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Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

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Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#341

Post by cubano »

glangdale wrote: post #266
on_and_off wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a perverse effect on the profession as a whole. In the silicon valley I have a fair amount of colleagues that expect of any dev to spend a fair amount of their free time grinding on even more dev. No surprise that there is a lack of diversity in the profession as a result.

I'm pretty sure it's age discrimination plain and simple. The only time in my life I would have been in great shape for the standard interview process without a good deal of study was a couple years in early graduate school, where nearly all of this "breadth" stuff was fresh in my mind. The relentless scepticism about people's achievements is to some extent understandable (we've all run into the senior person who can…

Without a doubt it's age discrimination...you've hit the nail on the head. Also, God help you if you have followed a non-traditional career path where you decide at points in your life that you wanted a break from it all.

I, too, in 1988, fresh out of my BS in CP with no family or life experiences and a strong desire to code day and night would have sailed past the technical side of these often ridiculous interviews for jobs I could literally do in my sleep now.

But now, at 53, not only has Father Time fucked with my ability to sight memorize (something I took totally for granted in my younger years) without even trying, I find it almost impossible to hide my frustration at the ridiculousness of the very idea that I would be unable to do the work required of me for the job...

"Ok..we really need someone to fix X and Y on this website, and it would be just great if they could reconfigure Z on the server..." "Well, sure...I first saw X and Y-like issues back in the mid-90s in a networked client-server environment and I did X(x) and Y(x) to fix it, and again saw it in the mid-00s under the LAMP-stack and again fixed it doing X'(x) and Y'(x)...and the server issue is something I've seen over and over again during my 30y+ career..I am 100% certain I can solve these relatively simple issues for you guys..." "Oh...yeah ok...so can you whiteboard a bubblesort in Javascript for us? You have 15 minutes." "???"

...and of course I don't get a callback. Do people think I'm lying about all my experience on my resume or what exactly?

It's at the level of life and death for me right now, to be honest. I've been shooting out resume after resume for the past month, and nothing good is happening.

All I know for certain is...if the real issue was truly about finding someone who can do the job and fix the problems, there is no way in hell I'd still be looking now.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#342

Post by stephenbez »

davidhyde wrote: post #25

I think that asking a candidate to perform a code review can be an effective method of evaluating quite a few desirable qualities. Can they understand someone else's code? Can they engage in constructive critical discussion? Are they able to effectively refactor something to make it better? Can they spot mistakes and do they have an opinion about how to avoid such mistakes?

Yeah that's what we do. As a developer you spend a large amount of time reading/reviewing existing code and making changes to it. I'm surprised there aren't more companies that test for that skill.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#343

Post by alboy »

I always thought that the primary quality measured by this popular interviewing style is "being-like-your-interviewer" which leads naturally to the avalanche effect due to which the practice becomes even more popular within the company and simply common sense after a while. The interesting part, to me, is how exactly similar the methodologies should be for companies different by size and domain. Even if you assume that some flavour of technical interview worked for Microfaceboogle, it might as well kill a copycat company (or may be completely irrelevant to its success or failure).

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#344

Post by toasterlovin »

warp_factor wrote: post #335
drblast wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a naval officer in a prior life, and my current manager loves that I get the job done, whatever it is, without complaint. I'm pretty much the opposite of what you think, so if my desire to study for the algorithm interview is your litmus test for that, kinda proves my point. Not everyone that would be good for Google has a burning desire to work for Google. Google might want to consider that.

To make it clear, I absolutely hate coding interviews that makes candidate lose so much time restudying. I think having some critical-thinking is absolutely needed and way too many engineers lack some (especially those swallowed into FANGs) What I described on my previous post is a credible explanation that my group of engineer friends came up with on why all the FANG companies pursue those heavy memorization algorit…

To my mind, the more likely explanation is that they would simply get too many false positives if they didn't use the algorithm stuff to filter potential hires. You lose a lot of potentially good hires that way, but the pool you're left with are all of a certain intelligence level. Whereas, if you don't use the algorithm stuff to filter, it's really hard to figure out who is even intelligent enough to do the job.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#345

Post by mturmon »

wolfgke wrote: post #293
alboy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the added friction of changing your place of work caused by this practice is meant to somewhat counterbalance the heavy incentives engineers have to job-hop in the current climate. Kind of makes sense from the point of view of tech employers.

> I wonder if the added friction of changing your place of work caused by this practice is meant to somewhat counterbalance the heavy incentives engineers have to job-hop in the current climate. Kind of makes sense from the point of view of tech employers. I am not sure what to think about this claim: it is the other company that prevents you from working for them by this interview process. The current employer has t…

These same employers (famously) had a cartel that prohibited job hopping before - the Jobs/Schmidt email - so it’s not surprising that the system would trend toward the same equilibrium again.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#346

Post by castlecrasher2 »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #326
ninja10 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite frustrating, I've submitted my portfolio of open source projects on GitHub for interviews. I specifically told the recruiters, HR personnel, hiring managers and some of the developers that the projects contain a large enough body of work to see examples of my code. These projects are quite comprehensive and not one person looked at them or mentioned them during the interviews. Unfortunately, people in gene…

Knowing what good work looks like is a plus, but I wouldn't be convinced by cherry-picked successes. That doesn't tell me how much you struggled with them, how many others you failed, or how much of the work was actually yours.

I think most of your concerns could be answered fairly quickly in a conversation, though. I can look over a Github repo and check out its history and ask specific questions about changes and why they were made or why design decisions were made.

The cherry-picked successes thing is certainly a problem, though, and not just for coding. Maybe it's the candidates I've asked it but when asked "tell me about when you made a mistake in a project" they tend to answer with a strength and try to re-frame it as a weakness. "Oh, I worked too hard on this project and it made me tired" isn't a weakness. "I worked too hard on this project and that made me neglect business requirements since I was too myopic to notice" is a weakness.

Sorry if that's a tangent, it's been a pet peeve of mine since I started interviewing that not many people are humble enough or have thought enough about what their weaknesses actually are, and how that affects the success of their work.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#347

Post by abhishekjha »

pcwalton wrote: post #79
gameswithgo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obscure algorithms are useful. it isn't a perfect system but its better than what most people propose as alternatives, which is to just have an ad hoc conversation. testing whether someone is willing to prepare for a thing is a relevant work skill test too.

Go search for "Knights on a Keypad" (a formerly-common Google interview question). Trying to imagine any situation in which the solution would be useful is harder than the problem itself.

Why can't it be done using Permutation and Combination formula? I am bad at dynamic programming so can't really get into the solution right now?

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#348

Post by whatever_dude »

isoskeles wrote: post #210
bunderbunder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Y'know, that's a great point. I could build a whole conspiracy theory off of that idea: If I'm a FAANG, I'm simply not using my normal interview process to hire for the really interesting jobs. I reserve those ones for people who got the job by virtue of their publication history in the academic literature, or because they built some well-known cool thing, or because they got promoted into the position. Those pe…

> or because they built some well-known cool thing What, like homebrew? :)

> What, like homebrew? :)

Context for everybody else: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

TL;DR: author of Homebrew interviews at Google, but doesn't get hired because he couldn't/wouldn't invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#349

Post by ball_of_lint »

abhishekjha wrote: post #333
zinclozenge wrote: post #15

The less talked about absurdity is that successfully passing programming interviews is a skill itself. It's especially absurd because the time I spend developing that skill is less time spent developing skills and knowledge more directly relevant to my job. Yet, programming interview skill is more relevant to progressing my career. edit: now if you'll excuse me, I need to do some dynamic programming problems.

Hi. Where are you learning DP problems from? I am very bad at those and need a few good references so that it sticks in my memory.

I'd suggest kattis and CodeForces. I use kattis mostly, but know a number of people who like codeforces better.

Here's a few for you to try. Some of these are pretty hard, but you should be able to find solution sketches online if you google the contests they are from.

https://open.kattis.com/problems/increasingsubsequence

https://open.kattis.com/problems/maximumsubarrays

https://open.kattis.com/problems/tray

https://open.kattis.com/problems/dinnerbet

https://open.kattis.com/problems/hyperpyramids

I've solved all of these as well, so if you get really stuck feel free to reply here and I'll try to guide you through them.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#350

Post by Gibbon1 »

louisswiss wrote: post #255
bunderbunder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Y'know, that's a great point. I could build a whole conspiracy theory off of that idea: If I'm a FAANG, I'm simply not using my normal interview process to hire for the really interesting jobs. I reserve those ones for people who got the job by virtue of their publication history in the academic literature, or because they built some well-known cool thing, or because they got promoted into the position. Those pe…

This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's literally exactly what business schools do... Teach a bunch of people to think in a certain way, speak a certain language and respect authority. Someone who excels at the repetitive mundanity of business school will be a perfect junior marketing manager at BigCo. It's basically taking the way the Army trains new recruits and applying it to white collar jobs.

Old quote I've forgotten the source but it's over 40 years old now.

'Business schools turn out well trained, amoral yet obedient clerks.'

Can likely say the same about most CS programs. I know you can say that about engineering.

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