Coding interviews are stupid (ish) • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#441

Post by niccl » Wed, May 08, 2024, 3:36 AM UTC

YZF wrote: post #436

blindriver wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have data to show that your "different way" produces better results, your idea sounds exactly the same as every other idea, which is basically garbage. Lots of people have lots of ideas on what makes a great interview question, but none of them are backed by data. LeetCode-style algo questions USED to be an indicator of intelligence as per Google's investigation, but now it's so heavily gamed that I doubt…

Don't discard good anecdotal evidence because there's no proper randomly controlled trial. If you're experienced/senior in the industry you probably worked with dozens of developers closely, with hundreds less closely, you've seen many projects and designs, you've interviewed and was involved in the hiring of dozens of people. This random controlled trial you're talking about is so hard to do because there are infini…

I guess we could make some reasonable evidence about hiring approaches based on HN hirers: What percentage of hires using your favourite technique/interview question do you think worked out as a success?

My rate is around 50% good, 50% I wish I hadn't hired.

Anyone else want to fess up?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#442

Post by tetromino_ » Wed, May 08, 2024, 3:53 AM UTC

zrn900 wrote: post #428

BurningFrog wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/experie…

> 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.

That only apply to software people who either (a) are getting paid to work on open source or (b) have enough spare time to work on open source as a hobby after hours. Option (b), in particular, usually implies having no children or other familial responsibilities.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#443

Post by moregrist » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:06 AM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #358

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…

I'm a chemist by education, so all my college friends are chemists. Being asked a theoretical chemistry question at a job interview would be...odd. You can be asked about your proficiency with some lab equipment, your experience with various procedures and what not. But the very thought of being asked theoretical questions is beyond ridiculous.

Hmm… I have a twist on this. Chemistry is a really big field.

My degree is in computational/theoretical chemistry. Even before I went into software engineering, it would have been really odd for me to be asked questions about wet chemistry.

Admittedly it would have been odd to be quizzed on theory out of the blue as well.

What would not have been odd was to give a job talk and be asked questions based on that talk; in my case this would have included aspects of theory relevant to the simulation work and analysis I presented.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#444

Post by vundercind » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:15 AM UTC

feoren wrote: post #262

darrenkopp wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, personally, cannot _think_ and _talk_ at the same time. It's just a stream of half-sentences, many of which my brain has already moved on from because what I originally thought won't work. After writing this article it became very apparent to me that I'm complete garbage at interviews, but I'll outperform and exceed at the actual job function.

In my work, if you literally cannot write any code while also discussing the code, and if you literally cannot express thoughts while also thinking them, then you actually wont exceed at the actual job function, at all. You're not the only programmer on the team. I don't know why people think communication skills are not required for programmers. You won't be coding the correct thing unless you can talk about what yo…

Shit, I can’t take notes on a meeting and also participate—like, at all. Decent odds I’ll reach the end and struggle to give you even the gist of what happened, without reading my own notes. If I’m trying to take notes and someone addresses me I’ll be all kinds of confused about what the context is.

And that’s English and mostly just writing what people are talking about, not thinking up novel things to write.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#445

Post by _akhe » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:26 AM UTC

recursive wrote: post #425

_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…

> 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.

It's like a designer with no portfolio. A lot of them do exist actually, not saying they don't, but I would never hire one.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#446

Post by kyle_grove » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #364

epolanski wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

I think (but cannot prove) that along the way, it was decided to explicitly measure ability to 'study to the test'. My theory goes that certain trendsetting companies decided that ability to 'grind at arbitrary technical thing' measures on-job adaptability. And then many other companies followed suit as a cargo cult thing.

If it were otherwise, and those trendsetting companies actually believed LeetCode tested programming ability, then why isn't LeetCode used in ongoing employee evaluation? Surely the skill of programming ability a) varies over an employee's tenure at a firm and b) is a strong predictor of employee impact over the near term. So I surmise that such companies don't believe this, and that therefore LeetCode serves some other purpose, in some semi-deliberate way.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#447

Post by vundercind » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC

OnionBlender wrote: post #134

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "point" of the whiteboard interview is to see how you think and converse and interact around your coding process, not (necessarily) how accurate/good you are at writing the code. You could write pseudocode that can't compile, and as long as you can explain the algorithm and talk about its complexity you could "pass" (in theory) Screening interviews do take place in a shared doc or other editor, I believe.

I've never had any company let me write pseudocode. I once tried to write "vec" instead of "std::vector" and the interview told me to write valid code on the whiteboard. (And I did explain that I was to avoid writing "std::vector" repeatedly).

I’ve managed to mostly avoid these kinds of interviews—is this for real?

Is this what lots of the folks mean when they claim tons of candidates “can’t even code?” Syntax or some names aren’t right for some particular language?

Shit, I forget the syntax for “for” loops or what the right way to get an array’s length is or what this language’s way of declaring a constructor looks like in languages I’ve written several hundred of lines of in the last few days, routinely, while under no real pressure at all. I crib off my own surrounding code for syntax hints constantly.

I’ve been doing this north of 20 years, and tend to end up as the guy to go to for tricky problems wherever I work, but I would fail 100% of whiteboard code-writing tests that gave any fucks about it being remotely correct in any particular language. I think the last time I could maybe have done it was when I knew only one language, and it was Perl, and I mostly wrote it in notepad—so, like, the first year or so after started writing code.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#448

Post by vundercind » Wed, May 08, 2024, 4:41 AM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #207

Paul-Craft wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the US, "$400k" is almost certainly an outlier and not the typical case. Ever notice how people making these claims never provide data about actual comp distributions? I've been an engineer for almost 10 years and never had an offer come close to $400k per year.

in the sfba, levels.fyi shows it roughly at 85%-ile, not everyone - but hardly extreme outlier

A giant proportion of developers have no idea wtf “levels.fyi” is and are quietly writing Java or some shit in some suburban office park in a city you wouldn’t ever bother to visit, for $80k-160k/yr.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#449

Post by phlakaton » Wed, May 08, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #388

wanderlust123 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got any evidence for the following claim: “ Also a 'white' older male is the least preferred even if he is smarter compared to all females and the minorities that are being interviewed as long as they are not terrible. Biases galore.”

He's close. The real bias is against extremely good looking guys named Rene who are also way smarter and charismatic than everyone else. Terrible bias.

I dunno. "Rene" sounds a lot like "renege." Which probably means you'll sign on to a project and abandon it halfway through or something. Very sus.

(I wish I could say my early interviewing rubrics were any better than this. We have come a long way as a people, we Silly Valley programmers.)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#450

Post by rsyring » Wed, May 08, 2024, 5:10 AM UTC

cma256 wrote: post #197

rsyring wrote: post #191

We used four basic exercises during the first remote interview. Simple things like, "there is a number on each line of this text file. Find the sum of them." This was an effective method to screen out applicants who didn't have the basic coding skills to align with their stated resume experience. And there were a decent number of these. We did further development project exercises later in the process that took about…

15 hours! You're hiring contractors not interviewing.

Debatable. But it was never client work.

Truth is, I'd much rather hire someone who is interested in working for us for 2-4 weeks as a contractor instead of the normal interview process. But that usually doesn't work for the candidate.