141–150 of 226 posts
If I do a live coding challenge, it is absurdly simple and is meant to root out people who have literally no business being in the room. Write a function that takes in a string and returns 1 if the amount of letters in the string is odd. It returns 0 if the amount of letters in the string is even. If you can do this, we are good. I dont need NP hard or whiteboarding or algorithms. I can tell how good you are just by…
If I do a live coding challenge, it is absurdly simple and is meant to root out people who have literally no business being in the room. Write a function that takes in a string and returns 1 if the amount of letters in the string is odd. It returns 0 if the amount of letters in the string is even. If you can do this, we are good. I dont need NP hard or whiteboarding or algorithms. I can tell how good you are just by…
I can never remember how modulus works, I use it so infrequently.
Everyone complains about the state of SWE interviews yet nobody seems to be able to come up with a legit better alternative. Even the author recognises this in the article. This format is popular because it's the best time/effort trade-off for both the company and the candidate. It's massively flawed, but everything else attempted so far turned out to be even worse.
The candidate gets some code and a ticket description of what the code should do.
If he spots an issue, he can fix it right in the code or simply explain it.
I'd that testing the ability to read and understand code is both less stressful for the interviewee (no "judging every key stroke" stress) and more helpful for the interviewer.
I think reviewing code is a much better method. It's a real skill you'll actually employ. You're coming at the code cold, which is actually a realistic scenario you'll encounter on the job. Your ability to catch bad ideas and prevent them from getting literally codified is a valuable skill. And all of that is worthless if you're in a state where you can see a mistake, but are too afraid to speak up; this gets tested…
The juniors spot obvious errors. The seniors also spot logical flaws and the conversation quickly moves into "how could this be done better, overall".
I've been on both sides of live coding interviews multiple times. I generally agree with the author, but I don't think any of the issues he brings up are insurmountable. When I'm the applicant, I make it a point to take control of the narrative by saying something like: > If it's alright with you, I'd like to approach this as an opportunity to expose how I approach problems in general rather than how I'd solve this s…
i had one who could not deal with that at all. he preferred to show me some of the code that he had worked on. fine, i let him do that instead. i passed on him not because he refused the coding session but because we didn't communicate well enough for me to be confident that i could work with him.
as a candidate i would skip the introduction though and just start talking like i would when pair programming, mainly because i'd be uncomfortable to ask for permission first.
I’ve never tried this exactly, but I wonder how “live coding” interviews might go if the interviewer was the one doing the typing/coding and the candidate’s role was to verbalize what the interviewer was doing (and why) - and also guide them to some degree. It’d be more akin to pair-programming, which some of the interviews I’ve conducted have evolved into, depending on the strength of the candidates. Would that capt…
there is also the problem that instructions given by the candidate may not be clear and then i have to decide whether i just assume what they meant (because i already know how to solve the problem) or if i try to take them literally leading to frustration.
Recently I took a leetcode screening, my first ever, and failed to complete one single question in the allotted time due to a minor panic attack and a sudden loss of focus. The whole time I couldn't help but think about the state of the economy and how "this is it, this is my only chance." Half the time I was fighting with the in-browser IDE and struggling to remember names of JavaScript builtins that usually come ea…
I have been in the software industry for 30 years as of this month. I have never had a gap of longer then 6 months and the shortest time with a company was 4 years 8 months and the longest time was 16 years. I have worked on the following technoclogies. Companies range from on of the Big 3 consulting firms to startups. Here are the technologies I have worked on - C/C++ on Win16/Win32 - Assembly language development w…
I have been in the software industry for 30 years as of this month. I have never had a gap of longer then 6 months and the shortest time with a company was 4 years 8 months and the longest time was 16 years. I have worked on the following technoclogies. Companies range from on of the Big 3 consulting firms to startups. Here are the technologies I have worked on - C/C++ on Win16/Win32 - Assembly language development w…
I don't get what's insulting about it and I'm glad I had the chance to prove it instead of people just binning my resume with experience the were obviously skeptical of.
If I do a live coding challenge, it is absurdly simple and is meant to root out people who have literally no business being in the room. Write a function that takes in a string and returns 1 if the amount of letters in the string is odd. It returns 0 if the amount of letters in the string is even. If you can do this, we are good. I dont need NP hard or whiteboarding or algorithms. I can tell how good you are just by…
I can never remember how modulus works, I use it so infrequently.