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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

#401

Google recruiters call me a lot. I think I'd do a good if not stellar job working there. I've passed multiple FAANG interviews and been very successful as a senior developer. In my email I have an "interview prep packet" from them that essentially tells me to brush up on algorithms and read Cracking the Coding Interview to prepare for their interview process. I'm fairly happy in my job. If they offered more money or…

What I find weird is why does anybody want to work at Google? I use their tools all the time at work. If you go to console.cloud.google.com... I mean... Wow. Just yesterday I was trying to find the logging for our cloud endpoints on Stackdriver. They should use that as their interview question ;-) And this is the big thing I've noticed about many Google apps (especially dev tools): they are all incredibly (for want o…

> What I find weird is why does anybody want to work at Google? I use their tools all the time at work. If you go to console.cloud.google.com... I mean... Wow. Just yesterday I was trying to find the logging for our cloud endpoints on Stackdriver. They should use that as their interview question ;-)

Working for Google is the only way to get bugs in Google products fixed, or your feedback even listened to. ;)

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “But without context, you can't effectively do that.” This is simply false. You don’t need context to understand if the breakdown of a technical problem into constituent trade-offs was appropriate or not — by definition that very breakdown into constituent technical details is the context. > “investigating that was someone else's responsibility" This just confirms to me that you are not correct in asserting people…

>This is simply false. You don’t need context to understand if the breakdown of a technical problem into constituent trade-offs was appropriate or not — by definition that very breakdown into constituent technical details is the context. I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important. You're asking for the context you need to assess someone's technical competency from the person whose technical c…

> “I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important.”

No, you definitely don’t need to come into it knowing about this, and even if you don’t know about this ahead of time, it won’t imply “just trusting” the candidate or being overly subjective. You will ask the candidate to explain why various decisions were important, and not stop at the top line answer but recursively probe into it, breaking it down into concepts and trade-offs that are universal in any kind of applied problem solving.

> “But now you're punishing someone for organizational things possibly beyond their control. If my job was to build a thing that made use of some blackbox algorithm, and John developed the algorithm, why should I put the algorithm under strong skepticism, perhaps that's how things work in your workplace, but there's no clear reason that mine work the same way.”

I’m sorry but this also just isn’t true. If you are describing your contributions to projects and all that keeps happening is you hit walls in your explanation where someome else did the work and you did not review that work at a high level of depth, then you’re just being misleading about your contributions at work.

Your job as an engineer in a company is to solve problems for your stakeholders, whether that means building tooling for other engineers, assisting designers with prototypes, designing algorithms for core product functionality, sales engineering for client stakeholders, etc.

It doesn’t matter how your company is structured, it doesn’t matter how the work was divided up. Your job is to know about the stakeholder problem you are solving, at a deep level, and when you represent your work to other people and you fail to offer technical depth about the trade-offs needed to solve stakeholder problems, that’s a clear mark against you as a candidate.

It’s bewildering to me that anyone would think that the way their current employer organizes assignments should reduce their burden of knowing how to represent their projects in significant technical depth. That is an always-on, never mitigated, constant responsibility for all employees anywhere. You’re not holding anything against someone if they can’t provide that in an interview... no, you’re just uncovering what they’ve lied about or embellished on a resume.

> “Except that, as I've literally just proven, you've failed to verify the authenticity of me because you've wrongly concluded that I'm not authentic.”

I see no such proof at all, and the cheeky rhetoric just makes me feel more entrenched that you are bullshitting hugely in this thread.

> “So again, either you take the candidate at face value in a situation where they have every incentive to lie to you, or you attempt to verify their authenticity, at which point that analysis is subject to a multitude of biases that have nothing to do with the candidates skill level.”

You are doing nothing but gainsaying here. You’ve made no argument that would support any of these strong conclusions, especially not any reason why this interview method faces the false dilemma between either just trusting the candidate or else succumbing to biases.

You are just asserting things, but they do not seem to be connected to or bolstered by any of the other things you’ve written.

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

#403
Where I earn my money is thinking of a solution to a hard problem while not actually at work. It probably only comes up a few times in a year.

Questions you can answer immediately simply don't test if you can do this. I have no idea how you would test to see if you can do this.

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

#404
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think because some people can't train themselves up through the gate. This is not because they can't figure out the leetcode problems, but because they have more difficulty dealing with the kind of pressure you see in interviewing situations than others.

If you have a hard time working under pressure, there's sadly not many viable alternatives. Any process that has a very low % success rate will inherently be stressful. Also, being able to perform under stress could be seen as a desirable skill too.

It's not that I can't perform under stress. It's that I can't perform under the specific stress of being in a new location having 5 hour one on one interviews because I have Aspergers

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

#405

Google recruiters call me a lot. I think I'd do a good if not stellar job working there. I've passed multiple FAANG interviews and been very successful as a senior developer. In my email I have an "interview prep packet" from them that essentially tells me to brush up on algorithms and read Cracking the Coding Interview to prepare for their interview process. I'm fairly happy in my job. If they offered more money or…

I've realized I can still have a great career, make a very respectable wage, and work on interesting, novel problems all without working for a FAANG. Moreover, I don't have to directly contribute to the proliferation of corporate surveillance as a societal norm.

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

#406
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This did not make them better engineers at all. How do you know? I understand that FANG have themselves come to the conclusion that brain teasers are not necessarily very predictive for engineering performance. But CS/programming questions for CS/programming roles? That seems sensible. You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you w…

Oh, you'll certainly be better at solving programming puzzles type of problems, but the thing is that those questions usually don't translate well into real-life problems that you'll encounter at work later. You can't architect a good solution IRL by trying to figure our what the test author wanted you to do, like with programming puzzles. And for implementing some algorithm keeping every detail of it in head definit…

As someone trying to break into the field, I'm very intimidated by coding challenges. The ones on leetcode take me an afternoon and some change to get through the easy ones. Some people seem to take no issue with googling the result then moving forward but I thought that wasn't in the spirit of doing these challenges.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels very much like that to me which is why it’s strange there isn’t a Kaplan equivalent. There’s interview cake and leetcode, but I think people would pay $2k for a class that focuses on the questions and in person whiteboard practice. They could collect information about the interviews at the major companies and then use those to create the program. For payment could also help candidates negotiate and then take…

This is exactly what Outco.io does, and I highly recommend them for this purpose.

Looks interesting - have you used them?

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

#408
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not following, how does memorizing algorithms correlate with intelligence and skill in the engineering discipline of the job?

Given that many job applicants apparently can't write a Fizz-Buzz implementation, I'd say that being able to implement an algorithm is probably a reasonable way to cull the herd by a hefty margin.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is simply false. You don’t need context to understand if the breakdown of a technical problem into constituent trade-offs was appropriate or not — by definition that very breakdown into constituent technical details is the context. I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important. You're asking for the context you need to assess someone's technical competency from the person whose technical c…

> “I mean, yes you do. Context tells you which decisions are important.” No, you definitely don’t need to come into it knowing about this, and even if you don’t know about this ahead of time, it won’t imply “just trusting” the candidate or being overly subjective. You will ask the candidate to explain why various decisions were important, and not stop at the top line answer but recursively probe into it, breaking it…

> You are just asserting things, but they do not seem to be connected to or bolstered by any of the other things you’ve written.

Let me lay it out clearly: I asserted that I can, and have, inflated my abilities to people who have technical know how. This was in response to you stating that "I’m sorry but you cannot do what you are claiming."

So to be clear, at this point, one of two things is true:

1. You are wrong

2. I am a liar

To you, it is clear that point 2 is the true one. To most readers, this is not as obvious. Once you have decided that (2) is true and I am a liar, nothing I say can or will convince you otherwise. But you haven't decided that based on anything factual. In fact, (1) is true here. I am not lying. I can, and have, done the things I claim to have done in this case.

I'm using this to demonstrate that your ideas about such a conversational interview don't work, by pointing out that in the conversational interview that we are having right now, you've decided, based on a preconception, that what I say cannot be true! I could be the world's most successful conman, but because you're preconceptions lead you to believe that your preferred interview process is effective and is less biased than your non-preferred one, you won't accept evidence to the contrary.

>I see no such proof at all, and the cheeky rhetoric just makes me feel more entrenched that you are bullshitting hugely in this thread.

Right, and my point is you're wrong and unwilling to accept that. And that is a demonstration of you not being able to effectively figure out whether or not someone is bullshitting from a conversation with them. You've decided that I'm bullshitting because the alternative would require you to do a lot of introspection about how and why you analyze candidates the way you do. So it's easier to just say "you're bullshitting" and then not put in the effort. And that's certainly your prerogative, but its not at all a good look for your interviewing capabilities.

That you're so prone to cognitive biases that you're willing to completely write off someone's experience because it forces you to rethink something you hold dear is not a selling point of the process you espouse. It demonstrates, like I've said, that the process is prone to cognitive bias and is therefore decidedly not objective.

That is, there are two possibilities:

1. You are wrong, and you're refusal to accept that is coloring your perceptions of our interactions in such a way that you are not able to be objective about my experiences and abilities, as I claim.

2. I'm completely making everything I've said up and haven't ever been able to inflate my abilities to anyone. Your person-analytical skills are infallible and you've caught me.

I subscribe to (1), you continue to wrongly believe (2). This is expected, its why your process isn't as objective as you claim.

>It doesn’t matter how your company is structured, it doesn’t matter how the work was divided up. Your job is to know about the stakeholder problem you are solving, at a deep level, and when you represent your work to other people and you fail to offer technical depth about the trade-offs needed to solve stakeholder problems, that’s a clear mark against you as a candidate.

This is, again, your opinion of how engineering should be done. Not every engineer has the opportunity to work in a workplace where that's how things work. Are you going to write off everyone whose experience has been in a PM led environment because they haven't had the opportunity to develop using the process you prefer? If so that's again your prerogative, but you're probably filtering out a bunch of good engineers.

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

#410

Why do developers complain so much about hard interview questions that can be supposedly be gamed by studying to the test? Every high paying industry heavily engages in gatekeeping, because the number of people who want to make 400k/year is far larger than the number of 400k/year jobs available. The traditional forms of gatekeeping involve requiring that people have the right personal/familial connections, or have an…

I already make plenty of money in my current job and I'm fairly happy. If I wanted to switch companies I'd be interviewed as if I were a recent college graduate. Anyone experienced and good at this isn't going to have time for that because they're not going to jump through hoops to increase a 275k salary to a 300k one. So what the interview selects for are people desperate enough to study hard enough to fool the inte…

Not sure how you think this advantages male candidates. Are you saying women don't have the work ethic to prepare for these interviews?
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