Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#121

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 8:37 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #112

anigbrowl wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

If I was interviewing you (I've never interviewed anyone) and you gave that fibonacci algorithm, I would probably say, "Hmm, and how does that algorithm perform? Can you think of a better one?" If you said "its performance is crap, storing the previous two results and using iteration is better", I'd be happy. If you said "exponential" and "linear" instead of "crap" and "better" you'd get bonus points. Volunteering th…

Thanks for your considered and interesting reply. I agree that a discussion is much more informative (for both parties) than a rapid-reaction test, but with the rise of a speed-dating approach to business in recent years it's hard to know what people are looking for, sometimes.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#122

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 8:40 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #115

philwelch wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was interviewing you (I've never interviewed anyone) and you gave that fibonacci algorithm, I would probably say, "Hmm, and how does that algorithm perform? Can you think of a better one?" If you said "its performance is crap, storing the previous two results and using iteration is better", I'd be happy. If you said "exponential" and "linear" instead of "crap" and "better" you'd get bonus points. Volunteering th…

Dammit, I made a syntax error. The factorial function in C should be int fctl(int n){ return ( (n == 1) ? n : n * fctl(n)); }

(n-1) for the recursive call. God, I'm failing this interview.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#123

Post by philwelch » Sat, Aug 08, 2009, 10:26 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #121

philwelch wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was interviewing you (I've never interviewed anyone) and you gave that fibonacci algorithm, I would probably say, "Hmm, and how does that algorithm perform? Can you think of a better one?" If you said "its performance is crap, storing the previous two results and using iteration is better", I'd be happy. If you said "exponential" and "linear" instead of "crap" and "better" you'd get bonus points. Volunteering th…

Thanks for your considered and interesting reply. I agree that a discussion is much more informative (for both parties) than a rapid-reaction test, but with the rise of a speed-dating approach to business in recent years it's hard to know what people are looking for, sometimes.

Your better employers will thoughtfully talk with you though, and this is a good way for you to pick a good employer. That's an unseasonably optimistic attitude during this recession though.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#124

Post by nomoresecrets » Mon, Aug 10, 2009, 9:33 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #66

pj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employer, I want employees who can solve problems whether they are under pressure or not. You really want an employee working for you, or even a team member in your group who can't work under pressure when your site is down and they are the only one who can fix it? If you can't work under pressure, you can't work. Or maybe you can work, but I'd rather work with someone who can work under pressure or who can't.…

Under pressure and "in a strange environment" are two different things. You could put interview candidates in SCUBA gear and take them down 5 fathoms to see how they'd do under pressure, but that's also completely unrelated to predicting their actual job performance. We don't ask trivia questions (what's the order of arguments to fputs, list all the overloads of foo in class bar) because knowing that (or anything els…

One thing I learned a while back at one interview (or rather, I just worked it out after experiencing it a few times) is that I find it much harder to think/code on a whiteboard. I don't know what it is, but it seems much easier for me to sit down with a pen and paper and work things out.

I mean, still coding without a computer - but it's something about standing up at a whiteboard. Maybe it's normally not so bad for me, but with the pressure of an interview, it's bad enough to give me problems.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#125

Post by gstar » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 3:13 PM UTC

clistctrl wrote: post #117

gstar wrote: post #35

Not depressing at all, completely representative of the job pool. The technique you're using isn't common - a lot of traditional companies don't interview on skill and technique (like Google do). Backing up your 70% of failures, we recently hired a fashion designer at our startup (we're in an interesting market!) I decided we should use the same kind of interview we would for a developer. Everyone we interviewed was…

what is an objective interview for a fashion designer like?

Difficult. IANAFD so this may be slightly technically inaccurate:

We got them to actually draw something (called a flat) from a half-drawn garment, draw a full flat from scratch, identify trends from a series of photos, pick textile colours from photos, identify designers from "signature" garments, have them debug a spec. to see if a garment was reasonable (say the spec called for a notion like a chunky zip on an unsuitable fabric), and a few other things.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#126

Post by Flemlord » Thu, Aug 13, 2009, 7:44 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #122

philwelch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dammit, I made a syntax error. The factorial function in C should be int fctl(int n){ return ( (n == 1) ? n : n * fctl(n)); }

(n-1) for the recursive call. God, I'm failing this interview.

Heh. Our actual interview question is similar but we ask them to add instead of multiply. We ask them to add up all positive whole numbers equal to or less than x. Good developers (who make it to the next round) bang out the answer in literally 30 seconds. Ok developers (who still make it to the next round) usually struggle for a while, maybe implementing it non-recursively first. The other 70% just type nonsense until I cut them off after 15 minutes.

If somebody makes a mistake I tell them and give them hints until they fix it. Well... it depends on the magnitude of the mistake I suppose. If they're not even in the right ballpark I keep my mouth shut.

Re: Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?

#127

Post by Flemlord » Thu, Aug 13, 2009, 7:58 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #74

plinkplonk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join." Scary! I wonder about your definition of "used", if you used an RDBMS in a non trivial app "for years" and never wrote a join! The database design must be very ... unusual :-). And this was in the days before ORMs :-D. " Then ORMs came along and handle joins automatically, so I've still never written one. " I've never yet seen a non trivial RDBMS based app w…

"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join." Wow. Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews. It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly. And really, you can get pretty much any piece of information out of a database using just four keywords . It's the least memorization of any language…

> Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

Heh. Quite a few people (~20%) take the attitude of the parent poster, saying they're not solid on SQL since they've been using ORMs for a while. So I ask them to write the same select in LINQ or their ORM language of choice. Not a single one has been able to do it.