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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#501

Post by jjgreen »

devbent wrote: post #431
pseudalopex wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had to work on tree traversal stuff multiple times in my life, anything low level GUI related will work with trees a ton. How many times did you have to write tree balancing code with no reference materials?

The exact same number of times I've been asked that during an interview: 0! I do ask tree traversal questions when interviewing because I've had to traverse a lot of trees so I think being able to do an in order traversal of an already sorted binary tree (which is only a handful of lines of code) is fair game.

Just the once? [maths joke]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#502

Post by sfn42 »

josephg wrote: post #382
sanderjd wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you ever want to go deeper, you’ve gotta understand data structures and algorithms. I don't think this is quite right. I think it's more like: If you ever want to go deeper, you've gotta be able to recognize when the problem you're solving fits a pattern for which good data structures and/or algorithms exist, and you've gotta be able to find, understand, and apply good reference material. Solving this "knowi…

Yeah I think that’s what I mean by “understand data structures and algorithms”. Or, I think your description is exactly what a useful working understanding looks like. You should know broadly what’s out there so if a problem comes up, you know where to look. (Would a hash table help? A priority queue? etc). And you should be skilled enough such that if you decide to use a red-black tree, you can find a good library o…

I think about time complexity and DSA all the time when programming. My personal view is that the people who claim it is unnecessary don't understand it and probably would be better off if they did.

I've seen lots of code that would be better if the author knew some basics. For example a report that took over half an hour to generate, I made a one-line change and cut the time to a few minutes - pretty sure I could have made it practically instant if I had taken the time to go through all of it.

And it's not like I'm some genius, I just understand the stuff I've been taught. Pretty sure most of my peers are supposed to have learned the same stuff, I think they just didn't really understand it.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#503

Post by jillesvangurp »

gnutrino wrote: post #82
surfingdino wrote: post #77

I have 30+ years of experience on my CV and I still am being asked to do coding interviews... I flatly refuse every time, because they have no connection to the actual job. The hiring process disregards experience and treats everyone in the same way. Ours is a stupid industry.

Have you ever been hired by a company you refused to do the coding interview for?

I've had people apologize to me for trying to make me do one. The interviewer was smart enough to realize that I was the senior in the room. I would have gotten that job but I declined it for another, more interesting one.

The mistake many companies make with attempting to hire senior developers is losing out on the opportunity to hire the good ones by assuming the candidate will fall on their knees to get the job and do the silly test and be subjected to some prolonged process. The better ones will simply not do that and lose interest the second you say "coding interview". They are only on the market for limited amount of time and all your competitors will be eager to hire them.

Hiring senior developers is mostly a sales job. You need to do your homework (i.e. read the CV, look at the Github) and really sell the notion how amazing it would be for the candidate to work for you and what a great fit they are. I speak from experience; having hired and built a few teams. If there's a lot of doubt after you did your homework, the interview needs to be about building a case that the candidate still has some redeeming features. If there isn't the interview needs to be about quickly confirming key points and then moving onto sales. If after all that you still doubt the person can code, then don't hire them.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#504

Post by willvarfar »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #500

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 s…

FWIW I always ask some really super simple coding questions in interviews, even for really senior people with apparently stellar CVs. Let them pick their language or use psuedocode or whatever.

It's surprising how many 'senior' engineers are actually BSers who will slow you down or derail you completely rather than speed you up and you need to spot them because they will excel at getting through the non-technical interview filtering!

Also, I'm interested in how you explore things and explain things. I'm not actually interested in acquiring an implementation of FizzBuzz or whatever. I just want you to show me that you 'get' it and then we can get on to the interesting stuff like 'tell me about your last project' etc.

So don't be too hasty to think the people doing technical interviews are idiots thinking devs are interchangeable cogs etc.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#505

Post by M4v3R »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #500

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 s…

I totally understand your point of view, but looking at it from the other side it’s not as simple. We had candidates with 10+ years of experience in their resume, talking to them it seemed they know what they’re doing, they showed some of the code they’ve supposedly written. Then they got hired and it turned out they can’t code - their PRs are below junior level, constant bugs, communication is abysmal, they overshoot their estimations by 3-4x, etc.

Thus happened to us twice, and after we introduced a simple live coding session to our interviews where you have to implement a simple real world web component (for a frontend position) suddenly the problem of bad hires disappeared almost entirely (you can’t judge someone’s character during a short interview but that’s another issue).

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#506

Post by whstl »

emseetech wrote: post #399
whstl wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with some of this. At some of my past jobs and the current one, this kind of algorithmic knowledge was important to build features that were differentiators in the market. As much as people love to pretend, not every single possible solution is in a library. Sometimes you're the one building the library. It doesn't have to be leetcode, but candidates should at least be able to produce some code that doesn'…

| this kind of algorithmic knowledge was important to build features that were differentiators in the market I agree with this, but with the caveat that it's extremely rare to come up with a truly novel algorithm in a production environment. Those almost always come out of academia or R&D departments. So is it important that people remember how to implement algorithms from scratch? Or is it important that they know w…

You don't need something "truly novel" to have a market advantage. Far from it.

You just need something that is not ready made.

Remember that not every algorithm is neatly package-able, or has a cool name like "Stable Marriage Problem" or "Levenshtein Distance".

Also: maybe your advantage is implementing some of those in a new language. Maybe your advantage is implementing one of those in SQL! Maybe you have a tree-like or graph-like structure, and you need to do something with it without having to export into some format expected by certain packages. Knowing what to implement is important too.

Also, those interviews are often testing for something even simpler than those fancy algorithms.

Nobody uses Fizz Buzz or Recursive Fibonacci daily, but you might need to implement something that is beyond creating views/models/controllers in your favourite MVC framework.

This is what the test is checking for: coding beyond what's on the README of your framework.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#507

Post by kovac »

ok123456 wrote: post #52

I've found that asking them to review some obviously bad code with glaring errors and problems is more informative than asking them to solve some random DSA problem. Candidates who can code well can point out code that has obvious problems. Just ask if this is good or bad, and if it is bad, how they could improve it. This demonstrates competency and doesn't make the interview seem like a grind but instead more like a…

This is a good idea. This would also show someone's ability to read and contribute to existing code which is a large part of our day to day tasks. There are some that can only solve problems their way, which often means them trying to rewrite everything.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#508

Post by sevagh »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #486
s_dev wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. What about the lad who develops homebrew who got rejected from Google because he wasn't able to invert a binary tree on the spot? Many Googlers use his software internally and externally. If the purpose of the interview is to make sure he can code why did…

Why does "Many Googlers use his software internally and externally" mean he would be a good hire for Google? From all his public complaining about failing an interview it seems Google did the right thing not hiring him, he has a massive ego and it's very possible that "writing homebrew" is less useful to google than "inverting a binary tree"

It means that he created a tool, with his skills and capabilities, that is a force multiplier for other Google engineers. This is a straight up undeniable example that his capabilities _already_ brought value to Google and their stacked deck of genius non-egostical binary tree inverters.

There's not a more pragmatic measure of whether somebody can code than a track record of a successful code project used by other coders.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#509

Post by sevagh »

nineplay wrote: post #244
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…

The problem is that the candidate has been assured that they will be asked 'leet' code questions where solving the problem isn't enough, they will also be asked about O notation and how the code can be optimized and whether to use memoization or recursion. This is what the books will tell you, this is what YouTube will tell you, this is what 'helpful' recruiters will tell you. And IME this is what most interviewers h…

You're all not getting it.

They only want to see somebody who can get working code and a glimpse of their thought process. But from 100s of mediocre examples, the better coder will have a "better thought process."

Same goes for dating. Of course people will swear up and down they "only consider personality." Turns out, they've met 10 other people with a better personality than you.

Just because they're "only looking for x" doesn't mean they'll accept anybody that clears the bar.

The ultimate read between the lines though is that "oh I'm only looking for xyz, nothing superhuman" in a process where you have 10,000 competitors and applicants will still require high performance on your part. It's just a nicety, a meaningless phrase.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#510

Post by willcipriano »

bobthepanda wrote: post #457
godelski wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have junior and senior students that struggle with fizzbuzz... But damn, are they not allowed to even do a lazy inefficient `sort(mylist)[-2]` if they forgot about for loops? That's the most efficient in terms of number of characters, right haha But I still think you can reasonably weed these people out without these whiteboard problems. For exactly the same reasons engineers and scientists can. And let's be honest…

Using GitHub is discriminatory against people who don’t code on the weekends outside of their jobs, and most people’s job related code would be under NDA and not postable on Github. To be a capital E Engineer you have to pass a licensing exam. This filter obviously is not going to catch everything but it does raise the bar a little bit. —- As far as the root question goes, they are allowed to propose that, and then i…

Hiring people who code at all is discrimination against people who played video games instead of learning to code.
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