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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

darrenkopp.com

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#551

Post by pavel_lishin »

OJFord wrote: post #512
willvarfar wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

> 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. Sounds like you'd more valuably/realistically get that from the discussion of a previous project though? How it works, or somethin…

> Sounds like you'd more valuably/realistically get that from the discussion of a previous project though? How it works, or something interesting they had to figure out, etc.?

You may be underestimating people's ability to bullshit their way through this sort of discussion.

It's harder to bullshit your way past a blank file in a code editor.

I'd wager that something like FizzBuzz will eliminate 90% of the chaff. Yes, it's laughably simple. No, it's not so simple that it won't stump a significant number of folks who've coasted for years.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#552

Post by bobthepanda »

willcipriano wrote: post #510
bobthepanda wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Codes on their spare time” is not part of the job description, but “codes at all” is.

There are plenty of reasons not to code on spare time. If anything the people who are most likely to do that are often also the people who coding interviews are supposed to be privileging, fresh single college grads.

I don’t know how people would square the statements “take-home assignments are unpaid labor and unfair to people with time commitments” and then do a 180 and say “people should have an up-to-date fresh github that they work on in their spare time.”

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#554

Post by willcipriano »

bobthepanda wrote: post #552
willcipriano wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“Codes on their spare time” is not part of the job description, but “codes at all” is. There are plenty of reasons not to code on spare time. If anything the people who are most likely to do that are often also the people who coding interviews are supposed to be privileging, fresh single college grads. I don’t know how people would square the statements “take-home assignments are unpaid labor and unfair to people wit…

If it would take the candidate "spending every waking moment of their lives coding" to have one or two small coding projects after a half decade plus in the field, that's a signal.

If you went to college but never made anything, that's a signal.

If you didn't go to college, and never made anything, just shut up and make something.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#555

Post by sfn42 »

sanderjd wrote: post #547
sfn42 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

In my case the processing was happening in our backend. I can't remember exactly why it couldn't be SQL, actually it's possible it could have been sql. But changing it to sql would have been a bigger change and this wasn't really the task I was working on, I just happened across it while doing something else.

I have also seen and fixed similar travesties where someone iterates through a huge list making one query per element, where it was fairly trivial to rewrite it to a swl join.

Point is just that understanding what you're doing is is valuable and in my mind DSA is a fundamental part of understanding what you're doing. Anyway I think we agree :)

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#556

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

arcticbull wrote: post #426
simoncion wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely does not always happen. I was asked to do interviews twice with one employer. Both times, I requested the interviewee's resume. Both times I was refused because they didn't want me to "bias" my interview. So, yeah, go figure.

It’s not generally the responsibility of the person doing the technical screen to also obtain signal on past experience. At a company with recruiting process these fall on different people specialized in the specific interview types. I’ve done an average of 2-3 interviews a week over several employers for the last 12 years, so over a thousand interviews. I’ve also defined much tech interview loop for my current emplo…

If you don't have a resume, do you still ask about candidates experience?

Many people can talk a good game and come across well but still be useless (e.g. hard fail on the simplest of white board tests).

I haven't done interviewing (on company's side of table) for a long time, but my main tack was always to go over projects on resume, focusing on last 5 years, and drill down to see if they could fluently talk about them, draw architecture diagrams, justify choices, etc, etc.

I you don't ask about past experience (= same as having resume), then how do you even know what the person's experience consists of? Useless cog, or tech lead? Highly agentic or passive, etc?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#557

Post by darkwater »

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…

> 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.

If you can navigate a software engineering position, purely undetected, by bullshitting it, I would say you can be a very good manager. You can probably handle high level concepts without knowing the implementation details.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#558

Post by bitwize »

Sounds like a skill issue, mate, just sayin. Might want to grind leetcode and do some mock interviews to build those skills up.

Look, I know a lot of the job application process is bullshit. But much of the job is bullshit too. You still have to do one kind of BS in order to land the job and the other kind in order to function as part of a team in an organization. There's really no way around that.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#559

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

esafak wrote: post #383
Ekaros wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using LLMs to find reasonable subset of algorithms for a problem sounds like a valid use case. Could even get naive implementation and lead to comparing them to pick right one.

If they take the LLMs advice were they astute or just lucky? You'd have to ask the candidate to go into details to get any signal, and if the algorithm is hard enough for them to have to consult an LLM, they might not be able to do that.

I was referring to LLM use on the job (or hobby), not as any part of interviewing process.

The reality is that most programmers can go an entire career without being algorithmically challenged, and on the rare occasion you need to do/optimize something and don't know what the best options are, then you can either just ask a colleague, or ask online, or Google, or nowadays discuss it with an AI!

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#560

Post by kstrauser »

JR1427 wrote: post #521
kstrauser wrote: post #231

Maaaaaybe, but I’m not ditching them. When I’m interviewing someone, I try to set them at ease. I’m not here to spot typos. I’m trying trying to trick you. I want to see how you think about problem solving, and I’m cheering for tou . I want you to be The One! At a prior job I was the person who asked candidates to write fizzbuzz, and it was much more of a filter than I ever would have suspected. One senior engineer,…

It's worth pointing out that there are all kinds or reasons why competent people may perform poorly at a given interview.

For sure. I do whatever I can to help them feel comfortable and emphasize the conversational style of the question. I’m not a compiler. I’m a person who wants to talk with them. Yet it’s still a stressful situation for them.

It’s not a good look for them to completely freeze up on something as trivial as fizzbuzz though. I worry how they’d react if production servers are down or if we’re being attacked if they can’t talk through the simplest of programs.

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