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In defense of coding interviews

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Re: In defense of coding interviews

#61

Post by neilv »

andreygrehov wrote: post #36

I used to hate leetcode-style coding interviews, but now I don't. The reason for this is a comment from a Google engineer. That comment changed my mind. In that comment they explained the motivation behind asking these type of questions and it all finally clicked for me. Corporations are not testing your knowledge of algorithms per se. While that knowledge is obviously important, what's more important is how dedicate…

> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming?

That's an interesting theory. And they pick the goal that happens to be best suited to fresh/current undergrads from Stanford who weren't working a draining job to put themselves through school, so can afford the additional person-months to achieve the gatekeeping that was set up by people like them, for people like them.

I and many other experienced software engineers have demonstrated perseverance and rising to the occasion of extremely challenging goals. But that theory suggests they're not interested in that. Maybe they're interested in the class shibboleth that was established when computers became less of a meritocracy for people with a passion for it, and more of a go-to status job for the upper middle class?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#62

Post by mountainriver »

d--b wrote: post #56

The dirty secret is that it’s never about the coding skills. It’s about the person’s behavior, the way he/she interacts with you. It’s about the person’s culture, tabs vs space, and that kind of things. And it’s mostly about whether you like the person or not. And I think it’s fine. You mainly need to be sure that the person knows what a for loop is, other than that, most people are ok at programming. What really mat…

Yup this is true for the most part, although someone bad will be harder to justify.

It’s hilarious listening to people review candidates on third coding interviews. Usually it’s “this person didn’t know this one thing I think makes me really smart”.

This is why I lean so heavy in OSS to review candidates. I can see how they interact with people, and whether they are actually able to build software that _people want_

I find with this approach it’s a lot harder to justify nonsense.

I hear people say maybe they don’t have time for OSS and then hand them a Leetcode interview, which as we all know is just about memorizing problems. OSS is such a better metric and has the added benefit of improving the world.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#63

Post by ng12 »

tombert wrote: post #13

I used to defend coding interviews, until I had an interview about a month ago, and the leetcode questions came off as kind of insulting. I have a decade of experience, working as a senior and staff engineer at megacorporations, have experience as a research scientist, am in a PhD program for computer science research, but lets just double check that I know how to use a hash table.

Well, that's a really great sign you don't want to work there. If I don't have a good interview experience I don't want the job.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#64

Post by light_hue_1 »

leeoniya wrote: post #58
vorpalhex wrote: post #27

"Can coding interviews work in an ideal world" which is what the article seems to discuss: sure, probably, this seems like a reasonable approach to what that ideal world might look like: a really carefully chosen question and attempting to understand the process the candidate is using to comprehend their skill. "Do coding interviews work in the actual world in which we live in?" No, fundamentally not. Almost nobody i…

> or asking obnoxious questions ("Why did you use a foreach and not a for loop?") you should be able to explain why you wrote something the way you did; that's not an absurd ask. perf characteristics of different iteration styles are often significant to the task at hand.

> perf characteristics of different iteration styles are often significant to the task at hand.

This ridiculously untrue.

It's also a great example of how dumb current interviews are. Someone like this poster could easily interview you, and now what? Do you just play along or begin to explain how incredibly wrong they are?

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#66

Post by t-writescode »

d--b wrote: post #56

The dirty secret is that it’s never about the coding skills. It’s about the person’s behavior, the way he/she interacts with you. It’s about the person’s culture, tabs vs space, and that kind of things. And it’s mostly about whether you like the person or not. And I think it’s fine. You mainly need to be sure that the person knows what a for loop is, other than that, most people are ok at programming. What really mat…

Statements like this make me distinctly angry because I do everything I can to remove myself from the interview, of sorts.

If they come up with, or start walking with an interesting solution, I listen to them.

Tabs and spaces don't matter.

I actively work against the biases of "whether I like the person or not" because I'm aware of that as a factor.

We can absolutely minimize all of those peripherals when we explicitly train against it and a good programming interview doesn't have to be about that.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#67

Post by lelanthran »

mountainriver wrote: post #62
d--b wrote: post #56

The dirty secret is that it’s never about the coding skills. It’s about the person’s behavior, the way he/she interacts with you. It’s about the person’s culture, tabs vs space, and that kind of things. And it’s mostly about whether you like the person or not. And I think it’s fine. You mainly need to be sure that the person knows what a for loop is, other than that, most people are ok at programming. What really mat…

Yup this is true for the most part, although someone bad will be harder to justify. It’s hilarious listening to people review candidates on third coding interviews. Usually it’s “this person didn’t know this one thing I think makes me really smart”. This is why I lean so heavy in OSS to review candidates. I can see how they interact with people, and whether they are actually able to build software that _people want_…

> It’s hilarious listening to people review candidates on third coding interviews. Usually it’s “this person didn’t know this one thing I think makes me really smart”.

Yup. I just went through a round of interviews at multiple companies. In the past I successfully interviewed at a FAANG.

I agree completely.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#69

Post by lelanthran »

Justsignedup wrote: post #19

I usually give a data structure coding interview: Here's some data models, and here's how you can reference eachother by properties. Cool. Let's do 3 levels of nested loops to extract the relationships and map them. That's like 99% of what they'll be doing. The signals I'd look for are "do they start the entire thing by looking at structures or not", etc. But unfortunately this breaks down when you're interviewing 10…

> Most things leet code interviews screen is "does this person know how to cram" because I tell you, everyone I know who aced leet code interviews crammed for 3 months and literally knew any one you can think of, and every variation.

As I commented above, I successfully passed multiple leetcode interviews in the last four years, including FAANG. I did not spend a single minute on prep.

Re: In defense of coding interviews

#70

Post by quickthrower2 »

d--b wrote: post #56

The dirty secret is that it’s never about the coding skills. It’s about the person’s behavior, the way he/she interacts with you. It’s about the person’s culture, tabs vs space, and that kind of things. And it’s mostly about whether you like the person or not. And I think it’s fine. You mainly need to be sure that the person knows what a for loop is, other than that, most people are ok at programming. What really mat…

It is definitely about the coding skills. It is too easy to bullshit and there is a financial incentive to do so. Also many people with genunine 10 years of experience are not too good at coding.
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