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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#341

Post by Paul-Craft »

hansvm wrote: post #314
Paul-Craft wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think one way to do well in that interview, is to pretend you're the professor and they're a student, and you're working through course material. If that's what they want, they should give out the questions in advance, and have the candidate prepare a slide deck. No professor conducts class by having students show up and fire random questions at them all semester. More explicitly, if that's what they want, they s…

> no professor ... That's one of the higher leverage activities for an instructor. Anyone can go read a book, watch a video, or do some practice problems, and lecturing at a bunch of students isn't a great way to convey information, either in absolute terms or compared to those alternatives. The instructor's job is to tell you which books to read, why the material matters, and contextualize the course against other t…

I know all that. But, have you perhaps been in an undergrad classroom recently? It's still predominantly lecture-based.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#342

Post by def_not_troll »

speeder wrote: post #254
humansareok1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people still so misinformed about Tech salaries? Are you in the EU? Salaries are lower across the board there for engineers. In the US for Silicon Valley Type large Tech Companies the starting salary for New Graduate SWE's is 150k USD on the low end. For a senior engineer at FAANG it can easily get above 500k USD.

I am in Portugal yes.

[flagged]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#343

Post by mewpmewp2 »

bjablonski wrote: post #305
paulddraper wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Also why do you need knowledge on compilers and graphs to create React?

Firstly, React is not compiled. Secondly the graph or tree or whichever aspect can come naturally when you come up with the idea of how it would be best to maintain JS apps.

In fact most important experience should have been grinding put tons of unmaintainable JS apps to come up with something like that.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#344

Post by darrenkopp »

tantalor wrote: post #249
darrenkopp wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data itself is ordered (which is why the task is to print them in order), but the order you receive the values is can happen in any order (ie the processing was split into multiple threads and each thread is posting back the results from the work).

Ah then that's the classic "merge k sorted streams" question. It's a good question and easy to solve in a coding interview. Good candidate should be able to solve in about 30 minutes. My favorite solution goes something like "put values in a heap and then read them back out" because you only need to read 1 value from each stream at a time.

Yep, that was my same approach as well.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#345

Post by nsxwolf »

humansareok1 wrote: post #148
speeder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of job pay 400k? Even when I worked as C++ guru at BMW and was hired as very senior my before taxes compensation was 40k (year).

How are people still so misinformed about Tech salaries? Are you in the EU? Salaries are lower across the board there for engineers. In the US for Silicon Valley Type large Tech Companies the starting salary for New Graduate SWE's is 150k USD on the low end. For a senior engineer at FAANG it can easily get above 500k USD.

Keep in mind that 150k USD can also be a terminal salary at 30 years of experience in most other places in the US.

Most jobs are not FAANG or FAANG adjacent.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#347

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

You cannot tell anything about a person by giving them a test, other than their test-taking ability (you are what you measure). You have to balance it against context and other information. If all you do is look at "the score", you're measuring the wrong thing. If your test leads to questions whose answers display competency and skill, you're measuring the right thing.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#348

Post by elevatedastalt »

feoren wrote: post #292

> I have, once again, failed an interview Can we stop calling it "failing" when a company decides you're not a good fit? If you go on a date and don't get asked for a 2nd, did you fail the date? You're not just what they're looking for right now; not everything has to be a failure. > for every 1-hour interview where I evaluated if someone knew their data structures, I could have just taught them I'm sorry, what? He t…

> Can we stop calling it "failing" when a company decides you're not a good fit? If you go on a date and don't get asked for a 2nd, did you fail the date? You're not just what they're looking for right now; not everything has to be a failure.

If you wanted to get the job, and you didn't get it, you "failed".

There's no need to sugar coat it.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#349

Post by SuperCuber »

okwhateverdude wrote: post #242
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #63

Honestly, as somebody who is hiring senior devs I can't imagine not doing a coding interview. Unfortunately, it is very hard to judge somebody's coding ability in discussion alone. You can sort of get the idea whether they have or don't have experience and whether they have luck being asked about topics they know (although you can help your luck just knowing a lot of stuff). I have seen a lot of candidates who were q…

>Unfortunately, it is very hard to judge somebody's coding ability in discussion alone. You can sort of get the idea whether they have or don't have experience and whether they have luck being asked about topics they know (although you can help your luck just knowing a lot of stuff). I disagree with your stated difficulty in judging coding ability by discussion alone. A skilled interviewer is easily able to ascertain…

> A skilled interviewer is easily able to ascertain breadth and depth of the candidate's experience [without a coding test]

And yet, many interviewers' experience shows that there are people that would pass a discussion-only interview and fail at basic coding tasks. There's plenty such people holding down jobs for a while, so even that may not be a sure indicator of skill.

> The intentional ambiguity is deceitful. The expected dependence and expected deference is so patronizing and manipulative.

I'm ~1.5years into my first job as a Backend Dev so I can't speak much about the industry, but based on my experience and what I hear from others, asking questions and clarifying unclear requirements is part of the job description. I almost never get my tasks in a precisely defined way and a lot of my job is gathering information and asking the right questions to build the right thing, often making my own choices and judgement calls. I assume that these skills are what GP comment is trying to test.

> They don't really care, nor should they, about your product, or your customers.

You can hardly blame a company for preferring someone who does. Or at least, pretends to.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#350

Post by glandium »

godelski wrote: post #339
markwkw wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: "Engineers always ask about beam bending, stress strain curves, and conservation of work. Know the theory and any technical questions are easy." Basically an equivalent of simple algorithmic questions. Not "real" because it's impossible to share enough context of a real problem in an interview to make it practical. Short, testing principles, but most…

> Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: I've been an engineer in the past (physics undergrad -> aerospace job -> grad school/ml). I have never seen or heard of an engineer being expected to solve math equations on a whiteboard during an interview. It is expected that you already know these things. Honestly, it is expected that you have a reference to these equations and you'll have memori…

We live in the age of ChatGPT. It might actually be time to assess how candidates use it during interviews. What prompts they write, how they refine their prompts, how they use the answers, whether they take them at face value, etc.
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