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In defense of coding interviews

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Re: In defense of coding interviews

#261

Post by dlkf »

vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

> Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not.

I look forward to seeing you disrupt every major tech company in the world via your superior hiring strategy.

> EVEN IF THE CANDIDATE CAN IN FACT PROGRAM JUST FINE.

You don’t seem to have thought very hard about what employers are optimising for. Everyone realises that programming interviews produce lots of false negatives. Even the strongest programmers have bad days. From the employer’s point of view, that’s okay - minimizing false negatives is not the goal. The goal is minimizing false positives. Failing to hire a strong candidate carries a much lower cost than hiring someone who can’t do the job.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#262

Post by kolanos »

ownagefool wrote: post #173
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

The false negative is the obvious downside of the coding interview, but I wouldn't say that it means there's no merit to the excercise. Take for example the "can't define an array" crowd. Are there people virtually sitting in front of me who just forget the basic syntax? Absolutly, but given we a) tell them that correct syntax isn't dreafully important, and b) let them pick the language, a [] would probably suffice,…

It seems to me that a false negative is worse than a false positive if the goal is to hire talent. Have never understood the mentality that it is better to mistakenly turn away a high skill individual than to mistakenly hire a low skill one, you're effectively guaranteeing the former to avoid the latter. Would you write a search algorithm that behaved this way?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#263

Post by Jensson »

woeirua wrote: post #256

Stop defending whiteboard interviews. We know [1] that they are inherently biased against certain groups and have a very large false negative rate. It amazes me how many people will defend the current interviewing process and then openly admit that the majority of their engineers could not pass the same process without spending dozens of hours preparing. [1] https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

That study lacks data. The entire result disappears if you exclude the women. And womens results looks strange, every woman does perfectly in the private version and every woman does horribly in the observed version. It is possible the interviewer either was a hot man who distracted the women, or he was a sexist creep who distracted them in other ways, or it was just random which is possible since there were so few women.

But other than that the study didn't find any evidence that men have any issues with being observed while coding. So unless a better study comes around we can dismiss complaints about observed interviews being stressful unless it comes from a woman, it is in the study you linked after all. (I do believe there is a stress effect, but that study isn't showing it, need a bit more samples and probably several different observers to get better data)

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#264

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

frostmatthew wrote: post #223
angarg12 wrote: post #29

Before we criticize the current interview format and propose alternatives, we need to understand how we got here first. This is my understanding of what happened (I wasn't there for most of this!). Leetcode-style interviews became popular in the mid 00s, primarily because they were used by hot tech companies of the time. The thing to understand is that at that time, the idea of asking people to write code during an i…

> the idea of asking people to write code during an interview what sort of revolutionary And I think it's a great idea, personally I would never consider working anywhere that hired devs without seeing them write some code. But my problem is with the types of questions asked at many companies, specifically the types that require weeks (or months!) of prepping. During my last job search one interview that stood out (p…

I think this is a great example of the kind of implicit expectations that always pervade these discussions. I had a similar interview in my last job search, and for me it stood out negatively. At the time I’d never parsed any part of an HTTP response in my professional career, so I made some mistakes that look kinda silly if you know what you’re doing, and it was clear that the interviewer didn’t believe me when I explained that this isn’t a problem that comes up often in my field. I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining, it’s not a big deal, but the interviews a web developer sees as neat and low-prep are exactly the ones I need to prepare extra for.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#265

Post by chrisweekly »

dlkf wrote: post #261
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

> Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. I look forward to seeing you disrupt every major tech company in the world via your superior hiring strategy. > EVEN IF THE CANDIDATE CAN IN FACT PROGRAM JUST FINE. You don’t seem to have thought very hard about what employers are optimising for. Everyone realises that programming interviews produce lots of false negatives. E…

But the adversarial puzzles and whiteboard programming are not "the job".

Hire for strengths, not to avoid weaknesses.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#266

Post by mikebenfield »

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…

The items you list may not be as universal in software development as you seem to think they are. There are plenty of highly competent programmers who haven’t thought about designing a database schema in many years, or who have never deployed code to a cloud environment (at least not in the way you have in mind).

Having a set of common knowledge to interview about is in fact very useful.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#267

Post by light_hue_1 »

leeoniya wrote: post #81
light_hue_1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perf characteristics of different iteration styles are often significant to the task at hand. This ridiculously untrue. It's also a great example of how dumb current interviews are. Someone like this poster could easily interview you, and now what? Do you just play along or begin to explain how incredibly wrong they are?

> This ridiculously untrue. at least for JS VMs, this is true today. this answer will certainly vary for other languages/runtimes. i profile and optimize a lot of JS/TS code that handles datasets with millions of datapoints at my day job. but you don't need to take my word for it; this claim is not exactly difficult to verify. > Do you just play along or begin to explain how incredibly wrong they are? in this case, i…

> at least for JS VMs, this is true today. this answer will certainly vary for other languages/runtimes.

Total nonsense. It is not true of JS today, not has it ever been true.

No modern web app's or website's performance is dominated by the performance of what loops you choose. It isn't even remotely meaningfully impacted by that; by this I mean, any differences are totally unmeasurable beyond some 3 line micro-benchmark.

You have never benchmarked or profiled your code.

Of course, tight inner loops for image processing or ML, etc. yes, this can make a difference. But we're only talking about a handful of loops that matter out of many tens of thousands an application may have, you are almost certainly never writing those loops, and that's a specialized field that basically has nothing to do with the web. And it isn't what you're talking about.

> in this case, i'd prefer to be proven wrong with code, rather than prose.

What absurdity. And this is exactly when interviews suck. Because people have strongly held beliefs that are ungrounded in reality, and since there are no objective measures by which to rate interviews you need to pretend that they're real, because a lot of interviewers are basically just testing "cultural fit".

But hey! I have to say. That if you brought this up in an interview. I would at least know to never take the job!

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#268

Post by BlargMcLarg »

dlkf wrote: post #261
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

> Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. I look forward to seeing you disrupt every major tech company in the world via your superior hiring strategy. > EVEN IF THE CANDIDATE CAN IN FACT PROGRAM JUST FINE. You don’t seem to have thought very hard about what employers are optimising for. Everyone realises that programming interviews produce lots of false negatives. E…

The question is whether they are actually decreasing the number of false positives. So far I've not really seen evidence of this beyond some mere anecdotes. For such a bold claim, one would expect evidence to be readily available.

Which becomes even worse when realizing "false positive/true positive" is too binary of a definition for a spectrum such as job performance.

And I say this as someone who's in favor of giving people a quick check on whether they can actually do FizzBuzz.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#269

Post by mikebenfield »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #174
vkou wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't give me the o(n) performance of the algorithm that you just wrote, this is a pretty serious red flag about your ability to understand what you are writing.

I'm going to blow your mind but a ton of important software was written by people who have a hard time explaining these things.

Also a ton of important software was written as a giant mess of spaghetti code, or with horrible security vulnerabilities.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#270

Post by Ntrails »

chrisweekly wrote: post #265
dlkf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. I look forward to seeing you disrupt every major tech company in the world via your superior hiring strategy. > EVEN IF THE CANDIDATE CAN IN FACT PROGRAM JUST FINE. You don’t seem to have thought very hard about what employers are optimising for. Everyone realises that programming interviews produce lots of false negatives. E…

But the adversarial puzzles and whiteboard programming are not "the job". Hire for strengths, not to avoid weaknesses.

So how do I effectively test for the strengths I want with a low likelihood of false positives?

Ideally without an increase of time/cost requirements.

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