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Enough with the Programming Puzzles

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Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#21

Post by m0nty »

kriro wrote: post #15
m0nty wrote: post #12

Do people applying for other roles get treated to tests like this? Seems peculiar to IT afaict. Having worked in IT for > 25 years, I would have thought my track record would speak for itself, but still I'm treated as though I've been lying and cheating my way through my career. It's not like just asking questions, either: it's a test of basic aptitude and (like the author) I'm at the stage of refusing to do them.

There's assessment centers for most decent entry level management jobs which usually involve grouping tasks by importance and team oriented tasks. They can last a day, sometimes two. Typical consulting gigs have case studies and market size guesstimating (the dreaded how many lawnmowers in NYC etc.) Typical office secretary jobs here require a work sample so you'll get a typical task for the job and have to do it on…

I guess that's encouraging, kind of. I've always felt like this whole thing was just an extension of "don't trust the IT guy", a viewpoint a one-time employer was happy to articulate loud and often ... in front of the IT guys.

I once had an agent almost freak out over the phone because he'd seen my open-source project and couldn't believe I'd created it myself. "It had to come from somewhere", I told him. "Why shouldn't it be me as much as any other random stranger on the phone?" Seems like even when I presented them with impressive, real-life work, they still didn't want to trust me :)

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#22

Post by gaius »

kriro wrote: post #15
m0nty wrote: post #12

Do people applying for other roles get treated to tests like this? Seems peculiar to IT afaict. Having worked in IT for > 25 years, I would have thought my track record would speak for itself, but still I'm treated as though I've been lying and cheating my way through my career. It's not like just asking questions, either: it's a test of basic aptitude and (like the author) I'm at the stage of refusing to do them.

There's assessment centers for most decent entry level management jobs which usually involve grouping tasks by importance and team oriented tasks. They can last a day, sometimes two. Typical consulting gigs have case studies and market size guesstimating (the dreaded how many lawnmowers in NYC etc.) Typical office secretary jobs here require a work sample so you'll get a typical task for the job and have to do it on…

After entry level...it's usually just an interview and references.

Except it's not, that's the problem. But this is not a matter of incompetence on the part of the employer, but of deliberate and calculated policy.

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#23

Post by hartror »

As an interviewer I am upfront with our hiring process and that part of it is we ask candidates to do a "exercise" after the first face to face meeting. This exercise is crafted to be representative of the job we are trying to fill and is followed up by a second face to face code review session of the code.

The key of the exercise isn't necessarily to complete the whole task (though often people do as the exercises are interesting) but to provide a discussion piece for the code review session. Candidates are told this so that they don't feel like they have to put too much work into it (2 hours is suggested).

The code review session is key, walking through someones code and discussing decisions and trade offs. It provides a layered insight into their smarts, communication skills and thought processes. It is the closest I've gotten to actually working with someone in the interview process.

And isn't that what both parties are looking for?

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#24

Post by pandaman »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #20
pandaman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that other professions have solved this. Nobody is asking lawyers to run a trial on a whiteboard or solve a whodunit mystery in 2 hours. And I don't think that licensing process for lawyers guarantees anything other than the right to practice law (there are pretty bad licensed lawyers out there). Do construction workers draw diagrams of installing drywall in their hiring process? Do plumbers get challenged w…

>I.e. they are not playing the anthem of Cambodia on a toy recorder in order to be hired as a death metal band drummer. Think about it this way: they are not playing a full playlist on an actual stage with a soundcheck and live audience either. Compared to the real gig they are performing a smaller task in an artificially simplified environment. It is actually very similar to a coding interview. People often forget t…

People also forget the goal of the hiring process - finding somebody who can get the work done. I am in the game industry and, luckily, not everybody is doing whiteboard coding and puzzles here, but, out of my anecdotal experience, studios that do it also release pretty crappy games. It could be that springboarding discussion is not selecting very good programmers. It could also be that the management who enforces these practices is not competent to run the studio. I cannot tell either way, just my experience.

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#25

Post by greggman »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #19

Do you really need to test whether a candidate is technically competent if they have a degree from a well respected university like MIT, etc? You already know he has the discipline and academic requisites. Interviewing someone at that point, I'd expect the employer would be more interested to see if they're a good fit for the company culture and not waste time on academic trivialities.

Well, Laszlo Bock claims Google looked at the data and found zero correlation between having a degree from a well respected university and being useful at Google

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman...

So no, using a degree isn't useful for hiring engineers apparently

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#26

Post by catnaroek »

kinkdr wrote: post #9

Us, software engineers, start to sound like spoiled kids when it comes to interviewing. We don't like writing code on the whiteboard, we don't like mind teasers, we don't like programming puzzles, and so on. We complain about everything. Well, hiring is a difficult problem, and nobody has a universal solution yet. But the truth is that if I want to get a job, I will need eat the humble pie and get out there and try t…

> We don't like writing code on the whiteboard, we don't like mind teasers, we don't like programming puzzles, and so on.

I love all of those things. In fact, dare I say I like them more than the job itself:

(0) The given task is usually short, self-contained, and has a single best solution that can be found purely by logical reasoning.

(1) There are no requirements of the form “you have to use this obviously misdesigned technology”. All one has to do is come up with data structures and algorithms.

(2) I won't piss anyone off for trying to do things in the most elegant way possible.

What's not to love?

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#27

Post by laichzeit0 »

jarcane wrote: post #16

If you want to find out if a programmer can actually do the job, then it seems to me that the way forward is to have them do something that actually resembles the job. In the high-end cooking world, it's not uncommon to do one of two things when looking to hire a new cook: 1) Make me a dish. Present the chef with the kitchen, and possibly a specific main ingredient(s), and have them make the best dish they can with t…

> If the candidate seems to know what they're talking about in the interview, maybe just hire the fucking person, and if they suck, fire them.

In some countries, employment laws are so crazy, that it's almost impossible to fire someone willy nilly because they "suck". You have to give them written warnings, re-"skill" them, move them to different departments, etc. It's such a pain in the ass and then they still take you to court for unfair dismissal.

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#28

Post by philbarr »

One of the problems with coding challenges is that I suspect you miss out on a lot of potential candidates. I did a round of interviews recently and one wanted me to do an online test and then a puzzle.

I did the online test, received the puzzle, and in the intervening period I was interviewed and offered a job by someone else. When I rang the first place to tell them the guy was very upset because it had taken so long to find someone who could pass the test!

Seems to me if you're that desperate for candidates then don't assume you're the only company in the world.

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#29

Post by joshvm »

gaius wrote: post #17

Typical LinkedIn "thought leader", didn't Google et al abandon brainteasers over a year ago?

The article isn't talking about brain teasers. Google did indeed banish them, but now they've switched to 4-5 interviews where you're asked a short coding problem.

The problems themselves aren't difficult and given the time constraint, you can fit the answer in the height of one whiteboard. The trick is that you have to be fast, optimal and correct (i.e. syntax counts). From my experience, you should be able to complete each problem in about 20 minutes - i.e. a good enough solution that the interviewer moves on.

The article is right: there are books and books on doing these toy problems with array manipulation, tree traversals, sort/search and so on. If you did a TopCoder SRM every night for a few months, you would probably ace most of these interviews.

But this is the issue: the interviews basically test how well you prepared. They don't simulate a work environment and I don't think I was ever asked any serious questions about my work experience/research beyond chit-chat. Given that I was applying for a specialist computer vision role, that was a bit surprising.

Re: Enough with the Programming Puzzles

#30

Post by sandworm101 »

pandaman wrote: post #14
kinkdr wrote: post #9

Us, software engineers, start to sound like spoiled kids when it comes to interviewing. We don't like writing code on the whiteboard, we don't like mind teasers, we don't like programming puzzles, and so on. We complain about everything. Well, hiring is a difficult problem, and nobody has a universal solution yet. But the truth is that if I want to get a job, I will need eat the humble pie and get out there and try t…

It seems that other professions have solved this. Nobody is asking lawyers to run a trial on a whiteboard or solve a whodunit mystery in 2 hours. And I don't think that licensing process for lawyers guarantees anything other than the right to practice law (there are pretty bad licensed lawyers out there). Do construction workers draw diagrams of installing drywall in their hiring process? Do plumbers get challenged w…

Actually, many firms do set puzzles, normally by asking the candidate to create a brief based on materials provided. It takes far more than a couple hours. Bar exams, depending on where you are, also sometimes incorporate this sort of thing.
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