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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#111

Post by lazide »

mrkeen wrote: post #86
BerislavLopac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardised on what exactly? There are so many methodologies and/or tools, with endless possible combinations, each of which can reach the desired result in terms of functionality and even quality. And enforcing just one means no possibility of progress. In physical engineering, things are very much limited by physical laws, which don't change (and even if our understanding on them might, that happens rarely enough…

> the foundational principles can and do change many times in an average engineer's career. I'd like to hear more.

Not the poster, but I personally know folks who have gone

Assembly (for 6800 series Macs) -> C (PC on windows) -> Java (hosted on prem) -> Cloud hosted Java + JS/React.

Depending on your definition of ‘foundational principles’ either nothing has changed, or everything has. But one thing is clear, the day to day is completely different.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#112

Post by Paul-Craft »

mrkeen wrote: post #87
viraptor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing out on lots of amazing people who treat programming as work and have other hobbies. Or people in temporarily different situations (like young kids). Or people with more important things happening in their life. You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s. I mean, it's your choice, but your loss too.

> You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s. Or people who used to be in their 20s.

You also implicitly filter out people who were in their 20s when Github et al didn't exist.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#113

Post by BerislavLopac »

mrkeen wrote: post #86
BerislavLopac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardised on what exactly? There are so many methodologies and/or tools, with endless possible combinations, each of which can reach the desired result in terms of functionality and even quality. And enforcing just one means no possibility of progress. In physical engineering, things are very much limited by physical laws, which don't change (and even if our understanding on them might, that happens rarely enough…

> the foundational principles can and do change many times in an average engineer's career. I'd like to hear more.

I'm talking about things like 8/16/32/64-bit processors, CISC vs RISC, from mainframes to personal computers, from isolated machines to ubiquity of modern Internet, quantum computing etc. Note that I'm talking about the fundamentals of software engineering, not software science.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#114

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #98
OnionBlender wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad whiteboard interviews are dead now that everyone does "virtual" on-site interviews. When I interviewed at Google, I requested a laptop because writing on a whiteboard all day hurts my hand. Every interviewer complained about me using a laptop.

What, exactly, was the substance of their complaint(s), if any? Was it just that you made them do their job in a way different from how they are used to?

The "point" of the whiteboard interview is to see how you think and converse and interact around your coding process, not (necessarily) how accurate/good you are at writing the code. You could write pseudocode that can't compile, and as long as you can explain the algorithm and talk about its complexity you could "pass" (in theory)

Screening interviews do take place in a shared doc or other editor, I believe.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#115

Post by shrimp_emoji »

viraptor wrote: post #8
cranberryturkey wrote: post #2

[flagged]

You're missing out on lots of amazing people who treat programming as work and have other hobbies. Or people in temporarily different situations (like young kids). Or people with more important things happening in their life. You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s. I mean, it's your choice, but your loss too.

Citation needed

All the good programmers I know have side projects and live and breathe code. None of the mediocre/bad ones I know do.

Think of it this way: what's likely to make you a better programmer: spending half (0.5x) of every day on (a work-mandated subset of) code or spending most (1x) of every day on code? The answer is obviously the latter.

And it sounds weird, but most of my programming knowledge comes from outside of work, even the knowledge that I apply at work. Maybe it's because work naturally discourages exploration since you're focused on the company's priorities. For example, I'm never implementing a collection in C at work (I use `std::vector` and stuff). Yet doing that in my own time taught me why certain operations invalidate iterators -- a thing senior coworkers of mine didn't understand and which helped us catch a bug. :D

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#116

Post by thaumasiotes »

leetrout wrote: post #27

I have never heard of the negative base question (I would have never passed that without help): https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216800/how-i-conver... My worst interview questions that were silly: • number theory for django dev: how many prime numbers are there. • random brain teaser for django dev: infinite lasers pointed in space that turn at each other at the rotational speed of light- does the intersecti…

There's a rotational speed of light? Does it mean anything for light to rotate?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#117

Post by krat0sprakhar »

speeder wrote: post #51
citizen_friend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality - people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling - licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

What kind of job pay 400k? Even when I worked as C++ guru at BMW and was hired as very senior my before taxes compensation was 40k (year).

I think the author is talking about comp data from levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&cou...

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#118

Post by Paul-Craft »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #114
Paul-Craft wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, was the substance of their complaint(s), if any? Was it just that you made them do their job in a way different from how they are used to?

The "point" of the whiteboard interview is to see how you think and converse and interact around your coding process, not (necessarily) how accurate/good you are at writing the code. You could write pseudocode that can't compile, and as long as you can explain the algorithm and talk about its complexity you could "pass" (in theory) Screening interviews do take place in a shared doc or other editor, I believe.

I'm sorry, I don't see how that relates to what I was asking. To be clear, I agree, I just don't understand why you chose to write this in reply to what I wrote.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#119

Post by thesurlydev »

I agree with the sentiment that the algorithms and data structure coding interview practices are a terrible measure of a software engineer candidate. There's so many other factors that make a good software engineer and to dismiss a candidate because they can't solve a single problem on the fly is wrong.

In my experience, I've never got an offer after bombing the coding portion of an interview even though I shined in system design and behavioral interview rounds.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#120

Post by shrimp_emoji »

kuu wrote: post #36
arcbyte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Others prefer to have hobbies outside of coding, and that's fine.

The good programmers I know have hobbies outside of coding too (gardening, retro computing, skiing), but coding is still one of them. If it's none of them, that's a red flag because it's never the case for any of the good ones I know.
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