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

The problems with live coding interviews

garrettdimon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 226 posts

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#31

Post by garrettdimon »

eesmith wrote: post #29
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #2

Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or…

The author did write "better yet, let applicants do a take-home, and pay them for their time. ... think of it as another chance to be selling them on joining your team over some other team."

I added that after-the-fact in response to this comment. So that's on me for not including it originally. It's a great idea and one I wholeheartedly endorse because it forces the company to put some skin in the game and helps limit the number of applicants that they would request perform the take home test while also recognizing that applicants' time is in limited supply.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#32

Post by pjsg »

eesmith wrote: post #28
Arainach wrote: post #16

Live coding interviews are the future. The risk of false impersonation was low enough for a while to rely solely on virtual screens, but widespread access to and awareness of large language models has made any virtual exercise unsustainably corrupted. Sure, you can often tell the folks who know nothing when asking them to explain the code, but it's increasingly difficult to tell a great engineer apart from a mediocre…

One of the author's points is that the live coding questions are often the types of problems which, in the workplace, might best be done with GPT. "So at that point, do they want to see you muddle through it, or would they rather see that you know to have ChatGPT run through the initial pass and then refactor?" "If a company is evaluating engineers with questions that can be easily answered by AI in seconds, what are…

If a candidate said that they would use ChatGPT to answer the problem, then I'd start to talk to them about the legal issues surrounding that approach. What would they do if the hiring organization forbade the use of ChatGPT for anything?

I would hope that all SWE candidates would understand software licensing to some extent and how to behave in a way that would not put the hiring organization in a legally risky position.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#33

Post by syngrog66 »

its extremely distracting. its like attaching an anchor to my brain. its like driving in traffic while simultaneously trying to text back and forth with someone on your phone. both suffer

and very unnatural

and insulting to an experienced person (whos been promoted, and whos survived many layoffs in the past, etc) with many accomplishments. someone who has clearly solved and shipped, repeatedly. and one who has artifacts visible out in public. and has praise testimonials from former bosses, coworkers, clients, etc

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#34

Post by nailer »

Also a bunch of us have autism, so coding, presenting, trying to gauge the audiences, existing understanding, ensuring remaining available space on the whiteboard, working out, went to talk, and went to type, making sure you were in gauged with everybody in the room, and all the other aspects of presentation at the same time is difficult.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#35

Post by commandlinefan »

lucisferre wrote: post #14

This presents as a bit of an unintentional strawman against demonstrating any kind of coding during an interview process. Live coding, if earnestly used only as a filter, does not inherently need to focus on speed or performance. It doesn't have to be a hard "galaxy-brain" problem. It doesn't have to have any tricks to it. It can literally be a simple task that one would expect any working software developer to be ab…

The point that's often overlooked by people who complain about any sort of interviewing process (this one being an example) is: somebody _does_ pass the interview, eventually, or they change the process. The poster here seems to be suggesting that live coding is an impossible hurdle that nobody can overcome, but that's obviously not true - people overcome it and get hired all the time. I've auditioned as a musician in the past and it's tempting, when rejected, to say, "well, their standards were just too high" - but I have to find the humility to recognize that they just went with somebody better, because they did end up going with somebody.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#37

Post by robin_reala »

hnfong wrote: post #23
pavlov wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down” But who does that professionally as a stand-up performance, clock ticking, a judge breathing down your neck who has been equipped with a script that tells him things like “if candidate doesn’t do X within the first ten minutes it’s very bad”? Doing well in that situation depends more on social performance skills than problem-solving skills. You’…

As for the time limit, it's relative. All things equal , if you can complete the problem in 10 minutes and the company can hire somebody that can complete it in 9, then objectively the other candidate is the stronger one. As for nervousness for being forced to partaking in a stand-up performance, I'd argue that "social performance skills" can work against you, since the more "antisocial" you are, the more you can ign…

They’re only objectively the strong candidate if that’s the sole thing the company values. It’s unusual for that to be the case.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#38

Post by AlwaysRock »

"Here are reasons why this thing is bad. I don't have a better option."

This type of interview related blog post seems to hit the front page every week. Almost everyone agrees that interviewing doesn't feel good and seems overly complicated/difficult/whatever.

I hate that interviewing is a skill that has to be developed, in large part, separately from other engineering skills. I also don't really enjoy SQL/Database work. But I've gained enough competence in SQL that I'll be fine in most jobs. The same is true for my interviewing skills.

Re: The problems with live coding interviews

#39

Post by kps »

pavlov wrote: post #10
bennyelv wrote: post #7

A perspective from the other side of the desk (playing devil's advocate here): There's a fundamental skill that a good programmer has to have, and that is to be able to take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down to solve it in a sensible way. There are plenty of programmers who fake their way through a career without having that skill. They just copy stuff and never really understand it. The…

> “take a novel problem that they haven't seen before and break it down” But who does that professionally as a stand-up performance, clock ticking, a judge breathing down your neck who has been equipped with a script that tells him things like “if candidate doesn’t do X within the first ten minutes it’s very bad”? Doing well in that situation depends more on social performance skills than problem-solving skills. You’…

Yes. I did this type of interview for a previous job, and don't want to do it again. I'm a software developer, not a salesman.

Requiring salesmanship to enter a company may well correlate with requiring salesmanship to advance and be recognized at the company. (I don't regret that job, because the rank-and-file were great, but I don't want the same structure of overlords.)

This time around, I am fortunate to have effectively lifelong runway, so I'm now trying to handle an interview as if I were discussing a problem with a co-worker. If that filters me out, that's probably best for me, too.

Post reply on HN