Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

The only ones that somewhat depress me is a particular class of bad developer: Fresh out of college, these people have their curriculum nailed... and know absolutely nothing else.

One example that really struck me was an interviewee that I asked to write a simple pre-order traversal on a seven-node tree that we print out for our interviews. Instead I got a moderately lengthy and correct description of how to search for a value in a sorted binary tree. Correct, except for A: it wasn't the question I asked and B: immediate visual examination of the tree we were looking would reveal it was clearly not sorted. Other things in this interview led me to the conclusion that I got that answer because this person had studied that topic, but almost couldn't even hear, couldn't perceive a question that wasn't essentially right off an exam.

These are the ones who depress me a little, because they have clearly done everything everyone told them to do (study hard, do well on tests, etc) and must have some significant raw intelligence to be able to do this well on a challenging curriculum... yet, for all that, they have walked away with so very little useful knowledge or skills. I also feel some anger at the system that they have learned too well to navigate... but by the time they get to me, it's too late to change anything.

I comfort myself in the near-sure knowledge they will find a job somewhere. Some percentage of them will even adapt to the real world and perhaps they will become great programmers. I don't know. I can't know. That's life.

But I can't in good conscience give a thumbs up for them. We are willing to train solid developers and we have a track record of hiring people that don't even know the language they will be working in (since they have demonstrated the ability to learn languages in the past), but you can only take that so far.

On the other hand, those who sat in college for four+ years and know neither the curriculum, nor any other skills, just barely squeaking by with the necessary grades and forgetting everything as soon as the class is over, well, they had every chance to realize they were in trouble and didn't take it. I don't feel depressed about them at all. That such people exist is just a fact of life.

> Invalid refutation, I said "if you used an RDBMS and ". That "and" was a boolean and.

Valid refutation. You can use an RDBMS without making use of most of its facilities, and indeed, that is the typical usage case.

You can easily have a non-trivial app which makes what you'd probably consider trivial usage of a database.

> someone claiming knowledge of an RDBMS and not knowing how to do a simple join across two tables is like someone claiming to be an expert in c and not knowing how to write a for loop (let alone use pointers)..

You're mixing up "working knowledge of SQL" with "expert knowledge of RDBMSes". I agree I am nowhere close to an RDBMS expert. However, I can use SQL, which was the point of the original post.

> after claiming to have worked with RDBMS for ages

Something is wrong in your mental model of my description. I used MySQL for years, starting many years ago. I did not say I was an expert in RDBMSes, or used advanced functionality in any sense, and I said the join functionality was done at the application level. My usage of SQL was basic, but I have a working knowledge of it. If there's something I need but don't know, I can read the docs and do it.

> it would take what, one day of reading a basic book on SQL to understand what a join is and formulate a query?

Reading an SQL book doesn't mean you're going to recall the syntax, until you have written queries a number of times by hand. I agree it is not complicated. I do not agree that asking someone to write a JOIN tells you anything about WHY they can't do it.

> The danger of NOT using a quick and easy litmus test is that all kinds of idiots get through to your personal interview stage

You'd probably filter out Pete Norvig, and Linus, and who knows how many other expert programmers, if you asked them to write an SQL join off the top of their head.

I totally agree, but I also think that introverted programmers work better in the situation you describe, whereas extroverts feel better about talking-out solutions, even over the phone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling you an introvert, but I, as an introvert, have experienced this.

Don't forget, our society rewards extroverts, is built for extroverts, and this is one way the ruling extroverts can weed out introverts.

As noted, there are numerous expert programmers who couldn't do an SQL join in a live interview.

Besides PG, RTM, and TLB, most or all of the Linux kernel programmers, including Linus; Pete Norvig; embedded systems programmers; and on and on.

You could find a lot of people who can handle the SQL you need while screening out brilliant people who are FAR more capable, but just happen not to know item X.

Agreed, but this is the very question I'm getting at - does Flemlord want to know the quality of algorithms someone naturally comes up with, or is this just to screen out the total BS artists?

Hence my mention above of how it feels like a trick question. I really don't know whether the interviewer wants the autistic-but-informative answer or the quick of-course-I-know answer. Trying to guess what sort of answer you are seeking induces mild panic in me: I don't know you, but if your response in an interview was 'what a crap algorithm' I'd be thinking 'this guy is a bit Machiavellian...'.

I mean, I can think of a much faster way (than this) to get a given term in the fibonacci series using a loop, but this one recurses, which was what was requested - I had to quickly choose a problem domain in which to demonstrate it. Towers of Hanoi would have been more impressive, but I don't know if I could just rattle that off correctly, verbally. See what I mean?