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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#541

Post by Aeolun »

lr4444lr wrote: post #511
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 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…

> I think you're completely ignoring the reality of frauds.

Or maybe their strategy still catches all of the frauds and it has therefore never been a problem to them?

I have to agree with their take, and just asking a bunch of technical questions -even without any code- is good enough to filter out the obvious incompetents.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#542

Post by Aeolun »

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.

That kinda makes sense, unless you want Rene to be your replacement.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#543

Post by Aeolun »

josephg wrote: post #303
devbent wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I still don't get why such questions are even asked as most jobs I've ever had not even remotely touched those and I've touched quite a few industries, technologies and types of companies. 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. I've also had to work with hash tables directly, and with memory caching layers. I really should learn…

Yep. In a project I’m working on at the moment (collab text editing), I’ve implemented 2 different b-trees, a skip list, 2 custom file formats and a dozen or so algorithms which do various graph traversals. I get that this is uncommon, but if you scratch beneath the surface, most software (browsers, databases, compilers, OSes) are full of this stuff. Even while I was consulting stuff like this would come up. At one c…

If I want to go deeper. I'll have to understand the trees _at that time_.

Not now, when I'm just re-exporting ESM node packages as CJS so our legacy system can work with them

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#544

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#545

Post by humansareok1 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #345
humansareok1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people still so misinformed about Tech salaries? Are you in the EU? Salaries are lower across the board there for engineers. In the US for Silicon Valley Type large Tech Companies the starting salary for New Graduate SWE's is 150k USD on the low end. For a senior engineer at FAANG it can easily get above 500k USD.

Keep in mind that 150k USD can also be a terminal salary at 30 years of experience in most other places in the US. Most jobs are not FAANG or FAANG adjacent.

Yes of course this is true but I was responding to this common idea that high salaries, say over 300k, don't actually exist in the US when they do and are very common for Engineers at large SV tech companies.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#547

Post by sanderjd »

sfn42 wrote: post #502
josephg wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

In my experience, whether this is top of mind has a lot more to do with what people work on and with what tools than with level of understanding. For instance, in your example:

> 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

In essentially all the work I've done in my career, this would be the result of expertise in SQL and the relational model, not in data structures and algorithms. I don't recall ever working on reporting code that isn't a dumb pipe between a SQL query and a mature library for writing CSV (or parquet or whatever). Sure, there are tons of data structures and algorithms on both the database server and client side, but that's not what I'm working on.

And I think this is pretty typical for people who mostly build "applications", that expertise in tools is more of a value-add than expertise in data structures and algorithms.

But having said that, I do agree with you that everyone benefits from these kinds of "fundamentals". Not just this, but also other fundamentals like computer hardware and systems, networking, etc. I think fundamentals are very useful, while also thinking that many people are good at their jobs without them.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#548

Post by camgunz »

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…

But this isn't what the leetcode interview tests for. Reversing a binary tree, or figuring out how to arrange the parking lot to fit the most cars or whatever isn't a working understanding, it's essentially memorization. Being able to memorize something like that takes intelligence and dedication, so it does a pretty good job selecting for that, but it also filters out a lot of people who for good and valid reasons don't want to spend hours and hours studying. Not even doctors/lawyers do this: they do it exactly once and never again.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#549

Post by s_dev »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #532
s_dev wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

>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

So the higher the role in Google the less the requirements?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#550

Post by DanielHB »

josephg wrote: post #303
devbent wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I still don't get why such questions are even asked as most jobs I've ever had not even remotely touched those and I've touched quite a few industries, technologies and types of companies. 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. I've also had to work with hash tables directly, and with memory caching layers. I really should learn…

Yep. In a project I’m working on at the moment (collab text editing), I’ve implemented 2 different b-trees, a skip list, 2 custom file formats and a dozen or so algorithms which do various graph traversals. I get that this is uncommon, but if you scratch beneath the surface, most software (browsers, databases, compilers, OSes) are full of this stuff. Even while I was consulting stuff like this would come up. At one c…

Traversing trees recursively is so trivial. I have to do this kind of stuff all the time. Just last week actually (in some frontend code no less).

Graph search and B-trees I haven't done professionally since I left college though. But it is still good to know the theory when dealing with databases.

A lot of these algorithms is more about knowing their characteristics than knowing how to implement them. For example cryptographic algorithms can be complex, but having a good lib and knowing each crypto algorithm characteristics is usually good enough for almost everyone.

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