221–230 of 540 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, this is literally how any kind of industry with a test develops. Do you think the MCATs or the Bar exam are flawed because they have books on how to do well? Whenever there is any kind of standardization for testing, some ecosystem will evolve around it.
The big difference is you pass the MCAT or bar exam once, then never worry about it again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The massive FAANG-types of companies receive so many millions of job applications, they championed these types of interviews to have a more objective way to filter through all the applicants. That practice has waned somewhat at the larger companies (not totally, but it's changing), but has trickled down to smaller companies.
I received a cold call from a Lyft recruiter recently for a senior machine learning position. I asked why they were reaching out to me and the recruiter mentioned that it’s an especially hard time to locate experienced machine learning candidates, they don’t have enough applicants. I said I was interested in interviewing but that I would only agree to a process that evaluates me based on my previous work history, and…
I find it hard to reconcile these two experiences. How can I thrive at a top tech company while failing to solve an 'easy' coding challenge. It makes me concerned about what would be of me if I had to look for a new job now.
Aside from all the things mentioned in the article, this also seems like a fairly predictable application of Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Once upon a time, skill at doing these sorts of problems might have correlated (imperfectly) with general aptitude as a programmer or software engineer. But the very act of trying t…
The less talked about absurdity is that successfully passing programming interviews is a skill itself. It's especially absurd because the time I spend developing that skill is less time spent developing skills and knowledge more directly relevant to my job. Yet, programming interview skill is more relevant to progressing my career. edit: now if you'll excuse me, I need to do some dynamic programming problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why this whole interview thing is so absurd. The amount of days lost by engineers to relearn obscure algorithms and training on leetcode while we could be coding for things that are actually useful.
obscure algorithms are useful. it isn't a perfect system but its better than what most people propose as alternatives, which is to just have an ad hoc conversation. testing whether someone is willing to prepare for a thing is a relevant work skill test too.
The less talked about absurdity is that successfully passing programming interviews is a skill itself. It's especially absurd because the time I spend developing that skill is less time spent developing skills and knowledge more directly relevant to my job. Yet, programming interview skill is more relevant to progressing my career. edit: now if you'll excuse me, I need to do some dynamic programming problems.
Note that one often-cited counterargument to its seeming "absurdity" is that it evens the playing field in a fairer, more meritocratic way. No matter your background, what school you went to, or what randomized experience you got in previous jobs, every person has equal opportunity to study and practice the same algorithms on their own (as opposed to being lucky enough to be able to afford a top-tier $$$ CS education…
Well, that's just not the cause - there are many groups of people who lack the opportunity to study and practice. Couple of examples: people with kids, people working 12 hour shifts, people without access to teaching materials, people without a sufficiently advanced machine to run dev environments, etc.
Another solution to this problem is contract to hire. I realize this is kicking the can down the road to the contracting firm but hear me out: that's the business the contracting firm is in. They can get really good at their hiring practice since that's their core business. That's not our core business. We've been doing this for the past two years and it's worked out great. Now you can see how well people do the actu…
Why would I leave my W2 job for your contract to hire position? All I can see here is a company that doesn’t want to fire people who aren’t working out, possibly to save on benefits and unemployment insurance premiums. And why do you have so many people not working out that you have to do this? None of this inspires any confidence.
It gives me the feeling that I will be working with people who either don't know their own value and so are willing to agree to this kind of deal, or are so poor performing they don't have the leverage to insist on a regular employment contract.