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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#411

Post by janalsncm »

For machine learning engineer roles a lot of companies are carrying over their leetcode questions from software engineering interviews. It makes it even more ridiculous. I’ve told recruiters that I have other interviews that don’t ask leetcode, and depending on how those go I’ll study leetcode.

I’m not a competitive programmer. I’m an engineer. If you want a competitive programmer go find a new grad who was in the competitive programming club in school. Assessing engineering skills with leetcode is like assessing bicyclists on their ability to swim.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#412

Post by belmarca »

hintymad wrote: post #376
kstenerud wrote: post #221

My approach to interviews over the past decade has been as follows: 1. My preparation for an interview involves researching the company, not technical matters. I don't brush up on coding interview questions. I've never done leetcode. 2. If I find the interview questions to be ridiculously off-topic (such as silly algorithm questions), I end the interview. You're not the kind of company I want to work with. 3. If I fi…

The past decade is the golden age for software developers, so we had lots of options. I was wondering if we will still have so much freedom as the market has increasingly become the buyer's one.

I haven't been interviewing full-time, but these past couple of years I have had barely any success. Currently getting insta-refused even for jobs with lower skill requirements. I've heard similar from friends and colleagues.

There's a bootstrap issue as well. A developer with a brand name on their resume is much more desirable than one without, even for equal skill and experience.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#413

Post by paulddraper »

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%.

I wouldn't argue with that.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#414

Post by citizen_friend »

pseudalopex wrote: post #370
citizen_friend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- licensing ensures only a minimum level of quality - people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling - licensed careers with high performers (lawyers, doctors, ib, etc) have other forms of filtering which are much more painful, like years of low pay internships Studying for a few weeks to solve fun puzzles to make 400k sounds like a deal to me.

> people with licenses still do interviews, often just as grueling The licensed engineers I know think software interviews are insane.

And most mech/ee make <150k. A closer comparison is IB.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#415

Post by _akhe »

dilyevsky wrote: post #402
_akhe wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think it's a failure of recruiting if you got someone into an interview who can't code "at all". That must mean nobody at the company is technical "at all" either then, if you are getting people that far along without having any clue if they even write code at all. I don't have this problem - I can easily tell who is good and who is not good by looking at their stuff online, which repos they are contrib…

> That must mean nobody at the company is technical "at all" either then, if you are getting people that far along without having any clue if they even write code at all. Lots of people skate by in technical roles by barely doing anything technical. Lots of people also overinflate their achievements in resumes and conversations aka lying. How is non technical recruiter supposed to evaluate their coding chops? > Peopl…

> People lie

Obviously taken into account - I still have no problem whatsoever identifying great developers on GitHub and I'm sure many other developers who actually code often could too. You have bigger problems if you can't tell if someone is lying or not about their abilities when all their work is visible to you. You should be able to easily tell what is theirs vs not.

> Lol, great method!

Yes people inflate their own egos and abilities - especially those who spend all their time interviewing others instead of building.

I prefer demonstrable experience for an engineer over standardized tests which tell you nothing about any real world experience: App architecture, async programming, APIs, UI, DOM, git, unit/e2e tests, any known framework or library, etc. A person who knows all those but hasn't memorized CTCI is a lot more useful than the CTCI memorizer with no evidence of work ever performed.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#416

Post by Salgat »

godelski wrote: post #310
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…

> 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…

If you talk shop with a mechanic, they're going to know pretty quickly if you actually know what you're talking about. In my experience, the same applies in our field.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#417

Post by dilyevsky »

_akhe wrote: post #415
dilyevsky wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That must mean nobody at the company is technical "at all" either then, if you are getting people that far along without having any clue if they even write code at all. Lots of people skate by in technical roles by barely doing anything technical. Lots of people also overinflate their achievements in resumes and conversations aka lying. How is non technical recruiter supposed to evaluate their coding chops? > Peopl…

> People lie Obviously taken into account - I still have no problem whatsoever identifying great developers on GitHub and I'm sure many other developers who actually code often could too. You have bigger problems if you can't tell if someone is lying or not about their abilities when all their work is visible to you. You should be able to easily tell what is theirs vs not. > Lol, great method! Yes people inflate thei…

> While you're spending all your time and the company's money conducting maniacal quizzes and tests your competition is building features and teams and making progress

If your research on your candidates' profiles is of the same quality as you demonstrated nosing around my profile, I don't think any of your competition should be worried at all ;-)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#418

Post by valicord »

nineplay wrote: post #261
kevincox wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will ask all of those questions. But I don't expect perfect answers. You should at least know what big O is. I would really like it if you can tell an O(n^2) algorithm from a linear one. (That is often really important in real-world code). I would like you to consider different ways you can optimize the code. I don't expect you to quickly crank out a novel optimal algorithm. But I like to see that you can think abo…

That's a pretty far cry from > which is to make sure the candidate can actually write code, like at all It's also still a terrible approach and only gets leet code crammers.

are you suggesting that only leet code crammers can tell the difference between quadratic and linear algorithm?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#419

Post by _akhe »

dilyevsky wrote: post #417
_akhe wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People lie Obviously taken into account - I still have no problem whatsoever identifying great developers on GitHub and I'm sure many other developers who actually code often could too. You have bigger problems if you can't tell if someone is lying or not about their abilities when all their work is visible to you. You should be able to easily tell what is theirs vs not. > Lol, great method! Yes people inflate thei…

> While you're spending all your time and the company's money conducting maniacal quizzes and tests your competition is building features and teams and making progress If your research on your candidates' profiles is of the same quality as you demonstrated nosing around my profile, I don't think any of your competition should be worried at all ;-)

[dead]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#420

Post by belmarca »

utensil4778 wrote: post #306

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 candidat…

Exactly. I get why interviewers want some sort of "can they code" filter. The test can be extremely simple though. If knowing data structures and algorithms were by heart was so central to every developer's work, then they wouldn't be interview questions.
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