Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 679 posts

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#491

Post by godelski »

glandium wrote: post #391
godelski wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and we live in the age of calculators. Just because we have calculators doesn't mean we should ban them on math tests. It means you adapt and test for the more important stuff. You remove the rote mundane aspect and focus on the abstract and nuance. You still can't get GPT to understand and give nuanced responses without significant prompt engineering (usually requiring someone that understands said nuance of t…

I'm actually not talking about interviewees (ab)using ChatGPT to pass interviews and interviewers trying to catch that or work around that. I'm talking about testing candidates' use of ChatGPT as one of the skills they have. > I see you're the founder of Archipelago AI. I don't know where you got that from, but I'm not.

> I'm talking about testing candidates' use of ChatGPT as one of the skills they have.

The same way? I guess I'm confused why this is any different. You ask them? Assuming you have expertise in this, then you do that. If you don't, you ask them to maybe demonstrate it and try to listen while they explain. I'll give you a strong hint here: people that know their shit talk about nuance. They might be shy and not give it to you right away or might think they're "showing off" or something else, but it is not too hard to get experts to excitedly talk about things they're experts in. Look for that.

> I don't know where you got that from, but I'm not.

Ops, somehow I clicked esafak's profile instead. My bad

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#492

Post by godelski »

morgante wrote: post #476
dclowd9901 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: “I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two.” Well, if he fucked it up, I don’t see any reason why his ideas can’t also…

Unfortunately this only works for interns and new grads. Nobody experienced want to take a job on an experimental basis.

Fortunately people with experience have resumes and are easier to tell if they're bsing their resume.

Fuck man, people do this with engineers who work on classified projects. You all are over thinking it. You're trying to hyper optimize for a function that is incredibly noisy and does not have optimal solutions.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#493

Post by godelski »

valicord wrote: post #407
godelski wrote: post #310

Earlier 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…

To have good comparison/calibration between candidates, you should be asking the same question each time, so it can't be about the "problem the team is currently undergoing", because that's going to be something different every week/month. In general however, of course, there is/should be a round of interview that covers architecture/system design. It's just that the coding interview is a different interview type, wh…

> because that's going to be something different every week/month.

Why's that a problem? What you're going to be doing on the job is going to change at the exact same rate. But people also tend to talk about recent problems and those may be even a month old. Honestly, the questions are about seeing how the person would approach it. It is not about solving them, because you're going to be doing things you don't know the answers to beforehand anyways.

> It's just that the coding interview is a different interview type

For what reason? "Because"?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#494

Post by mihaaly »

dilyevsky wrote: post #139

Classic mistake of overthinking it and failing to realize what interviewer really wants - which is to make sure the candidate can actually write code, like at all. The question itself doesn't really matter as much as it's just a pretext. I actually asked a variation of this question for many years at Google and it was clear within first 5 mins who has been writing code day-to-day and who's been mostly "brining key st…

If the interviewer want to know if someone can write code at all, then why he/she expects much more than that in an interview?

I believe there is no single declaration about 'what the interviewer' wants.

Especially that several times they do not know themselves, just try to mimic what is expected from them or seen in some random situation they came across. Sometimes, of course.

---

"brining key stakeholders into conversations at appropriate time"

This is some very good quality euphemism here, two thumbs up! : ))

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#495

Post by godelski »

usrusr wrote: post #481
godelski wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: I've been an engineer in the past (physics undergrad -> aerospace job -> grad school/ml). I have never seen or heard of an engineer being expected to solve math equations on a whiteboard during an interview. It is expected that you already know these things. Honestly, it is expected that you have a reference to these equations and you'll have memori…

I've had a coding interview (screen, not whiteboard) fail where the main criticism was that one routine detail I took a while to get right could have been googled faster. In hindsight I still doubt that, given all the semi-related tangents you end up following from Google, but that was their expectation, look up the right piece of example code and recognize the missing bit (or get out right immediately). For a proper…

> Last thing you want is someone overconfident in their from memory version of physics.

Honestly, having been in both worlds, there's not too much of a difference. Physics is harder but coding you got more things to juggle in your brain. So I really do not think it is an issue to offload infrequent "equations"[0] to a book/google/whatever.

[0] And equations could be taken out of quotes considering that math and code are the same thing.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#496

Post by e_y_ »

acdha wrote: post #423
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…

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.

I would say that it makes the interview process more consistent and documented, and less subject to individual bias. However there's definitely going to be some bias at the institutional level considering that some people are just not good at certain types of interview questions. Algorithm and data structures questions favor people who recently graduated or are good at studying. Behavioral interviews favor people who are good at telling stories. Etc.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#497

Post by godelski »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #463
godelski wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because to actually have those types of conversations you have to have legitimate experience. To be a bit flippant, here's a relevant xkcd[0]. To be less so, "in groups" are pretty good at detecting others in their groups. I mean can you not talk to another and not figure out who's also a domain expert? It's because people "in-group" understand nuance of the subject matter. [0] https://xkcd.com/451/

Doesn’t that comic more closely hew to the idea that some fields are complete bullshit?

That's one interpretation. But that interpretation is still dependent upon intra-group recognition. The joke relies on the intra-group recognition __being__ the act of bullshitting.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#498

Post by quartesixte »

godelski wrote: post #339
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…

> Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: I've been an engineer in the past (physics undergrad -> aerospace job -> grad school/ml). I have never seen or heard of an engineer being expected to solve math equations on a whiteboard during an interview. It is expected that you already know these things. Honestly, it is expected that you have a reference to these equations and you'll have memori…

I had a senior engineer chastise me once for NOT using the lookup tables.

"How do you know your memory was infallible at that moment? Would you stake other people's lives on that memory?"

So what you did on that phone interview was probably the biggest green-flag they'd seen all day.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#499

Post by pawelmurias »

xandrius wrote: post #289
paulddraper wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still don't get why such questions are even asked The thesis is not that these exercises are representative of work but rather predictive of performance. Sales has a similar phenomenon with sports. While there is no athleticism involved in selling, many believe history in competitive sports to be a positive predictor of sales success. --- You can reasonably argue whether leetcode accomplishes this well or poorly,…

So you're saying that someone wasting their time studying leetcode to pass a stupid game is a good indicator? I would almost believe the opposite: if you actually pass those tests with flying colours, it shows me that you believe you needed to do that to be hired, while someone who's actually experienced would never in a million years step down so low.

It's a good indicator for someone will to jump through arbitrary hoops to get promoted at a big corp: write all the paper work as design docs, get all the promos requirements and make sure all the weird business requirements of corpo customers are met. If you are not willing to "step down so low" you a perfect example of the someone who they want to filter out.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#500

Post by jillesvangurp »

My attitude towards code interviews is to politely decline them and encourage people best of luck hiring a junior developer; because that's obviously what they are looking for. I'm closing in on 50, so not that junior anymore. If anyone has any doubts about my coding abilities after reading my CV, browsing my Github repos, and talking to me, then it's not going to work and we can both save ourselves some time. I've stopped responding to recruiters as I rarely see any evidence of them even being capable of doing these simple things.

I've hired and interviewed a lot of people over the years. Mostly without the help of recruiters. I like to think I'm pretty good at that, actually. I always look for people that are eager to learn. I care more about what they don't know than what they can regurgitate because they did lots of silly online prep. If people are young and fresh out of school, my assumption is they are going to have to learn a lot in a hurry. So I look for people that are curious, eager, and have an open mind. The best way to do that is to get them slightly out of their comfort zone and talking about how they would tackle things. The signs I look for here are enthusiasm, ability to surprise with good answers, etc.

This generally does not involve code interviews; though I might ask some targeted questions about how they would deal with certain things in languages, frameworks, etc. they list as being proficient in. I've of course worked for some people that insisted on me organizing code interviews and it's a chore and IMHO you learn absolutely nothing that isn't obvious if you just casually talk to people for 30 minutes or so. I usually argue against such things and prefer just talking to people directly.

Post reply on HN