201–210 of 226 posts
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What's wrong with hiring for interviewers to be this nihlistic.
Working well under pressure is a skill too.
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> “take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down” But who does that professionally as a stand-up performance, clock ticking, a judge breathing down your neck who has been equipped with a script that tells him things like “if candidate doesn’t do X within the first ten minutes it’s very bad”? Doing well in that situation depends more on social performance skills than problem-solving skills. You’…
That’s why he says this approach is more likely to produce false negatives than false positives
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> “take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down” But who does that professionally as a stand-up performance, clock ticking, a judge breathing down your neck who has been equipped with a script that tells him things like “if candidate doesn’t do X within the first ten minutes it’s very bad”? Doing well in that situation depends more on social performance skills than problem-solving skills. You’…
> If someone says “I’d like to start by taking ten minutes alone in another room and think it out first”, will they get hired? Probably not. It’s not the expected performance even if the solution is fine. When interviewing I always start with a discussion about the problem. On the whiteboard. I'm explicit with the candidate that this is totally expected. I'm actually measuring something perhaps more important than th…
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> All things equal, if you can complete the problem in 10 minutes and the company can hire somebody that can complete it in 9, then objectively the other candidate is the stronger one. They are stronger in the specific problem space you’re testing for. If your business has a lot of novel coding problems that need to be solved in under 9 minutes, then sure, this is a great measurement. On the other hand, if your busin…
> if your business has a lot of hard problems that take days, weeks, or quarters to solve I suppose your ideal interview as an interviewer would be to give the candidate a take home task and ask them to spend 2 weeks to work on it? > If anything it’s a counter signal Or perhaps give the candidate a task that normally takes 30 minutes, and hire the candidate if they take 60 mins to finish it? I mean, you do you, but I…
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> if your business has a lot of hard problems that take days, weeks, or quarters to solve I suppose your ideal interview as an interviewer would be to give the candidate a take home task and ask them to spend 2 weeks to work on it? > If anything it’s a counter signal Or perhaps give the candidate a task that normally takes 30 minutes, and hire the candidate if they take 60 mins to finish it? I mean, you do you, but I…
I don’t get why I have to prove to some strangers I can write code when I’ve been doing it for the last decade. It’s a ludicrous and broken system.
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> if your business has a lot of hard problems that take days, weeks, or quarters to solve I suppose your ideal interview as an interviewer would be to give the candidate a take home task and ask them to spend 2 weeks to work on it? > If anything it’s a counter signal Or perhaps give the candidate a task that normally takes 30 minutes, and hire the candidate if they take 60 mins to finish it? I mean, you do you, but I…
I don’t get why I have to prove to some strangers I can write code when I’ve been doing it for the last decade. It’s a ludicrous and broken system.
Any idiot can write things on a resume and say they did things they didn't do (aka lying). You would never do such a thing, of course, but as crazy as it sounds, there are people out there who would do just that! So because there's no professional license to write code, the only way to prove to these strangers that you actually can write code is some sort of exercise where you prove it to them.
I really don't get why this is so hard to understand, either. I get that live coding in front of someone else is a crazy stressful situation - I've failed multiple interviews because I couldn't perform on demand and answer the interview question in the interview setting, when I could easily have done so after taking a proverbial shower to have a think, so I'd love to get rid of them too. But unless we all band together and start a software developers guild or something, the live coding interview is here to stay. (Though, Triplebyte, now Karat, and others did take a run at improving the process, so there's that.)
I know what I know, but you don't know what I know. It's only by communicating, in a sufficiently unfakeable way, like a 45-minute in-person interview, that one can pass or fail the unwritten "can program" shibboleth.
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.
Works great.
Tl;dr but this debate has been done, a million billion times already. The author concludes with a decent summary of the issue (ie. Is this the best method among the worst?). But doesn't actually find a better way of doing things. And in the million forum threads on this issue, no one else has either.
Works great.
I feel all discussions about the coding interview are missing two critical points: first, how we got here, and second, why are we still here. First, how we got here. I didn't experience this first hand, so I'm just making a recount based on what I've heard and read from "old timers". My understanding is that before whiteboard, leetcode-style interviews became the norm, tech interviews were mostly unstructured and qui…
About 1, big companies need regular standard hiring sessions also for anti discrimination, and simplifying comparisons of larger numbers of candidates. Bureaucracy can come about from involving big numbers of people.
After having been through this crap and now being on the other side of the desk, I've come to the conclusion that this is simply standardized testing for adults, with all of the same myriad problems. It doesn't identify what you're actually looking for, gives you more false signals, and alienates the talent you actually want. The way we do these at my current job is extremely productive for us. We look for two things…