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Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
601–610 of 679 posts
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding tests are an awful place to test someone’s conversational skills. I don’t talk while I code. You don’t either. Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I talked to anyone about the code itself outside of a PR. People talk about architecture and database migrations and why their containers aren’t behaving locally. Nobody ever tests for that stuff.
I consider taking while I code to be a somewhat useful skill. I’m totally capable of verbalizing my thought process as I work through a problem
What's the quality of output like? Have any links?
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if a senior person can't in 30/45 min of talking with someone figure out the general experience level then the problem is them, really. This is why I've always been so confused. Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview (seniors sit down with candidates and discuss how to solve a relevant proxy problem the team is currently undergoing (has the side benefit…
> Why is the software engineering interview wildly different from the traditional engineering interview I am guessing here, but wouldn't a candidate for a traditional engineering role normally hold a college degree in a relevant field, so that part of quality assurance is expected to have been done by the college?
Candidates for software engineering roles normally hold a degree in a relevant field.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#604Earlier 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…
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.
This, I freeze up when put on the spot, otherwise I can actually code, but it doesn't seem like it when doing coding interviews.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I'm not saying it should be mandatory, but they would have to show mastery some other way. Whiteboard? Live coding? Project?
godelski said your resume should really be GitHub. You could have said this instead of sarcasm.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#606Earlier 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…
> Do you think working at a FANG would make you a better developer?
No, but I do expect any reasonably competently run company to figure out that the person they hired isn't actually able to do their job, especially after 7 years. I was also under the impression that this company actually did coding challenges as part of their interview process, yet this person managed to slip through their interview process. On the other hand our approach to just talk about programming in general terms seems to spot this type of candidate pretty quickly.
One of our most used questions is to ask people to tell us about something they don't like in a language or tool (one the candidate is very familiar with or enjoy using). It's pretty hard to imaging even a senior Java who doesn't have some pet pew about the language.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, I think it's a failure of recruiting if you got someone into an interview who can't code "at all". That must mean nobody at the company is technical "at all" either then, if you are getting people that far along without having any clue if they even write code at all. I don't have this problem - I can easily tell who is good and who is not good by looking at their stuff online, which repos they are contrib…
No way to know for sure, but I'd guess the number of employed developers writing blogs and having personal projects is in the single digits. For developers with more than 20 years experience, I'd be surprised if it's even 1%. I've got more experience than that, which means I have an extensive network of former colleagues at a similar experience level and I don't know one single person who blogs about tech or works on…
Not to mention github profile eval would be much easier to game in the age of LLMs if it were to become mainstream. You can already kinda see the effects of these with people sending you mindless PRs fixing grammar and whatnot if you maintain any popular projects.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got any evidence for the following claim: “ Also a 'white' older male is the least preferred even if he is smarter compared to all females and the minorities that are being interviewed as long as they are not terrible. Biases galore.”
Isn't that the definition of affirmative action? Which most companies claim to do (e.g Google [1]). Admittedly Google also claims not to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics, which is somewhat contradictory to the definition of affirmative action as positive discrimination [2]. [1] https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/eeo/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
The Wikipedia article did not define affirmative action as positive discrimination.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sales has a similar phenomenon with sports. While there is no athleticism involved in selling, many believe history in competitive sports to be a positive predictor of sales success. This is interesting. I had never heard this before. Is there any research on this? For that matter, is there any actual research showing that leetcode-style interviews actually do predict performance? If so, do they do so any better or…
I recall reading that leetcode style questions are basically just a standin for an IQ test, except with plausible deniability for being directly applicable to the job.
I saw this claim. I never saw data.
Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that the definition of affirmative action? Which most companies claim to do (e.g Google [1]). Admittedly Google also claims not to discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics, which is somewhat contradictory to the definition of affirmative action as positive discrimination [2]. [1] https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/eeo/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
The Wikipedia article did not define affirmative action as positive discrimination.
“Affirmative action (also sometimes called reservations, alternative access, positive discrimination or positive action in various countries' laws and policies)…”
It calls them the same thing