291–300 of 693 posts
I recently wrote a post on designing better tech interview questions. [1] But one thing i never see interviewees do is outright ask, "Wait, what does this question actually tell you about me?" I find myself asking it in nearly every interview i go to. If you ask and your interviewer gets glassy-eyed or gives you the laughably generic "it shows how well you think algorithmically" you know that you are being interviewe…
When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…
> We recognized her skill and experience and cut to the chase So, to clarify, you're advocating that programmers be hired based on resume, references, and a conversation about prior projects? I'm not sure I agree with this. It seems you'd be selecting for ability to present yourself as a good programmer over actually being a good programmer. What is your objection to attempting to verify someone's programming skill d…
I think he is, considering this is the way every other engineering discipline does it. Please don;t fall back on the licensure issue, either. The vast majority of engineers in industry are not and do not need to be licensed. They still get interviewed this way.
While I don't interview for engineering jobs, we do bid on municipal contracts which are dominated by this concept (cover your ass, hire the big guy). A different animal indeed, but in a employment hierarchy where employees are held accountable for performance of new hires, it seems similar incentive would exist.
After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…
You are right. His problem is that he is not persistent enough. Maybe he lacks passion.
He proved that he's a decent programmer by releasing a bunch of semi-successful open source projects. He worked at Yahoo. He has 900+ days GitHub streak. That makes him passionate about building things more than a huge chunk of programmers.
Not being able to implement a random algorithm on a whiteboard while applying for a front-end position has absolutely nothing to do with the lack of passion. Of course he gave up, and so would I if I was in his shoes.
That said, it's perverse that there's a cottage industry around software engineering interview training on both sides of the table for the crazy questions that are being asked. No one wants this, but sadly, once you're in the door at these places that do these sorts of interviews, the motivation to affect change approaches zero.
There are some companies that have tried to make this a fairer assessment though, e.g. Foursquare http://engineering.foursquare.com/2016/04/04/improving-our-e.... Putting this sort of effort into an interview process is time-consuming, but if the software industry is going to make its interview practices assess candidates more fairly, it's going to take effort.
I hired Sahat as an intern three years ago while he was an undergrad. It was one of the best hiring decisions I have ever made. He was productive immediately and our (small) team felt the loss when he went back to school. This guy is good and gets stuff done, ask people who have worked with him. I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Tech interviews as Sahat experi…
When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…
You had to put the programmer through her paces because you had so many to choose from. If selection was limited, you'd be happy with just about anyone willing to work for you, but with the overabundance of programers out there, selection becomes a process.
I feel like it's a little weird that one of the author's big examples of a difficult algorithmic question is breadth-first search. While I agree it's not something that's very likely to come up much in real work (especially for a front-end dev!), it's also... not actually hard? You check the current node for your truth condition, you add its children to a queue, you pop the queue and do the same thing for that node.…
Everything is easy when you know how to do it.
Yes?
The point of an CS education is just as much to study well known algorithms and re-apply them to new contexts as it is to invent new ones. In fact, for most professionals, I'd argue the weighting is well slanted towards reapplication.
Our dev team previously used FizzBuzz, and found that every applicant was passing it. So they wanted a new take home programming problem, and internally their most important criteria was 'demonstrates algorithmic thinking.' They mostly write and maintain simple Django webapps, so I thought this was a bit silly, and suggested if they wanted to measure that, give candidates a problem easily solvable with topological sort. Unfortunately they bit hard and only found out afterwards that pretty much no applicants solved the problem correctly. We still hired four people from that round. So in some sense, turnover within a year will mean that none of our dev team can pass their own interview.
When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…
I frequently hear this basic point: "Software interviews test algorithms and data structures that are so clearly not relevant to the work being done and soooo theoretical I don't understand why interviewing isn't better???" I used to believe this myself, mostly because I didn't have a strong CS background and was still successful at carrying out software projects at a relatively high level. The truth is, as I learned…
The author of the article comes off as defensive and blame-shifting. I'm not surprised he didn't get hired. Since when is it ok to say "why?" when someone asked you to perform something in an interview? Do you really think the multi million dollar news agency will need you to program a maze at some point, so they're testing your ability to? Just how dumb do these engineers think recruiters are?
Many companies require this as a first step, before even talking to the candidate.
Apart from the problems being totally unlike what your future work will be like, the time constraint proves .. what ? That a candidate can "think fast" ?
What about code quality, architecture, design patterns, build systems, concurrency, etc ?
Here's what I've decided to do when they reply with a coding interview task:
I charge my clients 50 EUR an hour. If you want me to spend 3 hours on a coding interview as proof that I can code, then I'll expect you to pay me 150 EUR as proof that you can pay.
I think this is fair. Otherwise, I'm going to knock on someone else's door, were I can talk programming with an actual person, share "war stories" and get excited about building something cool together.