place. Asking tough questions in interview is not particularly bad because tough questions generally work welll…

"This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else." The downside to the methods Google etc use is they have a huge number of false negatives. They reject tons of great engineers. This works out well when you constantly have thousands of great engineers applying to work for your company. It does not work well at all if you are a normal company.

Exactly. This is one of the largest failures of the tech industry when it comes to interviews. They see the current tech behemoth and extrapolate their hiring practices, but the reality is that those companies are fitting their models to a different set of data than 99.9% of the other companies in the world.

When you're a household name and most engineers view your company as a top place to go and you're getting thousands of resumes a day, you have the ability to filter differently than most folks.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#76

Post by jghn »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #38

I'm not convinced that questions like these work effectively at all. They might give you some insight into a developer's ability to research and implement some specific algorithms (because you're not making them do it on a whiteboard, are you?) but there's a lot more to being an effective engineer than that. We've had success with a two-hour pairing exercise, in which the goal is "build a miniature version of one of…

We're starting to do something similar, although without the pairing (we don't do pairing) but with some engineers in the room playing the role of coworkers who are available to discuss the problem, bounce ideas off of, etc.

The issue that immediately came up is that within the 2 hour time frame it's just not going to be possible to have a truly realistic block of code from our daily work, there's just way too much domain specific knowledge that one would need to bone up on. So then what happened is that we're back to looking at problems that are in the mold of a whiteboard problem but a bit more complex and with a higher expectation in terms of what their output is.

I think this sort of thing works better when a company in the webdev space where companies are using well known frameworks (e.g. RoR) that candidates are going to know how to spin up a reasonable application complete with DB, etc without much effort.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#77

Post by jghn »

AYBABTME wrote: post #37
eeeemmm wrote: post #2

I never asked any of these question, a good engineer is not a mathematician.

A good engineer should have a good base in algorithms, know which one to use for which problems, and when the algorithms matter and when they don't. And be able to research literature for appropriate ones when the need arise. That's not the end of what qualifies a good engineer, but it certainly is part of it. CS and math researchers write papers (partially) so that engineers can pick them up and use them to improve…

The vast majority of programming jobs are such that the people working at them will never need to understand these things. It's a sad state of affairs, but it's how the world is.

Along those lines, most people feel that their programming jobs don't fall into that category.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#78

Post by neski »

sfbushstreet wrote: post #66
sfbushstreet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original title was not "Software engineering interview questions" ... Administrator of hacker news changed it ...

The original one was like "Most engineering interview questions of hot companies". My point was, very few companies are innovative for recruiting. Interview questions can be practiced, which only test a small subset of skills for software engineer position.

Somewhat a different approach here, devdraft.com. Just heard about it.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#79

Post by mahyarm »

pkaye wrote: post #24
fiachamp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've found a good middle ground. Giving the candidate a few days to do a test project that involves fixing a bug on the production site. Its something they can do at night after work, gets them resolving a real-life problem, seeing how fast they figure out the codebase.

Really good candidates will have multiple offers and given equal choices of companies, will choose those which make them not run through hoops.

The key is to give this in liu of a 6 hour panel of interviews. So your project should be 4hrs max. And don't add in vague time waster 'bonus points' for doing more details.

Re: Software engineering interview questions

#80

Post by mahyarm »

laeus wrote: post #20
Bahamut wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, speaking as a software engineer, I highly agree - if a company tried to pull that on me, that would be a quick way for me to turn down the company. It doesn't make sense if the candidate is working for another company - why would the candidate use up all of his/her vacation for one company if the company isn't serious about bringing the person onboard full-time as a regular employee off the bat?

To be honest, having experienced the tremendous damage done by poor hires (and the amazing difficulty of getting rid of them once they're identified as such), I might see this as a pretty substantial benefit of working at a company that uses this method. Given that, I might be willing to participate in this kind of interview process. It would probably have to be a company I already know and admire for some reasons up…

So were you a manager of this poor hire, or were you a fellow engineer and management didn't seem that enthusiastic in getting rid of the guy?
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