Hiring software engineers is like dating. If you find a suitable mate, maybe you don't commit too early because you think that there might be something better out there. Or, you monkey-branch to a better one. (How often do you have an amazing couple of rounds of technical interviews, only to be ghosted? For me: Too many times to count.) I find the same is true when hiring software engineers. The vast majority of "above average" developers around me in my career are wildly over-qualified for their CRUD work.
Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
421–430 of 679 posts
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
We talk about something like this now and then but the thing is, if fizzbuzz is still managing to eliminate more than half the candidates I don't think it's useless.
That does loosely suggest that something of fizzbuzz-level triviality may be sufficient for first-round filtering.
That's my impression. Anything more complicated and you're starting to filter based on your appreciation of the candidate's choices, style, etc. I.e. things that can be worked on or fitted to the company's work style.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview I have my personal theory. 1) Top companies receive way more applications than the positions they have open. Thus they standardised around very technical interview as ways to eliminate false positives. I think these companies know this method produces several false negatives, but the ratio between those (eliminatin…
I’d add another factor to #1: this feels objective and unbiased. That’s at least partially true compared with other approaches like the nebulous “culture fit” but that impression is at least in part a blind spot because the people working there are almost certainly the type of people who do well with that style and it can be hard to recognize that other people are uncomfortable with something you find natural.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding tests are an awful place to test someone’s conversational skills. I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I talked to anyone about the code itself outside of a PR. People talk about architecture and database migrations and why their containers aren’t behaving locally. Nobody ever tests for that stuff.
> I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. That's quite an assumption. You've never heard of pair programming? You've never asked for help on a bug in your code? You've never talked through alternate approaches to a piece of code with a coworker? You've never hashed out an interface or a method signature or some pseudocode while talking through the problem? You've never walked through a calculation with an SME? A…
Here's my brutally honest take on pair programming: Usually 1 person wants to do it more than the other, and usually that person is being unnecessarily assertive.
The only scenario I think pair programming is socially acceptable to force on developers is a senior type onboarding a new developer out of necessity - might screen share and direct them around some places to show the ropes.
Of course if you love to hang out with someone else while you write code for some reason - more power to you, have fun. For me it's a private thing, even after 20+ years. If anything the LLM is a much more useful sidekick to figure things out.
> Can't talk and code means can't code at all
I disagree with that, I can't even have lyrics in my music really if I'm working on something super hard especially outside my normal wheelhouse. It would at least be disruptive.
The last time "hanging out and coding" was a thing was learning it for the first time - I used to hang out with friends as a kid and we would all try to figure out what Visual Basic was lol and I remember hanging with a friend learning JavaScript during the early web days, drinking coffee through the night, good times.
These days it would feel forced and can't imagine why anyone would regularly pair program, especially now with LLMs.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#425Earlier 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…
> when all their work is visible to you
Doesn't really happen reliably in the real world.
> You have bigger problems if you can't tell if someone is lying or not ...
Whether or not I have bigger problems is independent from whether I need to recruit more developers.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's really no substitute for interviewing based on candidate's experience. That always happens in an interview loop too though.
It absolutely does not always happen. I was asked to do interviews twice with one employer. Both times, I requested the interviewee's resume. Both times I was refused because they didn't want me to "bias" my interview. So, yeah, go figure.
It’s not generally the responsibility of the person doing the technical screen to also obtain signal on past experience. At a company with recruiting process these fall on different people specialized in the specific interview types. I’ve done an average of 2-3 interviews a week over several employers for the last 12 years, so over a thousand interviews. I’ve also defined much tech interview loop for my current employer and usually interview from junior IC up to manager of manager roles.
I’ve never asked for candidate resumes because I don’t want to bias myself.
I’m not saying it will always, always happen, it’s just, it overwhelmingly will.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#427I'm currently going through these leetcode-style interviews and it's demoralizing studying for quizzes I know I'll never use on the job. I think knowing this makes it harder to motivate myself to study, which in turn means I fail more interviews. I think I'm just trying to get lucky at this point.
I know I can write code. I know I can work with the cloud. I know I can talk to stakeholders and gather requirements. But yet I am treated like a new grad in the interview process.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview One angle is that SWE is one of the very few professions where you don't need a formal degree to have a career. It's also a common hobby among a sizable population. I think this is truly great. A holdout breathing hole where people can have lucrative careers without convincing and paying off a ton of gatekeepers! B…
> But I also think that when you hire in other industries, you can get much more milage from looking at the candidate's formal degrees and certifications.
> In our industry, you kinda have to start from scratch with every person.
Not really - in software people leave a bigger and more easily trackable track record than any other engineering field. From previous work projects/experience to open source projects/experience, from personal projects to the communities a person belongs to. A lot of stuff is directly visible on the Internet. In other engineering fields, you have to trust what the applicant says in his or her resume and maybe at most you can call the previous companies he worked at for reference. In software, a lot of the trail is online or easy to tell, and you can still call.
Even for totally new graduates, it is better in software: Its much easier for a software undergrad to work part-time or in a hobby project or contribute to open source and produce something before he or she graduates, so that you can assess his skills. Its much harder for a mechanical or civil engineer to do that, so for that reason you have to rely solely on the relevant university/college and the grades of the candidate.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#429Earlier 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…
Half a dozen years ago in a conference talk, Joel Spolsky claimed credit for inventing these sorts of whiteboard interviews (with his Guerilla Guide to Interviewing), and that it had broken software engineering hiring.
https://thenewstack.io/joel-spolsky-on-stack-overflow-inclus...
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I buy this theory. The problem I have with it is that for this to be a reasonably effective strategy you should change the arbitrary metric every few years because otherwise it is likely to be hacked and has the potential to turn into a negative signal rather than positive. Essentially your false positives can dominate by "studying to the test" rather than "studying". I'd say the same is true for college admissi…
so having done interviews, just because the latter may be more present, does not mean the hordes of people just throwing a spaghetti made-up-resume at the wall have gone away. our industry has a great strength in that you don't need official credentialing to show that you can do something. at the same time, it is hard to verify what people are saying in their resumes, they might be lying in the worst case but sometim…
I had a candidate claiming over ten years of experience who couldn’t sum an array of ints in any language of his choosing.
This wasn’t an off-by-one or didn’t handle overflow, but rather was couldn’t get started at all.