91–100 of 372 posts
In short, companies should approach interviews like free consultations with an expert or peer.
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I think it's worse than a whiteboard. I have seen very few interviews that expected anything other than psuedo code on a whiteboard. With a repl I could easily pin myself on some trivial bug that interviewers would ignore on the whiteboard...
I thought I disliked whiteboard coding, until I recently had an interview on a provided laptop running one of those JavaScript IDEs. It was miserable. Extreme unusable OS X mouse acceleration, an awful keyboard, an unfamiliar hotkey setup in the text editor, and a tiny 11 inch monitor split into 4 sections which means my editor was maybe 10 lines tall. I failed miserably at a relatively short and simple challenge tha…
I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done. That said, I'm always surprised how many candidat…
I was always puzzled by how unrelated metric used for hiring is to actual work at many companies. I don't mind algorithmic brainteasers - on the contrary I would absolutely love to solve such problems at work yet those seem to be scarce. I also don't mind other types of developer work - be it more research or architectural oriented or "just" coding.
But I am not happy learning something different for interviews every few years and then forgetting it over the course of next period of day to day work. Feels like a waste of time and is confusing in regards to what one would actually do in certain job.
I think coderpad.io is the modern day equivalent of a whiteboard. It's nice that you get REPL and a keyboard, but the unnecessary pressure of being watched, critiqued, and timed are all there. My mind just goes completely blank whenever I am put in this scenario. Are we programming or defusing a bomb?
- Rob, you use Unix! Come quick!
* To disarm the bomb simply enter a valid "tar" command on your first try. No googling. You have ten seconds. *
- Rob?..
- I'm so sorry.
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I don't think that this is a proper justification for sending coding projects to everyone who submitted a CV. This is a big imbalance in time investment from both sides and quite disrespectful from the applications point of view.
It's not disrespectful for a company to ask you to write a little code for them. They're just as invested on the time front as you are since they have to read and analyze what you send them. Now, if you were to tell me that nobody ever looked at the test after you sent it in, then it becomes disrespectful. I had several companies do that to me a few months ago. Not that it matters much. I don't think code tests will…
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We're in Denmark and currently hiring. I'm not sure why there is such extreme hate for the whiteboard. Yes it has plenty of caveats when it comes to actual coding and recruiters should not expect any candidate to write precise code on that medium. I do use the whiteboard for trivial CS questions limited to 5-10 minutes. Think fizzbuzz and string reversal. Candidates have the option to use my laptop (not ideal because…
I believe the hate comes from unprecedented and hard CS questions asked on the whiteboard. I recently went to an interview that asked me to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard. It can be done, and I can do it. Thing is when you go to interview for that company that has 2 developers(small team, small company) and ask you that kind of question it puts you off thinking that those guys won't be great to work with (arro…
I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done. That said, I'm always surprised how many candidat…
> found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. This. I advocate this method of interviewing here in the states every chance I get. The most common form of push back I get is from hiring managers terrified of being hoodwinked into making a bad hire. It's like they don't trust their own judgement enough to be able to tell apart those who kno…
That says a lot about their maturity, not yours.
I'm responsible for hiring developers at our company based in Berlin, Germany, and found it best to have a guided interview about the candidate's work experience and interesting problems that she/he solved. I never understood the whiteboard hazing/CS trivia that are so widely discussed on HN since it seems extremely disconnected from the actual work that's being done. That said, I'm always surprised how many candidat…
> one solution that they're proud of. Pride is a very strong word, especially for those of us with impostor syndrome...
I think coderpad.io is the modern day equivalent of a whiteboard. It's nice that you get REPL and a keyboard, but the unnecessary pressure of being watched, critiqued, and timed are all there. My mind just goes completely blank whenever I am put in this scenario. Are we programming or defusing a bomb?
XKCD 1168: - Rob, you use Unix! Come quick! * To disarm the bomb simply enter a valid "tar" command on your first try. No googling. You have ten seconds. * - Rob?.. - I'm so sorry.
tar tf filename.tar
tar xf filename.tar
tar xfz filename.tar.gz # Newer tars don't even require the z
tar cfz filename.tar.gz directoryname
tar --help
More interesting questions would be like: "which lower-case letters are NOT valid options to GNU ls". :)