171–180 of 384 posts
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There exist automated processes[0] that efficiently reject such candidates - no need to bother staff with doing the same manually. [0] https://www.codility.com/
Soo ... not sure if you read the article, but that's exactly what it was discussing.
I take a completely different approach to hiring, and I've gotten fantastic results. Instead of throwing tricky algorithm questions at a candidates, I scour their detailed employment records for the most relevant experience for the first project. In other words, I'm looking for relevant experience rather than top-of-the-head algorithmic brilliance. In the interview, I pose our project problem, and the candidate who g…
You'll get the talented, flexible people that can get things done.
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The problem is there are a lot of people who are still good coders who suck at white-boarding for one reason or another. I became one of them due a combination of age, rustiness and an escalation of nervousness after failing a couple whiteboards out of the gate. Of course once I did land a job it took about a week to shake off the rustiness, and the company that hired me is thrilled. The point is that companies like…
You can offer a coding test - give them a computer, a piece of paper, etc. Let them sit a room by themselves, give them up to an hour to do a 15 minute problem. There are lots of ways to destress the coding interview, but the ability to code has to be tested.
As a senior devops engineer, I write a lot of trivial Groovy code for Jenkins pipelines. But the interesting part isn't the code, which for the most part a monkey could do. It's redesigning the release process. The rest is just implementation details.
Thinking coding is important is a failure mode.
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Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger. I don't blame them for not wanting to hire someone pushing 50. They just don't know if they're going to get the cool 50-year-old or the grumpy old troll who won't listen to anyone. Of course they can never come out and say that for…
> Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger. I play video games. I have all of the last two generations of consoles, a smattering of older consoles I've managed to hold onto over the years (lost most of them for one reason or another) and a half-decent gaming PC where I pref…
I reject senior software engineers all the time. I give interviews on whatever language you're most comfortable in, I'm not interested in time or space complexity, I just care about how well you can use your tools and debug. I'm continually astounded at the number of people who can't sort a list (with their language's standard library), clone an array, or do basic string manipulation. I've had a staff engineer at Goo…
Lol. At my job, I code in several different languages. Sometimes, a new project requires me to to learn to write in a new language. It's not a big deal... Programming is pretty general, so new syntax doesn't slow me down too much. But I can't tell you what the sleep command is any of these languages. I look it up every single time :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...
So there are multiple things that are true with people applying for development roles: 1. These "dev gate" programming challenges are filtering out senior devs, talented devs, creative devs etc. people who would be great at the role. 2. There are people applying for these roles who can't knock out a decent Fizzbuzz solution (in any amount of time). 3. For many roles, there's a flood of applicants Any solutions to thi…
It does scare me when experienced developers can't write FizzBuzz though, in any language of their choosing, in a reasonable time frame. The thing I tell myself is that there are so many "gotcha" style programming interview questions that people might just be nervous that there's some trap waiting for them in the question. A few years ago I instituted an "interviewing code of conduct" for my teams with a few tenants…
We need to admit that the interview process isn't about determining the relative qualifications of the applications in the pool, because we all know that 3 hours and whiteboard can't tell anything you need to know about whether or not that person will perform over the years. We need to acknowledge that we perform this pantomime in order to satisfy layers of management that are unable to accept that you can't hire for…
When I do whiteboard questions, I write in pseudocode. It takes some companies by surprise, but in the end they usually understand my reasoning: Whiteboards are for writing down algorithms and quick charts and other design-phase stuff, not writing compilable code.
Alternatively you could look for a different path in life. Best to get out of the coding jobs early in your career. Don’t look back.
That said, there are some good reasons to do the coding path. At the high end, they pay very very well, and there's no bar organization forcing you to get a $200K 3 year degree. Salaries start higher, and working your way up in other job ladders can be a grind and take quite a while to get up to SWE salaries.
I’ll leave the paradox of industry claims of a shortage as an exercise for the reader.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is there are a lot of people who are still good coders who suck at white-boarding for one reason or another. I became one of them due a combination of age, rustiness and an escalation of nervousness after failing a couple whiteboards out of the gate. Of course once I did land a job it took about a week to shake off the rustiness, and the company that hired me is thrilled. The point is that companies like…
You can offer a coding test - give them a computer, a piece of paper, etc. Let them sit a room by themselves, give them up to an hour to do a 15 minute problem. There are lots of ways to destress the coding interview, but the ability to code has to be tested.
Companies don't get excited about a dev who just passes. Even though that dev might be by far the best candidate - they just need a few days to chew on various architectures - or they take the test literally and don't add bells and whistles. Etc.
Companies get excited about a dev who aces it with flying colors.