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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#531

Post by k4rli »

belmarca wrote: post #412
hintymad wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The past decade is the golden age for software developers, so we had lots of options. I was wondering if we will still have so much freedom as the market has increasingly become the buyer's one.

I haven't been interviewing full-time, but these past couple of years I have had barely any success. Currently getting insta-refused even for jobs with lower skill requirements. I've heard similar from friends and colleagues. There's a bootstrap issue as well. A developer with a brand name on their resume is much more desirable than one without, even for equal skill and experience.

Please don't post such statements without location. This is completely irrelevant without knowing the country at least.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#532

Post by shawabawa3 »

s_dev wrote: post #530
shawabawa3 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Here's another way of phrasing it -- if Linus Torvalds went for an interview with Google would he have to invert a binary tree and if he failed to do so (maybe he misconstrues the question and messes up or him being Linus and just refusing) would that be a good reason to reject him? Linus also can be equally or far more egotistical than Max Howell.

I find the idea that just because someone is an excellent software engineer they are therefore guaranteed to be a good fit for a particular role at Google a bit weird

I'd say that if Linus applied to be a software engineer at Google they should be prepared to invert binary trees or do $generic_leetcode type things because that's the expectation for that role

If they applied to be Google Fellow or some other lofty position then I wouldn't expect them to need to do any coding at all in the interview

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#534

Post by valicord »

godelski wrote: post #493
valicord wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Why's that a problem?

The first half of the sentence you're responding to answers this question already. Because you can't compare candidates fairly if you ask everyone a different question. Is a candidate who aced an easy question better or worse than a candidate who struggled with a difficult question?

> For what reason? "Because"?

What are you asking? Why is an interview where you ask about high level design different from an interview where you ask to write code? Isn't that like asking why an apple is different from an orange? They just are, by definition.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#535

Post by acdha »

e_y_ wrote: post #496
acdha wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, to be clear I’m not saying it’s terrible - only that it’s not as objective as people who like it tend to think. In addition to the bias you mentioned, the big skew is that it selects for people who do well on that kind of question in an unusual environment under stress, which is rarely representative of the actual job. That’s survivable for Google – although their lost decade suggests they shouldn’t be happy with it – but it can be really bad for smaller companies without their inertia.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#536

Post by mrweasel »

vntok wrote: post #515
mrweasel wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently interviewed a candidate, with 7 years of experience at a FAANG company, fail a really basic coding interview and we don't even make you write code. I have no idea what these people expect. We ask coding questions, we have basic programming skills as a requirement, what do they think will happen if they get the job? Do they expect to just magically learn the required skills or hope that nobody will notice…

> Do they expect to just magically learn the required skills or hope that nobody will notice that they're not able to close their tasks? It obviously worked for the candidate you mention, didn't it? Spent 7 years at FAANG, didn't know how to code.

That is true, but how?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#537

Post by azornathogron »

mrweasel wrote: post #536
vntok wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they expect to just magically learn the required skills or hope that nobody will notice that they're not able to close their tasks? It obviously worked for the candidate you mention, didn't it? Spent 7 years at FAANG, didn't know how to code.

That is true, but how?

There are lots of roles at big companies that don't involve actually writing code. The bigger the company, the more communication and organizational overhead there is, and the more not-actually-coding work there is. Even within roles that have a "software engineering" title.

Hell, I barely touch any code in my current company. The only reason I can still code is because I love it, started programming at about 11 years old, and still do it in my spare time. If it was "just a job" for me, then no doubt the skill would atrophy.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#538

Post by ndiddy »

uuddlrlrbaba wrote: post #529
M4v3R wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overshoo…

So have the candidate do a small project and submit a PR.

The problem there is that the amount of time being wasted is asymmetrical since the employer isn't present, so the typical experience from the candidate's perspective is spending an evening working on a project and then getting no feedback and a canned rejection letter.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#539

Post by lr4444lr »

andai wrote: post #518
lr4444lr wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're completely ignoring the reality of frauds. Jeff Atwood was writing about this over a decade ago with "FizzBuzz". There are many people who spend more effort creating the illusion of competence on paper and on the job, getting harder to detect the higher they go. We as a profession (software engineers) have continually resisted broad unified certification like other engineers which could be a replacemen…

>even then it sometimes fails How can a code interview fail? Hidden earpiece?

People spending inordinate amounts of time memorizing solutions to common problems. This is admittedly partly the fault of HR not ensuring that interviewers have a good pool of problems to choose from and twists to put on things, but it's a constant cat and mouse game with various websites aggregating interview questions from companies.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#540

Post by [deleted] »

skydhash wrote: post #352
glandium wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in the age of ChatGPT. It might actually be time to assess how candidates use it during interviews. What prompts they write, how they refine their prompts, how they use the answers, whether they take them at face value, etc.

You might as well ask how they use book libraries and web search.

[deleted]
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