451–460 of 493 posts
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It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. All crucial skills in the modern technology or legal workplace.
At least you only have to pass the bar once.
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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…
> as a hiring manager it makes my problem harder. How do you compare the results from different choices equitably? That makes sense, and it's the perspective that's being drilled into a lot of us. Implicit bias and all that. But in my experience, the comparison problem has never been that big of an issue in practice. I guess it depends on the hiring climate, but I'm much more familiar with spending a lot of time goin…
They are unless you're going to hire everyone who ever applies. At some point, you're choosing between two candidates, and the only way you can make that choice is by projecting them onto a one-dimensional line. The approach you describe:
> stop thinking about how they might fail and start thinking about what it would look like if they succeed. They'll have different strengths and advantages.
is one method of doing that, but not an especially effective one.
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I think I managed about 10k users with my mac shareware games in 2009/10, and that didn't get me ramen profitability let alone modern pay scales. So not necessarily any budget for more than they did.
Single dev codebases have a really hard time growing to 400kloc though
> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Mark Twain [0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...
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…
I'm your average skilled introverted engineer. But after more than a dozen years of experience and problem solving, I'd go with #2. I feel i'd be able to explain myself much more easily, have to do much less work, and probably have much more ways to impress the interviewers with face to face. I have also been on the receiving side of take-home tests and I know how hard it is to impress someone with those.
When I hire I don’t need someone to impress me, he has to present himself as able to do the job.
I think a lot of devs think they have to hire someone that impresses them and we end up with insane tests and adversarial interviews.
Yeah of course there will be people who will blow through the task much faster than others with better quality than average and they will impress me and they will get the offer in first place - but often times they already get multiple offers and after negotiation they will pick some higher offer and we have to get someone we can afford to do the job.
> 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…
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I think I managed about 10k users with my mac shareware games in 2009/10, and that didn't get me ramen profitability let alone modern pay scales. So not necessarily any budget for more than they did.
Single dev codebases have a really hard time growing to 400kloc though
> 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…
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Single dev codebases have a really hard time growing to 400kloc though
The point is that one cannot be confident that 10k users maps to "enough money to engineer this properly".
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Single dev codebases have a really hard time growing to 400kloc though
Hmm. I've found that it's much easier and faster to write a lot of code than to take the time and be thoughtful of what you end up shipping. > I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Mark Twain [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...
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Apparently they expect people to work for free for more than a month to learn material they then won't use. In my mind that's a rather nasty practice. Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has.
> Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has. You're looking for people who feel like they can't be bothered to learn some of the science and fundamentals of their craft? And you'd actively oppose hiring people who have the determination to go the extra mile? You'd actually discriminate against p…
Whether someone demonstrates a willingness to dive in deep and learn things I catch with an entirely different technique, like putting them into contact with a new programming language.
Filtering out people with experience from "FAANG" will likely get rid of some people that think they are "too good to put in the work", because they have that line on their resumes. And those I've met were absolutely insufferable and incompetent.