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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

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Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#581

Post by _akhe »

darkwater wrote: post #557
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…

> 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.

This is basically what happened, the industry turned manager-heavy and expelled a lot of talent, replacing lifelong developers with bootcamp devs and other non-tech background people. It's kinda messed up because the lifelong developer types got called nerds growing up, had to learn what they know in the face of bullying and computers being very uncool, only to be basically replaced by those who made fun of them when it finally became "cool" and lucrative to be a developer.

Because it's all managers and no talent now, there's like an Interview Industrial Complex that emerged, where most teams spend the majority of time and energy just interviewing thousands of people and hiring/firing (via manufactured drama) while they never really build anything - it's all these managers know how to do because there are so few real developers left.

Some of the best developers I know of (of libs I use, etc.) outright refuse to work in the infantile conditions of the modern corporate setting anyway. The lucky ones have found other revenue streams and spend their coding energy on open source or personal ventures.

I talked to a young founder the other day - maybe 10 years younger than me, in his 20s - who said multiple times he was "retired", he kept waiting for some kind of validation on my face I guess but I just don't find it impressive. I lost respect actually, having heard that. In his mind he thinks he's a baller, in my mind he's a lazy egomaniac who knows 4 total things - I wouldn't even let this kid mow my lawn.

Smart, talented people just aren't valued anymore - it's more about prestige and authority now. But maybe not forever, they're certainly leaving themselves wide open at the advent of this LLM thing. Would love nothing more than the big tech ship to sink and get displaced by smaller, smarter companies.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#582

Post by willcipriano »

bobthepanda wrote: post #573
willcipriano wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the time you took writing this comment you could've gotten the repo created and the title and description filled out. Writing text in a public readme.md would serve you better than sending it to me.

I have side projects, but I don't expect every candidate to, nor do I expect every candidate to be a religious reader of every HN comment thread.

I'm not saying it should be mandatory, but they would have to show mastery some other way. Whiteboard? Live coding? Project?

I think a side project opens up the opportunity to skip that for a project presentation. This is a lot more in line with real life as you would typically code and later present that work to others. You would defend it to some degree, why you made choice A vs choice B. If you created it, you'll be able to do that.

Doesn't need to be a huge thing. Just show you can do anything at all really at the junior level. Intermediates can show mastery in a framework with something with slightly more complexity than a "hello world".

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#583

Post by zamalek »

LargeWu wrote: post #579
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…

Hard disagree. On my teams, we're going to give you a problem with some slight ambiguities to see how you handle that. We're going to see what kinds of questions you ask and how you respond to feedback. We want to hear you walk through your thought process. The more senior the position, the more important all of this becomes. Getting the "correct" solution is, at best, 50% of the goal with the interview.

This is not the approach that the majority of coding interviews take. In my experience, it has been disinterested interviewers who are blatantly pretending to understand what they are asking. Any attempt to engage in the type of discussion you aim for is met with dead ends, because that's not what the Googled answer contains.

Your approach is a major outlier. You probably have many good candidates turning away, and for good reason, they have no idea that you are different to everyone else. Find a different way to do this, there are several other approaches.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#584

Post by _akhe »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #465
spankalee wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. In the interviews I give I care about whether the candidate can write code, yes, but also talk and think about code. The conversation is the most important part of the interview, and the thinking (and communication) is the most important thing I'm trying to judge after basic skills. Like you said, you can get a good sense within the first few lines of pseudocode if someone's at least competent at writin…

Meh. I’ve met dozens like you. People who swear they just want to see “how you think.” Then, in the post interview roundup we talk about the candidates and you’re a bit disheartened that they didn’t complete the exercise, so you give a pass even when every other person in the room gives a thumbs up. Nah. Re evaluate yourself and your biases.

My favorite question to ask these "see how you think" types when it's my turn is:

What is the most impressive thing you've ever done?

Just watch how they struggle with this one. I've never met anyone slinging code tests who is so curious in "how we think" that has ever made anything interesting whether it's code, design, music, a company, anything. It's just a pretentious statement made by gatekeeping noobs who love to interview, nothing more.

I tried to save your comment lol

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#585

Post by dilyevsky »

s_dev wrote: post #484
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…

>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…

You should really read your own link - the part where he admits he made that whole story up. Im gonna guess failing some basic coding is not what tanked him. He still thinks they owe him the job though because he’s kinda famous and did a popular project in a language that Google doesn’t use, so that’s cute.

I also dont see how this one anecdote (even if it was true) invalidates anything I said above. You’re gonna have false negatives in any system you chose unless you just wave everyone in

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#586

Post by pseudalopex »

whimsicalism wrote: post #574
pseudalopex wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies What are the tiers? It's close to typical for a Bay Area Google L5 according to levels.fyi.

tiers are about the quality of the company, not the internal leveling. Google would be a tier1-2, Uber/Lyft/Netflix would be tier 1, Adobe would be tier 2-3, etc.

The point was companies usually considered tier 1 like Google did not have such compensation.

What makes Lyft higher quality than Google?

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#587

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

mrweasel wrote: post #514
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…

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…

Some people genuinely freeze up or overthink to their detriment in an interview setting, despite being competent otherwise.

Happened to me a couple of times back in university when I had to get an internship for one of the semesters.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#588

Post by [deleted] »

mihaaly wrote: post #494
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 conv…

[deleted]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#589

Post by barfbagginus »

mtnGoat wrote: post #572
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 you think working at a FANG would make you a better developer? I’m sorry but I think that’s a bad expectation, hire from a startup if you want great developers, their span of control and influence is much wider. Most of us at FANG are pigeon holed into a very narrow topic, have to work with really annoying, slow and complex internal build systems. And write very little actual code. Also, unless you have global sca…

15 years ago fang devs were some of the best. Now it feels like all of fang is crumbling under tech debt and enshittifying executives, like AOL did.

You love to see it!

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#590

Post by _akhe »

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,…

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