Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

Post by sagichmal » Wed, May 04, 2016, 8:39 AM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #542

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution." In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someon…

Post by p4wnc6 » Wed, May 11, 2016, 6:46 AM UTC

bnastic wrote: post #689

ljw1001 wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, people will write them, but very few people should write them. Also, the question is, is the ability to write a BFS on a whiteboard a useful way to screen programming candidates for most positions. No it is not.

Tree traversal is such a basic algo that anyone who's done any amount of programming shouldn't have trouble working out how to do it, depth- or breadth-first, even if they haven't done that before. If a potential candidate can't figure that out, even in a simple pseudo-code, and even with guidance from an interviewer, I can't imagine ever hiring that person. Next to arrays and lists, trees are such fundamental part o…