151–160 of 248 posts
Unsurprising. Turns out talk really is cheap and doesn't indicate one can do. I've even seen people able to maintain jobs over a period of years by talk alone without ever really doing much. Or even being able to do much.
"Fizz buzz style coding problems are less predictive of ability to do well in a programming interview"
I'm sure this is 100% true, but I thought the point of fizzbuzz-type problems were to weed out people who couldn't program at all? It's not to identify good programmers or even competent ones, it's to identify blatantly incompetent ones, which are surprisingly common even when hiring in SV.
I've never personally asked fizzbuzz when interviewing because my company's hiring process seems to do well enough to not require it. However, based on what I read here it's also very good for filtering out narcissistic divas (i.e., the occasional HN posters who pop a monocle when they get asked fizzbuzz: "how dare someone ask a dumb question that is beneath me?!? Needless to say, I walked out of the interview immediately! Harrumph!").
Maybe Triplebyte's article is using the term "fizzbuzz-type problem" to refer to any contrived programming problem, but in common usage fizzbuzz-type problems are bozo filters that serve no higher purpose than filtering out bozos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interview stress is of the type I call "defusing the bomb": everything at stake, essentially immediate time constraints and confrontational. This never occurs in real life.
"Unfortunately something not so different sometimes does. E.g., you're at a startup, you have a critical demo for your best-hope customer, it was scheduled very aggressively because the CEO wanted to fit the customer's availability, it's happening in one hour, and nothing is working. Not exactly confrontational (though it could easily get that way if you aren't careful) but just as stressful. Of course it's far bette…
Person after person says they do fine in the job, yet have trouble with interviews.
I've presented in rooms where the lowest ranking officer was a colonel, and most were important people at the Pentagon. No freeze up, easy peasy, because I know what the hell I'm talking about and because I know I'm not going to be judged on some bullshit evaluation. (re: "xDon't make up theoretical situations when you have real, empirical data, please.
while this process feels like it's hitting the sweet spot for finding out who can write brilliant code, that's half or less of the battle in hiring people. personally (and as a hiring manager), i feel like a majority of the hiring process is dependent (obviously) on the environment you're hiring into. hiring for that small startup? you'll want multi-hat wearing people first, brilliant programmers second. hiring for a…
Aka, the reason why virtually all enterprise software is pure shit.
Preamble: not middlebrow dismissal, I really like what they're doing here and will pay attention to them going forward. This is just picking a nit that my hypersensitive self just can't resist: "Fizz buzz style coding problems are less predictive of ability to do well in a programming interview" I'm sure this is 100% true, but I thought the point of fizzbuzz-type problems were to weed out people who couldn't program…
It's great to see some objective research being done on this, and I am very interested in following the results. They mention evaluating the effectiveness of giving a candidate a project to do "in their own time." I recently had a interview that included this and I can share the result: I accepted an offer from a different company that didn't require it. I doubt my life is that different than anyone else's, with a fu…
My wife is in this position now, and it's not for a programming job. She works in pharmaceuticals, in pharmacovigilance & risk management. She does a lot of data analysis & writing (the latest report she wrote for Health Canada & the FDA was 461 pages). A company she's interviewing with asked her to do a sample writing task as part of her application/interview. She hasn't decided whether it's worth it or not. For som…
Keep in mind that in today's job market, there are probably 10 people lined up who are willing to do just that.
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The point is that they pay you the $100k for the time you give them as an employee. They don't pay you a cent for the interview project, so you shouldn't give them a single second in return.
They don't pay you for the interview, but that usually costs the company several man-hours worth of work just for the time an applicant is on-site. Should applicants be reimbursing companies for failed interviews?
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Yeah, we agree. We don't plan on asking everyone to do hours of work on their own. A lot of people don't have the time. However, we're also seeing a bunch of applicants who are good programmers, but become really stressed in interviews and do badly (they freeze). These people have trouble getting jobs. What we want to do is offer them the option of doing a larger project on their own, rather than our final interview.…
Interview environments are always stressful, but so are other common workplace situations. Being unable to manage stress effectively might contribute to poor on-the-job performance, even for people with great pure coding ability. The process right now seems focused on finding people who are the best at only coding. In the future, do you intend to also consider communication skills? Senior developers act as mentors fo…
Personally I don't have nervousness/stress issues in interviews, but I've found that conversation screws up the analytical mode that I use when I'm programming. It's like how people say they don't like having their managers interrupt them in the middle of the day because they get taken "out of the zone." I can program or I can converse, I can't do both without screwing up both of them.
That's just my particular conundrum. People probably have all sorts of reasons (besides the possibility of them being bad at programming) for why they may have trouble in interviews.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Unfortunately something not so different sometimes does. E.g., you're at a startup, you have a critical demo for your best-hope customer, it was scheduled very aggressively because the CEO wanted to fit the customer's availability, it's happening in one hour, and nothing is working. Not exactly confrontational (though it could easily get that way if you aren't careful) but just as stressful. Of course it's far bette…
You are ignoring the data. Person after person says they do fine in the job, yet have trouble with interviews. I've presented in rooms where the lowest ranking officer was a colonel, and most were important people at the Pentagon. No freeze up, easy peasy, because I know what the hell I'm talking about and because I know I'm not going to be judged on some bullshit evaluation. (re: "x Don't make up theoretical situati…