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In defense of coding interviews

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Re: In defense of coding interviews

#211

Post by vletal »

slifin wrote: post #195
vletal wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just interviewed for Google and Meta. In total I went through 8 individual coding interviews. With an exception of one, which was a bit too much like a puzzle, I think the assignments were completely fair examples of what I might experience on daily basis. Not at all tailored to people doing competition style programming, which was what I expected after being exposed to HN for years. I have to say I enjoyed both…

> preparing for the interview

Not sure what is wrong with preparing for a challenging interview. What is the point you are making?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#212

Post by lapcat »

koonsolo wrote: post #184
implmentor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I would love to share some: I relate strongly to the anxiety induced descriptions in OPs text and thus try to avoid these when I interview devs as an engineering manager. Of all the candidates I have interviewed over the years I have never done a live coding interview because it is essentially worthless for me as an interviewer and only serves to discards potentially very clever people whose thought proce…

So how do you know they did it on their own? Spouse is a developer, helps them out, explains everything. Then on the job there is no spouse, and it all goes to shit. Not saying this would be every time, but you might come across one of these. We have an initial Hacker Rank 'filter', that if you don't pass that, we don't even do an interview. A few weeks ago we interviewed someone who passed that filter very well. But…

> Not saying this would be every time

How often would you say it ever happens? This feels like a rather extreme level of paranoia.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#213

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

Apocryphon wrote: post #8

Instead of endlessly rehashing the controversy of coding interviews, has anyone considered just how engineers are expected to be able to understand the material on the interviews? Should it be from university CS programs? Which are supposed not to be vocational? And would discriminate against those who are not degree holders? Should it be from internships, which are nowadays subject to the same Leetcode examinations…

I don't get your comment on junior developers.

We have no issue whatsoever hiring juniors (we hire about as many as mid-levels), but we don't have to settle for someone who doesn't have internships or projects and the openings can be closed in 2 weeks so it seems like nobody is hiring, but actually the bar has risen (and there are plenty of candidates who clear the bar).

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#214

Post by lapcat »

sitkack wrote: post #109
weatherlite wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s about the person’s behavior, the way he/she interacts with you. It’s about the person’s culture, tabs vs space, and that kind of things. And it’s mostly about whether you like the person or not Not in FAANG or famous startups it's not. You're either gonna solve 3-6 medium hard Leetcode questions perfectly or you're out. Sure, liking you will help you better not come off as a douche - but you're not gonna get a…

Interview technical folks at a FAANG and I don't asking leetcode questions. It isn't a SWE role but people should be SWE material. I do ask them to * read code * extend some working code with a new feature * parse some semi-structured text into a data structure Programming interviews suck for everyone, even the interviewer. I feel absolutely horrible when someone locks up, or fails really hard. The questions I ask ar…

> I had one person start crying they put so much pressure on themselves, I had to take a two week break from interviewing after that.

This is a sign that the hiring process is broken. It's not testing skill level, it's testing anxiety level.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#215

Post by lapcat »

koonsolo wrote: post #150
pkolaczk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's is also easy to bullshit a coding interview. The problems solved at interviews are just too small to verify code organization skills.

I suppose you never did any interviews yourself. You can't imagine how many people can't even do or know the basics.

> You can't imagine how many people can't even do or know the basics.

I can imagine it, because I've been that person.

It's simple interview anxiety, which causes temporary but severe performance degradation. Then when the interview is over, the anxiety suddenly disappears, and you can even go back and do the same problems much more easily.

But I suppose interviewers will just assume that my resume is a lie or that I managed to incompetently hold onto previous jobs.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#216

Post by vletal »

motogpjimbo wrote: post #209
vletal wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just interviewed for Google and Meta. In total I went through 8 individual coding interviews. With an exception of one, which was a bit too much like a puzzle, I think the assignments were completely fair examples of what I might experience on daily basis. Not at all tailored to people doing competition style programming, which was what I expected after being exposed to HN for years. I have to say I enjoyed both…

If you have to prepare for the interview, doesn't that suggest the assessment isn't representative of day-to-day programming skills? In fact, it suggests the exact opposite. With zero preparation, I could go to an interview with you right now and tell you anything you wanted to know about designing a database schema, how to get any kind of data out of that schema, how to make that data available via an API, how to ca…

Interviewing is assessing how a person would perform, not an actual day to day collaboration. There is a gap. You do not talk like you would to a colleague. You have a limited time and it's more one-sided to even the playing field. It's worth preparing for to overcome the gap.

It's like a dance. Your are supposed to lead deriving the solution, interviewer is supposed to follow closely and judge your performance.

If you expect to ace an interview just like that then you also need to be lucky not accidentally getting asked to stuff, which you always need to Google an answer to, basic algorithms and patterns, which you usually kind of know but could slow you down during the precious 40 minutes you have to show off your skills.

And lastly, people do prepare for these. If you do not do that, you might simply make a slightly worse impression than someone who did.

That being said, I mostly did not prepare for the coding interviews. I focused on the design and behavioral interviews.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#217

Post by extropy »

vletal wrote: post #211
slifin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preparing for the interview

Not sure what is wrong with preparing for a challenging interview. What is the point you are making?

To add some thought to this.

The interview results need to be reasonably repeatable and comparable to assess interviewer skew and bias.

The result is that the interviews themselves inevitably end up being somewhat predicable. And what is predicable you can prepare for, giving you predictably better results.

If you are top 0.1%, sure you will nail them without much prep, but most of the candidates would spend some time preparing.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#218

Post by manuelabeledo »

esoterae wrote: post #16

Please provide proof that a coding interview makes a statistically significant effect on predicting success in a position, all other things being equal.

My experience is obviously just anecdotal, but I can say that in the severely limited candidate pool I worked with in the past decade, there has been no correlation between their proficiency at code interviews and their performance at their day to day job.

I’m also not familiar with other fields, but are doctors or lawyers asked to do anything analogous to code assessments during interviews?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#219

Post by s1k3 »

The idea of observing someone writing code is a freaking joke. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on the candidate, and it forces the candidate to think and talk deeply at the same time, which in and of itself is a skill that is not never for the job. Coding interviews are a joke and the defense of them is even worse.

Edit: on further thought. I think I’d be ok with coding interviews if the interviewee got to bring in their own coding question and the interviewer had to do it as well. That way the they also knows the people they are working with can live up to their ideal of a good coder.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#220

Post by nicoburns »

Jensson wrote: post #168
amitport wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) plenty of agile shops give you more freedom than Google does. Following Agile methodology really doesn't mean what you think it means; and b) please don't casually "ie sweatshops" when talking about something that is clearly not that.

Do your developers have to work in 2 week sprints and forced to work on tasks split into sub 1-day part so they never have any real autonomy? Then you aren't giving your developers more freedom than Google. And if you aren't working like that then you aren't doing Scrum. Google gives even junior developers multi month projects to own, manage and complete. No Scrum shop gives developers that level of autonomy, not eve…

If a company is really following scrum, then the developers are creating and managing their own tickets
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