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Code Interviews

alaiacano.github.io

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Re: Code Interviews

#11

Post by tchalla »

yodsanklai wrote: post #6

> a decent evaluation of junior engineers without industry experience, but it’s a common complaint among senior engineers that they have to study material that they haven’t used in years to get a job where they won’t use it. Counterpoint: some engineers with industry experience may have been working on very specific tech that doesn't readily translate to a new position. Actually, I'm sure some companies wouldn't even…

> Counterpoint: some engineers with industry experience may have been working on very specific tech that doesn't readily translate to a new position.

Some

Re: Code Interviews

#12

Post by seanmcdirmid »

a_square_peg wrote: post #10
yodsanklai wrote: post #6

> a decent evaluation of junior engineers without industry experience, but it’s a common complaint among senior engineers that they have to study material that they haven’t used in years to get a job where they won’t use it. Counterpoint: some engineers with industry experience may have been working on very specific tech that doesn't readily translate to a new position. Actually, I'm sure some companies wouldn't even…

No. Senior engineers are expected to have different level of skills - project management, leadership, and ability to identify problems that matter, rather than blinding solving problems that are given to them. You're also not going to be able to test their ability to learn by giving tests. I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one.

> I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one.

Not if we had a few weeks of prep time.

Re: Code Interviews

#14

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I won't bother with coding interviews. I consider them to be "hazing rituals"; not actual qualification assessment. I am very, very fortunate, in that I don't have to deal with them. I am not looking for work, and plan to never look for work, ever again.

I have a giant portfolio[0]. It has links to 40 or so repos, with tens of thousands of lines of code, spanning decades. Just about every project can be cloned, built, and submitted to the App Store, or SPMed into your own work, in about thirty seconds.

I've written stuff that is now a worldwide standard infrastructure, and the links to that work is in my portfolio, as is a blog entry, where I discuss the strategic thinking that informed its genesis.

I've written dozens of articles, tutorials, and blog entries, that detail the way I think, work, document my code, evaluate and implement architectures, and work with others. Links to all that is...you guessed it...in my portfolio.

There are years of checkins, so things like development velocity can be measured. My GH ID is solid green.

If you aren't willing to even look at it, then we probably won't get along, and we're both better off, avoiding each other.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

Re: Code Interviews

#15

Post by achompas »

legerdemain wrote: post #2

> It is increasingly common to use this kind of “pipeline-as-YAML” > configuration to piece together a workflow of pre-built > components 1. Some real examples of this are TFX components, > scikit-learn Pipelines, or Airflow DAGs. Airflow DAGs are Python objects, defined in Python code.

I took Adam’s point here to be that an Airflow DAG author primarily concerns themselves with the configuration of those objects, since the underlying components (Celery worker, Python execution process or K8s pod; data warehouse; RPC) have been abstracted in the form of Operators.

Re: Code Interviews

#16

Post by leet_thow »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

I won't bother with coding interviews. I consider them to be "hazing rituals"; not actual qualification assessment. I am very, very fortunate, in that I don't have to deal with them. I am not looking for work, and plan to never look for work, ever again. I have a giant portfolio[0]. It has links to 40 or so repos, with tens of thousands of lines of code, spanning decades. Just about every project can be cloned, built…

I'm in the same boat. Fortunate to have worked at startups that exited succefully and now in cushy corporate job. If I went out and did interviews I would just make enemies.

Re: Code Interviews

#17

Post by ___luigi »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

I won't bother with coding interviews. I consider them to be "hazing rituals"; not actual qualification assessment. I am very, very fortunate, in that I don't have to deal with them. I am not looking for work, and plan to never look for work, ever again. I have a giant portfolio[0]. It has links to 40 or so repos, with tens of thousands of lines of code, spanning decades. Just about every project can be cloned, built…

GREAT work!

I can understand why big companies use LC type of questions to assess coding skills of those who graduated recently or didn't enough experience to show their work, but I struggle to understand why many Startups adopted such way of evaluating engineers. I see many startups nowadays asking to candidates to reverse a tree, a task that doesn't reflect the daily work in a startup (where people change gears frequently). I understand that people interview to join the big company, pass a certain bar and then get matched to a team, the startup is too small to not have clarity on what skillset they are looking for.

Re: Code Interviews

#18

Post by IshKebab »

gallamine wrote: post #8
carlosrdrz wrote: post #5

Max Howell's tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard/algorithmic interviews. What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering i…

“He actually did well” - how would he know that? He also wasn’t hired.

It's possible they told him but given that he admits he didn't know what a binary tree is it seems unlikely he did well at a Google coding interview, where I assume 90% of people know.

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

Hmm so he fully admits that he made a bad package manager and is often a difficult dick. He sounds pretty arrogant too. I wouldn't have hired him.

And yes it is bad (try installing an old version of something). Just because it is popular doesn't mean it is good. It only ever had one competitor (ports) and that wasn't really Mac focused.

It's of no interest to Google that something bad you made happened to become popular. It's not like you can repeat that on demand.

Would you hire the person that wrote Bash? Or YAML?

Re: Code Interviews

#19

Post by dmoy »

gallamine wrote: post #8
carlosrdrz wrote: post #5

Max Howell's tweet gets pasted on every article talking about code interviews as some kind of exemplification of the problem of whiteboard/algorithmic interviews. What some people might not know is that he reflected on that tweet two years later (3 years ago), in this Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... He even explains how he actually did well in the software engineering i…

“He actually did well” - how would he know that? He also wasn’t hired.

We can't know, but

> I am often a dick, I am often difficult

If that came out during interview, it could easily have sunk their packet

Re: Code Interviews

#20

Post by AnimalMuppet »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #12
a_square_peg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Senior engineers are expected to have different level of skills - project management, leadership, and ability to identify problems that matter, rather than blinding solving problems that are given to them. You're also not going to be able to test their ability to learn by giving tests. I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one.

> I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one. Not if we had a few weeks of prep time.

But I'm not going to take a few weeks of prep time to prepare for a high-school trig test, either. I have no reason to waste my time in that way.

And I have no reason to waste my time spending a few weeks prepping for a code interview, either. I am who I am. Either you want that, or you don't. I'm not going to try to spend weeks studying so I can pretend to be different than I am.

(Disclaimer: I'm not looking, and I haven't been for a very long time. I've never been desperate while looking. I haven't even been unemployed while looking in over 30 years. If I were unemployed and watching the bills pile up, I might feel a whole lot less smug...)

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