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

Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 679 posts

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#301

Post by davidw »

paulddraper wrote: post #298
davidw wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about React. It's a JS framework, yet to invent it one needs to understand at least compiler and graph. Are you hiring people to create new JS frameworks, or to use an existing one?

To use an existing one. And tools are best used when they are understood.

Hiring, like many things - including engineering - is about tradeoffs.

Is someone more knowledgeable "better"? Sure. But sometimes it's about getting a specific thing done, and if you're hiring someone to improve a web thing that uses React, maybe you don't need someone who understands compilers and the kernel and how the underlying hardware works and all that. Maybe you can spend a bit less and get someone who will do a perfectly adequate job.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#302

Post by hansvm »

xandrius wrote: post #259
spankalee wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. In the interviews I give I care about whether the candidate can write code, yes, but also talk and think about code. The conversation is the most important part of the interview, and the thinking (and communication) is the most important thing I'm trying to judge after basic skills. Like you said, you can get a good sense within the first few lines of pseudocode if someone's at least competent at writin…

I would like you to be the interviewer of all my future jobs, please.

The normal way to phrase that is "are you hiring?" :)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#303

Post by josephg »

devbent wrote: post #288
xandrius wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get why such questions are even asked as most jobs I've ever had not even remotely touched those and I've touched quite a few industries, technologies and types of companies. To me, the value of a software engineer is to ask questions, make hypotheses and be able to iterate quickly. Balancing trees, leetcode and other algorithmic stuff on the spot sounds like bringing the dreadful education system struc…

>I still don't get why such questions are even asked as most jobs I've ever had not even remotely touched those and I've touched quite a few industries, technologies and types of companies. I've had to work on tree traversal stuff multiple times in my life, anything low level GUI related will work with trees a ton. I've also had to work with hash tables directly, and with memory caching layers. I really should learn…

Yep. In a project I’m working on at the moment (collab text editing), I’ve implemented 2 different b-trees, a skip list, 2 custom file formats and a dozen or so algorithms which do various graph traversals.

I get that this is uncommon, but if you scratch beneath the surface, most software (browsers, databases, compilers, OSes) are full of this stuff.

Even while I was consulting stuff like this would come up. At one company we were using a custom graphql wrapper around a CMS, and it was missing some functions we needed. The wrapper was implemented like a compiler from the cms’s data format to a set of query functions. Fixing it to do what we needed it to do was really hard and broke my brain a bit. But I did it. And I wouldn’t have been able to without understanding compilers and algorithms.

You can spend your whole career walking the beaten path adding features to apps and websites, and never traversing a tree at all. There’s lots of work like that out there. But if you ever want to go deeper, you’ve gotta understand data structures and algorithms. I know not everyone is suited to it, and that’s fine. But there’s definitely a reason big tech asks about this stuff.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#304

Post by darrenkopp »

feoren wrote: post #262
darrenkopp wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, personally, cannot _think_ and _talk_ at the same time. It's just a stream of half-sentences, many of which my brain has already moved on from because what I originally thought won't work. After writing this article it became very apparent to me that I'm complete garbage at interviews, but I'll outperform and exceed at the actual job function.

In my work, if you literally cannot write any code while also discussing the code, and if you literally cannot express thoughts while also thinking them, then you actually wont exceed at the actual job function, at all. You're not the only programmer on the team. I don't know why people think communication skills are not required for programmers. You won't be coding the correct thing unless you can talk about what yo…

If I'm not cut out to work in your environment, that's fine. I do disagree with your other conclusions, however. I'm not bad at communication, I'm bad at verbal communication while simultaneously trying to solve a problem. I'm excellent at problem solving and simultaneously chatting in something like slack, however.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#305

Post by bjablonski »

paulddraper wrote: post #298
davidw wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about React. It's a JS framework, yet to invent it one needs to understand at least compiler and graph. Are you hiring people to create new JS frameworks, or to use an existing one?

To use an existing one. And tools are best used when they are understood.

How many react developers understands compilers & graphs? I'd wager that it's way below 10%.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#306

Post by utensil4778 »

Where I work, we have a really just absolutely radical hiring process.

We sit the candidate down, and present them with a task. Then we all sit down as a team and work the problem. The most recent one was building a game of marbles. None of us knew the rules of marbles, but the candidate knew how to take a vague task and work with the team to produce something functional.

Which is what the job is. We ask the candidate to show us that they can do the job and then hire whoever 1) did the best work and 2) vibed with the team.

Anyone who places real value on leetcode is not someone who should be managing programmers because that's not the job. In precisely zero real-world situations does any programmer need to be able to write a red/black tree blindfolded on a whiteboard standing on one leg and signing the national anthem. In the real world you just grab the algorithm out of a book or stack overflow.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#307

Post by godelski »

blindriver wrote: post #299
hintymad wrote: post #239

Assuming that a company does not look for candidates who are naturally good at ICPC-type of questions or geniuses who can come up with amazing algorithms in a matter of minutes, there is actually a different way to do coding interview: just give a high-level description of a sophisticated enough algorithm to a candidate and ask the candidate to turn that into code. I think it strikes a good balance between depth in C…

Unless you have data to show that your "different way" produces better results, your idea sounds exactly the same as every other idea, which is basically garbage. Lots of people have lots of ideas on what makes a great interview question, but none of them are backed by data. LeetCode-style algo questions USED to be an indicator of intelligence as per Google's investigation, but now it's so heavily gamed that I doubt…

> Unless you have data to show that your "different way" produces better results, your idea sounds exactly the same as every other idea, which is basically garbage.

Do you have evidence that the standard coding interview works? (There's evidence that it doesn't)

I'm with you that the claim might be too strong to say "this is the way" but that's because I'm of the (very strong) opinion that interviewing is an extremely fuzzy process and there are no clear cut metrics to measure one's abilities in a significantly meaningful way. a̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶e̶l̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶f̶u̶l̶ There are useful interviewing methods but certainly not "the best" method. Trying to just mark checkboxes only leads to mediocre results. The reason we're generally okay with this is because we more often than not don't need rockstars and it doesn't make sense to put a lot of time and energy into this process when we get sufficient results through lazy methods.

FWIW, a typical (non-software) engineering job really just involves high level discussions like the OP suggests but even without the implementation. It is generally about seeing how the person thinks/problem solves and looking at problems they solved in the past. It isn't resource intensive and good enough. Because truth is, you don't know what someone is like as an employee until they are an employee (and even then this is fuzzy)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#308

Post by [deleted] »

xandrius wrote: post #297
paulddraper wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't state my personal opinion above, but yes I have seen leetcode aptitude to positively correlate with day-to-day problem solving.

If your company uses leetcode to filter out employees then you are a leetcode team with your internal levels and ranks, not at all representative of the whole population of skilled IT people.

[deleted]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#309

Post by henryfjordan »

htrp wrote: post #32
leetrout wrote: post #27

I have never heard of the negative base question (I would have never passed that without help): https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/216800/how-i-conver... My worst interview questions that were silly: • number theory for django dev: how many prime numbers are there. • random brain teaser for django dev: infinite lasers pointed in space that turn at each other at the rotational speed of light- does the intersecti…

> I have never heard of the negative base question In what real world situation would you even use a new base system? Seti and Aliens are the only one that comes to mind, encode a new numerical system based on some fundamental physical constant like the atomic weight of hydrogen.

I mean we use base-10 and base-2 both all the time. I'm using base-2 to talk to you over the internet right now!

> Seti and Aliens are the only one that comes to mind, encode a new numerical system based on some fundamental physical constant like the atomic weight of hydrogen.

That's base-1, aka counting

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#310

Post by godelski »

xandrius wrote: post #257
hintymad wrote: post #239

Assuming that a company does not look for candidates who are naturally good at ICPC-type of questions or geniuses who can come up with amazing algorithms in a matter of minutes, there is actually a different way to do coding interview: just give a high-level description of a sophisticated enough algorithm to a candidate and ask the candidate to turn that into code. I think it strikes a good balance between depth in C…

I still don't get why such questions are even asked as most jobs I've ever had not even remotely touched those and I've touched quite a few industries, technologies and types of companies. To me, the value of a software engineer is to ask questions, make hypotheses and be able to iterate quickly. Balancing trees, leetcode and other algorithmic stuff on the spot sounds like bringing the dreadful education system struc…

> if a senior person can't in 30/45 min of talking with someone figure out the general experience level then the problem is them, really.

This is why I've always been so confused. Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview (seniors sit down with candidates and discuss how to solve a relevant proxy problem the team is currently undergoing (has the side benefit of making the interview process potentially fruitful if you don't go with that candidate. This can be (and sometimes is) abused though)). I mean... we all speak the same language, and that isn't standard English... right?

Post reply on HN