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In defense of coding interviews

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Re: In defense of coding interviews

#271

Post by ajross »

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.

See, that's just not right. I mean, we all agree there's a hard problem to solve here, right? The world is populated by engineers of widely varying skill levels. It just is.

So how do you detect them? Well, the ability to bang out a correct solution on a whiteboard is a verifiably correct way to do that. It may not be optimal (passing candidates with other issues that make them bad fits), and it may have undesired failure modes (rejecting people who have trouble performing in the high pressure environment). And those are problems worth discussing.

But... it works. It clearly works. We've all seen it work. Companies that use these techniques aggressively tend strongly to be organizations with a long track record of producing working software. The FAANG employers are desirable because FAANGs ship code and make money!

So I just don't get the absolutism here. If there's a clearly better way that produces a more effective workforce, where's the darwinian example? Who's winning by hiring better people than Apple or Meta? I just don't see it.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#272

Post by xigoi »

arethuza wrote: post #162
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.

What would you do if a candidate said with a smile "I'm pretty sure it is O(n!)"?

“So you want to put code into production without having a better estimation of its time complexity than O(n!)?”

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#273

Post by Jensson »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #260
Jensson wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sanity check: Would your manager complain if you stopped doing Scrum? If yes then you don't got that much freedom. If no, then I can see it being fine. It can work fine if nobody outside of it depends or uses the Scrum process, but then the company isn't doing Scrum, just the team doing it internally. This lets the team adapt and stop doing Scrum when it no longer fits their problem etc, that is the agile way. My poi…

In every Scrum team I’ve personally worked on (admittedly not a huge sample size), it was OK for a senior engineer to say that their work for the next two weeks isn’t scrum-able so they’re going to mark themselves as having no capacity this sprint.

Yes, and my point was that juniors at Google have more freedom to go and work on different things than seniors have in a typical Scrum team. The description for the junior role (level 3) at Google says that they go off and work on individual projects lasting no longer than 3 months. Having a project for a month or two isn't an exception, it is expected from juniors. Then as you advance levels you get more and more freedom, and as a senior IC you are basically a free agent expected to be able to find things to improve, write a design for that, sell it to the higher ups on the product, and then go and build it, possibly get a junior to build it instead as a few months project, possibly get headcount and set up a team to maintain it etc, on your own.

I'm not saying that this way is strictly superior, but you undeniably have way more freedom under it than Scrum.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#274

Post by bluedevilzn »

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…

You just described a CRUD app.

At FAANG, most people are not doing any of these things. Think of people working on EC2, Ads or Maps.

I only worked at multiple FAANG and I never had to design a database schema or make data available via API.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#275

Post by hapiri »

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,…

I notice there seems to be a "No true Scottman" issue here where the critics is stating one problem and the proponent is like "yeah but what if we change it to this". I'm guessing the process at your place is much more tolerable than what people have been complaining.

I wonder at what point does it stop being "whiteboard interview" and just a "few sprinkle of algorithmic questions to test logical skill".

Also when the talents pool is large enough, obviously you can do as many brutal questions as you can and still fill the headcounts with good developers. So I think saying "but it still works" is not very productive.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#276

Post by dlkf »

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.

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

This is true. They are closer to ”the rare, most intellectually difficult parts of the job.” A hockey player typically spends 70% of each game sitting on the bench; yet this isn’t what is emphasized in tryouts.

> Hire for strengths, not to avoid weaknesses.

I guess you didn’t read the part of my comment where I wrote:

1. ”Failing to hire a strong candidate carries a much lower cost than hiring someone who can’t do the job.”

This is the default position of large tech companies who do coding interviews, and especially those like Google and Microsoft who interview with very difficult discrete math problems.

If we assume 1, the hiring practices of Google/Microsoft make perfect sense. They are not trying to hire all the extremely talented candidates. They are trying to ensure that all the hires are extremely talented. Put differently, they are optimising for precision rather than recall.

It seems like you disagree with 1. And if you’re right, then you have a huge opportunity, because this suggests you can disrupt any vertical where the incumbent does the LeetCode thing.

But my default position is scepticism, because if it was possible it would probably already be happening.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#277

Post by amelius »

vletal wrote: post #160
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…

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…

> I've just interviewed for Google and Meta. In total I went through 8 individual coding interviews.

Curious, were there any questions about what you think of their company ethics, and if you have a problem with it?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#278

Post by wiseowise »

RavingGoat wrote: post #28
adam_arthur wrote: post #2

The best coding interviews for 90% of tech jobs are ones that are heavy on coding and light on theory. Very few jobs are particularly well served by somebody with strong theoretical foundations, while most are well served by somebody who can pump out high quality code quickly. Yet most companies interview as if they are inventing novel storage/processing mechanisms. Theory is important to understand which tools to le…

I've found that coding interviews just prove that you can write rushed, crappy code to solve a problem.

> Crappy code

Being able to come up with an algorithm in a reasonable time doesn’t make it crappy. No wonder you can’t pass those.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#279

Post by wiseowise »

adam_arthur wrote: post #4
Patrol8394 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> slow coding What does that even mean?

You have a task to implement a new product feature and it takes you 1 week instead of 1 day. In an interview context, I've seen cases where somebody fully understands the logic underlying the solution, yet it takes them 30m to write it, while another person can do it in 5m or less. Essentially how long it takes to translate from mental understanding to working code

> Essentially how long it takes to translate from mental understanding to working cod

Congrats, you just invented whiteboard interview.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#280

Post by fumeux_fume »

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…

Maybe you're the enlightened one here or maybe you're just rationalizing an awful and lazy part of the hiring process for many companies.
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