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Please stop the coding challenges

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Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#421

Post by flustercan »

jjav wrote: post #375
aleksiy123 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is studying, practicing and preparing, gaming the system? Is reading a book on software engineering to become a better programmer also not allowed? I feel like people want these jobs to be distributed "fairly" based on "natural" ability/talent. But it has never and will never work that way.

> Since when is studying, practicing and preparing, gaming the system? Fair question.. the problem today is the emphasis on studying and practicing irrelevant things like memorizing algorithms. That's become the paved short-cut to well paying jobs so naturally people do it. To the point that even the people doing the hiring have forgotten what it meant to be actually qualified, not just a leetcode memorizer. If you n…

I don't think its common for people to try to "memorize leetcode."

Most interview loops at places that do algorithm interviews are 2-3 rounds and each round will have up to 2 questions. Its very very unlikely the interviewee will only encountered questions they have memorized.

More likely, the interviewee encounters questions similar to ones they have solved and they know the pattern around solving, then are able to apply their learned skill to the new problem.

Similar to your music analogy: you can absolutely be a strong guitar player in a band if you just memorize a few different chord shapes and can apply them up and down the fretboard to different keys (lookup the "CAGED system").

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#422

Post by socksy »

mekoka wrote: post #234
swatcoder wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they brig…

> No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. Perhaps. I had 9 years of practical experience myself before going through that grind (leetcode + system design) some years ago. It is no substitute, but you don't come out of it the same engineer. You read, write and understand code differently. Also,…

Did you study CS before you went into the workforce?

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#423

Post by rockemsockem »

0xmarcin wrote: post #117
paxys wrote: post #75

The more people online complain about coding interviews, the more confident I am that they are the absolute best way to filter candidates for a software development job. Across the industry there are way too many talkers/pretenders/meeting schedulers and not enough people who can roll up their sleeves, jump into the code and actually get stuff done. And this problem becomes worse at higher levels. You can bitch about…

Maybe there were in the past, currently there is entire industry there to help you game the system. - Cracking the coding interview. - Elements of programming interviews in Java|Python|whatever... - leetcode & other sides with paid premium subscriptions... - mock interview bootcamps... It's no longer about skill, it's only about gaming the system.

There are physics textbooks and YouTube videos everywhere and yet we aren't all physics experts. Existence of knowledge and accessibility of information does not guarantee everyone can learn to do something and it especially doesn't guarantee that everyone can learn to do something well.

LLMs are another great example

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#424

Post by _proofs »

agentultra wrote: post #154

> When was the last time you had to debug an ancient codebase without documentation or help from a team? All the time. 300-400k SLOC in C++. Legacy in the sense that there were no tests of any kind. Little-to-no documentation. Solo developer at the tiny company. Fix bugs and add features while keeping the system available to the tens of thousands of users. A more recent example: here’s a patch for a critical feature…

another +1 from me -- my job, with some exceptions, is literally "plop this guy into an unfamiliar project and implement some user need be it a bugfix, feature, or (silently) a refactor.

agnostic programming flueny/software practices, including being comfortable debugging unfamiliar things or navigating uncharted waters without many domain experts to guide me, is the number one skill required in my role.

bonus points if i end up becoming an active maintainer to the project, or someone who can help other devs w it, the more times i dip into it.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#425

Post by kristopolous »

akudha wrote: post #383
drdrey wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you think would be a better test?

I have mentioned this before. The best interview I had as a candidate was - they gave me access to their codebase, explained an actual relatively small bug, asked me to fix it and left me alone (I was seated among their devs, they were minding their business, I was minding my own). I think it took me half hour or so (can't remember the exact time, it was a few years ago). I fixed it, they asked me to explain how I fo…

I sometimes ask obscure questions but I don't hold it against people if they can't get it. It just tells me a bit about how the person works, who they are, where they might fit ... I've certainly recommended people for hire that score an actual 0% on those questions.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#427

Post by kristopolous »

paxys wrote: post #351
ryandrake wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I happen to hate coding challenges, but not because they're hard--because they bias towards "people who have time to do coding challenges". That said you're absolutely right about how many phonies are in the industry and coding tests are probably the best we have to weed them out.

This goes beyond software interviews and is just how the world works. "I want to work for your company" "Ok, prove yourself" "Sorry, I don't have time" How do you expect that conversation to go from there? If you don't have time then make time. It isn't anyone's problem but your own.

That's not it though.

Pretend I was hiring a restaurant chef and the industry standard test was "run a mile in 4 minutes", a test that 98% of all candidates fail!

So professional chefs practice by jogging daily so they could prove themselves during the famous "run a 4 minute mile" weeding test so they can be hired to prepare meals for people.

That's what we're talking about here. I've had to write out the mathematical proof of various algo complexities of B* trees exactly 0 times when writing SDKs for some CRUD application but that's what's expected during the interview.

It's as correlated with the ability to do the job about as much as running a 4 minute mile in that younger, more desperate, easier to control, and thus cheaper people can do it better. That's what the actual filter is for - to find candidates that are easier to abuse and take advantage of - smart enough to do the work and foolish enough to take the job.

I've hired large teams at multiple companies where such tests were used and that was exactly why we did it. We didn't want the experienced 45 year old wanting to work 40 hours with vacation, we wanted the foolish 25 year old that gave us their weekend.

Actually saying that is illegal, but using a stupid test that selects for it is not.

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#428

Post by icedchai »

thatguysaguy wrote: post #261
zimpenfish wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for "all the time". Today I have been debugging a critical piece of the system which is written in Python (none of the rest of the system is) and largely hasn't been updated since 2020 and, you'll not be surprised, has no comments, no documentation, and a fucked up deployment system which makes me cry every time I have to think about it. Last week I was debugging some similarly uncommented, undocumented, Go code f…

Yeah from the title I thought this was going to be about leetcode problems, but this is truly something that comes up regularly. Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly?

A repo would be nice. I was recently given a 500 meg .zip of "backend stuff" and asked to figure out what's going on. No repository, no history, the read me is useless, the APIs look like they were built by rabid animals...

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#429

Post by lkjdsklf »

RussianCow wrote: post #270
mekoka wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. Perhaps. I had 9 years of practical experience myself before going through that grind (leetcode + system design) some years ago. It is no substitute, but you don't come out of it the same engineer. You read, write and understand code differently. Also,…

> Exponential inner loops for big searches, huge recursive calls. Those things show up in code written by experienced coders IRL. The thing is, those things are easily fixable after the fact. A bad architecture is not, and without practical experience designing systems in the real world, you don't have those instincts to guide you towards the correct choices because you haven't made any mistakes to learn from.

And thanks to modern CPU design, they are often actually faster than more complicated data structures.

I know in interviews they are looking for the solution that is the most efficient by big O standards so that’s what I use

But big O is often just not a reflection of actual performance on modern computers

Re: Please stop the coding challenges

#430

Post by fishtoaster »

dahart wrote: post #231
fishtoaster wrote: post #195

I recently ran an interview process for a relatively senior eng role at a tiny startup. Because I believe different interview methods work better for different people, I offered everyone a choice: 1. Do a takehome test, targeted to take about 4 hours but with no actual time limit. This was a non-algorithmic project that was just a stripped-down version of what I'd spent the last month on in actual work. 2. Do an onsi…

Interesting! I like the idea of choice, but as a hiring manager it makes my problem harder. How do you compare the results from different choices equitably? I find trying to compare candidates fairly to be quite difficult, even when they have the exact same interview. Last time I did a coding interview for real, I had the choice of any programming language, and could choose between 3 different problems to solve. I li…

Yeah, that was the explicit tradeoff: I'm losing the ability to compare apples-to-apples. I decided it was worth the risks associated with that - that I'd wind up with two candidates who picked different options and I couldn't decide between them because I got different signal between them. As it turned out, it didn't really come up - nearly everyone chose the takehome. On a larger scale, though, you'd definitely have to grapple with that.
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