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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#271

Post by xandrius »

majormajor wrote: post #211
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #144

This was an interesting observation: > What I do know, however, is that for every 1-hour interview where I evaluated if someone knew their data structures, I could have just taught them. I don't really hear much about training. I doubt it's because we don't do it, but maybe it's not an interesting topic for discussion.

Training and teaching is hard. "One hour of interviewing could be avoided with one hour of training" is wildly optimistic. It also ignores the breadth of knowledge you likely want a candidate to have (and are just trying to sample at through a short few interviews). How many hours of training are you willing to sign up for? How confident are you that the knowledge will "stick" for any given candidate? Are you going t…

Yeah but a data structure is definitely some stuff one could grok in 1h.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#272

Post by iamleppert »

kstenerud wrote: post #221

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 fi…

I have done a few of these types of interviews. It's incredibly awkward. At one place, I was even issued a laptop, a badge and added to the Github organization. I mean, I guess? But it felt like I was starting work, not doing an interview. People there also didn't know if I was a new employee or who I was when I went to lunch and get snacks. I spent more time getting my local dev up and running than actually doing the task I was assigned, which they could have gathered the same information about me in a 30 minute interview.

If you can't determine from a few interviews you want to hire me or not, it's a no from me. It's a HUGE red flag if an employer can't seem to make up their mind so they have to resort to awkward "test drives" like this. If you have a job at the time already, it also makes it almost impossible to pull off without using PTO.

Add all these things together and you really don't want to work for a company who is very inexperienced in hiring such that they resort to tests like these. It shows they don't know how to interview, are not efficient with your time (and probably their time also), and a high chance they are non-technical.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#274

Post by rdtsc »

> like we are stuck in a cargo-cult mentality where we are just doing things because that’s what the big companies do, and if it works for them it must be what we need to do.

Absolutely. They do leet code -- we must as well. Google is laying people off -- so must we. Steve Jobs was an asshole, I also must be an asshole, that's how you grow a great company.

> The question, which I’ve heard is a Facebook favorite, was “convert a decimal number to base negative 2”.

Assuming I don't care as much about the the interview and am just practicing, I would have asked "so how often do you folks, convert numbers to base negative two?"

> but fuck that question and just waiting for you to eventually arrive at the little trick to make it work.

That sounds like a "coffin"-type problem as per https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556. You have to know the trick, or you might spin your wheels for 40 minutes.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#275

Post by xandrius »

andrewp123 wrote: post #121

If you want a more efficient way to practice, I’ve been working on https://deriveit.org/coding/roadmap#note-215 . It’s LeetCode site that’s -organized intelligently -has simpler explanations than you find online We’re super proud of our content and just recently 2 people have landed Amazon with us. People actually feel ready for interviews with us. Give it a go :).

No thanks, we don't need more leetcode-related stuff. It should just disappear.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#276

Post by entropicdrifter »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #238
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're anything like me then you think a lot while you code, like inner monologue thinking, and that's what the interviewer is testing for.

This provided me with a fascinating, albeit somewhat familiar, piece of insight: which is that I don't really ever hear my inner monologue. I'm not sure I have one! I'm either typing out my thoughts as I have them or speaking them as I have them. I struggle in coding interviews precisely because of this: either I end up vocalizing my emotions and insecurities instead of coding, or I end up coding instead of talking a…

Interestingly, it turns out a large number of people have no inner monologue. [1]

Some studies indicate that it's as low as 30% of people who do (so 70% don't have an inner monologue), while others show the opposite, implying around 75% of people have some amount of inner monologue while 25% do not. It's a difficult subject to test and study since we don't have direct access to people's minds and asking someone what they're thinking about literally forces their thoughts through the filter of language.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#277

Post by pseudalopex »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #113
mrkeen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the foundational principles can and do change many times in an average engineer's career. I'd like to hear more.

I'm talking about things like 8/16/32/64-bit processors, CISC vs RISC, from mainframes to personal computers, from isolated machines to ubiquity of modern Internet, quantum computing etc. Note that I'm talking about the fundamentals of software engineering , not software science .

DSA puzzles do not test software engineering. And they did not suggest eliminating interviews.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#278

Post by basil-rash »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #238
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're anything like me then you think a lot while you code, like inner monologue thinking, and that's what the interviewer is testing for.

This provided me with a fascinating, albeit somewhat familiar, piece of insight: which is that I don't really ever hear my inner monologue. I'm not sure I have one! I'm either typing out my thoughts as I have them or speaking them as I have them. I struggle in coding interviews precisely because of this: either I end up vocalizing my emotions and insecurities instead of coding, or I end up coding instead of talking a…

This is a fairly common condition, along the same lines as aphantasia (lack of inner-picture, rather than inner-voice). I do not believe there is any “cure” for it.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#279

Post by pseudalopex »

tracker1 wrote: post #219
parpfish wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't think other engineering disciplines have countless sub-areas of expertise?

I don't think other areas of engineering see the tooling options double every other year.

The sort of interview being discussed doesn't test knowledge of the latest tooling.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#280

Post by [deleted] »

feoren wrote: post #267
spyspy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. That's quite an assumption. You've never heard of pair programming? You've never asked for help on a bug in your code? You've never talked through alternate approaches to a piece of code with a coworker? You've never hashed out an interface or a method signature or some pseudocode while talking through the problem? You've never walked through a calculation with an SME? A…

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