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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#171

Post by angarg12 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #144

This was an interesting observation: > What I do know, however, is that for every 1-hour interview where I evaluated if someone knew their data structures, I could have just taught them. I don't really hear much about training. I doubt it's because we don't do it, but maybe it's not an interesting topic for discussion.

Sounds a bit delusional to me that you can just "teach someone data structures in 1 hour".

Also the role specifics matter here. It might be ok to bring in a junior who needs lots of mentoring onboard. For a tech lead who is going to be driving the direction of a team, I'd expect them to be up to speed and autonomous very quickly.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#172

Post by tracker1 »

weezin wrote: post #125
citizen_friend wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven’t met the guy who is an algorithms genius who can’t program, but I can guarantee a license isn’t going to solve that problem.

Programming is a very small part of the battle of being an effective software engineer. It leaves out: - communicating - teaching - dealing with ambiguity - navigating politics - working cross-functionally Most high level individual contributors at large tech companies don't even code.

As an addendum to "communicating" is documentation. That said, plenty of those who do document/communicate well can still suck at teaching/training at a higher level.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#173

Post by bena »

I think people get confused with "the best" rather than "good enough". You'll never find "the best", you will find a number of people who will suffice.

Interviewing should be more about avoiding bad candidates than finding the best candidate.

This guy fails coding interviews. Then he gives coding interviews, but the people he selects based on these interviews are a mixed bag. Because he's failing the interview from both directions.

I've given coding interviews, all the questions I've given have been "leetcode easy" level at worst. In person, I usually try to get the person to write up an implementation of Towers of Hanoi. One of the example recursion problems. The interview is not an adversarial process, it's a cooperative one.

I want to see them think and I want to see them come up with code on the fly. Because while we can look up things on the job, at some point, it also requires original thought.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#174

Post by ryandrake »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #88
fileeditview wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in other countries than the US there are also these interviews and you make far from 400k :)

Even in the US, "$400k" is almost certainly an outlier and not the typical case. Ever notice how people making these claims never provide data about actual comp distributions? I've been an engineer for almost 10 years and never had an offer come close to $400k per year.

Everyone on HN knows someone whose brother's uncle's girlfriend's nephew's former roommate works at Facebook and made $400K as a developer. And they'll point to that one person and say "See, it is possible to make $400K in tech." Yes, it is technically possible, just like it's possible to do plenty of difficult things. That doesn't make these salaries common. For every 1 person making $400K-800K at FAANG in the Bay Area, how many dozens are working outside the Bay Area and/or for some no-name company making $120K?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#175

Post by jkingsbery »

benreesman wrote: post #19

The modern FAANG Frankenstein interview is a mess. It was so/so at Google 15-20 years ago, it was so/so when initially FB but most everyone cargo-culted it 10-15 years ago. It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode. The trouble is it’s a hard problem, and it usually gives - some signal, so it’s sort of better than nothing? I guess? In cases where contract-to-hire make sense for both the company and…

I work at a FAANG (and obviously, I'm not a company spokesperson, just sharing my own experience). Those who are passionate about interviewing internally all seem to agree on not asking leetcode questions. I know leetcode questions get asked anyway, but there's pretty clear internal guidance and training for interviewers saying not to use them.

At least part of the problem is that leetcode questions are easy to ask, and most interviewers don't want to go through the hassle of coming up a question that scales well to the candidate's experience and knowledge.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#176

Post by yodon »

coev wrote: post #45
yodon wrote: post #34

I'm a believer in Joel Spolsky's recruiting goal: "Smart and gets things done."[0] Add "not a jerk" (which I find is part of "gets things done" on an ongoing basis) and everything else is either vanity or decision paralysis on the part of the interviewer. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/06/05/smart-and-gets-thi...

The article is from someone whose final-boss interview was with...joel spolsky. And it was a pretty useless-in-the-real-world question he was given as a coding exercise (base -2 number conversion).

The base -2 question was asked by someone other than Joel, and definitely fits in the category of interviewer vanity questions.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#177

Post by ryandvm »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #96
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did the "how many gas stations in the us" interviews for years before finally realizing that doing well on questions like this had no correlation to success on the job. Now, in reaction to that failure, everyone is doing the LeetCode thing instead, and presumably will eventually realize that this doesn't correlate either (especially irrelevant in this CoPilot era when ability to memorize and code up an algorit…

Why do you think they haven't adjusted again? Is it possible it is actually (loosely) correlated to job performance? I interviewed at Google and all the questions were practical, challenging, and not found on leetcode. I've seen all kinds of interviews in my twenty years of experience, and while all types can be done poorly, (including DS&A ones), having some live coding is one of the best signals you can get in a sh…

> I've been blown away by a candidate while they're talking about their experience, but then asking them to code something small, they utterly bomb.

You're making the opposite point you think you are. How do you know that you observed an inability to code as opposed to interview performance anxiety?

I've been coding for 25 years, but have bombed my share of very simple white-boarding exercises because I panic and my brain absolutely stops working. If it's experience-based or even take home, I generally knock it out of the park.

White-board coding works for FAANG because they have 100,000 applicants at any given time and it doesn't matter if it has an exceptionally high false negative rate. It does not work so well for shops that are struggling to find candidates.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#178

Post by tracker1 »

mucle6 wrote: post #146
roenxi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The roughest outline for hiring as far as I can follow it is start with 100 resumes, filter it down to 10 by picking ones that are nicely formatted, then filter down to 1 by interviewing. Each level of filtering should be structured so that it biases towards technical competence. It isn't really a licensure examination because, as you point out, the industry doesn't bother to put the resources in to make sure anythin…

90% of the filter is resume formatting!!!? I'm open to hear your experience but that sounds like an arbitrary filter which limits your pool more than it selects for talent

It can depend, but yeah.. when you're filling 1-2 jobs and have a stack of 500 resumes, you're going to do quick filtering based on some pretty arbitrary decisions. Worse is that the recruiting companies will often do weird things to any formatting you have done. If even 50% of the applicants are technically qualified, dumping 90% at random is still likely to get you where you need faster.

It's worth taking the time to ensure your formatting is consistent, with no/few spelling and grammatical issues.

It will also vary by market/location. If you're looking at jobs local to you, it could be very different, especially for those jobs wanting domain experience. Different business sectors also congregate around adjacent businesses... so the choices and technology in one City will vary greatly to other Cities. As will the development process itself.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#179

Post by dmoy »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #101
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…

Your last example reminds me of a particularly absurd one years ago. I got asked to write a function that calculates all the subsets of a given set. The problem wasn't the question, though. It was that the person asking me this didn't even know what "yield" was in Python.

> I got asked to write a function that calculates all the subsets of a given set.

I very much dislike the interview questions which roughly translate to "do you know combinatorics/?". Even back when I was personally good at those questions (straight out of University), they were less interesting interview questions.

I'm sure there's some jobs where it's relevant, but for the vast majority of software jobs... not so much. I get why it's done - they can be small, self-contained problems, which don't require a lot of external context. And they can be easier to come up with.

> The problem wasn't the question, though. It was that the person asking me this didn't even know what "yield" was in Python.

That is a problem too. As an interviewer, I'm okay with someone using a language or lang feature I don't know, so long as they can explain it. Some interviewers are much less flexible. Hell, sometimes I'll feign ignorance over some lang feature just to see what their explanation is like, because it's a measure of signal on how well they can teach a feature to a more junior dev.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#180

Post by madmountaingoat »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #164
skohan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s become “grind leetcode” which is clearly a failure mode. I have no insider knowledge, but I always wondered if those kinds of cultures had a hazing / blind-leading-the-blind aspect to them. I.e. the people who got hired were the ones who jumped through some arbitrary hoops, so they doubled down on those hoops being the right hoops to choose the best candidates.

You see the same effect in the cottage industry built around "cracking the code" and getting hired in these sort of companies. They produce marketing/video content that endlessly repeats "grind leetcode and 3 other simple tips" for getting hired, and then they insist that this is the exact and only reason they got hired (rather than plain luck or some reference), so everyone outside looking in emulates and internaliz…

This is a great point. As companies get bigger you can find HR actually codifies the behavior as part of their efforts to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process. So you end up with developers, who know this is a flawed system, perpetuating it because the rules require it.
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