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Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

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Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#61

Post by alephnan »

mike_hearn wrote: post #56
alephnan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fizzbuzz question would sufficiently address points 1 thru 5. The issue at hand is that the "unrealistic" algorithm questions aren't fizzbuzz.

Fizzbuzz was the leetcode of yesteryear. It's exactly the same concept, just a different unrealistic question. The leetcode issue is to a large extent caused by, literally, leetcode.com the website. When I first started doing technical interviewing this website didn't exist, so if you developed a question that wasn't too easy or too hard, covered the bases, fitted well into 45 minutes, that you could calibrate the di…

Right, but points 1-5 aren't about these issues you're bringing up.

Sure, people can rote memorize "public static void main(String[] args)", but there's way you can test them their understanding on each of these magic keywords. This would achieve the goal of understanding programming language constructs without unrealistic algorithmic questions.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#62

Post by mike_hearn »

phreeza wrote: post #52
alephnan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody has found a more reliable proxy yet. Companies have not found a process at scale where they can train their employees to systematically gauge candidates. Small and startup companies where leadership is still involved in the interview process can gauge candidates based on their own technical intuition. So it's false to say NOBODY has a proxy for good software engineering skills. The founders can also look at…

> Small and startup companies where leadership is still involved in the interview process can gauge candidates based on their own technical intuition. So it's false to say NOBODY has a proxy for good software engineering skills. Is there any proof that this method actually works better though? I've heard plenty of stories of people in smallish (30 FTE or so) startups working alongside some really disastrous hires.

Sure. I built a team of ~35 this way and it worked out pretty well. There were very few dud hires, and of those that happened on investigation it was always because the process I put in place wasn't followed (on one occasion it wasn't followed by me!). It got noticed; we had customers telling us they had to deal with us because they couldn't match the talent we'd been able to attract. We had employees leave and come back because they wanted to work in a good team again.

The process wasn't anything special and the questions weren't particularly hard. It was very heavily standardized though.

No system is perfect. You'll get bad hires no matter what, and miss good hires. The question is only how many.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#63

Post by rgavuliak »

alephnan wrote: post #32
rco8786 wrote: post #15

As always, it's an imperfect proxy. Nothing more, nothing less. But nobody has found a more reliable proxy yet.

> nobody has found a more reliable proxy yet. Companies have not found a process at scale where they can train their employees to systematically gauge candidates. Small and startup companies where leadership is still involved in the interview process can gauge candidates based on their own technical intuition. So it's false to say NOBODY has a proxy for good software engineering skills. The founders can also look at…

> Employees don't

As a manager in a scale up, my incentive is to hire competent people into my team so we can meet our goals. Sure, it's not the same as the company being mine, but it's a good enough incentive. I think a standardized process is better because it reduces unconscious biases.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#64

Post by mike_hearn »

alephnan wrote: post #61
mike_hearn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fizzbuzz was the leetcode of yesteryear. It's exactly the same concept, just a different unrealistic question. The leetcode issue is to a large extent caused by, literally, leetcode.com the website. When I first started doing technical interviewing this website didn't exist, so if you developed a question that wasn't too easy or too hard, covered the bases, fitted well into 45 minutes, that you could calibrate the di…

Right, but points 1-5 aren't about these issues you're bringing up. Sure, people can rote memorize "public static void main(String[] args)", but there's way you can test them their understanding on each of these magic keywords. This would achieve the goal of understanding programming language constructs without unrealistic algorithmic questions.

That's covered in the article, my bullet points were just an attempt at a summary.

Briefly, it doesn't work like that. Interviewing developers is very unintuitive. Many reasonable expectations are violated. There are lots of people who can talk very well and will appear to have a good understanding of programming, up until the point that you ask them to write a program (any program) at which point they can't even start. If you don't force candidates to write an actual working program you will pretty quickly hire people who just can't do it, and then have to fire them later. Yes this sounds totally wrong, everyone struggles with this fact at first. It's sort of like the Matrix. Nobody can be told what interviewing is like from the employer's perspective. You have to see it for yourself.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#65

Post by guappa »

cturner wrote: post #59

Could not read the whole article but get the gist. Time was that I would have agreed. But I have changed position. Candidates: you need to appreciate how difficult it is to hire good people, the dishonesty of many candidates, and how limited the tools are for identifying talent and filtering out weasels. It is true: party trick Big O questions have low utility in most jobs. It is true: there is talent out there which…

Yes the candidates are aware that interviews are terrible.

But I seem to understand from your comment that we should just all accept that they are terrible and keep doing things the same way?

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#66

Post by guappa »

sgu999 wrote: post #24
Kelteseth wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank god I never had these interview questions at the companies I interviewed for, here in Germany. Most talks were simply a 30min chat with the actual developer there. Mostly about the job, what they do, and some of their current issues. Then they would ask me how I would tackle them.

It's roughly the same in France, aside from some startup bros who have been told leetcode and brainteasers are the way of unicorns. I think it's in part due to the higher trust we put on credentials like Eng degrees.

I studied with people from many countries and I think the french people were very qualified students in general.

There were students from Greece and Iran who, after a bachelor degree in computer science, could not find the highest value in an array.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#67

Post by guappa »

zwnow wrote: post #40
begueradj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it is simply an efficient way to discriminate applicants based on their age: a fresh school graduate in his/her twenties is the one who is more likely to solve LeetCode like algorithms than a senior developer in his 40s who has a respectable knowledge and insight on how software should be done, deployed and run.

Usually the issues companies throw at their applicants aren't that difficult to solve. Every dev should know how to split data into structures you can work with.

Google asked me a question… I could solve it in O(n²) but not in O(n).

After, with calm, talking about it with a friend who is a professor at university and has a phd in mathematics, he reflected that since my problem only used positive numbers, I could have exploited a certain property and simplify my algorithm.

So in the end, if you're lucky and have faced that particular completely artificial problem before, you can do it.

Otherwise you need some calm to think, and you can't do that while there are two people harassing you because you named your variables with a name they don't like, and a clock is ticking.

In the end you're selecting for "has this person heard of this problem or a similar one before" and not "can this person think".

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#68

Post by [deleted] »

guappa wrote: post #65
cturner wrote: post #59

Could not read the whole article but get the gist. Time was that I would have agreed. But I have changed position. Candidates: you need to appreciate how difficult it is to hire good people, the dishonesty of many candidates, and how limited the tools are for identifying talent and filtering out weasels. It is true: party trick Big O questions have low utility in most jobs. It is true: there is talent out there which…

Yes the candidates are aware that interviews are terrible. But I seem to understand from your comment that we should just all accept that they are terrible and keep doing things the same way?

[deleted]

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#69

Post by karmakurtisaani »

guappa wrote: post #65
cturner wrote: post #59

Could not read the whole article but get the gist. Time was that I would have agreed. But I have changed position. Candidates: you need to appreciate how difficult it is to hire good people, the dishonesty of many candidates, and how limited the tools are for identifying talent and filtering out weasels. It is true: party trick Big O questions have low utility in most jobs. It is true: there is talent out there which…

Yes the candidates are aware that interviews are terrible. But I seem to understand from your comment that we should just all accept that they are terrible and keep doing things the same way?

Pretty much yes. Unless you're the head of HR at a big corporation, you have pretty much no say on how it's done.

Re: Why do big companies ask unrealistic software engineering interview questions?

#70

Post by sebastianconcpt »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #49
sebastianconcpt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and is not because they are making money out of you (that's fine if you agree) it's mostly because they aren't censorship proof or ideologically neutral.

Medium started expressly for the money. How to let authors monetize. To criticize it for doing what it was created to do, seems odd. Sure, there are a lot of software packages out there so any dev can create a new Medium. Who cares? The point was to pull a lot of people to one site to monetize it. They would browse around and find other authors, which is not possible if every dev out there creates their own site. Jus…

I already mentioned that monetizing is fine if you agree so no point in being triggered by that.

Regarding to censorship your reduction to the absurd attempt is making a non-point here. The cultural war is overt, well understood, widely understood at this point and no human discipline is immune to the ideological mind viruses. These might not change the patterns you code but certainly boycott hiring you without feedback, unconfessably, for the revolutionary goals of advancing a power grab agenda based on either true self-deception or lies.

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