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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I went in with doubt I had done it right. And if in your doubt you decided to run it through the interpreter to get the "real" answer, whoops, you're rejected.
That's cheating (even if it just assures you that your answer is correct)
They had some leet code problem prepared and I tried solving it and failed.
During the challenge, I used some python string operand (:-1) (and maybe some other stuff) that they didn't knew.
In the end, I failed the challenge as I didn't do it in the O(n) way...
These kind of stupid challenges exemplify what's wrong with hiring these days: one interviewer, usually some "vp"/"head of" decides what is the "correct" way to write some code, when they (sometimes) themselves couldn't write a line of code (since they've been "managers" for a millennia)
ps. they actually did not know what `:-1` means ...I rest my case
I got the right answer but it was so easy I went in with doubt I had done it right. Which I understand is my issue to work on, but if I were interviewing, I'd ask candidates to verbalize or write out their thought process to get a sense of who is overthinking or doubting themselves.
That is, if you're really interested in pursuing the position.
Not only are you willing to take their tests, but you go beyond what is required, for your own benefit and edification.
That's why, when presented with the URL during the interview, you immediately load it, and right-click View Source into another tab, while simultaneously making small talk with the former CTO interviewer.
Even though you're a backender, you know enough frontend to navigate the interspersed style and html and javascript and so, you solve both puzzles, and weave into the conversation the two answers, while also deciding that this is probably not the gig for you, but who knows, let's see how they answer your questions now...
Peeking at the source, it's just a zero-width div, which is not accomodating of people with disabilities. This might open you up to litigation if you disqualify a blind person on the grounds he gave the wrong answer 'using AI', when he might have just been answering the question his screen reader read out.
If someone is visually impaired, it's short enough you can just read the problem text to them.
For anyone who missed the (poorly-explained) trick, the website uses a CSS trick to insert an equals sign, thus showing different code if read or if copied/pasted. That's how the author knows whether you solved it in your head or pasted it somewhere.
The thing I found particularly fascinating, because the article was talking about discarding AI applicants, is that if you take a screenshot and ask ChatGPT, then it works fine (of course, it cannot really see the extra equals sign) So this is not really foolproof, and also makes me think that feeding screenshots to AI is probably better than copy-pasting
There was story like this on NPR recently where a professor used this method to weed out students who were using AI to answer an essay question about a book the class was assigned to read. The book mentioned nothing about Marxism, but the prof inserted unseeable text into the question such that when it was copy&pasted into an AI chat it added an extra instruction to make sure to talk about Marxism in relation to this book (which wasn't at all related to Marxism). When he got answers that talked extensively about the book in Marxist terms he knew that they had used AI.
Why wouldn't a qualified developer just run the code? Takes two seconds instead of ... whatever you're going for here.
Is it really faster to run the code than to just answer it? Like are people struggling to answer this question?
Considering there's no (explicit) instruction forbidding or discouraging it, I'd consider the REPL solution to be perfectly valid. In fact some interview tests specifically look for this kind of problem solving.
I get it still, I'd expect some valuable signal from this test. Candidates who execute this code are likely to do so because they really want to avoid running the code in their head, not just because it's more straightforward, and that's probably a bad sign. And pasting that into an LLM instead of a REPL would be a massive red flag.
I just don't think answering "-11" here is a signal strong enough to disqualify candidates on its own.
somewhat off-topic: I had an interview for an Engineering Manager position with the Head of Engineering. They had some leet code problem prepared and I tried solving it and failed. During the challenge, I used some python string operand (:-1) (and maybe some other stuff) that they didn't knew. In the end, I failed the challenge as I didn't do it in the O(n) way... These kind of stupid challenges exemplify what's wron…
That was REALLY weird to read. In reader mode the comparator in the first conditional was >=. But without reader mode it was just >.
Apparently they don't want to hire people who don't use reader mode. But then the question is, how do you reach people who filter out the job ads?
It also excludes users of Lynx, cURL, possibly people using accessibility tools, those with custom/overriding style sheets.