Coding interviews are stupid (ish) • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#671

Post by CraigRo » Fri, May 10, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #130

cranberryturkey wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nope. tech is so fast moving if you're not at least experimenting with your own code then you're not going to be a good fit. we tend to also hire engineers who have contributed to open source.

>tech is so fast moving I recently meet a programmer in his 50s, still working on Cobol. Sure, you aren't gonna hire him, but do you think he has any worries about his job?

I had to learn cobol last year. Not hard if you have read lots of books from the 70s and 80s and have a strong background in algorithms. It is expensive and annoying to maintain these systems, but until there's a business case to replace the underlying application, he's safe

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#672

Post by CraigRo » Fri, May 10, 2024, 11:27 PM UTC

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #115

viraptor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing out on lots of amazing people who treat programming as work and have other hobbies. Or people in temporarily different situations (like young kids). Or people with more important things happening in their life. You're effectively filtering for mostly people in their 20s. I mean, it's your choice, but your loss too.

Citation needed All the good programmers I know have side projects and live and breathe code. None of the mediocre/bad ones I know do. Think of it this way: what's likely to make you a better programmer: spending half (0.5x) of every day on (a work-mandated subset of) code or spending most (1x) of every day on code? The answer is obviously the latter. And it sounds weird, but most of my programming knowledge comes fr…

Being really smart and inquisitive for 30 years .. I've been lucky that people paid me a lot of money to do whatever it took to make lots of different products work, at levels from extremely low to high. Just because people don't post their work to public archives doesn't mean they aren't working and learning all day. So this filter tends to catch people who are at second tier employers and are a bit bored

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#673

Post by rvba » Sat, May 11, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC

henryfjordan wrote: post #622

mtnGoat wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's less that working at a FANG produces better devs and more that FANG can afford to be picky and so having worked there is a sign you passed a high hurdle once. Kinda the same idea as having Harvard or Stanford as your alma matter. Most schools will teach you most of the same stuff, but those universities only take the "best". If your idea of "best" is similar, you'd take that Harvard also liked the person as a go…

Iant Harvard 10% best on scholarships and 90% children of rich and connected parents? Not total idiots, but still.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#674

Post by rvba » Sat, May 11, 2024, 4:03 PM UTC

jimbobthrowawy wrote: post #587

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…

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.

Some people freeze up when they have to do their jobs...

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#675

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 12, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #536

vntok wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do they expect to just magically learn the required skills or hope that nobody will notice that they're not able to close their tasks? It obviously worked for the candidate you mention, didn't it? Spent 7 years at FAANG, didn't know how to code.

That is true, but how?

[deleted]

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#676

Post by uuddlrlrbaba » Sun, May 12, 2024, 12:55 PM UTC

ndiddy wrote: post #538

uuddlrlrbaba wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So have the candidate do a small project and submit a PR.

The problem there is that the amount of time being wasted is asymmetrical since the employer isn't present, so the typical experience from the candidate's perspective is spending an evening working on a project and then getting no feedback and a canned rejection letter.

it doesn't need to take an evening just something simple can be a great indicator

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#677

Post by 6510 » Tue, May 14, 2024, 10:41 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #236

spyspy wrote: post #203

Earlier 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.

Personally I only ask super easy questions because you should at least be able to talk about something trivial. Yet unfortunately the question “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” has a high failure rate as the first question, because there are a lot of people lying on their resume just throwing spaghetti at the walls.

Thats to easy man arr.sort((o,O)=>oOne for you: Write a recursive function that finds the second largest number in an array of numbers.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#678

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, May 22, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #634

pseudalopex wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people do not have side projects. Few people working as software engineers were not tested in some way. I think it's more useful and more fair to give candidates some direction when I request something. What scope is enough? What tests are enough? We define side project differently or you would expect much more time from candidates than I do.

> What scope is enough? What tests are enough? How each candidate answers each question themselves tells you about them.

I used to think so. But real tasks have acceptance criteria. Seeing how candidates work with loose criteria has told me more than telling them in effect to read my mind.

Re: Coding interviews are stupid (ish)

#679

Post by 6510 » Sat, May 25, 2024, 11:27 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #677

bobthepanda wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I only ask super easy questions because you should at least be able to talk about something trivial. Yet unfortunately the question “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” has a high failure rate as the first question, because there are a lot of people lying on their resume just throwing spaghetti at the walls.

Thats to easy man arr.sort((o,O)=>o One for you: Write a recursive function that finds the second largest number in an array of numbers.

https://jsfiddle.net/9ykxqw2t/