Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 679 posts

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#221

Post by kstenerud »

My approach to interviews over the past decade has been as follows:

1. My preparation for an interview involves researching the company, not technical matters. I don't brush up on coding interview questions. I've never done leetcode.

2. If I find the interview questions to be ridiculously off-topic (such as silly algorithm questions), I end the interview. You're not the kind of company I want to work with.

3. If I find the questions to be valid, but I can't answer them, then I'm not the right candidate for the job (hopefully I'd already have found this out during the research phase, but we all make mistakes).

4. If we can get past all this gatekeeping to the actual important topic if what BUSINESS issues they're trying to solve, and how I can fit into this process, then we've got a real interview and I'm interested.

So far I haven't been out of work more than a few months.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#222

Post by bick_nyers »

mylons wrote: post #214
cma256 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 hours! You're hiring contractors not interviewing.

this seems completely reasonable compared to endless whiteboarding?

Depends on the pay. If more companies start doing this, then you can imagine having to slog through 10-20 of these as an applicant will increase the time to find a job significantly. Most people don't get hired off of their first successful round of interviews. If the company pays as much as the job salary itself then I am fine with this.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#223

Post by endemic »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #29

Thinking like an engineer, from the companies perspective, its just a filter. While it could be the case that candidate A who passes the coding interview makes a terrible employee, while candidate B who does not pass the interview would make a better one, it doesn't matter. As long as the pool of candidates who pass the coding interview, fares better than the pool who does not, it will be a useful tool until someone…

> There was a time where unless you graduated from a top-flight school, or were top X% at one of the better state schools, or had some other "in" (e.g. knowing somebody) the cool kids at the time (Microsoft/Apple/Yahoo/Intel/etc.) wouldn't even talk to you

I don't think this has changed.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#224

Post by ryandrake »

munificent wrote: post #167
humansareok1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ways every other field on earth interviews people? Do Surgeons need to perform mock surgeries before they are hired? Do Accountants need to complete a test audit? Do Lawyers perform a mock trial?

> Do Surgeons need to perform mock surgeries before they are hired? They must have a degree from an accredited institution before they can begin practicing, and part of earning the degree is operating on cadavers, so, yes. > Do Accountants need to complete a test audit? In order to be a Certified Public Account in the US, you must pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination, which has a section on auditi…

Yea, OP's questions show that what we really need is an equivalent to the bar exam for software developers, if we want to move beyond these fizzbuzz interviews. Something that would at least assure a base level of programming skill. You'd still have to test for specific domain knowledge, but a comprehensive "programming bar" test could at least show someone met the minimum.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#227

Post by munificent »

humansareok1 wrote: post #200
munificent wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do Surgeons need to perform mock surgeries before they are hired? They must have a degree from an accredited institution before they can begin practicing, and part of earning the degree is operating on cadavers, so, yes. > Do Accountants need to complete a test audit? In order to be a Certified Public Account in the US, you must pass the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination, which has a section on auditi…

>They must have a degree from an accredited institution before they can begin practicing, and part of earning the degree is operating on cadavers, so, yes. You know what I meant. You have merely created a series of strawmen. They don't need to perform a trial surgery every time they interview for a new job. The same goes for all my examples so nice try.

In every profession that is relatively high stakes, there is a pretty concrete chain of validation that the person can do the thing they claim to be able to do and that chain of validation does indeed rest on demonstrated performance at that capability.

Yes, a surgeon doesn't need to perform traial surgeries every time they change jobs. But, also, they only work inside certified, heavily-regulated institutations that are able to vouch for their previous performance.

No such institutions exist for software engineering.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#228

Post by lapcat »

ok123456 wrote: post #52

I've found that asking them to review some obviously bad code with glaring errors and problems is more informative than asking them to solve some random DSA problem. Candidates who can code well can point out code that has obvious problems. Just ask if this is good or bad, and if it is bad, how they could improve it. This demonstrates competency and doesn't make the interview seem like a grind but instead more like a…

> I've found that asking them to review some obviously bad code with glaring errors and problems is more informative than asking them to solve some random DSA problem.

I once had a coding interview like this, but the problem was that the code was so obviously bad, I couldn't even make sense of what the code was supposed to do if it were good. It felt like the interviewer had just come up with an example of bad code without any context of how the code would make sense if made "good". It was just totally artifical.

If someone had presented the bad code in some Stack Overflow question, I would have started by stepping back to ask, "What are your trying to do?" Except in this case, the interviewer wasn't actually trying to do anything except quiz me.

Identifying a bug in production code would be better, I think.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#229

Post by [deleted] »

spyspy wrote: post #203
spankalee wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. In the interviews I give I care about whether the candidate can write code, yes, but also talk and think about code. The conversation is the most important part of the interview, and the thinking (and communication) is the most important thing I'm trying to judge after basic skills. Like you said, you can get a good sense within the first few lines of pseudocode if someone's at least competent at writin…

Coding tests are an awful place to test someone’s conversational skills. I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I talked to anyone about the code itself outside of a PR. People talk about architecture and database migrations and why their containers aren’t behaving locally. Nobody ever tests for that stuff.

[deleted]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#230

Post by pseudalopex »

corytheboyd wrote: post #160
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…

Leetcode has the side-effect of filtering on “can code yes/no” which is a completely fair filter… I just wish it wasn’t difficult DSA problems we used. The same screen can be done with much simpler problems. This light coding interview should also be more or less pass/fail. Do it before everything else to short circuit those who have no idea how to write a for loop. Save the interesting insights for real problem solv…

> Still, I’m conflicted, because a solid DSA understanding is incredibly helpful at times. At the very least, a solid understanding of the commonly used data structures, how to transform data structures, a good understanding of memory allocation with respect to code and runtime, reference vs copy… All things that if not understood, can cause serious problems.

The same screen can be done with much simpler problems. Or direct questions.

Post reply on HN